Will's Good Idea for the Week of 11/21/21

Last night our neighbor Tommy messaged the neighborhood dad's chat group, 'Fellas it's my 57th birthday. Come on by!' So we did, as did three other the dads. Tommy is Vietnamese and so was the party. At least 40 of Tommy's family and friends were packed in his house. The food was delicious. There was this one shrimp dish...wow. We saw a few people cross themselves before eating.  The men were dressed to various degrees of casual. The women wore jewels and dresses, most of the later was orange, by design. There was a live band and much Karaoke was sung in Vietnamese. Our best guess is these were French songs with Vietnamese lyrics. The karaoke was not wholly unlike this. Many danced, especially one older gentleman. 

'He must have run for his life,' we thought. Tommy himself was a child in Saigon in when the NVA rolled in. HIs father, an officer in the ARVN, later spent a decade in communist prison. We were chit chatting with another party-goer, who told us he knew people who were evacuated in the great South Vietnamese navy run for the Philippines. 

Segwaying to Will's Good Idea for the Week of 11/21/21, why not do the Vietnam War short story collection? Remember MACV advisor Captain Sean Lane from Seven Stories? We could write one story this December for starters. We'd show Sean Lane in Tet, in Cambodia during the evacuation, later on as an advisor in Nicaragua....We'd take his story all the way out to Desert Storm...and beyond. Maybe he becomes a minor celebrity opposing the invasion of Iraq in 2003? It's a thought.

Anyway, happy birthday, Tommy.