I used to think it was my memory, you know, some things you forget, other things you never do, but it's not.

Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone.

But the place, the picture of it stays. And not just in my memory, but out there in the world.

What I remember is a picture of floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die,

the picture of what I did or knew or saw is still out there. Tony Morrison, 11.

My own memories began very concretely in a refugee camp, a few weeks after the fall of Saigon.

We were actually boat lifted out of Saigon, and then airlifted from Guam to Pennsylvania, and ended up, you know, in a military base,

for Indian town gap in Harrisburg. And that's where my memories begin.

Vietnam War, boat lifted out of Vietnam, then airlifted to a new life in the United States.

The war fundamentally defined his life, even though his memories of it are hazy.

Before the end of the war, all I remember, because I was four years old, are just these fragmentary images, which I don't even know, what they really happened.

For example, being on a boat and seeing sailors shooting at a smaller boat approaching us.

My brother, who was seven years old, has never happened.

So I have to trust that his memory is right, and my memory is wrong.

He has to trust it, even though what his brother says contradicts Fiat's own memories. And that tension has animated his writing.

I am a professor, a scholar, and a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Probably best known for my novel, The Simplifizer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016,

as well as its sequel, The Committed, Collection of Short Stories called The Refugees, and a nonfiction book called Nothing Ever Dies, Vietnam in the Memory of War.

Viet also calls himself a scholar of memory, someone who studies how we remember events of the past, both as people and as nations, and how those memories affect how we face the future.

And no narratives are more contested than those of war.

Millions are doing all they can do, and heading for the nearest border. And so for several days now, a growing wave of Ukrainian refugees has fanned out across Europe.

Right now, the world is watching the war in Ukraine. In just one month, Russia has destroyed major cities. Many communications are gone. And more than 3 million refugees have fled the country. Many of them children.

As if war in Ukraine, missile attacks, jet fighters screaming overhead and tanks bullying their way through suburban streets, wasn't already terrifying enough.

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