Distorted “lessons” from the Vietnam War

Abstract

D uring the 1980s, was teenagers' chief source of information about the in Vietnam. Via their graphic depictions of gore and mayhem, such films as Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Full Metal Jacket, Coming Home, Good Morning, Vietnam, Rumor of War, and Born on the Fourth of July seemed to send a strong, and indeed salutary, war is hell message to the impressionable young. But as for imparting what the Vietnam conflict was about, and why the United States fought and lost it, too often these films were worse than inadequate. The problem was not simply that these films' visceral vision trafficked more in feelings than in facts: in many cases their depictions of war's reality were artfully employed not to deglamorize and decry per se, but to suggest that the horror was peculiar to one in particular, Vietnam, and that it was the consequence of strictly American behavior, policy, and attitudes. The message was not lost on the young: the locus of evil was the American system itself. So it was with a sense of relief that critics of Hollywood found high schools beginning to squeeze the Vietnam era into their American history courses. How disappointed they will be to learn that a popular and acclaimed Vietnam curriculum, and the only one now in print, virtually duplicates Hollywood's rendition of the war, which thus stands poised to become the standardized version of history in the public schools.