Reflections on the Vietnam War: A Fifty-Year Journey

A young lady is assigned a U.S. History class project in school over the Vietnam War. She emails her godfather a list of questions because she knows that he was involved in this infamous conflict. After receiving these questions and answering them as best he could to help his goddaughter, Warren E. Hunt decides this would be the perfect time to expand his answers and write his own memoir on his experiences, in hopes that even though he is forty-five years removed from the battlefront in Vietnam, he will be better able to understand this infamous war that had such an impact on the world, let alone himself.

Hunt was drafted into the war at the age of nineteen. As he says later in the book, he was an immature young man who wasn’t even old enough to legally consume liquor; regardless, he served in the U.S. Army, First Infantry Division (aka the “Big Red One”). His time and service in Vietnam was eye-opening for himself, and will be for his readers, on many levels: political, cultural, and personal. Being in a foreign land, he had to adjust to the extreme climate, pests, and people that he was forced to be around daily. He also had to adjust to the mental stress that war, or any type of fighting, can have on a person.

Hunt has much to say about his service in Vietnam, and he should be commended by us all for his work and dedication. Being of a much younger generation than Hunt, before reading his memoir, I couldn’t tell you too much about the Vietnam War. After reading his story, I feel I have a lot better grasp of the situation, while still not anywhere close to those who lived through it in the war or back in America. I had heard of Vietnam veterans returning home to much less than applause, but now I understand why. Reading the last chapter was emotional as it really showed how vulnerable people can be, and then you mix in traumatic experiences, and there is a lot of work to be done for people physically and especially mentally. The way Hunt wrote about those two years of his life gave detail that you will only learn in war, but was still done respectfully. Based on current happenings, it seems like history has a way of repeating itself in respect to people who work toward power and having control.