# Event Details

- **Event Name**: Author Event: Robert Brigham, This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam
- **Event Start and End Date**: Thu, 09 Apr, 2026 at 06:00 pm (-04:00)
- **Event Description**: Join Battenkill Books for an author event as Robert Brigham talks with WAMC's Joe Donahue about Brigham's new memoir, 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 fifty-eight, Brigham, who had long known he was adopted, discovered that he'd improbably and unknowingly been studying and talking about his biological 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.

Robert K. Brigham is the Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College. He is the author or coauthor of ten books, among them Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam.
- **Event URL**: https://allevents.in/cambridge/author-event-robert-brigham-this-is-a-true-war-story-my-improbable-history-with-vietnam/200029902778241
- **Event Categories**: Art, literary-art, Workshops
- **Interested Audience**: 
  - total_interested_count: 0

## Ticket Details


## Event venue details

- **city**: Cambridge
- **state**: NY
- **country**: United States
- **location**: 15 E Main St, Cambridge, NY, United States, New York 12816
- **lat**: 43.0281
- **long**: -73.3803
- **full address**: 15 E Main St, Cambridge, NY, United States, New York 12816

## Event gallery

- **Alt text**: Author Event: Robert Brigham, This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam
  - **Image URL**: https://cdn-az.allevents.in/events3/banners/f233b9d7e2df2f50022bfda3f637f571b5d36c27427f82a932de575cfb1b3d4c-rimg-w784-h295-dc0cc1e0-gmir?v=1775522740

## FAQs

- **Q**: When and where is Author Event: Robert Brigham, This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam being held?
  - **A:** Author Event: Robert Brigham, This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam takes place on Thu, 09 Apr, 2026 at 06:00 pm to Thu, 09 Apr, 2026 at 06:00 pm at 15 E Main St, Cambridge, NY, United States, New York 12816.
- **Q**: Who is organizing Author Event: Robert Brigham, This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam?
  - **A:** Author Event: Robert Brigham, This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam is organized by Battenkill Books.

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