War Courses Popular : Lessons of Vietnam in Curricula

Some enrolled because their fathers served in Vietnam and they wanted to understand their parents better. Some enrolled because they had fought in Vietnam and wanted to understand themselves better. Others were in the class to figure out this city’s burgeoning community of Southeast Asian refugees, human proof of war’s upheaval.

Whatever their motivation, the students in history of the Vietnam War this past semester at San Jose State University shared a need to learn more about the conflict that ended more than 12 years ago but continues to ripple through American society. By doing so, they joined a growing national trend of treating the war as an academic topic, not just a source for family quarrels and Hollywood screenplays.

“Time enough has passed so the war can be looked at as history,” explained Larry Engelmann, who has taught the class at San Jose State since 1983. “Maybe in 20 years we will be teaching a course on Guatemala or the Persian states. Better late than never.”

‘Lessons of Vietnam’

A generation ago, the Vietnam War brought informal teach-ins, enormous protests and, in the case of Kent State University in Ohio in 1970, death to American college campuses. Today, the war means three credits, long reading lists, guest lectures and final exams that, like Engelmann’s, ask, “What are the lessons of Vietnam?”

In 1980, college courses devoted to the war and its effects numbered about two dozen throughout the country, according to a survey by the Indochina Institute at George Mason University in Virginia. By last year, that number jumped to at least 220. In addition, many broader courses in political science, history and communications are spending more and more time on what was America’s longest and perhaps most divisive war. And, the results are trickling down to high school curricula.

Plans are in the works for a national conference this spring on teaching the Vietnam War, and next month’s issue of the scholarly journal Social Studies is entirely devoted to the same topic, including such articles as “Pedagogical Implications of Teaching Literature of the Vietnam War.”

‘Trendy Now’

“Vietnam is trendy now, which is kind of embarrassing,” said Carol Wilder, a professor of communications who teaches a course named Vietnam: Rhetoric and Reality at San Francisco State. “But I have been teaching college for 22 years and have never seen a topic that carries such inherent interest for students. They are learning what Mommy and Daddy didn’t tell them, what their history teachers in high school didn’t tell them and what their culture doesn’t want them to know.”

The most popular course by far at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is taught by Walter Capps of the religious studies department. His topic is the impact of the Vietnam War on American society, and his technique, now copied nationwide, is to invite veterans and other firsthand participants to share their often highly emotional memories with the 900 students crowded into Campbell Hall.

In a recent interview, Capps explained the popularity of his course and similar ones. “I was born in Nebraska in the mid ‘30s, and my father would always tell us about hard times in the Depression. I realized I couldn’t understand the way I was brought up unless I understood the Depression,” he said. “In much larger terms, the Vietnam War is the similar kind of event for this generation of college students--their formative event.”

Many of the professors involved are veterans of Vietnam combat or protests. In astonishment at their own aging as much as anything else, they echo a common theme: Vietnam is to their students as World War II was to them. They ask: How do you tell students who were in kindergarten when Saigon fell about Madame Nhu, David Dellinger, Robert McNamara, the Tet Offensive, the Christmas bombing, the Pentagon Papers, Dien Bien Phu, My Lai, Khe Sanh?

Ignorance ‘Frightening’

Engelmann at San Jose State decribed his students’ initial ignorance about the war as “frightening.” Thomas Maddux, a history professor at California State University, Northridge, who has taught aspects of the war since 1978, said many of his students at first “were lucky if they could find Indochina on a map, let alone Vietnam.”

The reasons? High school survey courses on American history usually are chronological and rarely leave much time for Vietnam. Moreover, some high school teachers report that until recently they purposefully glossed over the topic to avoid political controversy.

But on a deeper level, some professors say the nation as a whole wanted to forget the war and its attendant sorrows. Students say older relatives often brushed aside their questions about the conflict and its causes.

“It was a touchy subject, and everyone avoided the topic when I asked,” recalled sophomore Stew Jenkins, 20, enrolled this semester in a Vietnam history course taught at Stanford University. Jenkins said the class, taught by Grace Sevy, made him realize that the political rifts caused by the war still exist and that “if more people learned about the war, perhaps those divisions could be healed.”

His classmate, Rachel Marcus, 20, said: “I feel shocked that I never learned anything about it before. In high school, they sort of pushed it under the rug.”

Student interest in the war rose partly because of its depiction in such movies as “Platoon” and “Rambo,” according to teachers who also criticize those films for inaccuracies. Another spur was the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington in 1982.

‘Topic of Study’

“The memorial allowed more people to accept Vietnam as a topic to study and talk about. It opened a lot of avenues because they finally had a physical symbol to say it was all right to,” said Sandie Fauriol, former executive director of a Washington center that was dedicated to education about the war and which has merged with the institute at George Mason. A trip to the memorial is a popular climax to some courses.

Plus, some students say they are looking for guidance in forming their opinions about American foreign policy in Central America and the Middle East. They keep hearing about “the next Vietnam” and do not know much about the original.

More important to instructors is the recent availability of such relatively balanced teaching tools as the 1983 public television series about the war, its companion text “Vietnam: A History” by Stanley Karnow and other scholarship like George C. Herring’s “America’s Longest War” published in 1979.

The war produced a flood of writings and documentaries; for example, a history course at Cal State Northridge required the reading of Herring’s book and four others, but listed more than 300 supplemental books or articles for analysis. But teachers say most works, while important for students to sample, are either too highly partisan or too narrowly focused to serve as the basic college text.

Next month, the Center for Social Studies Education in Pittsburgh is publishing “The Lessons of the Vietnam War,” the first text and study guide on the war geared for high school and lower-level college students, according to its editor, Jerold M. Starr of West Virginia University. It includes such homework questions as “What were the two major components of the Geneva Agreement of 1954?” and “Do you believe that the outcome of the Diem regime was what the Kennedy Administration wanted?”

Those kinds of questions can still fire debate about fairness and balance in the classroom in a way that teaching about World War II never did. Should American involvement in Vietnam be presented as a tragic blunder, a noble cause or something in between?

‘Keep Their Minds Open’

“I try to keep away from the simplistic questions of being for or against the war,” said Engelmann in San Jose. “Week after week, I cajole them to keep their minds open.”

A Vietnam veteran suffering still from combat stress recently talked to a history class at Miraleste High School in Rancho Palos Verde at the invitation of teacher Randy Beardslee. Afterward, Beardslee received letters from some parents who wanted to make sure that a broader version of the war would be presented, as Beardslee said he intended to do anyway. “I took (the letters) as a compliment because that meant the students went home and talked about it. It meant they either enjoyed it or reacted to it,” he recalled. “At least they didn’t sleep through it.”

In a reversal of previous generational conflict, professors report that many college students are politically conservative and sometimes challenge the course materials for being too dovish. “Fire in the Lake,” Frances FitzGerald’s book about American ignorance of Vietnamese culture and nationalism, was very popular on campuses when it was published in 1972 and is now sometimes challenged by students as propaganda from the left.

On the other hand, learning about the war sometimes awakens political activity on quiet campuses.

For example, some older veterans in the area complained that religious studies professor David Dungan’s course about the war at the College of Wooster in Ohio stressed the bad experiences of the war too much. But Dungan’s students and some Vietnam veterans worked together last spring to build a campus memorial to all those who suffered in the war, not just the American dead. And, as a result of Capps’ course there, UC Santa Barbara students have gotten involved in outreach programs to help veterans.

Style, Content Vary

The style and content of the college courses vary a lot.

There are straight-ahead academic approaches like a history course taught by Roger Dingman at USC. His syllabus covers weekly topics as “Imperialism: France in Southeast Asia, 1841-1941,” “Mr. Kennedy’s Choices, 1961-1963” and “Kissinger’s Peace: Honor or Betrayal?”

“We are using the war story to get students to think about broader issues they might not otherwise,” Dingman said.

Some are surveys of how the war and veterans are portrayed in movies and television shows like “The Deer Hunter” and “Magnum P.I.”

“Students come to understand that Vietnam veterans had been stereotyped, and they no longer accept the stereotype of the psychotic or the victimized veteran. They understand the American experience in Vietnam is much richer and deeper,” said Harry Haines, an Army veteran of the war who teaches such a course at Trinity University in San Antonio, Tex.

Others, like a tutorial at Cal State Northridge led by Maddux, study the many novels and memoirs with Vietnam War themes. The syllabus for that class listed 104 novels for possible reading.

The most unusual development in Vietnam academia is the use of guest lectures by people who fought in, planned or protested the war. Most are still alive, and many are willing to tell the next generation about their roles. This oral history in the flesh has been criticized by some academics as too theatrical, biased and repetitive; those critics say more effort should be spent on researching lesser-known aspects of the war, especially from North Vietnamese sources. But defenders of the oral history technique say there is no better way to get across the passions and impact of the war.

At UC Santa Barbara, Capps said he uses the talks by veterans as a kind of confessional that has a “healing and reconciliation effect” on the speakers and the audience.

Being in the Washington area certainly helped Philip Straw organize a popular course at the University of Maryland. Over the last three years, his guest speakers have included Gen. William Westmoreland, who was commander of American forces in Vietnam; U.S. Sens. Barry Goldwater, Eugene McCarthy and J. William Fulbright, former CIA director William Colby, American flyers who were held for as long as nine years in North Vietnamese prisons and veterans who actively opposed the war.

‘Long and Productive Journey’

Awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart for his Marine duty in Vietnam, Straw came home from the war eager to learn more about it. He scoured the Washington area for an apt course and finally, with the help of a friend on the Maryland faculty, began his own class three years ago. “I’m an academic bus driver,” said Straw, who also works full time as an aide to an Ohio congressman. “I feel it is my responsibility to take my students on a long and productive journey on what I consider to be the most critical period of American history since the Civil War.”

In San Jose, Engelmann taps the very large community of Vietnamese refugees. Former high-ranking officials of the South Vietnamese military and government have visited the class and a Cambodian-born student recently delivered a shocking and painful account of his sufferings under the Pol Pot regime. The San Jose-Santa Cruz area is also home to American veterans active in various political causes.

“This is like teaching a course on D-Day and living near Normandy,” Engelmann said. “The chance to listen to primary sources is just extraordinary.”

His students appear to appreciate those sources.

To some of the younger ones, the Vietnam War had been a mystery always hovering at the edges of their lives, they recently told a visitor to the class. Some had fathers and uncles who fought in the war, and one is engaged to marry a woman whose father was killed in combat. Some have family friends who are Vietnamese.

Senior Andrew Heim said most of his ideas about the war had come from his father, a veteran who often stressed that American politicians wound up losing a war the military could have won. Heim said he now can discuss and even debate aspects of the war with his father. “Instead of just the perspective of a Vietnam veteran, I have a longer perspective,” the history major explained.

Several veterans enrolled in the class said it helped them sort out what long had been a central part of their lives. For example, political science graduate student and Air Force veteran Ed Anderson said he was based in Okinawa during the war and helped in midair refueling of jets he presumed were en route to bombing missions. “I never understood why I was there,” he said of his service. “This course by no means cleared everything up, but it gave me a good, objective starting point. It reinforced my opinion that we had no clear objectives in the war.”

Few Vietnamese Enroll

Although San Jose State has a large contingent of Vietnamese-born students, relatively few have taken Engelmann’s course. The professor speculates that is because so many Vietnamese young people are majoring in engineering or the sciences and have little time left for history electives.

However, his teaching assistant this semester was Melissa Pham, the daughter of a South Vietnamese Army officer. Pham, 21 and a computer engineering major, said she was 8 years old when her family fled Saigon, the night before the city fell to the Communist forces and its name was changed to Ho Chi Minh City. She said she often hears “bits and pieces” about the war from relatives, who still talk about how they never expected American forces to withdraw and how Americans and Vietnamese allies did not understand each other well.

“Although the war is still part of our lives, we need to get on with our lives,” she said. “The important thing in learning about it is that maybe we can improve our future.”