After Such Strife, Vietnam Fades From Campuses

The Vietnam War, which tore the fabric of American society for a decade, has dwindled on college campuses to just another case study of foreign policy during the Cold War.

It’s not for lack of scholarly interest. Since 1990, academics have been churning out more books on Vietnam than on World War II. The trend has continued through the decade, with a regular crop of finger-pointing exposes, revisionist theories, revisions of the revisionists and incessant searches for lessons amid the rubble of defeat.

Nor is it a lack of student interest. At many campuses, students mob the few available classes. They hunger for insight into the war, hoping to learn more about events that reverberate through popular culture and radically altered their parents’ lives.

Nonetheless, Vietnam scholars estimated that there are only 400 courses focused on the war spread across the nation’s 3,500 colleges and universities. The war doesn’t surface much in high school either. Despite better textbooks, many harried teachers breeze through the war if they get to it at all.

At the college level, UCLA provides a typical example: the campus does not offer a single history course this term specifically on the Vietnam War. John Whitmore, a visiting professor from Michigan, is teaching a course on pre-modern Vietnam, which ends with the 19th century. Professor emeritus Damodar SarDesai gets called out of retirement once a year to teach the modern history of Vietnam, from 1920 to the present.

For this term, the only option among the 2,100 courses offered at the university is “The Vietnam War and American Culture,” taught by English professor James Goodwin.

At UC Berkeley, only one week of a 10-week course, “Political and Cultural History of Vietnam,” is spent on what the professor prefers to call the Second Indochinese War. The other 90% of the class covers history dating back 2,000 years.

Those who do teach about the war bemoan what they call a frightening level of ignorance among today’s college students--most of whom were not born until after the war ended.

Vietnam scholars are exasperated that the topic that dominated--and sometimes even defined--their college years has been reduced to an occasional elective course offered by various departments.

“This new generation of college students is as likely to take a course on the Peloponnesian War as the Vietnam War,” said Allan Goodman, a former Georgetown University professor and now head of the Institute of International Education. “The more it becomes ancient history, the higher the risk we will ignore its many lessons.”

Professor Katherine A. Kinney of UC Riverside is one of several scholars who suggest that, unlike World War II, the Vietnam War has yet to bring a consensus from American society. Nor has it developed a coherent body of commonly held assumptions on the war’s causes and consequences, much less simple facts such as when it actually started.

The result, not surprisingly, is a high level of confusion and lack of knowledge, even among some of the nation’s brightest students.

When Kinney asks her students, “What was World War II all about?” they have no trouble rattling off a basic narrative: The rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, America on the sidelines until Pearl Harbor, D-day, the liberation of Europe and finally the dropping of the bomb over Hiroshima.

When she asks them about Vietnam, they stumble.

“They will give you emotions: ‘It was terrible. It was confusing,’ ” Kinney said. “When you press them, ‘What does it all mean?’ They don’t really know. They have this amazing repertoire of images. They recognize it, but cannot articulate a context.”

Similarly, consider this conversation with a high school valedictorian now enrolled at UCLA. She took Advanced Placement history in high school and passed the AP exam (with a score of 4 out of 5 points). Because of that she will never have to take a history class in college.

What happened at My Lai?

“I don’t know.”

What were “The Pentagon Papers”?

“I cannot recall what this was about.”

What happened at Kent State?

“They protested something there, but I don’t think it was about the Vietnam War. It was civil rights stuff.”

The point is not to embarrass this valedictorian. She was never taught about National Guard troops firing into a crowd of antiwar protesters, killing four college students. The bloodshed took place nine years before she was born.

It’s not that students just don’t have mastery of the details. They don’t understand the big picture either.

Every semester, professors are startled at how many of their college students are flabbergasted that the U.S. military didn’t win the war. How could the world’s lone-standing superpower actual fail?

They have little understanding of the Cold War, why the United States entered the Vietnam conflict or its consequences. They cannot locate Vietnam on a map.

Eric Crystal, coordinator of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at UC Berkeley, has a theory about why:

“Postwar Vietnam was such a disappointment to the liberal faculty who wanted a socialist paradise to emerge,” he said. “And the abject defeat of American forces by this ragtag group of guerrillas was such a disappointment for conservatives. The two ideological poles unconsciously agreed to wipe this whole subject off the curricular map.”

Both Sides Chose to Remain Silent

Of course, the Korean War has never really caught on in academia either, nor are there many courses specifically on World War I. But Vietnam, the war Americans love to hate, remains freshest in the minds of baby boomers, who cannot understand why the next generation doesn’t share their fascination.

In some courses, professors skim over the Vietnam War as an example of U.S. intervention that bogged down--a sticky episode to compare and contrast with what are seen as more typically American heroics in Kosovo or the Persian Gulf. Others relegate America’s longest war to a brief period in an Indochinese history course that spans two millenniums.

More often, antiwar protesters-turned-professors touch on Vietnam as part of seminars that often romanticize the 1960s counterculture of their youth.

So no wonder America’s youth are confused.

The war does continue to rage--or at least smolder--among professors who came of age under its influence.

George Mason University’s Indochina Institute once surveyed professors who teach about the war and determined that nearly half (47%) were active in the antiwar movement, while 25% were veterans of the war.

“I tell my students: ‘If they ever meet anybody with gray hair who purports to tell them a straight account of the war, they are confronted by someone who is delusional or a liar,”’ said graying historian James R. Reckner, director of the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University.

Timothy Lomperis, chairman of the political science department at St. Louis University, agrees with Reckner’s assessment of his generation’s half-blind obsession with the war. “We are damaged goods on this subject.”

Each of the 50-something professors served two tours in Vietnam, Lomperis was in Army intelligence, Reckner was a Navy officer. Both teach about the war through the lens of military and diplomatic history.

Eric Newhall, an American studies professor at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, strenuously disagrees.

Newhall spent 10 months in federal prison as a draft resister, a past he shares with his students in a popular seminar “The Social Movements of the 1960s.”

“There are clear lessons to be learned from the war that I teach in an evenhanded way,” Newhall said. “I think young people are owed the truth.”

But all three Vietnam scholars share frustration over how little their incoming students know about the war and how few of their colleagues help to close the knowledge gap.

Perhaps like the Vietnam War itself, widespread teaching about the war has never had much chance to succeed.

In the immediate aftermath of the war which ended in 1975, administrators worried that hotheaded professors would present polemics more akin to teach-ins than analytical college courses. They feared such classes might rile up students, disrupting the calm that finally had settled on campus after a decade of tumult.

“Colleges didn’t want to touch it for a long time,” said Rick Berg, an English professor now at Scripps College. He was one of the early ones who slipped the subject matter into writing classes, beginning in 1982, as fodder for student essays.

Some of the leading Vietnam historians left for Australia after having trouble finding U.S. jobs Others stayed to fight for tenure, often with limited results.

“If you made Vietnam the focus of your scholarship, you got killed somewhere along the way,” said Lomperis. He lost a lengthy tenure battle at Duke University, in part, he believes, because of “the righteous factor--being perceived as on the wrong sides of the angels.”

In the high schools, it’s not a question of hiring teachers interested in Vietnam, but making sure they have enough time to get to the war in the rush to cover all of American history.

“I know a lot of history teachers have trouble getting through the curriculum,” says Pat McHarg, a Vietnam veteran and longtime history teacher at North Hollywood High. “They get hung up on the Second World War and the beginnings of the Cold War and never get past that.”

In 1987, California revamped its history framework to solve the time problem. As outlined now, U.S. history taken by high school juniors focuses mostly on the 20th century. Earlier grades, fifth and eighth, carve up earlier periods of American history.

Yet not all classes follow the framework.

The Advanced Placement class in U.S. history, in preparation for the AP test, gallops from American colonies to the modern era.

The test always has a couple of Vietnam War questions, so teachers try to reach it. But with so much ground to cover, and state-mandated tests cutting into their lesson plans, they often don’t.

Nicole Kelley, a UCLA sophomore and history major, recalls that her high school history classes taught relatively little and cast “an American halo” over the treatment of the war.

“I didn’t realize that there was any opposition to the domino theory,” she said, referring to the notion put forward by supporters of the war that if South Vietnam became communist, the rest of Asia would fall like a row of dominoes. “I thought scholars all viewed it as an accurate theory.”

This term, Kelley enrolled in Goodwin’s course on the war and popular culture. Thirty-seven students wrote essays to try to get into the seminar. He accepted 15.

Students Have Only Impressions of War

Goodwin, 55, characterized himself as “a foot soldier in the antiwar movement” while a student at Stanford. “In my own intellectual life, it was a defining moment.”

So he enthusiastically cobbled together an interdisciplinary honors course that’s part history, part literary criticism and appreciation of Vietnam-era novels, poetry, nonfiction books and film.

Last Tuesday, he and his students went over Bruce Weigel’s “Song of Napalm” and other poetry. This week they will peruse war photojournalism. Later in the semester comes Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”

Goodwin has found that his course fills in the back story for students who have little more than impressions of the war. “Educationally, I think, it is filling in unexplored territory.”

There are some indications, however, that the lack of teaching about the war may be about to change.

Marc J. Gilbert, a historian at North Georgia College & University, gets calls every day from new instructors inquiring about his book on how to teach the Vietnam War.

“At state universities, community colleges and high schools, there is enormous pressure to offer more courses on Vietnam,” Gilbert said.

Gilbert, a former antiwar activist, is particularly encouraged by the younger scholars coming up the ranks.

Unlike those snared by campus politics of the past, scores of doctoral candidates are writing about Vietnam without fear of reprisal.

They carry no emotional baggage. They did not get drafted, sign up for second tours or jostle with police at the barricades. As Lomperis puts it, “They have nothing to defend.”

And in the nation’s high schools, Vietnam’s shift from a topic of emotional immediacy to one of scholarly detachment has allowed teachers and textbook publishers much greater freedom.

Gary B. Nash, a UCLA historian, devotes an entire 39-page chapter to Vietnam in his best-selling high school textbook “American Odyssey: United States History in the 20th Century.”

“I did not have any difficulty with presenting material on the Vietnam War, which I think is pretty hard hitting,” Nash said.

That’s a dramatic departure from previous treatments of the war, which were skewered five years ago by James W. Loewen in his popular book: “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.”

Surveying a dozen popular textbooks at the time, Loewen pointed out a series of evasions and omissions that would leave “students ignorant of the history of the war” and render the antiwar movement “incomprehensible.”

Mark Elinson has noticed a remarkable transformation over the 31 years he has taught history. In what would have been an unthinkable act decades ago, he now has his students at Monroe High School in the San Fernando Valley hold a mock military tribunal to discipline those soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians.

It brings nary a peep from parents.

For many students, Vietnam seems far in the past. “They see it as very quaint, kind of like the Beatles.”

Sometimes that’s the view of teachers too. A growing number of high school teachers--those 35 or younger--have no memory of the war.

Middle-aged scholars have high hopes that this next generation--the high school teachers and doctoral candidates alike--will help society reach consensus on the causes and consequences of the war and what to impart to America’s youth.

So 25 years after the fall of Saigon, it’s not that the lessons of Vietnam are being lost to the next generation as the tumultuous period fades into history.

Instead of being too late, maybe it’s just too early.

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Lessons and Legacies: 25 Years After Vietnam

The longest war America has ever fought--and the first one it lost--Vietnam continues to provoke questions and evoke emotions both vivid and complex. The U.S. was involved in Indochina from the late 1950s until the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Throughout this month, The Times is examining the impact of that turbulent time on American society and popular culture and on institutions from the military to the media.

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Also see https://www.latimes.com

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LESSONS AND LEGACIES

* OPINION--It is time to try to understand what we made of Vietnam.

* SO CAL LIVING--Grown children of MIAs remain in emotional limbo.

* BOOK REVIEW--A look at the literature of war and remembrance.