My father is a vet from the Vietnam War & I would like to share our story.
It is rare for a a child to grow up being taught by their own father to question authority. With the emergence of today’s “alternative facts,” I appreciate the way that my father has always encouraged his children to look deeply into the information we are given, considering multiple viewpoints and sources.
Coming from a linguistic point of view, he taught us the value of deconstructing language to be able to “read between the lines” and consider motive and ends as we try to figure out what is really going on. This approach to parenting had everything to do with his experience in Vietnam.
Captain Peter T Leonard enlisted in the army, fully supportive of our armed forces and encouraged by his father, a WWII veteran who fought in the South Pacific. He was honored to be accepted into officers candidate school and ended up with a position in intelligence, with a focus on photo interpretation. Because of the access to information he had as part of the intelligence community, he realized that the stories our government was telling citizens were not in line with the information to which he had access. He was crushed. So much of what he believed in was turned on its head, and he began sympathizing with the movement of US citizens who questioned our motives in the war…essentially he turned into a hippie (!) while in Vietnam during the war.
At the same time, he fell in love with the Vietnamese people. In fact, he started going back to Vietnam in 1989 to teach, and spent the following 23 years teaching at the University in Saigon and even starting his own school. This allowed me to spend time visiting him and exploring Southeast Asia as a teenager and young adult, an experience that allowed me to understand the pluralism of worldviews that make our world so dynamic. We both continue to be amazed at the resilience of Vietnamese people and maintain life long friendships there.