Personal Statement On The Vietnam War

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“The worse part about serving in this war wasn’t the blood shed or fighting in general, but how we were abused. I left Josiah but thanks to poor filing and lack of care for those serving I not only lost my abilities, I lost my name.” The strongest and most horrifying statement that left Joe’s mouth during our interview. Prior to our interview I have had the honor of being Joe’s tech tutor for the past two months, from time to time he would come trying to learn some basic computer skills now that the campus is going mostly digital. He’s a season veteran who served in the Ghost battalion in Southern Laos being some of the first people to enter the war, even before the US advisors, sent on secret missions for the US Marine Corps.
Prior to our interview I did an in-depth read and research on the Vietnam War, my grandfather serving in WWII and having 3 uncles serve in the Korean War played heavily on my own person experiences. Seeing them randomly break down and lose their minds somewhere at moment’s notice, I was tentative to ask serious questions to Joe out of fear of hitting a soft spot. Thankfully he’s a joyful individual who was more than willing to tell me about his experiences that weren’t too secretive and regale me with thoughts and opinions that were not far different than that of my own family members who served. I centered my questions on his personal thoughts of the war, what it was like for him and how he originally decided to enlist in the war in the first place. My first real question to him was: “You were serving in the Marine Corps. prior to the official war starting, when you learned of the impending crisis, what were your first thoughts?”
“Honestly scared, I was doing Seal training at the time, hearing anything...

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...g knowledge of it all he honestly had a shining embraced that I was blown away by.
Personally I found myself on the verge of an emotional breakdown, his story so closely related to that of my family members who have served and the horrors they have deep in the back of their mind. He was a physical embodiment of the horror the war was no only to the country of Vietnam but for those who were there to fight. He explained how the reason we suffered o greatly during the war because unlike other wars the US has fought in the past, they were fighting this wear for themselves without know the people they were fighting with. To the Vietnamese, the war wasn’t to fight communism or bring a halt to some type of tyrannical leader engaging in the domino effect, but for their own freedom, and because of that, we were doomed from the start from making my kind of positive impact.

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