The Cornell University Veterans Colleague Network Group, Southeast Asia Program, and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies presents:

The 2008 National Defense Authorization Act authorized a program to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War.  The Commemorative Partner Program is designed to assist a grateful nation in thanking and honoring our Vietnam Veterans and their families. Cornell University has become a Commemorative Partner.  As a partner, the university will host an event that will recognize the Vietnam Veterans and their families' service, valor, and sacrifice.

We are hosting the photographic collection of Glenn Hoover ’68, a Cornell alum and Vietnam veteran from November 7^th - November 30^th.  Glenn Hoover will provide a presentation on November 9^th from 3:00pm -5:00pm in the Willard Straight Art Gallery.  This followed by a reception.  Through Glenn's lens, we can see the primitive living conditions of a divided and disrupted country on the other side of the world. We see the camaraderie among our servicemen and, occasionally, among the US combat troops and their hosts. We see that Easterners and Westerners could join together...not just militarily, but also in so many individual interactions.  This book and the exhibition of photographs that it supports, features pictures captured in 1968 during the peak of a conflict that Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call The American War.  

In Vietnam, the innocent soul was the 19-year-old Army draftee from Cortland, New York; the group of African American kids who loved singing songs more than shooting guns.  It was also the conscript VC soldier forced to leave his village and fight for a cause he didn’t understand; the aging Mama-san; and the beautiful young girl selling chilled Coca Colas to tall men with guns dressed in green.  It was also the members of a Montagnard tribe trying to find a new way after peacefully co-existing with nature for centuries before the arrival of foreigners with different ideas and their own agendas.  They were all innocent souls in this war.