In August, my story on Norman Morrison was published in the Erie Reader.
While it was a story about Norman and the Vietnam War, it was also a story about his family and the impact that his choice to die by suicide in protest of the escalating war had on his friends and family — including his young daughter who, through no choice of her own, is forever entangled with the story of that day.
"In the end," wrote Robert Dockhorn, senior editor for the Quaker publication Friends Journal, in 2009, "maybe understanding these acts is less central for us than learning how it is possible to heal such painful and lasting wounds."
Anne had to process her own shock and grief about the death of her husband in a very public way.
“I feel like a big part of my life stopped in 1965," she said in a 1995 interview with Sojourner three decades after his death. "I have worked through enough – with [daughters] Christina and Emily, and within my own soul.”
As the years passed, one can sense her loyalty to Norman and her desire to curate and protect his story, while not downplaying the impact that his decision had on her family.
“It was a horrible thing and a dreadful thing, to do,” Anne reflected. “It was a traumatic loss and took a tremendous toll on our family — and it still does. But I respected the great concern and commitment Norman had — and the anguish he had — about the war.” She respected, he said, his courage to at least try to find a way to stop what he saw as the madness of the war, the unstoppable train that was escalation.
It’s likely that, even before considering ending his life, Norman could not have imagined the extent of the next decade in Vietnam and, of course, stateside.
In 1996, Paul Hendrickson, The Washington Post journalist who first covered the self-immolation, questioned how Morrison, having experienced the death of his own father so young, could leave behind his own three children. “One wants desperately to find clues to the inexplicable,” he wrote.
In the 2003 documentary Fog of War, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense at the time of Morrison’s death, reflected on the act that took place just outside the windows of his Pentagon office.
“[Norman’s] wife issued a very moving statement – 'human beings must stop killing other human beings' – and that's a belief that I shared, I shared it then, I believe it even more strongly today,” said McNamara. He then continued: “How much evil must we do in order to do good? We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities. Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil, but minimize it."
In 2026, the Vietnam War remains a complex and divisive and, for many, a painful memory. Over five decades after its end, many who served in the war and many who lost somebody are still reckoning with their experiences and memories, still trying to make sense of it all, still picking up and putting the pieces back together.
U.S. Army Infantryman Dennis Beauregard served in Vietnam in 1967-68. During the Tet Offensive, he was severely injured and hospitalized for over three months. He returned to the country in 2001. He was looking for closure, whatever that looked like. He’d long suffered from PTSD and survivor’s guilt. He found it on a bridge in Hue City, surrounding by children who had followed and sat with him. He broke down in tears.
“Yeah, I left Vietnam,” Beauregard said in a later interview. “But Vietnam never left me.”
"A lot of people don't want to have that wound reopened,” Anne said of the war around the same time. “But if a wound is festering, it needs to be reopened to be healed. The pain, or the fear, or the hate, or the suffering has to be acknowledged…”
In a story years after the war remembering SSgt. Ronald R. Martin, the first citizen of Erie, Pennsylvania to die in Vietnam, veteran Gene Parker said, “As a combat veteran, I have seen firsthand the horrors of war. Even more disturbing is watching your comrades wilt away and die because of their war experiences.”
In my research for the Norman Morrison piece, I came across an op-ed in the Erie Times-News from 1998 in which an English professor at Penn State Behrend, Dr. Diana Hume George, described teaching a unit on Vietnam era writing.
The class read Peace Is Every Step Book by Buddhist monk and poet Thich Nhat Hanh. They read Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story.
“True war stories do not generalize,” wrote O’Brien. “They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis ... There's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh.’”
They then read a piece written by Anne about her Norman.
“Anne’s ethical and emotional issues became a template for thinking about what matters in writing and in living,” wrote Dr. George. She and her students contemplated whether Anne was “still doing PR” for Norman and “protecting him from bad press, trying to make sure no one could think he was deluded or crazy.”
“Weren’t you angry at him? Didn’t you feel abandoned? We insisted that she must have,” George’s students wondered in class discussions. Some students argued that her writing would feel more honest and fair if she didn’t “martyr herself to his martyrdom.”
Anne responded to the students that they didn’t understand what she was trying to say when she wrote of Norman: “For war protesters like Norman, America was the homefront battlefield in the war to end the war. He went out that day like the men in thousands of families in Vietnam. And that was the day he just didn't make it home from the field.”
“Oh,” Dr. George concluded.
What else was there left to say?