The Internship Experience and Closing Thoughts

Greetings, this will be the last post of my internship. 

If you have been a persistent reader please accept my personal thanks! In reality, I know that Dr. French and Dr. Gannon are the main absorbers of my written content. 

While the process of assisting in guided research and critical writing is integral to the internship experience, one point of contention continues to remain even after this post.

That is the conflict of history and memory.

Perhaps the most enduring aspect of history is that it is interpreted and that memory is owned by the individual. Without gaslighting our veterans I encourage some reflection on the memory of recent wars/conflicts and how historians analyze and discuss past events.

Recently, I talked to a man named Jerry at my place of work. Jerry is a veteran of the Vietnam conflict, one the United State joined nearly a decade after its inception. After enlisting "to fight the spread of communism," Jerry was shipped off to fight his way up the coast and into Northern Vietnam. 

The Mekong River, which flows through the six dragons (China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam) was a prominent feature of the southeast Asian peninsula and passed through Ho Chi Minh City to exit south of Soc Trang. 

Jerry was taken as a prisoner of war during this conflict and spent months in a prison camp witnessing horrors and experiencing a fair share of them.

With this in mind, and without going too far into the details, I want to ask the reader some vague questions.

Is nobility in warfare impossible? What are the duties of a soldier beyond training to kill? Do we drive ourselves towards armed conflict as a solution for our global issues? 

One thing is certain: the only way to honor our veterans is to practice peace.


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