The Fayetteville Public Library is hosting a special photo exhibit, film screening, and discussion about the Vietnam War this Veterans Day. On Tuesday, Nov. 11, the library will screen Voices from Vietnam from director Mark Biggs and Lt. Larry Rottman, who served with the 25th Infantry Division during the Vietnam War.
Rottman, along with reference librarian Kelly Haley and genealogy librarian Cora Boland, joined Ozarks at Large’s Daniel Caruth ahead of the event to talk about why they wanted to bring this exhibition to FPL.
Boland says the project is special because both she and Haley are children of veterans.
Cora Boland: When our manager brought this to us, we didn’t know what we were in for. And Larry has been great. He came in with such energy and enthusiasm to share something with everyone — to bring reconciliation for a difficult war like the Vietnam War. Reconciliation for everyone.
Larry Rottman: Well, all three of us happen to be the children of veterans. My father was a disabled vet of World War II. My grandfather, a disabled vet of World War I. Also at the program will be my son, who just recently retired from a quarter-century with the U.S. Navy. So it’s a very veteran-oriented and veteran-friendly program.
Daniel Caruth: This is the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
Larry Rottman: We’ll be talking more about post-war issues for veterans of both countries as well as the general public.
Daniel Caruth: Obviously, this focuses on the Vietnam War. What is your hope in bringing this to the public, and what are some misconceptions or issues people have when talking about the war, especially among veterans of the Vietnam War?
Rottman: The true story — and Cora weaseled it out of me earlier this morning — so I came back from the war. I had not been an author. I had not been a photographer of any import. And I hadn’t written anything about the war or anything else. I mean, you know, what do I know as a college student and a soldier? I don’t know anything.
Anyway, a few weeks after I got back from the war and out of the military, I was invited to speak to the Chamber of Commerce of Springfield, Missouri, through family, through a family connection. And they said, you know, “We want the straight skinny,” right? And we’re talking here about the captains of industry, the founding fathers, many of them Korean War vets and World War II vets. And I said, no, you don’t really want to know what it’s like. “Oh yes, we really do. We think maybe we’re not getting the full story.” And I said, well, yeah, that’s true.
So out of respect to the family member who asked me to do this, I did it. So we go to — it’s a monthly lunch for more than 100 people, all men, of course, in those days. And as I said, many of them vets, or some of them even had sons in the war at that time.
In preparation, I had written some stories down about some things that happened to me that I saw personally and so forth and so on. And I began relating them to the people there, and they started getting up and walking out. They didn’t want to hear the real story, or it was too upsetting. One of the two, or maybe both.
And by the time I finished — I’d talked about 40 minutes — half of them had gotten up and left. They didn’t boo me. They didn’t throw food at me. They didn’t cause any problems. And then when I finished, the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce got up and walked out. Nobody said thanks. Nobody said this is the end of today’s talk. Nothing.
And so I’m thinking to myself later, if these people — every one of them a college graduate, every one of them knowledgeable, the people who are running the city and the county — if they don’t know or they don’t want to know what the war is really like, somebody needs to tell them.
So I began writing books and plays and performance art and making films and writing newspaper articles and so forth. And I’m 82, and I’m still doing it.
Caruth: And for you, when you — I mean what you have on display in the photography and with the film, what do you hope people get out of it, and the crowd you hope comes to this and sees it?
Rottman: For most veterans of the Vietnam War, it was the most exciting thing that ever happened in their life, right out of high school. Still teenagers. First time to leave their county or their state. First time to ride on a plane. First time to ever visit — and never have visit again — a foreign country. First time to have a serious girlfriend and a chance to be a warrior for America.
And yet, as time has gone by, popular culture has gone from Rambo to stuff that’s more thoughtful, more historically correct. And so people are beginning to realize that maybe the pride they felt in their service, risking their lives, wasn’t necessarily a good thing — that actually, the war that we brought to Vietnam — remember, they didn’t attack us. No 9/11 from Vietnamese. We attacked them at home in their country and did it for 10 years. Dropped more bombs on this little bitty country the size of New Mexico for a decade than we dropped in all of World War II. Maybe it wasn’t all that great an idea. But you know, damn it, you know I meant it to be good. I meant it to be important. And now what, right?
So one of the things that I’ve always tried to do in my work — and it’s just spontaneous, it’s not a protocol of mine — is to give veterans a chance to cross the threshold between unreasonably patriotic — that is, going to war for a reason we don’t know — to realizing that you were part of, and, let’s be honest, a kind of genocide. And that’s a step. That’s a threshold that’s really hard to — very, very hard for vets to cross. They need a soft landing.
I was talking to Cora earlier this morning. The show that we did in Columbia at the Missouri Historical Society — one of the people there was a former American POW who was in prison camp in Hanoi, former pilot there with his wife at our show. He came to see the photo exhibit. He saw the film, came back the next night for the stories. And they sat huddled together, holding hands and hugging, crying through the whole evening. And then he came up afterward, and he said, that was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen about this matter.
He was nonpolitical. He had never written a book. He had never let himself be used for political purposes. He never ran for office. He said, I never thought about it that way. So as I told Cora, if we just helped one vet one night, right? We’ve been doing this since 1985. The program we’ll be doing here in Fayetteville is our 215th in 25 states and nine foreign countries.
If we help this guy and his wife — don’t forget, it’s a partnership — you don’t have to have served in Vietnam to be a veteran of that war. One of the things we’ll see in the program is my son, who will talk about being a veteran himself, but also, as he says half-jokingly, the son of a crazy Vietnam vet. So if we just help that one guy, then it’s all been worth it.
Considering everything that’s going on in America, in the world right now, I think healing for this particular group of people, Vietnam veterans and their families, is good work.
Caruth: And, Cora, I’m wondering for you, you know, having the localizing part of this and getting the genealogy department involved, can you talk about that aspect of this program?
Boland: I think people that are researching their genealogy are always searching for understanding of the people that came before them and understanding why their lives were the way they were. For me, as a child, I didn’t know what Vietnam was, but I knew not to bring it up. But this is a chance for that younger generation to have that reconciliation and understand how horrible that time in my father’s life was, being 18 years old. Just to understand what they went through and then find some peace and some healing for myself. And it’s probably the same for Larry’s son and maybe for Kelly as well, even though it was a different war that her father was in.
Haley: Right. I think, like you said, Cora, this is something that is not talked about a lot. I mean, if it is brought up in a family or if you have a family member who’s a veteran of the Vietnam War, often you’re told, we don’t talk about it or don’t mention it, don’t talk about it at Thanksgiving dinner or whatever. It’s just not something that’s talked about. And you get the point of view from the news and pop culture, but not very many personal points of view. But with this film and this talk — the film on the 11th and the talk on the 12th — it does make it very personal. And the photographs are also very personal. There are a lot of kids, there are animals, there are farmers. There are soldiers talking with just regular people. So it does give you kind of a slowed-down, not politicized, not in-your-face look at what was happening. Just you can kind of get an idea of some of the more human stories.
Caruth: Yeah. Well, can you talk a little bit about that? Talking about this subject often is very political, can be politically charged. It can be tough to talk about, especially if you aren’t directly impacted by it. If you aren’t a vet, or even if you are the child of a vet, it’s hard to have these conversations and to breach that subject. So what is the value in having a program like this available to people? Open — I mean, how should people come to this and engage with this?
Boland: For me, it’s a new perspective. It’s not about the shooting and the carnage. It’s about there were people living in this country, and the photographs really show that with the children. They’re still living their lives. It’s just different from what maybe American children were living at that time. And he says really beautifully that it was, in one of the writings, that he wanted to make sure that the children were OK. And that was really touching.
Haley: I think, you know, usually when people come to library programs and exhibits, they’re coming because they’re curious and they just want to learn something new. I think you should approach this like any other because you will learn something new.
Rottman: So the photo exhibit, particularly over 100 photos, just shows people. And one of the reasons that I do the work I do is I fell in love with the country. It’s absolutely, spectacularly beautiful and calm. And even in a war, or maybe particularly in a war, there are moments of quiet. There are moments of silence. There are moments of calm. There are moments of beauty.
As Cora and Kelly had just pointed out, we don’t see those, right? We got Rambo and Apocalypse Now and Hamburger Hill. But they left out the human side. It’s gone. It’s just guns. And the whole country continued to operate as a country for a decade, almost exactly 10 years, growing crops, hunting, fishing, and trying to make some sense of how to keep your family and your country together while being attacked all day, every day, by the biggest country in the world. That’s one of the most important parts of the work that we try to do.
Caruth: Yeah. And having done this for so many years in different variations in different places, I’m wondering, does the exhibit, does this program change? Has it changed over that time?
Rottman: No, that’s a great question. As I go back and forth to Vietnam, Vietnam changes, right? So if you’ve got an IBM, you know parts of it — there it is right there in front of you — parts of that came from Vietnam. So there’s growth and change. And also, I learn more. And as I get older, I become more thoughtful and introspective and have acquired a lot more information and knowledge. And it’s an evolutionary process.
Right here we have Cora and Kelly, both with family members who are Vietnam veterans, and yet they’re going to be learning and seeing things from a different perspective all these half a century later. Yes. So you bet.
Also, I would point out that we did our first program on Veterans Day at Missouri State University in 1985, number one, and never have been the same because people, times change, additional information makes itself available. And so, yeah, the program that we did at the Missouri Historical Society on April 3, which was actually 50 years to the day from the fall of Saigon earlier this year, the program we’ll be doing here is different. It’s changed. It’s grown. And that’s just the natural order of things.
Caruth: All right. Well, the fun part now — if you guys want to give me the dates and times for when all these events will be and when people should know about that.
Haley: On Nov. 11 at 6 p.m., that’s when we’re showing Voices from Vietnam. That’s the film screening. And then after you’ll have the discussion with Larry Rottman and Mark Biggs, who was the director.
And then on the 12th at 6 p.m., A Different Vietnam War. That event is the spoken word — the true stories about war. And then it’s accompanied by live music, and the musician is Tim Burrows. And he’ll be with you, with Larry and Larry’s son Eli.
Rottman: And Tim is a Navy veteran from Vietnam and a very experienced professional musician. He’s playing original blues compositions. He’ll tell his own story about being a Vietnam vet, and the rest is his musical interpretation of his experience. So everybody in the show is a vet.
Boland: I’d like to include that we’ll have Faces from Vietnam. The photography will be displayed a week before the program and then also during the programs on Nov. 11 and 12.
Cora Boland, Larry Rottman, and Kelly Haley speaking with Ozarks at Large’s Daniel Caruth. Last month, the film Voices from Vietnam will screen Tuesday, Nov. 11, at the Fayetteville Public Library at 5:30 p.m.
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