While many a historian has felt compelled at some point to write about a subject close to them personally, Robert 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 in Vietnam who took some of that war’s most indelible and widely reproduced pictures. Brigham had used those images in decades’ worth of classes and public lectures, never knowing his connection to them.

Both Brigham and Atwell were products of the American foster care and adoption system, and both were defined professionally by Vietnam. Brigham explores his own history as an adoptee; 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.