A Lost Audio Recorder in Ho Chi Minh City

Neither rain nor humidity nor the pace of travel through Vietnam would have allowed me to forget it. Yet on that final day of our trip, I was emotional. Distracted. Nervous. Sad. I’d done it. I’d traveled with my war veteran father back to the place he’d served. And I was minutes away from leaving a voice recorder with hours and hours of conversations between us on a hotel restaurant breakfast table. Off I’d go, leaving it all behind.

My father was returning to the United States, and I was on my way back to finish out my service as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines. We’d concocted this trip after a lifetime of dinner table conversations about war and peace, his roles as a propagandist and later a Red Cross volunteer, and the weight of expectation from his military family as he served as All-American hero and later anti-war activist. So we came, we traveled, we talked. And I managed to forget the vessel of all his responses – the digital voice recorder. I tried briefly when back in Manila to contact the hotel, but it was all in vain. I had vanquished my dream of producing some kind of family artifact in the form of a podcast or digital story.

Years later, I wonder if my forgetfulness was not as inadvertent as it had seemed in the rushed final hours of packing and saying goodbye. Did I leave it on the table on purpose? Was the digital recorder a failed effort by a son to hold onto a piece of history that my father needed to let go? Or did I need to let go of something, some long held fascination with the enormity of war?

I’ve continued in the years since to coax my father back into the conversation. He has talked with kids on Zoom and in person throughout my time as an international school educator. Now in his late seventies, I’ve heard most of what he tells students about his Vietnam War experience, and I’m asking him again this coming week to participate in another processing; this time he will focus on the moment he received his draft card. He’ll write alongside students as they pick a thing in their lives with tangible and intangible significance.

I’m conflicted. In a world of growing conflict, does an experience from the past have a responsibility to be played back with new batteries through a lifetime of rewinded memories? As I read of soldiers around the world taking up arms and fighting around the world, I’m conflicted about the possibility that his draft card essay will say much that would steer future generations away from the giddiness of young men towards righteous violence. I’m conflicted about whether the stories of war veterans and their varied traumas reduces the likelihood of conflict or creates a curiosity about it as a tool for change.

Sometimes it is not the things we carry but those we leave behind that teach us the most, and sometimes we are carrying the right thing at the right time. My daughter is running around the house this morning with the replacement digital recorder my wife and I bought to capture voices during the remainder of our service in the Philippines. When we fill it with AAA batteries, it plays back my son’s baby voices from our more recent history – one forged in peaceful family homes surrounded by walls, security cameras and a sense that criminal violence is a trifle of prudent anticipation. My son’s voice carries through our home; my wife starts talking about his giggle. The weight of memory falls on us as we hit play on the good times. As we leave the house to go to a trampoline park, my daughter picks up the recorder from the kitchen table, and we head out the door.