New Bridges

The new Fall 2008 issue of Bridges , the newsletter written and produced by Lindy Poling’s Lessons of Vietnam history students at Millbrook High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, is now on the web.

The issue includes “Unlocking My Father’s Past, ” an article by student Michael Nguyen about his father, Luong Nguyen, who as a young South Vietnamese Navy officer went to The Naval
Officers Candidate Academy in Newport, Rhode Island, as part of the Nixon Administration’s Vietnamization program, then served in Vietnam until the war ended in 1975. After the war he was put in a re-education camp for five long years—an experience that the father had never shared with his son.

Michael Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1991, and came to this country in 1993 “through a humanitarian program that allowed Vietnamese POWs who had spent five or more years in a reeducation camp to immigrate to the U.S, ” he says in the article.

It was through a class assignment that Luong Nguyen first told his war and post-war experiences to his son. “Hearing my father’s story for the first time was a surreal moment in my life, ” Michael Nguyen said. “Learning about my father’s experiences made me realize that this was a man who has sacrificed so much for my very existence. My Lessons of Vietnam class became the key to opening the door to my father’s past—a door bolted shut for many years.”