Sang approached me at break time. “Teacher, I have problem. My father, he live in Vietnam. He find four dog tag from U.S. soldier. He find bone too. He keep in box under his house.”
“He farmer. He cut the tree and he see.”
Sang is not the first student with news from the war. I’ve heard lots of other stories teaching English to adult refugees at Truman College. Many of the Vietnamese students in the college’s refugee program arrived just in the last year or two, though they’ve been trying to come here since the war ended. For them, the war is not history; it is their life. And they carry it with them in little bits.
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I was stunned and for a moment couldn’t speak. “Do you remember the war?” I finally asked the rest of the class. No one responded to my question. They just looked at me, expressionless. I asked Sang to explain in Vietnamese. They just looked at him too. A few nodded.
The Chicago recruiter stayed on the line. He asked about my students. I told him some of them were former soldiers who’d spent time in reeducation camps. Over the last few years several had insisted they’d seen American soldiers as prisoners. “You’re kidding,” the recruiter said. “Someone ought to know about this.” He thanked me for calling, and I hung up.
“Why hasn’t someone bothered to follow up?”
That was three months ago. Last week Sang came up to me on break. “Teacher, what happen? Why nobody call? It a long time!”
