I watched the Vietnam War – it was on television, and things like that – but it didn’t register to me. I’ll never forget when I’d just become a parent at 30 years old, and they dedicated the Vietnam War monument down in Washington, that Maya Lin did, and I remember seeing parents go up to it, and they were in tears. And I think I began crying for the first time in my life about the Vietnam War, because I think I knew what it would be like to be a parent, to lose a child in that war. I really had to gain a little more distance, a little more maturity, to measure the magnitude of what happened, which I couldn’t measure then.
My parents subscribed to Life Magazine and Time Magazine, and I remember Life cover stories of the monks immolating themselves, and the burnings, the suicide; but it was probably the My Lai Massacre where you just remembered kids not that much older or younger than myself , and the pictures of the bombings in Life Magazine, those just seared into me: they just seared into my memory, to have that on a coffee table, to see that massacre.
I think that’s when it really began entering into my mind, and when I got to college, and I had an anthropology teacher and a political science teacher; freshman year, I read the Pentagon Papers – freshman year, ’71 – a professor assigned us to read the Pentagon Papers, it just opened up my eyes to what had been covered up. I began to study history, I began to study the Vietnam War, in a critical perspective, and I’ve loved to be a scholar and a historian ever since. I’ll never forget reading the Pentagon Papers, and getting all of the documents, and all the evidence, and all the stuff that had been covered up, and all the secrets, and I was getting introduced to that stuff. It was like something so demystified, overcoming the denial, it was really getting honest, or seeing a critical perspective on our history.