Examine Objects
Portrait of my father in 1959.
Painted on pegboard by a South Vietnamese artist.
Objects having secret lives and telling stories is a wonderful way to think about this tool.
A South Vietnamese man painted this 1959 portrait of my father on pegboard. The artist noted his name, date, and the locale where they were stationed – Ban Me Thout, a camp in the western highlands not far from the Cambodian border. It captures an important time in my father’s life that my mother, sister, and I couldn’t be part of. An Infantry lieutenant colonel, he was one of no more than 342 “MAAGs” during the late 1950s, who lived with and advised the South Vietnamese army as Communist guerrilla attacks increased.
The first casualties in the Vietnam War were two MAAGs near Saigon in July 1959 while my father was in country—contrary to my high school teacher’s insistence that the U.S. didn’t send anyone to Vietnam until the early 1960s.