Yet, while Latino veterans share many commonalities, their experiences in the war are as diverse as the category of Latino itself. Some, like Mr. Alvarez, a Navy pilot whose plane was shot down in the Gulf of Tonkin incident and who spent eight and a half years as a prisoner of war, enlisted as a way to follow a family tradition of military service and patriotic duty. Others joined the service as a means of exerting control over their destiny in response to what they understood as the inevitability of the draft. A few, like the Chicano student activist Rosalío Muñoz, bravely staged public protests refusing induction; many more, like my father, received their draft notice and reported for duty.

This broad range of Latino veteran experiences, coupled with Dr. Guzmán’s research, galvanized the robust Latino antiwar efforts that culminated in one of the largest antiwar demonstrations during the Vietnam era: the Chicano Moratorium on Aug. 29, 1970, in which nearly 30,000 Latinos marched through Los Angeles. Latino antiwar activists were as diverse as Latino veterans and included university students like Mr. Muñoz; draft board members like Julian Camacho, a Korean War veteran who resigned from the Santa Cruz County draft board to protest the class inequities of the induction system; and family members of servicemen, such as Mr. Alvarez’s sister, Delia Alvarez, who, as a modern-day Antigone, spoke out against the state in an effort to honor her brother.

The history of Latino participation in Vietnam, then, not only deepens our understanding of American involvement in the war but also, according to Dr. Summers Sandoval, “acts as a prism for a larger social history of the Brown Baby Boom generation and offers lessons about the terms and costs of integration for Latinos in the United States.” Or as the Vietnam veteran Charley Trujillo observed, “They wanted us to come out here and work in the cotton fields and call us Mexicans but as soon as there’s a war, all of a sudden, we’re American.”

A few months after the Edgewood Vietnam Memorial’s unveiling, I entered my senior year at a high school across town. By then I had already begun to consider myself an aspiring writer and a child of the war. These two facts were, for me, profoundly connected. My first poem, written when I was 12, was a poem about Vietnam. So many of my poems since then have also returned to Vietnam and its particular impact on Latinos. Like Tomás Summers Sandoval, whose father also served, I am part of a generation of writers and scholars who are now adult children of Vietnam — the descendants of veterans or refugees — who grew up with the war and who try in our own work to do as my father did: stare into that dark hollow in an effort to extract what’s painful or to heal what’s broken. We write our way toward our parents, we write a way back from the war.

As the recent anthology “Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees,” edited by Laren McClung, suggests, we recognize our profound connection to one another precisely through our attempts at documentation. My father came back from Vietnam, and together we create space to move through the silences left by the historical record, by the lasting effects of war, and by those Edgewood neighbors who never returned.