Voices from Vietnam: Veterans' Oral Histories in the Classroom

Patrick Hagopian

Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane.

—Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

War stories become just that—stories. Just as time distances the storyteller from the events themselves, so do the repeated tellings. Gradually the stories are embellished in places, honed down in others until they are perfect little tales, even if they bear little resemblance to what actually happened.

—David Hackworth, About Face

Many of my students have seen films about the Vietnam War and are avid to learn about the war experiences of Vietnam veterans. Some, like the fictional protagonist of Bobbie Ann Mason's novel In Country, have felt the effects of the war through family members' avoidance of the topic and want words to fill up those silences.1 Others want to understand why the war so fractured the United States. Still others, who know of the atrocities United States soldiers committed in Vietnam, believe that only the ordinary veterans who fought there could explain why they occurred.	1
Many Vietnam veterans have been eager to share their painful experiences with students. Veterans have witnessed events beyond the bounds of ordinary experience, and they can feel an urgent need to communicate what they have seen and done, both to spring themselves from the trap of isolating knowledge and to ensure that society draws the proper lessons. For veterans and students, listening to war experiences and discussing them can be cathartic.2 Veterans thus appreciate seeing their accounts published in collections of interviews and being invited to classrooms.	2
The appeal of veterans' accounts is evident in the frequency with which teachers of courses on the Vietnam War invite veterans to speak to students and use published oral histories. A survey of 89 university courses on the Vietnam War reported in 1993 that 11 of them invited Vietnam veterans as guest speakers. Students in a popular course at the University of California, Santa Barbara, taught by the late Walter Capps, used to greet guest speakers who were veterans in ritual "welcome home" ceremonies. Such events enabled students to touch part of the nation's history, and the students took satisfaction in compensating veterans for the public indifference they encountered when they returned from the war.3 In sharing the veterans' stories, veterans and their student listeners believed they could contribute to the "healing" and reconciliation that veterans' organizations have placed at the top of the nation's post-Vietnam agenda.4	3
Even in printed form, first-person testimony can provide both a sense of what the war felt like that official documents and secondary sources do not capture and evidence of hard truths that some other sources evade. The 1993 survey found that oral history collections appeared frequently on syllabi; for example, the two most used books that explore the African American experience were oral histories—Bloods and Brothers.5 But, while veterans' narratives have value for tellers and listeners alike, teachers who ask students to interview Vietnam veterans should be mindful of the limitations—and not just the potential value—of such interviews.	4
The Wannabe Phenomenon . . .