YORBA LINDA : Vietnam War Study Wins State Honor

Brenda Jones was born five years after the Vietnam War ended, but mention the Pentagon Papers or the My Lai massacre and the eighth-grade student at Bernardo Yorba Junior High School is likely to answer, “Read them” or “Saw that.”

In fact, Jones viewed hours of news footage and read more than 22 books, newspaper and magazine articles dealing with the Vietnam War while researching her paper “The Media and the Vietnam War.”

Jones’ paper was recently awarded first place at the state level of a National History Day contest and has been entered in the national competition, to be held Sunday through Thursday. The hours of research came in addition to the two to three hours a night she spends on homework and the four hours a day--six on weekends--she practices the piano. Jones has a 3.83 grade-point average and is enrolled entirely in honors classes, including her elective, a French class she takes at Esparanza High School.

Vietnam was an unlikely topic for Jones to pick last October when her social studies teacher, Virginia Gannaway, announced the assignment. Free to write on anything dealing with communication and history, Jones picked a theme she knew little about.

“I thought it would be interesting to learn about the Vietnam War,” she said. “I knew it was the only war we lost, and I thought the media might have had something to do with that.”

Despite that bias, and the acknowledgment that she couldn’t imagine protesting anything the government did, Jones changed her mind about the media’s role in the outcome of the Vietnam War.

“If the media hadn’t portrayed the war the way it did, people wouldn’t have been so negative,” Jones said. “But President Johnson’s military plan wasn’t strong, and even the generals were uncertain of the war’s objectives.”

The 18-page paper, which has 59 end notes and cites 25 sources, including interviews with two Vietnam veterans, was one of 32 from the school to be entered at the county level of the contest, which was judged in March. Winning that competition meant that Jones’ paper would be judged at the state level.

It also meant that Jones spent much of her spring break rewriting the paper, often staying up until midnight reading revisions to Gannaway over the phone.

And because the state competition involved defending her paper to a judge, Jones kept reading everything about the war that she could get her hands on.

To prepare her for the judge’s questions, Jones would have her teacher and parents grill her about her paper.

Despite winning the state contest, nearly six months after submitting the paper to Gannaway, the battle isn’t over yet. The national contest, to be held in College Park, Md., will involve a panel of judges once again challenging Jones’ data and conclusions.

So while her classmates prepare for graduation, Jones is plowing through books several inches thick. She is, surprisingly, not the least bit bored by the topic and plans to visit the Vietnam Memorial while back east for the contest.

Asked where she would have fit in during that era, Jones doesn’t hesitate.

“I know I would not have been protesting--I don’t believe in that,” she said. “I would have supported the men who went to fight.”