I was one of the few American children who lived in South Vietnam just before the country fell in April, 1975. In those last fateful days, while the rest of our family fled, my father stayed behind and orchestrated the evacuation of 1000 South Vietnamese who would have otherwise died or been subject to a fate worse than death. Three years ago, I decided to write about all these experiences. I found that I had to face the fact that Vietnam is a wound that is still bleeding. If I was going to keep writing, I had to ask myself some hard questions.
Is all this your fault? No.
Is it your responsibility to fix these things? No.
Is it your responsibility to find out what all this means to you? Damn it. It is.
In this slim volume, I describe why we were in Vietnam, what my father did, and offer simple, powerful guidance about how to seek truth and power in writing.
Kat Fitzpatrick, a trained journalist and rampant writer, earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and Pedagogy from the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College just so that she could better tell her stories of Vietnam. Many of them can be found at www.StoriesOfVietnam.com, and she is available to tell them more as a visiting author or teacher. She lives in the Capital Region of New York state.
