Ursula K. Le Guin, the Vietnam War, and Me

When the precise stylist put aside subtlety to make a polemic point about war in The Word for World is Forest

The Vietnam War is the instigating event leading to me sitting in this room, in this house, where I’m writing this.

It’s not because of my own family, although my father was drafted into the Marines in the mid-1960s. He never deployed to Vietnam, instead serving his military time at Camp Pendleton Marine Base, where I came on the scene in December 1967. But none of that led directly to my sitting here typing on my computer in Northern Virginia.

The actual instigating event was the fall of Saigon in April 1975, when the U.S. evacuated its embassy and I was finishing up my successful stint as a third grader. Over on the far side of the world that I was only vaguely aware of through the NBC Nightly News, the first of my future in-laws escaped Vietnam with her family (she worked for the embassy). Skip forward to 2002, when I meet my future husband — his mother brought them over when they were sponsored by her older sister, above — while playing tennis.

Toss in a wedding and a slew of aunts, …