This Is a True War Story - My Improbable History with Vietnam

A personal account by a war historian and adoptee who discovers his biological father was a famous Marine combat photographer in Vietnam.

Robert K. Brigham has had a substantial career as a historian of the Vietnam War, with a hand in nine books, a documentary, public history projects, and more. While many a historian has felt compelled at some point to write about a subject close to them personally, Brigham did not think he was doing that. But, at age 58, Brigham, who had long known he was adopted, discovered that he'd improbably and unknowingly been studying and talking about his real father for decades. That man, Bruce Atwell, was a Marine Corps photographer who took some of that war's most indelible and widely reproduced pictures. Brigham had used those images over and over again in decades' worth of classes and public lectures, never knowing the truth.

Both Brigham and Atwell were products of the American foster care and adoption system, and both were defined professionally by Vietnam. In a story shot through with echoes and shadows, Brigham not only reveals his own history as an adoptee but opens a startlingly fresh vantage on the fragility of American families; the power of social norms and taboos to shape lives; and the forces that inequitably disrupt families, not least of them war. The result is an accessible and moving book that is at once both a powerful personal story and an illuminating social critique.

About the author

Robert K. Brigham is the Shirley Ecker Boskey Chair in history at Vassar College. He is the author or coauthor of ten books, among them Reckless: Henry Kissingerand the Tragedy of Vietnam.

Product details

• Authors: Brigham Robert K., Robert K Brigham
• Publisher: University Presses
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 27.01.2026
• EAN: 9780226846880
• ISBN: 978-0-226-84688-0
• No. of pages: 264
• Weight: 454 g
• Illustrations: 30 halftones
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; USA, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economic History, 20th Century, military history, Memoirs, 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, HISTORY / Military / United States, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Franchises, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, Economic history, United States of America, USA, History of the Americas, Franchises, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs