Distorted "Lessons" from the Vietnam War Tory Stempf uring the 1980s, Hollywood was teenagers' chief source of information D about the war in Vietnam. Via their graphic depictions of gore and mayhem, such war films as Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Full Metal Jacket, Coming Home, Good Morning, Vietnam, Rumor of War, and Born on the Fourth of July seemed to send a strong, and indeed salutary, "war is hell" message to the impressionable young. But as for imparting what the Vietnam conflict was about, and why the United States fought and lost it, too often these films were worse than inadequate. The problem was not simply that these films' "visceral vision" trafficked more in feelings than in facts: in many cases their depictions of war's reality were artfully employed not to deglamorize and decry war per se, but to suggest that the horror was peculiar to one war in particular, Vietnam, and that it was the consequence of strictly American behavior, policy, and attitudes. The message was not lost on the young: the locus of evil was the American "system" itself. So it was with a sense of relief that critics of "Hollywood history" found high schools beginning to squeeze the Vietnam era into their American history courses. How disappointed they will be to learn that a popular and acclaimed Vietnam curriculum, and the only one now in print, virtually duplicates Hollywood's rendition of the war, which thus stands poised to become the standardized version of history in the public schools. A War Studied for Its "Lessons" Jerold M. Starr, professor of sociology at West Virginia University, was among the first to recognize that as recently as 1982 few of the nation's universities and practically no public secondary schools taught about the Vietnam War. Suspecting that the dearth of courses was due to "scant and extremely distorted "1 texts rather than student disinterest, Start resolved to write his own curriculum. Ever mindful of "the predictable opposition of the militarists, "2 Starr recruited a team of"global curriculum specialists, "3 teachers, and Vietnam-era veterans and in 1984 founded the Center for Social Studies Education (CSSE) in Pittsburgh to write and distribute the product. "I had to do it," he told a reporter, "I survived the moral anguish of that period in the hope that we would learn from our mistakes and become a wiser nation for it. It was very disturbing to me that nothing was being done. "4 Tory Stempf is a freelance writer living in Hartford, Connecticut. Please address correspondence to Academic Questions, 575 Ewing Street, Princeton, NJ 08540. 42 Academic Questions/Winter 1992-93 From his anguish emerged the first comprehensive Vietnam War curricu- lum for high schools in the country. The Lessons of the Vianam War is a twelve-unit "modular textbook" curriculum consisting of a teacher's manual and twelve unit guides for students. 5 Each thirty-two-page units focuses on a general topic and includes graphics, discussion questions, research assign- ments, and classroom activities. Published in 1988, Lessons has been sold to some 2,500 high schools and an indeterminate number of colleges. In addi- tion, in 1989 CSSE received a $ 100,000 grant from Home Box Office and film director Oliver Stone (via the Vietnam Veterans Foundation) to recruit thirty "trainers" to introduce Lessons to school systems across the country. Starr's idea "was to [organize] the units around the basic questions any teacher or student might start with in addressing the war. "6 These units are: "Introduction to Vietnam: Land, History and Culture," "America at War in Vietnam: Decisions and Consequences," "Was the War Legal?" "Who Fought for the United States," "How the United States Fought the War," "When War Becomes a Crime: The Case of My Lai," "Taking Sides: The War at Home," "How the War Was Reported," "The Vietnam War in American Literature," "The Wounds of War and the Process of Healing," "Boat People and Vietnam- ese Refugees in the United States," and "Lessons from Yesterday for Today." Starr's preoccupation with finding Vietnam's "lessons" is the first sign that this is no ordinary curriculum. But for Start Vietnam was no ordinary war. He variously describes it as "different from the world wars," "unconventional," "controversial," and "complex'--not only because we lost it, but because of "events that cast America in an unfavorable light. "7 What makes Vietnam such a "daunting" subject for teachers--who, he says, "need help in being intro- duced to the subject matter, the materials and the approach"S-is not what might be called its narrative complexity but rather its ethical complexity. War is studied, said Herodotus, so that the great deeds of men may not be forgotten. But for Start Vietnam needs elucidation for quite a different reason: not to honor deeds that, being morally compromised, can hardly be called great, but rather to reveal certain "lessons." Thus it is no surprise that his curriculum is intent not so much upon informing as upon guiding the teacher, and by extension the student, through the war's manifold complexi- ties to its moral meaning. Starr is well suited to writing an ahistorical history curriculum. "I have never believed in the abstraction of 'objectivity' about something so huge and complex as a war involving millions of people," he confesses. 9 Thus Starr has collected a wide variety of perspectives, in the form of interviews, poetry, diary entries, court testimony, letters, songs, and sketches, which he hopes will "humanize the issues and consequences of the war for the students in a way that traditional narrative accounts fail to do. "1~ This subjectivist approach complements Starr's broader objective, oudined in the teacher's manual, "to teach students how to think critically about Stempf 43 conflict resolution alternatives in international relations," "reason ethically about difficult moral choices," and "better...understand people from social backgrounds and cultures different from their own." To achieve these goals, Start encourages teachers to "challenge student's [sic] ethnocentrism" and "conduct a variety of simulations that put students in the roles of key historical players." Roleplaying, he believes, "facilitates an empathy that undermines stereotypes and propaganda." But, he cautions teachers: Any unsolicited criticism or invidious comparison will intimidate the students from further risk-taking. Any assertion of "correct" and ~incorrect" views will trivialize the exercise and reinforce the image of the teacher as the source of all knowledge. Consequently, your role is to draw out and acknowledge the legiti- mac}, of all points of view. One might think Starr's uninterest in separating fact from fiction a serious drawback in a history curriculum. However, Start" seems unconcerned about eschewing "objectivity" while claiming to be accurate and "balanced." He avers, "You can come out of this curriculum being for or against the war. It does not take sides or place blame. "11 But of course Lessons does take sides. Contrary to Starr's claims, the chances of a teacher, much less a student, approaching Vietnam for the first time via Lessons and coming away being "for" the war, or neutral, or even having a good understanding of what it was about are practically nil. This is because Lessons is less history than an allegory designed to lead young people ineluc- tably toward one conclusion: not that Vietnam was a noble failure, or the wrong place to be fighting communism, or that, given the nature of the Saigon regime and our military strategy, we could never have won-not indefensible positions--but that the United States, for reasons inherent in its political makeup, shouldn't have won. How Lessons Teaches How does Lessons go about imparting this message? Foremost by denying that, contrary to the claims of five American administrations, an ideology called communism played any significant role in the conflict. This would seem a tough trick. Yet it is achieved by the simple technique of excision: by dispensing with information about communist doctrine, strategy, and tactics as they pertained to and helped shape the war. From the outset Lessons makes no attempt to depict the geopolitical climate during the seminal years 1945-1950. The cold war? Lessons merely mentions "tensions" between the United States and the USSR that grew into a "bitter rivalry." Yet without any discussion of the conflicting ideas about man and society that drove this "rivalry," of Moscow's adventurism advancing its Stalinist version of those ideas, or of the fate of those countries that suc- 44 Academic Questions / Winter 1992-93 cumbed, the "fear of communism" exhibited by Truman and Acheson, and later by Eisenhower and Dulles, will appear quite incomprehensible, if not irrational. This pertains to Asia as well. Denied any information about the communist insurrections in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, and the Philippines in 1948 (on the heels of a world youth conference in Calcutta, at which speeches seemed to signal a communist plan for Asia as a whole), students will not understand why these statesmen viewed the situation in Indochina as some- thing more than an anti-colonial war of liberation being waged by Ho Chi Minh. The introductory unit of Lessons, written by William Duiker, professor of East Asian history at Pennsylvania State University and the one real authority on Staff's team, does indeed explain that Ho was a Comintern agent trained in the Soviet Union and sent by the Kremlin to Indochina in the 1920s to foment revolution. But the implications of Ho's communism for Vietnam, and the coming war, are never examined. In fact, the next unit (authored by Starr) ignores Duiker's account and portrays Ho as, yes, a Communist, but more essentially "a practical man" and "first and foremost a Vietnamese nationalist." Students might even think of him as an American-style democrat after reading Starr's cloying description of Ho's quoting the Declaration of Independence in a famous speech in 1945.