^ Yeah, dude. That's basically one snippet from my father's story.

He had to forego his last year of high school because of the war. He passed the officer's training exam at 17--he's intelligent but it could have been because of the abundance of openings. He ended up a Lt. His 'squad' (sorry not familiar with military lingo) was mostly slaughtered at some point in the war--he took shrapnel through the pelvis and out the ass and laid among dead bodies for two days before he was rescued.

After the war, officers were given something like 9-12 months to report to reeducation camp. His higher education was 5 years of clearing forest with intermittent lineups, executions and mock executions (the sort that were dramatized in Chuck Norris movies), + burying the dead.

Now, usually cats are proud of their catches. I suspect that it was the cat that drug it in, but during my teens and some 15 years ago, a rat spent 3 or so summer weeks decaying in my parents' garage before it was found. The smell was atrocious and nobody in my family knew that it was the smell of flesh rotting but my father..he knew "because of the war" and didn't explain any further (I learned the more gruesome stories second hand from my mother and not for another decade at least). That was also a pretty fucked up PTSD nightmare time that I was pretty whatever about at that age.

It's a different story, but I wasn't unlike the kid making videos, and of course this guy's videos are in fun and I myself was a shit second generation (hapa) teenager. The gentleman in the video was probably too young to be in the army himself, but, and at the risk of essentializing the experience, everyone had a fucked up time of it. While totally unique to the individual, the Vietnamese refugee experience is something else and this video made me pretty sad, despite the kid in this video and his father laughing about it and obv. it being OK to joke about for them. I guess though the more you learn and grow up like this kid no doubt will, the less appropriate joking about the struggles of refugees seems. Gotta learn that family story