Dispatches

"I had plenty of problems when I came in. But wait until the fellow who follows me sees what he will inherit." - President John F. Kennedy, joking in 1961 about his campaign attacks on Eisenhower

1. Was the Vietnam War different than other wars in American history? If so, how? Consider issues of technology, soldiers' response to wartime, and popular perceptions of the war and its causes. Beware of easy answers to this question!
2. What was the government's rationale for being in Vietnam? What are the catch-phrases and euphemisms associated with the Vietnam war? How does U.S. policy in Vietnam compare with that in Latin America?
3. What was the relationship of journalists such as Michael Herr to the soldiers? What advantages and disadvantages are associated with Herr's status as a journalist?
4. How did the soldiers come to terms with the contradictions and the horrors of Vietnam? Was the Vietnam War different from other wars?
5. Was the dehumanization of combat reflective of a dehumanizing policy? How so or why not? What was the role of technology in the war?
6. On page 49, Herr writes "You couldn't find two people who agreed about it when it began. . . . might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along." What does he mean by this passage? What is the significance of race and class in the Vietnam War? Consider both the homefront and the war zone.

Internet Resources

Unarmed and Under Fire

An oral history of female Vietnam vets, compiled by Austin Bunn from interviews with Women's Army Corp (WAC) veterans of Vietnam.

Re: Vietnam - Stories Since the War

A PBS-sponsored site that gathers oral histories about how the Vietnam War affected people, both at the time and in the years since.

The Sixties Project and Vietnam Generation

An exhaustive collection of references, documents, and oral histories of people and events in the 1960s. The site also includes a Vietnam comic book published in 1967 by a legislator expelled from the Georgia House of Representatives for opposing the War.

Vietnam, 1966

Volume IV of the State Department historian's published collection of documents and memoranda related to Johnson's foreign policy in Vietnam. This exhaustive collection of primary sources unfortunately lacks an index or search engine.

"The Conservative 1960s"

Review in "The Atlantic Monthly" of Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP. Provides a different view of the 1960s than that presented in most films and books and a 1960s context for the conservative renaissance of the 1980s. Available only via university servers with institutional subscriptions.

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