From Silence to Understanding: A Daughter’s Journey, 50 Years After the Vietnam War
- Danae Hendrickson
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Growing up Vietnamese American, I always had this quiet feeling that a part of me existed in a world I couldn’t quite see. At school, I learned American history. At home, I lived American life. But there was another story. One I didn’t have the language for, sitting in the silence between my parents’ memories and my questions that never felt appropriate to ask.
My dad came here in 1981 at seventeen. My mom followed in 1985 at fifteen. They arrived not as tourists or dream-chasers but as refugees. Teenagers who had already lived lifetimes filled with fear, loss, and unimaginable resilience. And like so many refugee parents, they didn’t talk about the war. They didn’t talk about leaving. They didn’t talk about what they endured.
Silence was their survival.
And for a long time, it became mine too.
I went to Vietnam for the first time in 2019 with my dad. At the time, I thought it was just a family vacation. A chance to eat street food, meet relatives, and see where my parents grew up. I remember the motorbikes, the noise, the beauty, the humidity. But I didn’t yet understand the history beneath all of it. I didn’t realize what it meant for him to return to the place he once fled, or why certain moments made him quiet.
I saw Vietnam, but I didn’t understand Vietnam.
I didn’t yet grasp that I was standing in a country that held both my roots and my family’s trauma, or that the silence I grew up with had a story, and that story had consequences still unfolding today.
In 2021, everything shifted when I began working at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) on its Vietnam War Legacies and Reconciliation Initiative. Suddenly, I was in rooms where the conversations my family avoided were on the table. Real, raw, necessary. Conversations about bomb clearance, Agent Orange, missing soldiers, trauma, healing, and what reconciliation actually takes, fifty years later.
And something unexpected happened: my parents started talking.
Not all at once, but slowly. The way you open a door that’s been closed for a long time.
They shared pieces of their journey: crossing oceans, leaving family behind, starting again in a place where no one knew their pain. I realized their silence wasn’t forgetting. It was protection. It was love disguised as quiet.
And the more I listened at work, the more I understood why their silence mattered, and why breaking my own mattered too.
Since that first trip with my dad, I’ve had the privilege of returning to Vietnam twice with USIP and going to Laos for the first time with Legacies of War.
This time, I didn’t just see the markets and the rice fields.
I saw the legacies.
I sat with local partners clearing unexploded ordnance, removing Agent Orange, and recovering service members who became missing from the war.
I spoke with leaders dedicated to healing and rebuilding.
I walked on land where war memories still live in the soil and in the hearts of families.
I saw Southeast Asia full of pride, strength, and hope. I also saw the wounds that never made it into my textbooks growing up. Those trips moved me in a way I didn’t expect. They helped me connect the dots between my parents’ quiet resilience and the resilience of a nation still mending and rising.
Fifty years since the end of the war, the story isn’t finished.
It lives in families.
It lives in the land.
It lives in the silence and in the courage it takes to break it.
For me, this work has become more than a job. It is my way of honoring my parents, my grandparents, and every refugee who rebuilt without ever asking for recognition. It’s how I turn inherited silence into voice, inherited trauma into purpose, and inherited history into hope.
Healing takes generations.
But healing starts somewhere.
It started for me the moment I chose to ask questions instead of staying quiet. And it continues every time I show up for this work. With gratitude, humility, and a deep sense of responsibility.
As we mark 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War, I hope you’ll pause with me. To remember, to honor, and to learn. If you carry this history in your family, or simply in your heart as someone who believes in peace and humanity, I invite you to join this journey.
Learn your history.
Ask the questions that were never asked.
Hold space for the stories carried quietly in our homes.
And when you’re ready, lend your voice, your hands, and your heart to healing.
Support efforts to clear unexploded ordnance.
Engage in conversations about reconciliation.
Explore the work of organizations like Legacies of War.
Be part of building the next chapter. One rooted not in silence, but in understanding and hope.
We honor the past not by looking away, but by stepping toward it, together, to build a more peaceful future.
