Introduction: 

Something He Couldn't Write About

I have possessed a genuine curisoity about my father, Louis J. Raynor's, experiences in the Vietnam War ever since I found his diary and photo album from the war when I was in middle school. He reluctantly shared those items with me for a class project, but he did not talk much about his experiences, at least not to me. I noticed that he did, however, talked to other veterans who also served in Vietnam. This childhood curiosity lead to the veterans oral history projects that are the focus of the website: Breaking the Silence: The Unspoken Brotherhood of Vietnam Vietnams, When Writing Goes to War, The Silence of War and In the Face of Adversity: The Service and Legacy of African American WWII Veterans.

Sitting on my writing desk at home is the diary my father kept during the Vietnam War. With its tattered and worn pages, it sits there in a glass case with one of his original dog tags, the patches from his uniform and a few personal writings and several photographs. As my father grew older, he became an utilitarian collector of all things useful, but his collection of writings and photography from his service during the Vietnam War represents a legacy of war that was passed from father to daughter. As the inheritor of his collection, these objects are a daily reminder of his service and sacrifices. They represent more than just collected memories from a time long passed but a sacred trust between father and daughter. These objects not only represent my father's time at war as a eighteen year old African American Army draftee serving with the 3rd Squad/5th Cav, 9th Infantry Division (Black Knights), but they also represent all the times, during and after the war, that Vietnam took him away from his family. While the many photographs and documents illustrate his stories of war, the personal writings in his diary are just a glimpse into his 365-day tour as an infantryman.  

These are the historical traces that tell a story of war that he never could tell. While they are ethnographic carriers of personal memories for my father and for me, they evoke postmemory, which "most specifically describes the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they 'remember' only as the narratives and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right. It is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, and creation--often based on silence rather than speech, on the invisible rather than the visible." For me, living with these objects is a testament to the inherent power that lies within these artifacts that allow me to remember my father's memories of war. These objects fill silences when I long to hear my father's voice. They have led me to document those voices, stories and memories that we may miss once our veteran is no longer with us. On this journey, I have collaborated with amazing documentarians, filmmakers, photographers, oral historians, agencies and communities who have similar stories. This website is dedicated to the servicemen and women who participated in these veterans oral history projects that emerged from these intimate conversations over the past two decades. My work has been featured by the media source, Cardinal & Pine: “Hidden Valor: Remembering North Carolina’s Black Veterans on Memorial Day.” 

After being drafted and entering the military in 1966, my father started writing in a small, leather-bound burgundy diary measuring 5.5”x4” which was compact enough for him to keep it in either his footlocker or inside his uniform wrapped in plastic to protect it from rain when he was out in the field. Inside the front cover of the diary, he wrote his name, rank, unit, date of departure for Vietnam, body measurements, home address, telephone number as well as the name of his girlfriend who was later to become his wife and my mother. The diary reads according to the dates of his tour of duty from September to December and then the diary continues from January to September. Instead of counting the days of his tour in chronological order, from Day 1 to Day 365, he does a backwards countdown, indicating his first day in Vietnam as Day 365 and to his last day in Vietnam as Day 1. As my father’s tour-of-duty was ending, he wrote the last few days as multiple entries on the same page. He continued to count down until Day 1, September 24, 1968, which was the only blank page in his diary. On several pages in the back of the diary, he wrote the names and addresses of family and friends. On the inside back cover of the diary, there are tiny, monthly calendars for the years 1967 through 1972, where he marked the days of his time in Vietnam.