"Fringes of War: Vietnam, 1969," with Roger LeBrun, a vector-borne disease specialist from the University of Rhode Island, who was a combat medic with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam in 1969-1970. During this commemoration, LeBrun will exhibit 24 photos he took during the war of abandoned Amerasian children, who lived in a Buddhist orphanage, as well as other poignant photos of unusual non-combat scenes. Both moving and uplifting, in spite of the grim context in which they were taken, his images received rave reviews when they appeared earlier this year at a gallery in Newport, Rhode Island. LeBrun will describe his experience and that of the children he photographed. In addition, he will discuss his planned work this summer on infectious disease in Vietnam as a Fulbright Senior Specialist for the Pasteur Institute at the Institute for Hygiene and Epidemiology in Hanoi.
"Impressions of My Father," with Quyen Truong, a Brown senior art concentrator, who was born in Saigon, and moved with her family to Hartford, Connecticut, when she was seven. Her father, an ARVN (South Vietnamese) soldier, was imprisoned in a re-education camp north of the 17th parallel for seven years and barely survived the experience. She has taped and transcribed interviews with her father, and is transforming her impressions into large, black and white drawings (5 of them, roughly 10 feet by 5 feet each). Her paintings are overwhelming in their power to move the viewer. Truong will describe the process by which she "interviewed" her father, what motivated her to do so, her father's response to seeing her paintings, and some reflections on her trip during the summer of 2004 back to Vietnam with her father (their first since immigrating to the U.S.).
"A Surgeon in Vietnam Reports," with Augustus A. White III, former head of orthopedic surgery at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, and a MASH unit surgeon in South Vietnam in 1965-1966. White, who graduated from Brown in 1958, was an athletic star in his college days and, following medical school at Stanford, became one of the foremost orthopedic surgeons in the world, specializing in spinal surgery. He returned to Vietnam for the first time as an observer at a 1997 conference in Hanoi on the war, sponsored by Brown's Watson Institute. He will speak about his medical experience in Vietnam, and share some race related perspectives. In Vietnam, White led a team of military medical volunteers, who offered surgical and non surgical care in a leper colony in a non secure region of Vietnam. He will describe and discuss his experiences.
Moderator, James G. Blight, professor of International Relations (Research), Watson Institute, Brown University.
Location: Starr Auditorium, MacMillan Hall 117.