Reading The Mountain Sings while on vacation visiting my father who was in the Vietnam war was complicated. Did anyone else have a family member in the war?

Reading The Mountain Sings while on vacation visiting my father who was in the Vietnam war was complicated. Did anyone else have a family member in the war?

Very good question.
I did not have a family member but deeply cared for someone that had just returned from Vietnam. The way the war affected him made reading this story difficult. Initially it was hard for me to have sympathy for the North Vietnamese. Yet as I read more and more of Grandmothers hardship I ultimately realized those people suffered just as much as the American soldiers sent to war.

Exactly how I felt and how my conversation with my dad went. One can only imagine how the citizens of North Vietnam are faring now - not much better and hopefully not worse. Although worse since it is 2021.

My husband was in a Marine Corps helicopter squadron for three different tours. He never has given any indication that there was the extreme suffering in North Vietnam as explained throughout the book. But then, he wasn’t involved with ground troops except when proceeding with MEDIVAC.

In the 60s and early 70s the TV news was nothing like today’s exploding broadcasts!

My husband was in the Navy during the Vietnam war and was on a ship that was in Da Nang Harbor. He would not talk about the war and went to great lengths sometimes to avoid telling anyone about his time in Vietnam. This was a very difficult book for me to read and made me so much more sympathetic to the people of Vietnam. I very much wish my husband was still around to ask him questions. In any war there are always two sides and reading this book made that so evident.