Lecture Series | Vietnam Story

A Unique Vietnam Story

In our engaging lecture series, we delve into topics of culture, history, health, and art.

Kat Fitzpatrick, daughter of a CIA operative, will present her experience in Vietnam with historic images. It is a story of love with a happy ending, despite the difficulties they endured.

Kat Fitzpatrick

"A Saving Grace: A Unique Vietnam Story" 

Come to the August 21, 2024 presentation and slideshow at the Round Lake Auditorium to hear Kat Fitzpatrick, daughter of a CIA operative, speak about her unique Vietnam story. 

She will share why her family was invited into a critical war zone in 1974, insight into the super-secret propaganda radio station her father coordinated, and personally documented (by her mother) glimpses into the slow, but steady decline of America’s footing in that beleaguered country.

Ultimately, it is a story of love and one with a happy ending, though the details are hair-raising, harrowing, and, at times, heartbreaking on both a personal and universal level.

“The slideshow will include historical images as well as those from Fitzpatrick’s 2015 "Retracing Her Father's Footsteps" in South Vietnam. By blending the old and the new, the familial with the global, Fitzpatrick hopes to re-ignite the examination of war, loyalty, and responsibility through the subject of the Vietnam War, which documentary maker Ken Burns called: "a tragedy of epic proportions."

Kat Fitzpatrick, M.F.A., is a freelance writer and educator, and the author of the narrative nonfiction book, For the Love of Vietnam: a war, a family, a CIA official, and the best evacuation story never heard and the pedagogical chapbook, The Fight to Write: What the Vietnam War Taught Me about Truth & Writing.