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The Center for Asian Studies and Partnership for International Strategies in Asia (PISA) joined Norlin Library and several departments on campus to host the exhibit, Waging Peace in Vietnam: U.S. Soldiersand Veterans Who Opposed the War. Curated by Ron Carver, the display of photographs, documents, and oral histories documented dissent within the United States active duty armed forces, among officers, and returning veterans, as well as their means of disseminating information to mobilize others. Launched on October 30, 2023, the first week included a series of events that engaged multiple units across campus including the College of Music, the English Department, the College of Media, Communication and Information, the History Department, the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program, the Applied History Program, and the Center of the American West. The Waging Peace Project at CU Boulder was made possible by support from the Chino Cienega Foundation.

With film screenings, panel discussions, poetry readings, and lectures, the Waging Peace project amplified the message that the American War in Vietnam has had a legacy of baneful consequences that endure to this day. Recordings of most of the events can be found on the PISA page on the Center for Asian Studies website.

As a key feature of the project, students were invited to submit essays with their reflections on viewing the exhibit. Renowned photojournalist Nick Ut, whose photo of the so-called “Napalm girl” helped to move public opinion against the war, selected Ian Messa’s essay and Vietnam Veteran Curt Stocker presented the award on behalf of Veterans for Peace. Ian hails from Golden, Colorado. He is majoring in geography and pursuing an environment-society geography B.A. with hydrology and GIS certificates, as well as a civil engineering minor. Congratulations Ian!

Curt Stocker, Vietnam veteran and member of Veterans for Peace presents a $500 check to Ian Messa, while Linda Yarr, director of PISA looks on.  

Ian’s  thoughtful essay, Waging Peace, empathically recalls his childhood as he reflects on the consequences of the American War in Vietnam as he viewed the exhibit. You can read his essay here:

Waging Peace

I’d never seen unexploded cluster bomb submunition before looking through Waging Peace in Vietnam. I thought it would be more hostile – silver-and-red rusted steel, maybe something bullet- shaped. Instead, I saw a photo of a dark-brown metal baseball with curious directional patterns cast into it.

When my brother and I were young, we would climb dead trees and swordfight with rusty steel fenceposts; we had a go-kart that was all too sparse and wobbly for its lawnmower engine. If we were to find one of these unexploded bombs on the ground, we would have made the same decision Hồ Văn Lai and his friends did – to play with the thing. With each throw, I bet we’d try to spin it the same direction the arrow-like things on its surface point.

It hurts to think about finding an object so strange and wondrous only to have it maim or kill you. It hurts more to think about the guilt and blame borne from those situations: Who lived and who died? Who found it on the ground? Whose idea it was to play with it at first – whose idea it was to play with it again on that day? And how hard would it be to remind yourself that Americans left it there; how would you cope with the fact that they won’t be held accountable because they’re long gone?

Across the library, covers from wartime magazines are spread across another black-papered posterboard. On an issue of FTA (“Fun Travel Adventure,” a stand-in for “Fuck the Army”), the soldiers at Iwo Jima raise a huge purple flower instead of the American flag. It’s hard to imagine producing an image like this as a soldier in Vietnam: Practically forced to knowingly kill innocent people, stuck with fear and protocol in an unfamiliar landscape for days on end, how did these soldiers return to base, meet at an anti-war coffee shop, and portray their hatred of the conflict in such a heartfelt way?

Waging Peace in Vietnam captures violent disjunctions. Kids play games with armed bombs; soldiers raise war-flowers on self-print magazines. Photos and media from the war hang in black and white, simple compared to the high-def colored pictures from decades after – survivors of cluster bombs and agent orange, volunteers cleaning the land, veterans standing stolid against their own memories of paralysis and misdeed. The war itself never ended: The U.S. military is gone, but it’s still tearing towns, families, and individuals apart with stray munitions, tainted memories, and violence against bodies and minds. That violence has only grown more difficult to trace.

What resonates with me most is the phrase “waging peace.” There are kids in the United States who play with syringes and firearms. There are police, soldiers, and security guards who feel helpless to do what they believe is right for fear of retribution, rejection, and ruin. People here, and around the world, are stuck in violence – born into it; forced into it; attracted to it until they see it, at which point they cannot turn back.

The violent scars of war loom so large in Vietnam, their tissue suffocating its inhabitants, that it is impossible to ignore them. Attaining peace is not an act of cessation or reflection, but of constant resistance against the tumorous spread of violence. It really isn’t something we “attain” at all; we need to constantly wage it with money, time, and passion – with everything we have.