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Articles by Drew Pham
From Vietnam to Afghanistan-and Back: An Offering
If you only ever imagined us as your enemies, how could we be anything else? By Drew PhamTwitter Today 5:30 am fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Bookmark September 8, 2021 Media representatives film and take pictures of a US Air Force aircraft parked on the tarmac after an evacuation flight from Kabul at the Rota Naval Base in southern Spain. (Cristina Quicler / AFP via Getty Images) Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays.
America’s Legacies of Violence in Afghanistan and Vietnam
Photo: Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images Another fleet of American aircraft abandons another broken capital, and again, a familiar wound opens in me. It bleeds through time, staining my present with the past. I see my Vietnamese parents: my father watching his city burn on the horizon from an American warship. My mother huddling among packed bodies on a boat that will take her to an island, to a camp, to a plane, and finally to a country that’d dropped bombs on her since she could remember.
New Flash Fiction from Drew Pham: "On Their Lips, the Name of God"
Current Issue, Fiction 1 day ago by Drew Pham This is the memory that stays with him as his blood abandons the body and life fades—this, the one comfort that will carry him into the next life. Dawran had waited beneath a mulberry tree in May of last year. He’d come to love mulberries in a small way—they’d always kept him company through the boredom of waiting. It was still cool in the mornings and evenings, the breeze shaking the branches, dropping the still tart clustered berries.
Letters to My Country, Part 4
This is the fourth and final essay in Drew Pham’s four-part series “Letters to My Country That She Will Never Read,” published the week of September 11, 2018. The author receiving chemotherapy. Courtesy of Drew Pham I write this for the children I want, but cannot have. Cancer was the consequence of toxins sown into the air by burn pits and jet fuel and air-dropped munitions. A case of friendly fire that took years to inflict its wound.
How to Lose A War
This part is important. Start with good intentions—and a couple of givens: that you’re an idealist, the son of war refugees. You see another conflict fomenting on TV, you see those civilians suffering, and you can’t help but think of your parents. You want to help. On paper you’re middle class—your parents both have degrees, you go to a fancy liberal arts school—but truth is, you’ve been hungry.
Facing It - Reflections - War Horse
I keep telling the same story over and over, but I can never get it quite right. Sometimes I start by saying that no one ever told me how it would feel to kill. The power of the act, the biochemical euphoria of it. No room for feelings, of course, in all the hours of training for one lethal moment. I pulled the trigger and I didn’t even have to think about it; my body just did it for me. No one ever told me how fleeting that euphoria would be, either.
My Heart, a Fallow Field
Dear Daughter, I miss you already, though we’ve never met, though you never had a chance. I’m writing to say hello. To tell you all the things fathers must tell their children—I believe in you, I’m proud of you, I love you. I’m writing to say I’m sorry I’ll never be able to tell you those things. Above all, I’m writing you to say goodbye. Let me explain myself. I was a soldier and I fought in a war.
Japanese Poetry Never Modifies
August 2011 I remember when you first joined, I used to tell you that the Army would be four years, the way that college had been four years, and that really used to help you. These days, I’m not so sure. You called me this morning on my way out the door. You know the routine, the sun’s still not out yet so I go out onto the landing looking down on the parking lot to wait for the carpool of teachers so we can drive the hour north to Clinton.
Letters to My Country That She Will Never Read (Part 1) — The War Horse
By Drew Pham This is the first story in a four-part series, published the week of Sept. 11, 2018, by Drew Pham. We are told we must never forget that day in September. I’ve added it to that prescribed list of American things to remember, like the names of all 50 states and the Pledge of Allegiance and the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” There’s more to that list—rules for migrants and their children: to speak clean, unaccented English.
Letters to My Country That She Will Never Read (Part 2)
Memory can be cruel. It can come uninvited as it has always come to my mother, sending her into weeklong bouts of silence and depression. Memory can drive a man to cruelty, as it did my father. He was also a refugee, but from the south. Once, he told me he hated nothing more than a lie. The year he was born, the CIA had circulated a fiction that the communists had planned to slaughter the Catholics, so my father’s family fled Hanoi, across the line that split his country in two. Hostilities mounted.
How to Lose a War — The War Horse
By Drew Pham This part is important. Start with good intentions—and a couple of givens: that you’re an idealist, the son of war refugees. You see another conflict fomenting on TV, you see those civilians suffering, and you can’t help but think of your parents. You want to help. On paper you’re middle class—your parents both have degrees, you go to a fancy liberal arts school—but truth is, you’ve been hungry.
My Heart, a Fallow Field
Maybe I’m afraid because my heart, like my father’s, is buried in the past. You’ll find mine in a fallow field in Afghanistan. If you’d been born, you’d never have known your grandfather. He left us to chase after his heart, left behind in Vietnam. Part of me is glad that you’ll never see me as I saw him: those distracted eyes always looking backward, the way his bedroom smelled of defeat, and yes, that inescapable wrath that overtook him when he battered my mother, when he abandoned us.
My Heart, a Fallow Field. A Letter to My Unborn Daughter.
Dear Daughter, I miss you already, though we’ve never met, though you never had a chance. I’m writing to say hello. To tell you all the things fathers must tell their children—I believe in you, I’m proud of you, I love you. I’m writing to say I’m sorry I’ll never be able to tell you those things. Above all, I’m writing you to say goodbye. Let me explain myself. I was a soldier and I fought in a war.
Brother, Forgive Me
I don’t think I’ll ever meet anyone quite like Joe. He’s a big Native American Cavalry Scout with a gleaming bald head and sharp features. He looks just like Magua in the 1992 adaptation of Last of the Mohicans, and I was more than a little scared of him at first, but he’s more than an imposing face. I remember after the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” he told his soldiers about the two-spirit people and the immemorial tradition of gay and transgender spiritual leaders in Native culture.
Facing It. "The Harder I Held on, the Further I Felt From Home."
I keep telling the same story over and over, but I can never get it quite right. Sometimes I start by saying that no one ever told me how it would feel to kill. The power of the act, the biochemical euphoria of it. No room for feelings, of course, in all the hours of training for one lethal moment. I pulled the trigger and I didn’t even have to think about it; my body just did it for me. No one ever told me how fleeting that euphoria would be, either.
I was a U.S. Army officer, but nowadays, America feels like a foreign country to me
Best Defense is on summer hiatus. During this restful spell we offer re-runs from the past 12 months. This item originally ran on April 10 In 2010, I deployed to Wardak province, Afghanistan, as a scout platoon leader. It was beautiful. Mountains in all directions like an ocean, the sky so close I felt I could touch the clouds, and night so black it made me feel draped in a blanket of stars. But I was an occupying soldier. My family had fled Vietnam, and the war there.
I Leave Out the Part where we Catch the Man
There’s an insurgent commander we’d chased all year, who’d killed policemen, blown up civilians, and attacked Americans. An informant calls us to say that the commander is at his family home. If we hurry we might catch him. We rush out there with our Afghan National Army counterparts, but he’s gone. The informant calls again to say that the target escaped but we can still get his lieutenant, hiding in a nearby village. We find the village at the top of a steep hill overlooking the valley.
How Our Military Discards Its Wounded Troops
When I joined the Army, I took a creed to “never leave a fallen comrade.” Now it appears that the military community to which I belong is failing to honor that creed. I was disheartened but unsurprised to read the newly released Government Accountability Office report finding that 62% of servicemembers who received less than honorable discharges suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Traumatic Brain Injuries, or other mental-health illnesses.
I was a U.S. Army officer, but nowadays, America feels like a foreign country to me
In 2010, I deployed to Wardak province, Afghanistan, as a scout platoon leader. It was beautiful. Mountains in all directions like an ocean, the sky so close I felt I could touch the clouds, and night so black it made me feel draped in a blanket of stars. But I was an occupying soldier. My family had fled Vietnam, and the war there. Yet here I was in a war in which I saw strong similarities — unrealistic goals, a failure to understand (or respect) local culture. I felt like a tyrant.
The Real Cost of Killing an Enemy During War
Drew Pham, 27, is a former Army captain who deployed to Afghanistan’s Maidan Wardak province from 2010 to 2011. He lives in New York City. Everything in Afghanistan has a different sense of proportion. It’s as if you are living in a different world. The Taliban would attack us, and part of what I did was fight insurgents. One time, I killed a man—an insurgent who was setting up an ambush against us. I shot him with my M4 carbine as he was reaching for a Russian hand grenade. At first I was elated.
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