RETURNING TO VIETNAM IN PEACETIME

by Karol Nielsen

New York Times, April 22, 2025

My father served in Vietnam War with the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles. He figured out that it was not a winnable war soon after he arrived in country. He felt his mission was to keep his men alive. Once, he found a dead North Vietnamese soldier with a photo of his family in his pocket. My father had a family, too. He thought that under different circumstances he and this soldier could have been friends. Forty years later, my father, mother, and I traveled to Vietnam. We traveled to all the places he had been—along the central coast and up in the central highlands. Our guide told us his father had been sent to a reeducation camp. In Kontum in the central highlands, we teamed up with a local guide. He took us to fox holes where Vietnamese took cover from bombings and then to his friend’s cafe. It was in a tropical garden with art about the war. The cafe owner and our local guide had studied art in Hanoi. Later, our main guide told us they were Viet Cong. But in that lush cafe, we all talked like friends. My father thought Vietnam was a beautiful country and he always wanted to return in peacetime. Now our government has told diplomats not to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

Karol Nielsen is the author of Walking A&P: A Vietnam War Memoir and other books. Her Gulf War memoir Black Elephants was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poem “This New Manhattan” was a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in Epiphany, Guernica, The New Verse News, and elsewhere.

THE NUN WAS TORTURED

by Karol Nielsen

The nun founded the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC).

The American nun, who was gang raped and tortured in Guatemala, died of cancer in Washington, DC. She had been helping indigenous Guatemalans when she was captured. The government suspected the indigenous of left wing subversion, with the United States backing the Guatemalan military in its civil war. The nun was burned by cigarettes, exposed to dead bodies and rats, and forced to mutilate another captive with a machete. She jumped out of a car as the man with accented Spanish drove her to a new location. She fled to the United States and struggled to remember her life there. She sued a Guatemalan general who was studying at Harvard. A judge ordered him to pay millions but he escaped to Guatemala. She told a reporter that even though she was Catholic she struggled to forgive.

Karol Nielsen is the author of two memoirs and two poetry chapbooks. Her first memoir was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her poetry collection was a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry.