Rationale
Vietnam was the war of my parents' generation. Decades removed, the Vietnam War is a historical event, but for me it lacks the weighty remembrance of a violent culture clash or painful personal experience which it is to so many. I recognize then that if Vietnam is the stuff of legacy to me, it is likely to be less memorable or meaningful to my students. Some may know that a war took place with a country somewhere in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, but their knowledge would end there. Few would know what a draft card was, or why someone would want to burn it. Even fewer would be able to make the connection between the images they may have seen of protests or peace signs and an actual war. Almost none of them would understand what the war had to do with Communism and the Cold War. Therefore, the first critical need this unit must meet is teaching my students about the Vietnam War and its historical and cultural significance.
This unit is also about stories and films. There is an abundance of material - short stories, oral histories, images, comic strips, documentaries and feature films - that could be used in a study of the Vietnam War. I chose e The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien as our central text because I find it rich with war stories and questions about war stories. The book will help us chart our course through the genre and the war itself. In addition to clips from documentaries, studies of war photography, and examples of oral histories, this unit's other central pieces are films. I have chosen to focus on four films (The Green Berets, Platoon, The Abandoned Field, and White Badge) that view the war from a variety of perspectives to both broaden my students' understanding of the war's context and deepen their empathy for others' experiences of these events.
I am aware that while I find this material compelling in and of itself; my students may not be so immediately engaged. It is therefore necessary for me step back and ask myself, as my students will surely ask me, why are we learning this? The most apparent answers are curricular - as a Humanities educator I am duty-bound to instruct my students in interpreting history and interpreting texts. Teaching interpretative strategies is a challenge all its own. I find my students, even as far along into high school as they are, struggle to make their own interpretations of material. They look to others - usually teachers and textbooks - for the the "right answer." It is one of the goals of my student-centered classroom to give my students tools and strategies to come to figure out what things mean for themselves.
This unit is also about how we read and watch stories. So our study of text and film will include some explicit teaching of literary and cinematic elements. I want my students to be able to identify plot, character, setting, theme, tone and mood in literature. I want them to be able to tease apart the pacing and structures of plot from exposition to complication to climax to denouement. In film, the narrative language may be similar but the technical vocabulary is different. This unit will be one of the first times in which we learn from and with films, so I will explicitly introduce film terms to my students. In their purest forms war stories and films lend themselves to this technical and formal analysis; this is a genre that relies on conventions. Yet focusing on the Vietnam War complicates the predictability and formulaic aspects of genre. Many writers and directors choose to play with narrative structures in order to comment on the senseless or disorder of war. Writers and filmmakers manipulate formal elements to destabilize the reader and viewer.
It is my opinion that the tension between clean narratives and disconcerting asynchronous stories makes my selected films (and The Things They Carried) a useful window into the conflict in Southeast Asia. The very things that are challenging about some of these films and texts are indicative of both the ambivalence and the deeply-held beliefs embedded in our conflicted national consciousness when we deal with Vietnam. I find that sociopolitical complexity doesn't mean much to my students when they read about it in the parsed chronologies of a history textbook. Allowing my students to get mired in the confusing aspects of the stories and films would be an instructive experience. I can anticipate my students asking, "Why don't they just tell me what happened?" or "Who am I supposed to root for?" I imagine the conversations these questions would lead into would teach us more about the complexity of the war than any summary analysis or point-counterpoint review of "sides."
This unit will also use films that are not part of the traditional canon of Vietnam War Films. The decision to include international films (The Abandoned Field from Vietnam and White Badge from Korea) in my unit was informed by the work in my seminar, which focused on global storytelling traditions. In our seminar, we often discussed the many benefits of exposing our students to other cultures and perspectives in films and stories. Not only are these films themselves a glimpse into Vietnamese and Korean filmmaking and storytelling traditions, but they also problematize the American narrative(s) of the Vietnam War. These films enter directly into conversation with a text and two films that conceive of Vietnam as a purely American venture, which is by no means the case. It is one of my larger goals for my students to see themselves and this country as part of a larger global community. It would be a disservice to them to study the Vietnam War from only an American perspective.
The final reason for focusing this unit on stories of the Vietnam War is by no means an afterthought. There are important thematic and strategic connections between our discussion of the Vietnam War and my students' understanding of current international conflicts - most notably the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am therefore interested in giving my students opportunities to think critically about the country's current wars and the stories that are and will be told about them..
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