TACOMA — The Washington State History Museum in Tacoma opened a new exhibit Saturday to showcase Vietnam War veterans’ personal keepsakes, commemorating half a century since the war’s end.
Titled “The Things They Brought Home,” the exhibit showcases the stories of Washington’s Vietnam War veterans by displaying a collection of personal objects that people brought back from their service. People from a variety of roles in the war are represented, including medical workers, nurses, the U.S. Navy, the Air Force, the Naval Construction Battalion and the Army, said retired Army Lt. Col. Erik Flint, a military historian and co-curator of the exhibit.
The exhibit opened to the public Saturday, displaying dozens of personal artifacts until Nov. 16 to reach until Veterans Day, said Gwen Whiting, lead curator of exhibitions at the museum. Tickets cost $17 for adults, $14 with a military or senior discount and $11 for students, but are free for Washington State Historical Society members or children ages 5 and younger.
Megan Nishikawa, co-curator of the exhibit and a post-doctoral fellow at the museum, said the collection focuses on unique personal items, such as a collection of letters between one veteran and his Vietnamese landlady, as well as war artifacts such as bullet casings and uniforms. Lesser-known facts about the war period — such as that some veterans had been able to live in civilian buildings with landlords — are brought to light in the exhibit, Nishikawa said. Another special display item includes a video of a Navy dentist performing work on his unit’s pet bear in Vietnam, Flint said. Objects will also be accompanied by written stories and photos of each veteran’s time in Vietnam, Nishikawa said.
“(The unit) loved to feed the bear cookies, and the bear loved the cookies, but in the end, he ended up having to have a tooth pulled,” Whiting said, chuckling. “And so you see them helping the bear, and then you see them feed him cookies immediately afterward. … The last thing I expected was that I would hear a story about a pet bear.”
Over 184,500 Vietnam-era veterans reside in Washington, and 1,123 Washingtonians were killed or declared missing in action in Vietnam, according to a proclamation from former Gov. Jay Inslee. The United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration recognizes all those who served in active duty in the U.S. Armed Forces between Nov. 1, 1955, and May 15, 1975, as Vietnam veterans. According to the National Museum of American Diplomacy, the Vietnam War effectively ended on April 30, 1975.
Nishikawa said the idea for the exhibit was inspired by the museum’s director of audience engagement, Mary Mikel Stump, whose father was a medical corps adviser of the 1st Special Forces Group in Vietnam. Stump said her father carried her sister’s baby bracelet and a personal firearm throughout his time in the war and kept them always in his sight on his desk upon his return, sparking the idea for the project.
“The idea of commemorating that experience 50 years later is about making important those individual memories and things they brought home with them,” Stump said.
The exhibition will also lead into another display planned for November about Vietnamese resettlement in Washington after the war’s end, she added. Stump said the museum is here to teach, adding it was important to consider that “it’s also the 50th anniversary of those Vietnamese communities being established” by people who had to leave their country as a result of Saigon’s fall.
As Flint and Nishikawa began to contact veterans for the project, they discovered that many had stories about objects they had brought home from the war, which shifted the project’s focus from its original title, “The Things They Kept with Them,” to “The Things They Brought Home.” Some veterans even donated their items to the museum’s collection, which will help preserve history for years to come, Stump added.
While many objects were collected by Flint and Nishikawa as they interviewed veterans in the community about their stories, some items on display came from the museum’s existing collections, Whiting said, adding that some are materials from Cheryl Dineen, a late advocate for Vietnam War veterans who had received many objects from veterans as thanks for her assistance in helping them return to civilian life. Many objects in the collection show fuller perspectives of the details of daily wartime life, Whiting said.
“I often like the simple stuff; we have a wallet, for example, that has … the immunization certificate that you had to get to go over there, to identification, to personal little notes,” she said.
