Allan's Story

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 April 2003.

Americans in Vietnam, Disturbed and Heartened

We passed through the square where the Buddhist monk Thich

Quang Duc had immolated himself to protest the regime in

Vietnam, which the United States was supporting. I remembered

where I'd been when I'd first seen that frightening image on

the front page of a newspaper almost 30 years ago. The horror

My students had insisted that we see the site. They were

familiar with the classic photograph, and had just come from

Hue, where Quang Duc had started the journey that led to his

death. They had seen the car he had driven to the square,

preserved on the grounds of a beautiful seven-tiered Buddhist

pagoda. Now they wanted to see the square for themselves.

Along with 15 undergraduates from a seminar I am teaching --

"Vietnam: War and Society," exploring the struggle and its

impact on both Vietnam and the United States -- my co-teacher,

and another colleague, I was spending the recent spring break

in Vietnam. In the back of all our minds was the near

certainty that, any day, the United States would go to war

with Iraq. Some of our staunchest allies from the cold war

that had formed so much of the backdrop of our seminar's

reading were now accusing the United States of warmongering.

American troops, many of them the age of my students, or the

age I had been during the Vietnam War, were poised for battle.

The trip grew out of my own preoccupation with Vietnam. Like

many members of the generation that came of age in the 1960s,

I found it hard to escape the impact of the war. I knew plenty

of people who fought in the conflict -- some who came home and

some who did not -- but I did not serve in the war myself.

Even so, it affected everything I did. More than 25 years

since it came to an end, the very word Vietnam still has a

Vietnam emerged slowly in my consciousness. I can't remember

hearing much about it in high school. At one point in the

early 1960s, I was invited with some other teenagers to appear

on a New York television show dealing with international

affairs, but our subject was the Belgian Congo and never

touched Southeast Asia at all. I have vague memories of

reading newspaper headlines about the Cambodian conflict in

the early years of John Kennedy's presidency, but I really

have no recollection of Vietnam until that picture of the

Buddhist monk dousing himself with gasoline and burning to

The war was distant and remote. The overall international

framework was not. For my friends and me, the cold war was

immediate. After my early years playing cowboys and Indians,

it was an easy transition to find a real foreign enemy to

worry about, and we grew up fearful of the Russians, afraid

that they might take over the world. I remember going outside

to look for Sputnik in 1957 and wondering why we hadn't

managed to get a satellite into the sky. And I remember, too,

hiding under my desk in elementary school during air-raid

drills, in what I now realize was a futile attempt to avoid

the consequences of a nuclear war. But "duck and cover" seemed

very real back then, and many of us debated with absolute

seriousness the crucial question: "better red than dead?" The

Cuban missile crisis of 1962 made the cold war even more real.

Only three years later, Vietnam dominated the news. As the

United States replaced France as the power trying to stop Ho

Chi Minh's struggle for independence and began the relentless

escalation that led to the engagement of a half-million

American troops, I followed the story with real interest. Like

most Americans, I was caught up in a Father Knows Best

syndrome. I had grown up watching that early sitcom, with

Robert Young and Jane Wyatt as Jim and Margaret Anderson,

working through innocent family dilemmas with their children,

Betty, Bud, and Kathy. Every week, the family faced another

problem, and every week, Father somehow managed to make things

right. As we looked beyond the confines of that fabricated

family, most of us were willing to make the same assumptions

about our national leaders. Hadn't Franklin Roosevelt led us

to victory during World War II? And hadn't Harry Truman done

the right thing in Korea, even if we hadn't really won that

The Vietnam conflict, of course, grew increasingly intense and

turned into what the historian George C. Herring has called

America's Longest War. When it finally came to an end in 1975,

many Americans were only too willing to forget what had gone

on. Compounding eagerness to ignore Vietnam was the fact that

the country was off limits. The United States refused to

recognize the new regime and imposed an economic embargo, as

if in retaliation for having lost the war.

Vietnam, I have learned, suffered real upheaval in the years

after 1975. Determined to reunify the country on their own

terms, the North Vietnamese placed about 400,000 South

Vietnamese in re-education camps, where people languished for

from 10 days to 10 years. The new regime sought to

collectivize both agriculture and industry, even as the

economy ground to a halt. Faced with the embargo, and

increasingly uncertain conditions, more than a million

Vietnamese fled the country, especially when offered asylum in

the United States. Vietnam never suffered the traumatic

genocide of Cambodia, where Pol Pot used the killing fields to

slaughter millions of his countrymen in an effort to enforce a

ruthless ideological purity, but it still had a hard time.

Like most Americans, I read the books and watched the films

that dealt with the war. I was overwhelmed with the veteran

Ron Kovic's account of his devastation in Born on the Fourth

of July, intrigued by movies like The Deer Hunter and

Apocalypse Now. Once, some years ago, I team-taught a short

course on the war, and later wrote a chapter on the conflict

All the while, Vietnam was beginning to open up. In 1986,

faced with economic chaos, the government embarked on a

program called doi moi, or economic renovation. The

ideological commitment to socialism remained intact, but now

the government was willing to allow -- even promote -- a

free-market economy that valued private ownership and

initiative. Then came President Bill Clinton's overtures to

Vietnam. He lifted the American trade embargo in 1994 and

established formal diplomatic relations in 1995. In 1997, Pete

Peterson, a pilot who had been incarcerated for six years in

the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison, became the first American

ambassador. And, in 2000, President Clinton signed a bilateral

trade treaty with Vietnam and visited the country himself.

Suddenly, American scholars began to go there, interested in

how people perceived -- and taught about -- the United States

after all the years of hostility. I thought about making such

an excursion myself, but the opportunity never arose. Then, in

the summer of 2002, my wife and I joined an alumni trip that

That trip was overwhelming. I went fearful that I would be

branded an imperialistic, capitalistic, warmongering

representative of the dark side, but found myself, instead,

welcomed by the Vietnamese. While I saw cemeteries of wartime

dead everywhere, the war had receded into the background.

Fully 60 percent of the current Vietnamese population was born

since the end of the conflict and has no firsthand

recollection of it. I was impressed by the vitality of the

country and the energy that had rebuilt its ravaged

Our guides on that first trip were very different. Davies

Stamm, an American in his mid-50s, spent half the year in

Southeast Asia, half in Vermont, and was in love with Asian

culture. Vo Le Truc, a Vietnamese in his mid-30s, was the son

of a South Vietnamese army officer who had served as an air

controller at the Tan Son Nhut airfield in Saigon during the

war. Because of his responsibility at the air base, Truc's

father had not been able to leave as the North Vietnamese took

Saigon, and so the family stayed behind and endured the

mandatory re-education. Truc went to college, worked in

banking for a time, and finally gravitated into the tourist

In the midst of that trip, I began to think about the

possibility of bringing a group of students to Vietnam. The

idea sounded intriguing, appealing, and utterly impossible.

But I was slated to teach a senior seminar the following

spring. I thought about doing it on the 1960s, but suddenly I

realized that the focus could be Vietnam, with a trip to take

place over spring break. The only rub was that I didn't want

cost to keep able students out, so I needed to raise the money

to make it possible for everyone to go. Over three days,

working against the university deadline to list the course, I

received almost $30,000 from our president, provost, dean of

the college of arts and science, director of liberal

education, and the English department. To be eligible for

those last funds, I arranged to team-teach the course with

Richard D. Erlich, a colleague in literature. Another

colleague, Mary Kupiec Cayton, in history and American

studies, asked to join the trip and soon became an active

participant in the course. We were on our way.

The class was a diverse mix. While most of the students were

in their early 20s, the group included Brandon, a marine with

10 years in the infantry, now working for an undergraduate

degree, and Chris, a war protester in the 1960s, who had then

spent 21 years in the Navy and was now studying to be a

journalist. It also included Wendy, formerly in the Air Force

and married to an officer still working in that branch of the

service. The fathers of three of the students had served in

Vietnam, and Craig's was clearly unhappy about our trip. He

had been a medic in the war, and had been infuriated when the

enemy began to attack medical units to keep them from patching

up the wounded and returning them to the front lines. Hallie's

father, a Green Beret in the 1960s, was pleased that his

daughter was taking the class and going on the trip, and,

indeed, he came and talked to us about the difficulties

soldiers faced, both in fighting in the field and in coming

The impending war in Iraq hung over the course. As we

struggled to understand how the United States had become

involved in the quagmire of Vietnam, and to assess the impact

of the war at home, it was inevitable that we should ask

similar questions about the conflict that faced us today. Were

the assumptions about America's dominant role and unilateral

demands that propelled us into Vietnam at the height of the

cold war similar to those now pulling us into Iraq? What right

did the United States have to be in Vietnam? And what right

did we have to attack Iraq? Could we even begin to predict the

human consequences of the impending war, in light of what we

were learning about the struggle in Vietnam? At a more

practical level, some of us worried that the outbreak of war

might prevent us from leaving the United States, or from

Once we departed for Southeast Asia on March 6, I was

intrigued by how the expectations of each of us governed first

impressions. As our Cathay Pacific plane from Hong Kong

swooped down over Hanoi, Chris thought he saw bomb craters

below. Only as we got closer did he realize that those were

sand traps in a golf course near the airport. Many of the

students, as well as their parents and friends, had thought we

were heading into the jungle, where we would encounter wild

insects -- or booby traps. In what we're told is an era of

increasing globalization, the outside world still seems alien

to many Americans. At Hoi An, a quiet coastal city not far

from the once-famous demilitarized zone, I came upon Megan

taking a picture of the pool and garden in our lovely,

well-appointed hotel. "Everyone was saying I'd be staying in

jungle shacks," she told me. She wanted to show family and

friends back home what it was really like.

For me, the joy of the trip came in watching the responses of

my students and colleagues. In Hanoi, we visited Ho Chi Minh,

lying in state -- just like Lenin in Moscow -- in his massive

mausoleum. We had read William J. Duiker's massive Ho Chi

Minh: A Life in class and had some sense of the extraordinary

impact of the man who had declared, "There is nothing more

precious than independence and freedom" and had devoted most

of his life to helping his people achieve them. We saw his

modest house, with but a bed and a writing desk in his room,

and the garden outside where he had loved to putter, and I

found myself wondering about the contrast with the trappings

of power in the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein.

In Hanoi, after the requisite ride with each of us in a

separate cyclo, a three-wheeled cart powered by a foot-pedaled

bicycle in the back, we went to the home of Jean Vander Woude,

an American foreign-service officer whom I had met in Turkey

on a lecture trip a few years ago. She invited us all for

dinner with a group of a dozen advanced college students and

their dean from the Institute for International Relations. The

students' English was excellent, and they were almost as eager

to talk with our students as our students were to speak with

them. As soon as we walked in the door, conversations began,

and the animated discussion, stopped only by occasional games

the Vietnamese students proposed from time to time, continued

for the next several hours. Some conversations concerned

international politics, including war in Iraq. Others touched

on boyfriends and girlfriends, language training, and career

While in Hoi An, we took a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride to My

Lai, site of the horrifying American massacre in March 1968 of

innocent men, women, and children. It was sobering. A simple

museum contained pictures, taken by an Army photographer, of

the senseless slaughter. Outside, no trace of the village

remained, but there were plaques scattered around the grounds

pointing out where different families, all killed, had once

lived. A large statue of five figures, some bent over with

pain on their faces, commemorated the horror, while a mosaic

wall, near the open ditch where bodies had been piled, served

as another memorial. A young woman whose aunt was one of the

approximately 500 victims, spoke to us for about half an hour

about what had happened that awful day. I watched as Brandon,

our career soldier, borrowed a lighter to rekindle sticks of

incense that had gone out in front of the statue. As we left,

Wendy said quietly, "This afternoon I have a very heavy

I was struck by the way we all shared a sense of horror at the

massacre. I had been haunted by it since stories had first

appeared in the press nearly 35 years ago, but the students

had only read about it in history books. Even so, they came

away from the massacre site with a powerful sense of how

fighting, even with the best of intentions, can sometimes get

out of hand. As Craig observed afterward, "We are used to evil

people doing these kinds of atrocities, like Hitler, Stalin,

or even Saddam Hussein. But this was an American atrocity." We

talked about Philip Caputo's memoir, A Rumor of War, in which

he discussed how, in the blind fury of combat, soldiers

sometimes find themselves out of control. We all felt a sense

of empathy for soldiers in the field, facing fearful

conditions, just like those fighting in Iraq were likely to,

even as we deplored what happened at My Lai. The day after we

visited the site, I asked Brandon what he had felt as we

walked through it. He commented quietly: In the military,

soldiers are taught to follow orders, but, at the same time,

they are also taught to follow a moral imperative. It was

clear, he said, that these soldiers had lost their ethical

Our trip south took us to Hue, the old imperial capital, which

was the site of ferocious fighting during the Tet Offensive of

1968. Some temples had been leveled in the struggle. Bullet

holes were still visible from shots that had ripped through

statues and walls. Buddhist shrines competed with them for our

attention. It was a vivid demonstration of the unintended

Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, had more motorbikes,

weaving between the buses and cars, than any of us had ever

seen. Crossing the street was literally an act of courage,

demanding that we venture forth, make eye contact with a

driver, proceed forward relentlessly, and never turn back. I

confess my biggest fear as organizer of the trip was an

accident harming a member of the group. But we grew more

daring, learned to push ahead to get where we wanted to go,

Saigon is the site of the War Remnants Museum, which is the

nation's most extensive reflection on the war. The students

were riveted by one exhibit about journalists and

photographers who had lost their lives; by the posters showing

worldwide opposition to the war in the 1960s and early '70s;

by the photographs of the lingering effects of Agent Orange on

the Vietnamese people. We saw a French guillotine, like that

once used in the Hanoi Hilton, and some of the equally

notorious tiger cages where prisoners languished and died.

War, we thought, could be devastating in so many ways.

Finally, we went to the Cu Chi tunnels, about 60 kilometers

northwest of Ho Chi Minh City, where the Viet Cong had built

an underground complex that stretched for about 250 kilometers

by 1965. That massive network permitted the VC to remain

hidden for days or even weeks, and allowed them to infiltrate

Saigon at will. We took turns climbing into a camouflaged

entrance, and followed one another through a lengthy passage

that had been widened to make sure that foreign visitors would

not get stuck. I found myself overwhelmed by the tenacity of

people who had managed to hold out under such miserable

conditions for so long, until they finally secured their

As our trip came to an end, we were all struck by how much

Americans had misunderstood the Vietnamese during the war

itself. Lyndon Johnson assumed that Ho Chi Minh was just like

an American political leader who could be bullied or cajoled

into doing whatever the United States wanted. Many Americans

were mystified by the losses the North Vietnamese and Viet

Cong were willing to absorb to achieve their ends. How much,

my students asked, do we misunderstand Iraqis today?

One point divided us, however. The war in Vietnam fractured my

faith -- and the faith of many of my contemporaries -- in

government. Some of that skepticism still remains,

particularly among people of my generation, but the students

were more willing to assume that Father Knows Best and

I had no agenda in teaching the course, other than to ask that

we all try to understand that other people, in a far-off

corner of the world, can live differently from the way we do.

The papers and Web sites students have been working on since

our return -- on different attitudes toward death, different

ways of dealing with sacred space, and different experiences

in war -- show that they have, indeed, come to see the world

in a more expansive way. The experience of studying about the

war, of looking at the consequences firsthand, has given them

the tools to ask honest and penetrating questions about the

issues that face us today -- just as it has made me more aware

For all our differences, I also came to realize how much that

war has been on America's mind. For a time we tried to forget;

for too long we ignored the pain of our returning veterans.

But our recollections of Vietnam have refused to go away. As

the class began, I was surprised to realize that our students,

even the youngest, were also preoccupied with the conflict,

even if without some of my prejudices. Somehow, a collective

concern has been passed down, through the books and films that

continue to appear, and through visits to the stark, black,

riveting Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Do American

policy makers, I wonder, fully realize the depth of the

It was also instructive -- perhaps a relief -- for all of us

to learn that Vietnam itself is not obsessed by the war. For

the people we met, what they called the American War was a

blip on the radar screen. They had fought the Chinese for a

thousand years, the French for a hundred years, the Japanese

for the duration of World War II, and finally the Americans.

More important, they told us, they had won all those wars.

What reason did they have to worry about how we felt? They had

The class talked about the irony that the United States could

now interact with a country that was healthy, vital, and

secure. Those qualities, which we had fought so desperately to

achieve in the 1960s and '70s, were, in the end, only possible

to gain after we lost the war. As we watched fearfully what

was happening in Iraq, that lesson seemed more haunting than

ever before. Could we, I wondered, absorb it without the same

fearful loss of life we, and the Vietnamese, had suffered

those decades ago? Could we finally understand -- perhaps

through courses and trips like this -- that everyone in the

Allan M. Winkler is a professor of history at Miami University