In Chapter 5, Friendship and Sacrifice, Chau Nguyen illustrates the formation of friendships between soldiers, and how that strong bond could develop quickly and end just as fast. She introduces the audience to personal accounts from soldiers, and their journey to find their friends and honor their lost memory. Personal narratives from soldiers are an integral part of history because it provides an alternative perspective and challenges the misconceptions told in the dominant narrative. Even after the war, South Vietnamese servicemen were subjected to discrimination and harassment and were forced into hard labor and interment camps. This is a part of history that is completely ignored and silenced in the dominant narrative, and in doing so it forgets what these people went through. It can be so easy to dehumanize people in war, but these kinds of personal accounts show the hardships the soldiers went through, even after the war.
After reading the stories, it makes me wonder how many other stories are left untold. The history books should be taken with a grain of salt and we should be conscious and aware of who is writing it, and realize there is another side to the story. My question is, how can we document untold narratives in a better way? Even now, why does society have such a defensive view of refugees and how can we change the narrative to support them?
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