Teaching the Children of the Vietnam War

Abstract

Last spring in my course on United States history since 1945, I thought I was going to teach my students about the Vietnam War. Instead, they taught me in two surprising and unforgettable ways. There was an intellectual lesson: how the meaning of the past shifts according to the vantage point from which we look back at it. There was also an emotional lesson: how we, students and professors alike, bring personal feelings into the classroom. For me, fifty-eight years old, the war remains a bitter memory. I first opposed American intervention in Vietnam in 1964, and as the troops and casualties escalated, so did my fury and frustration. But, shielded first by graduate school and then parenthood, I was never in danger of being drafted. Indeed, I never personally knew anyone who fought over there. For my undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina, the war has very different meanings: It is both further away and closer. On the one hand, it ended before they were born, so it is a piece of history, like Watergate or the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), that they have heard of but that seems remote. On the other hand, as I discovered last spring, for many of my students the war is a haunting family secret. My discovery took place during a discussion among fifteen students led by my teaching assistant, Katie Otis. (I was observing her work as part of my teachingsupervision responsibilities.) As usual, she and I had devised beforehand a pedagogical strategy, starting with open-ended questions (What was for you the most compelling part of the reading? What surprised you?) and moving on to analytic issues (How did the author's description of the battle of Khe Sanh compare with the Washington Posts account? What would antiwar demonstrators have said about this book?). Also as usual, being a devoted teacher who wanted to make sure the stu-