Getting Vietnam War Into Classrooms Is Still a Battle

In 1982, Ronny Newman assumed the bold task of introducing his Laguna Beach High School students to a subject that at the time was considered virtually taboo.

The Vietnam War was difficult to understand, and most teachers shied away from the daunting, controversial task of explaining why the United States had become embroiled in a war that bitterly divided the country and became a metaphor for political and military disaster.

“When I first began teaching the war, people were still very angry,” Newman said. “War veterans were treated like criminals when they came back, and people were still arguing about the war. Teachers were afraid to talk about it.”

Since that time, Newman has devoted three weeks of his U.S. history class each year to teaching the war--considerably more than most of his peers, but by his own estimation far too little to ensure that his students truly understand the complexities of the conflict.

Once too controversial to be taught in American high schools, the Vietnam War has slowly slipped into the curriculum, but only in a superficial way, educators say. Although many teachers consider Vietnam crucial to understanding American foreign policy and identify it as one of the key events in U.S. history, today’s high school students learn about the Vietnam War in much the same way they study other contemporary affairs--quickly and without much depth, educators say.

Despite Orange County’s large concentration of Vietnamese Americans, whose presence in this country is an outgrowth of the war, Orange County teen-agers tend to be as ignorant about the conflict as students in areas with no ties to Vietnam, educators say. For the most part, high school students throughout the country come away with little understanding of Vietnam’s consequences and legacies, students and educators agree.

No historical event can be thoroughly covered considering the time constraints of the high school curriculum. But some educators believe the Vietnam War affects the nation’s state of affairs more than any other event of recent years.

“I think it’s a shame that high school students don’t learn more about this war, because the Vietnam War is still constantly referred to in public discourse as a standard to measure proposed military intervention,” said Jerry Starr, director of the Center for Social Studies Education in Pittsburgh, Pa., who has done extensive research on how the Vietnam War is taught in American schools.

“It was also America’s longest war, and it continues to impact how we think about our role in the world,” he added.

The problem is compounded by the fact that today’s high school students, who were born after the fall of Saigon, are growing increasingly detached from the war that rocked their parents’ generation.

“To the kids we teach today, the Vietnam War is just like any other war, in that it happened a long time ago,” said Rene Boyum, a history teacher at Garden Grove High School. “It’s not like they say, ‘Oh, goody, we’re going to talk about the Vietnam War.’ Kids know that there was a Vietnam War, but it doesn’t create any sparks.”

Before she took U.S. history, Thuy Doan Le’s knowledge of the Vietnam War was limited to what her father told her about his career as a captain in the South Vietnamese marines.

The 17-year-old Garden Grove High School senior knew her father had witnessed atrocities during the war, but the conflict is strangely distant to her because she was born in the United States, three years after it ended.

“I don’t think it affects me that much because I was born here,” Le said. “I can only feel what my parents tell me.”

Andrea Nielsen, a senior at La Quinta High School in Westminster, said that despite her interest in learning about the war, her American history textbooks shied away from controversy, providing an elementary view of it.

“We just learned the Western view, what’s politically correct,” she said. “But any history is going to have a slant.”

Even though Quan Nguyen of Westminster lived in Vietnam until he was 10, the La Quinta High School senior said the war carries little meaning in his life.

“I wasn’t part of it,” he said. “I wasn’t there when it happened, so I don’t really care about it.”

In the years following the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, most school textbooks either ignored the war or briefly skimmed over it. Educators also tended to avoid the subject in their classrooms because the mere mention of the war could stir heated debate.

“During the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, teachers didn’t want to teach the Vietnam War because of the great division that it caused in the United States in terms of public opinion,” said Gary Matta, social studies coordinator at Westminster High School. “People wanted to get away from Vietnam.”

In 1982, a survey of history textbooks revealed that the average space reserved for the Vietnam War was three paragraphs, Starr said. The texts also tended to glorify America’s role in Vietnam and avoid the controversies surrounding the war, he said.

The dearth of information led Vietnam veteran Jim Harlan, then a history teacher in Sacramento, to show students his two-hour slide show of life during the war.

“I would say to them, ‘Here’s me getting off the plane in Vietnam,’ ” said Harlan, now executive director of the West Orange County United Teachers Assn. “ ‘And here’s some guys we blew away.’ ”

As years passed, controversy over the war ebbed and many history teachers began teaching at least its basic issues. School textbooks began adding chapters on the Vietnam War, and textbook authors began encouraging students to come up with their own interpretations.

For instance, one of the primary American history textbooks now used in the Garden Grove Unified School District includes more than 22 pages on the Vietnam War. It also asks students to respond to such questions as, “In what ways did U.S. military planners fail to understand the Vietnamese culture?” and, “The domino theory is still used by some politicians to explain global politics. Do you agree with the theory?”

The typical student in California spends one to two weeks learning about the war in 11th-grade U.S. history class, significantly more than in previous years. Coverage of the war in Orange County varies by school, but students in areas with large numbers of Vietnamese students don’t necessarily learn more about the war than students in other areas.

Despite the increase in time spent studying the war, students’ knowledge of it is often limited to such events as the Tet Offensive, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the Kent State shootings. But they tend not to understand why such events were so controversial and how the Vietnam War came to change the way America viewed itself in the realm of world politics, school officials said.

“We don’t have enough time to deal with the complexities of any issue,” said Charles Glenn, a history teacher at Ocean View High School in Huntington Beach. “We’re expected to cover so much curriculum that we are forced to give students only licks and promises.”

Adds David DiLeo, a former history teacher at San Clemente High School who now teaches a course on the war at Saddleback College: “High school teachers are in this exhaustive spring semester, and then all of a sudden they have to explain how a country as powerful as the United States could not prevail over a far less technologically advanced country like Vietnam. I think the Vietnam War is often ignored by high school teachers because it’s too exhaustive and complex of a topic.”

But Don Carlos, instructional specialist for the Garden Grove school district, said he believes many high school history teachers are making an effort to emphasize the Vietnam War.

“I can’t speak to every student in every classroom, but students definitely are being made aware of the war,” Carlos said. “Within the state framework, the focus of American history is on the 20th Century, and the Vietnam War is certainly a key event that’s covered.”

Diane Brooks, history administrator for the state Department of Education, said the state requires that the Vietnam War be covered, but teachers decide how and to what extent they will incorporate it into their curriculum.

“I think the key is in staff development,” she said. “Teachers must be adequately prepared to teach the war, because teaching about controversial issues can be very difficult.”

For years, Tuan Pham, an 18-year-old Garden Grove High School senior, has struggled to understand how South Vietnamese troops with the aid of American soldiers and weaponry could succumb to Communist forces.

Pham, who fled the country with his family when he was 4, probed his parents for details, spent his free time reading books about the war and studied it in his advanced placement U.S. history class. But Pham said he is still unclear why the war was lost.

“What I learned wasn’t enough,” Pham said. “To really understand this, I know I have to look deeper. Even though I was born after the war, I feel linked to it because I know it’s the reason I’m here. I’m trying to go back to find my source.”

Kara O’Keefe said she became intrigued with the war last year when she took Newman’s advanced placement U.S. history class at Laguna Beach High School.

Now a senior at the school, O’Keefe is taking DiLeo’s Vietnam War class at Saddleback College to gain further insight into a conflict that ended three years before she was born.

“Mr. Newman did a great job with giving us a total overview of the war, but now, I’m getting more into the theories behind the war,” O’Keefe said. “Before, I never questioned what the government did. But now I do.”

Matta said he believes the Vietnam War and will receive more attention in high school history classes as the Asian American population continues to grow and the United States develops stronger economic ties with Asia.

“We’re seeing more emphasis on Asian history and events because of the growing interest in the Pacific Rim,” Matta said. “It has to be that way, considering how many Asian Americans there are in this country, especially in California.”

Understanding the Vietnam War is particularly critical for today’s high school students, as Vietnam and the United States begin to forge economic ties for the first time in 20 years, educators said.

In February, 1994, President Clinton lifted the U.S. trade embargo with Vietnam. The end of the embargo is viewed as the first step in establishing diplomatic ties with the former adversary.

It’s important for students to know what happened between the two countries in the past to understand the significance of the current ties, Newman said.

“I see the Vietnam experience as a war that continues to shed light on the present,” he said.