I was only eight years old when I first saw the effect of war.  It was 1971, fifteen years after the start of a conflict that eventually escalated in Vietnam and became a hotbed of controversy in the U.S.  More than fifty-seven-thousand Americans had died in the fighting thus far. Fathers, uncles and neighbors didn’t come home. Some were killed; others were held in horrid conditions as prisoners of war a world away in a place I had not yet heard of, but soon would....