The following write-up and series of photographs are from photographer Bryan Grigsby. A picture editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Grigsby began his photography career while serving in Vietnam with the United States Army's Special Photographic Office, a unit of photographers and filmmakers with almost unfettered access to front-line troops. His personal photography is now in several collections, including the Graham Nash Collection in Pasadena, California.

I asked Grigsby to put together a series of images and some text related to his Vietnam experience. His views are a poignant reminder of how little we have learned from our own recent history.

Bryan Grigsby: The Lessons of Vietnam Even after all these years the sound of a helicopter passing overhead will stop me in mid thought, accessing a very private part of my mind. Helicopters provided the background sound to the war in South Vietnam. Like most guys my age Vietnam was like a giant punctuation mark in the story of my life. I was one person before I served there and a different person after I got back. Even if you didn't go to Vietnam the draft hung like a cloud over just about every guy's head.

When the war ended in 1975, it was not over for many of the people who served there. During the 1970's and early 1980's pop culture painted a picture of Vietnam Vets as drug crazed child killers. There were lots of stories of guys who went bad after they came home. The news was full of stories of Viet Vets in jail or on drugs and collecting unemployment.

After I got out of the Army I eventually became a newspaper photographer. Early on I began to photograph stories that dealt with veterans. It wasn't until Vietnam Veteran Jan Scruggs came up with the idea of a memorial to the people who died in Vietnam that public opinion about vets began to turn around. Most of us kept quiet about our service over there. Admitting you were a vet was a real conversation stopper at a party. So mostly we kept quiet. When the memorial was dedicated in Washington DC in 1983 the Vietnam Vets threw themselves a giant welcome home parade. I was there for that. Later the government buried what was believed to be an unknown soldier for the war. I was there for that too.

Other story assignments fell my way or I covered events on my own. After the memorial dedication in 1983, Vietnam War Memorials began to spring up all over the country. I covered several in the Philadelphia area where I was now working for the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper. As the vets aged and raised families I noticed they had begun to take their children to these events. Little boys would dress up in kid-sized military uniforms. They were proud of their dads. Their dads could now wear their medals with pride instead of keeping them in a drawer. I noticed something else however, and this began to bother me at the time. What were we teaching these boys of ours? Unlike the John Wayne movies from World War Two, Vietnam movies tended to be more realistic about what war was all about. But on a local, more personal level I sensed that my fellow vets were passing on to their young sons something nearly as dangerous as what The Duke had passed on to my generation. War as a heroic, honorable thing that did not show the horror, blood and pain. Again we teaching the next generation to not ask questions of the people who were sending us into harms way.

Now when I see the faces of those soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan I see the faces of those little boys who stood by their dads during those military ceremonies twenty years ago. What did we learn in Vietnam? I'm not so sure I know anymore.