Award-winning poet Ocean Vuong speaks about his new book Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which weaves growing up in America with his family's memories of a war-torn Vietnam.
Hanoi and Washington hope to strengthen economic and defense ties, especially in the wake of Beijing's construction on a disputed reef in the South China Sea.
In just 18 months, China has created more than 2,000 acres of new land where before there were just waves and reef, according to the U.S., which sees the work as a threat to regional stability.
Forty years ago, Viet Luong was a 9-year-old Vietnamese boy fleeing Saigon with his family. Today he's the first Vietnamese-American general in the U.S. Army and is helping train the Afghan military.
U.S. Marines were deployed to the coastal Vietnamese city 50 years ago last month. Now, 40 years after the war's end and amid great change, former Viet Cong and an American reflect on that time.
During the war, young men often tried to join the National Guard to avoid being sent overseas. But that war changed the nature of the guard — paving the way for today's deployments abroad.
Satellite imagery of a coral atoll in the South China Sea shows the reef is growing. A U.S. military official likens Beijing's land reclamation to building a "great wall of sand."