Still Not Past

From the desk of: Hannah Hayes, Advocacy Ambassador, Legacies of War

I still remember clinging to my grandma on the back of her motorbike, the heat swallowing us whole as we wove through the city, taking it all in as best as I could from behind her. These rides were part of the early years of my childhood, growing up in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, with my grandma and my cousins. I loved it. 

It was through my grandma that I came to know Vietnam and all that it is: experiencing life alongside her shaped my sense of the place – and my understanding of what it means to be Vietnamese – more clearly than any explanation ever could have. It was in that same vein that I came to understand the consequences of the American War in Vietnam.

Maybe it was because I was young, but no one sat me down to retell stories of the war or explained to me the harm it had left behind. I learned about Agent Orange as something that just existed, its legacy woven into everyday life over 30 years later. Families dealt with health conditions everyone understood were connected to dioxin. Certain parts of the countryside were avoided for reasons people didn’t want to talk about for too long. And our visits to family friends in the South were often reminders that some places had been hit harder than others.

My grandma and grandpa in HCMC.

When I got older, I moved back to Texas, but Vietnam never felt too far. My family and I went back every summer and every holiday break we could manage. It was during these visits that I started volunteering with local groups and Buddhist temples, helping to raise money and direct food and medical supplies to families affected by Agent Orange. I witnessed just how monumentally this chemical had altered people’s lives, but what struck me most about all of it was how little awareness of this enduring issue existed back home.

Of course, we learned about the American War in Vietnam and Agent Orange in history class. My eighth-grade schoolmates and I were taught that it was a herbicide the U.S. military had used as a weapon, that it had devastating effects on Vietnam and its people. Had. Past tense. But I saw for myself that these weren't historical cases. These were people still living with it everyday. They carried burdens that had rarely been acknowledged, and outside of certain circles, no one seemed to know or want to talk about.

Me in my childhood bedroom in Vietnam.

That gap hasn’t closed, and it's what brought me to Legacies of War. Legacies names something most people treat as settled history, or would rather avoid altogether: that U.S. bombing campaigns across Southeast Asia left damage that didn't end when the fighting stopped. Environmental contamination is still making people sick. Agent Orange and other herbicides are still shaping the lives of children born generations after its use. Unexploded ordnance is still killing people.

As an Advocacy Ambassador, I want to help keep this issue visible. It may have faded from public attention, but for the people living with its consequences, nothing has faded. And while we've made real progress, there's still far to go. More than anything, I want to help platform the people affected firsthand. Not to speak for them, but to make room for them to tell their own stories, and to write their own futures. That's what stayed with me from my time helping provide medical supplies: it wasn't just supplying aid, but being able to afford those impacted with agency. It was helping give people a way to take back some of what the war had taken from them.

Working with a local Buddhist temple supporting those affected by Agent Orange to distribute food, vitamins, medical supplies and equipment.

What I'd seen in Vietnam followed me to college. I majored in political science, focusing on international affairs and post-conflict justice. It struck me how rarely my classes throughout high school talked about what happens after the history-making conflicts end. I found myself being drawn to the unresolved: what comes after a ceasefire is signed, who stays accountable after the cameras leave and attention drifts, why some harms get remembered and others quietly disappear.

This led me to spend a semester abroad studying armed conflict, humanitarian law, and reconciliation. Part of that was a field program in Sarajevo, Mostar, and Srebrenica, where I met families still living inside the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars. The loss was visible, and heartbreaking. But what I kept thinking about was the endurance – how people had learned to keep living with so much unresolved and unanswered for, while the world filed their suffering away and looked elsewhere. As I sat eating lunch with these families, meeting their children and pets, watching ordinary life carry on alongside all that weight, I kept thinking of Vietnam. I thought of the families affected by Agent Orange, by unexploded ordnance, and by a war that supposedly ended decades ago.

The Srebrenica–Potočari Memorial Cemetery, where thousands of victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide are buried. Many were identified and laid to rest years later, but names are still missing.

Every war leaves its own legacies. But there's a thread running through all of them: the people who remain inside those legacies long after the world declares the story over. The work Legacies of War does matters because it refuses the convenience of a finished story. Legacies reminds us that wars don't end cleanly, that acknowledgement isn't optional, and that responsibility doesn't dissolve with time. In my experience, it's not that people don’t care about these issues or about helping those affected. It’s that they don't know, or that they turn away because the discomfort of engaging feels like too much. By continuing to speak about it, and by teaching younger generations, Legacies refuses to let these stories become forgotten. They make them something people can actually talk about, rather than a subject too taboo and uncomfortable to touch.

I think it's easy to treat this as a closed chapter, and to keep this history at a distance. I'm twenty-one. I wasn't born until decades after the war ended, and I don’t live in Vietnam anymore. The legacies it left behind feel personal but remote at the same time, and I understand why people abstract away the consequences left behind – especially now. Recent cuts and pauses to USAID and funding for UXO clearance and Agent Orange programs only make it easier to think of these as tragedies of the past. But being in Vietnam, talking to people who never had the option of turning the page or looking away, reminds me that being able to close the book is a privilege. It's a way of wrapping the past up neatly so we don't have to look too closely. I think a lot of people my age feel this tension. We're told, or we tell ourselves, that the story is over, while seeing evidence with our own eyes that it isn't. Advocacy, for me, is doing something meaningful about that disconnect rather than smoothing it over. And Legacies of War feels like the right place to keep learning and trying to do just that.

My cousin and I in Vietnam, growing up long after the war, but witnessing what it left behind every day.