Personal Narrative: My Grandpa John's Life

As I Easter came upon us, I knew my Grandpa John would be in town. My Grandpa John is 69 years old, and has experienced many different social issues during his life, so I decided to interview him. In his prime, my grandpa served in the military which allowed him to move often around the United States, and the world. I knew he had a lot of experience due to the military, and he was quite the storyteller. I knew it would be easy to talk to him about different social issues throughout his life. As we sat down we talked about many things, but the two ideas that really stuck out to me were the Vietnam War and the Space Race. The Vietnam War was the first social issue that we discussed on Easter. What I knew from school about the Vietnam War was that the war lasted almost 20 years! This was the
longest war in United States history. Also, I remembered that the U.S. didn’t lose the war, but they withdrew from it before they likely lost. What my grandpa told me about the Vietnam War brought up lots of problems and changes to the U.S. society. My grandpa told me a few crippling stories about the war. He told me that “many young men that came back from the war were in terrible condition. I was one of the lucky ones.” This was crazy to me because I never really looked closely into the Vietnam War. I never knew about the horrible conditions they were in, and that almost everyone in the states gave them no support. Also, my grandpa stated that “when we [the troops] came back to the states, we were treated very poorly. I was lucky enough to have a stable family to go back to.” This quote also stood out to me because many of the troops had to live on the streets when they came back. Some were already in critical condition, and they never got the help they needed. Today, there is nothing really going on like the Vietnam War. But the war was a competition between rivals, and this occurs everyday between cell phone carriers and other companies. Hopefully nothing like this war happens in the future. After our Vietnam War conversation, we moved to talking about the Space Race.
The Space Race was huge to society during his youth, and I thought it was awesome to hear about. It was really interesting to me that with little technology, countries were able to send men into space successfully. My grandpa was a teenager at this time so he couldn’t remember everything that happened, but he told me the important parts. When it came to the space race he told me, “when the Russians were first into space, it was a pretty big deal. Nobody in America liked them, so we had to do better. So we decided to go send our own guys into space to see if we could be better than the Russians.” He also told me that the Space Race was a massive rivalry that stood between the United States and the then- Soviet Union which lasted for many years. During recent times, NASA sent a space shuttle, Atlantis, containing people in 2010. The Atlantis space shuttle is the last shuttle that NASA’s program is going to send into space. Over the years, space travel has become more and more advanced. But NASA has went to more of a satellite-base program, which shows why they are going to stop sending humans into
space. Over the years, I have listened to many stories from my grandpa, but we never really talked about social issues that happened in his youth. He has told me stories about him spending every hour of his summer working, hunting with his dad, fishing with his friends, but he has never talked about social issues with me. I thought it was very interesting to hear what he went through as a 20 year old. It got me thinking about what I could tell my kids and grandkids someday. Over the past 60 years many different things in society have changed. It’s really hard to tell what is going to happen in the next 60 years.