Personal Narrative: My First Vietnam War

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History had happened and it had taken a toll on my soul. I no longer wanted to think about the dark past that still haunts me to this day. It all started back in 1965. Asian conflicts were rising, and so was the red scare. The communists were spreading like termites. Our prestigious nation, with the goal of spreading the true government, was on its journey. I was a mere pawn, a proud one, however. The war had started. Vietnam, the land of the war between ideologies. It was simply not that at all, it was in fact a mass genocide of innocent people drafted in. Drafted to protect an ideology, not a nation. It was madness, yet I fought. A young heart swelling with pride of patriotism.
I was assigned to Alpha-1, to lead a flight of F-105s on a bombing mission in Vietnam. On the …show more content…

The steady pound of the soldier’s footsteps echoed in my ears as we dashed to the plane. Not knowing when we will come back, I started the engine. The pulsating engine soon muffled as the plane pulled up into the sky. As we reached the Con Dao District in Vietnam, we heard a strident alarm let out by a nearby lighthouse, and that caught our attention. Without a warning, Vietnamese soldiers burst out from inside the lighthouse and started open firing. The plane started shaking as if it were in a hurricane. Almost immediately, I realized that one of the wings was shot and we were going down. I woke up in a place that I did not recognize at first. Steel bars and people made me realize that we, the survivors had been captured. Looking back at what had happened, I remember that before the radio signals blackened out, my fellow pilot said: “The war has just begun”. At this point, I realized that he had left a short but deep message. My views on the war changed after this, and I lost all the motivation to fight. All I wanted to do was survive, and go back to my beloved

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