Viet Thanh Nguyen

And so a happy forgetting is something that we have to work for, work through to get to.

I felt so much rage everywhere.

And anger and also deep empathy for Afghan people.

And the reason why I felt so much rage and anger is because I felt that as soon as 9-11 happened and we went to war in Afghanistan, that this was exactly the outcome that was going to happen.

There was no other outcome that was going to happen.

And it just was a tragedy, not only that it happened, but it took 20 years for all of this history to unfold in Afghanistan and in other countries.

be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.

And I felt that it's so utterly predictable what the United States will do to other countries and how the United States will absolve itself of what it has done to other countries.

And that my experiences as a Vietnamese person coming out of the Vietnam War

deeply skeptical of American idealism, prepared me to think this way.

Zero.

And so when the fall of Kabul happened, I felt that the United States is responsible.

And so that was why it was important in that piece to say, well, we need to rescue them because we bombed them literally in the first place and made the country the way that it is.

And part of the strange experience for me as an American to feel on a very regular basis is this contradiction between

Being a refugee from an American war in Vietnam and being a citizen of a United States that is at perpetual war.

I think for a lot of people, particularly Americans, who are insulated from war, they think of war as something that happens somewhere else in a very discrete period of time.

But anyone who's actually survived a war knows that's not the case.

I think about how refugee stories remind us of the human consequences of war.

I think most nations prefer to remember the stories of their soldiers, which even if terrible, nevertheless continue to affirm the importance of the nation

through the sacrifices of the soldiers.