The five-year-old boy in the photograph is Tran Van Hay. I did not know his name until a friend still in Vietnam sent me the newspaper clipping after I’d returned from the war. When I first saw Tran, his abdomen was ripped open and his intestines were exposed and dangling outside of his abdominal cavity. I didn’t think he would live.
Vietnam’s Mekong Delta
Due to the intensity of the agriculture practiced throughout the region, the Mekong Delta is both rural and densely populated. This led to a great tragedy of the Vietnam War—the number of civilian war casualties. The mix of American firepower in the highly populated Delta caused the wounds and deaths of many Vietnamese civilians, children and aged among them. Nothing impacted my own tour more than the numbers of civilian war casualties I saw and treated. Nothing has stayed with me like the scenes of our firepower landing on innocents caught in situations beyond their control. None of the excuses and euphemisms used to explain the numbers of civilian casualties ring true to me. Three-year-old children did not harbor grenades waiting to blow us up. Five-year-old girls were not waiting with rifles to ambush us.