We Were There

We were there.

That is the last sentence you would read in the The Women by Kristin Hannah. She is one of those authors I follow on Goodreads. This is a story of a war veteran nurse who served in Vietnam for two years during the Vietnam war back in the seventies.

A fellow blogger and an online friend wrote about her own review of the book. I was in the middle of reading it when she posted it.

I was already in college  (1973 ) when I learned of the Vietnam War with the US but according to my research, it started in 1959 up to 1975. And like the rest of world happenings, you just didn’t concern yourself with it as long as you are not directly affected. It was on the news alright  but it was just that, a part of the news reel that you see on television. It was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on April 30,1975.

Hannah’s book was based on the real happenings in Vietnam. According to her, it took her a year to write it based on real life stories of people who have been there. I can just imagine the atrocities done to the US war veterans who went home either in coffins, lost of limbs, suffering from the effects of war, struggling with tragedies, PTSD and the like. Vietnamese civilians and especially children were victims too.

The Women gave me a glimpse of how life was back then. When these women came home, they were looked down with disdain and some people even said that there were no American women involved in the Vietnam War. Most of them were nurses. They found it hard to start a normal life again after coming home.

It took the US government a decade to dedicate a memorial to all those war veterans. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is located on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The memorial consists of three parts: the Vietnamese Vetersns Memorial Wall, the Three Servicemen Statue and Flagpole and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial.

I know I  listed the books I want to read from my TBR list on a previous blog post but when I saw the nice and not so good reviews of the book on the Historical Fiction page on Facebook, I just have to get hold of it. It took me almost a week to read it in between painting my new project.  Next on my list is Still Life by Sarah Winman, a new author for me.

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Life

Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.

Time  was when I got lost when my parents and two brothers left us. It was just five months ago when Mom said goodbye and sometimes I keep imagining her sitting infront of this very table I am working on playing solitaire. When her hearing loss got severe and her eyes became cloudy due to old age,  she no longer watched television. I miss Dad’s wise words when he was  alive. We used to take coffee at the ledge of our garage and I would listen to his stories, though sometimes, they were repeated ones that I heard before.

Would you believe, I can still vividly recall when I stayed with Alden for a week at the hospital a year before he died? He would wake up around 2am and he would start telling me those stories that he remembered well, the difficulty of his work as municipal administrator of our town, those people he met every day, those who asked him to make architectural plans for their future homes, supervising construction but some of them never paid him in full, some of our relatives who were probably envious of what he did. He was a gentle, kind and loving brother. It is almost two years now since he left us.

Our youngest Junior is our angel. I was in grade school when he died, he was in and out of the hospital since he was born. All I know is that he  died of beri-beri complications fifty six years ago at barely a year old.

Memories, the happy ones are engraved in my heart.❤️❤️❤️❤️

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