War, Journalism, and Oral History

Gary Rice

It is the in-class telephone interviews that get the attention and light the fire. Students in my honors class, offered by both the history and the mass communications departments, "War and the News Media: From Vietnam through Desert Storm and Beyond," have used the phone to question some of the biggest names in war and the media. They have talked to Col. David Hackworth, the most decorated living United States veteran; Hugh Thompson, the heroic helicopter pilot who saved Vietnamese lives at the My Lai massacre; Liz Trotta, the first woman to cover Vietnam full time for a television network; and the biggest catch of them all, Walter Cronkite.	1
But the popular in-class interviews are only a precursor to the most valuable exercise my students will perform—oral histories. During the last third of the semester, the students become practicing historians, venturing out of the classroom to make use of the knowledge they have absorbed. Students see that history is not just something that remote scholars distill into learned tomes. Interviews give students the chance to experience firsthand the excitement of history.	2
My class strives to give students a thorough understanding not only of conflicts from the Vietnam War through current times but also of how the media covered each of those conflicts. Because the class is an honors course, I try to give my students more of a challenge than I would toss at a regular class. I expect my students to dig deeper, to question more, and ultimately to comprehend the subject matter more fully than those enrolled in a regular class. Oral histories help meet those goals by giving students a vested interest in the material they are learning. They become players in the educational process. Interviews are also a natural way of putting students in the shoes of the people they have been studying—the journalists and combatants themselves.	3
Each student is required to do an oral history with either a war correspondent or a combat veteran of any United States war. The interviews must be one-on-one. Group interviews tend to dilute the educational benefits a student gets from the assignment, besides making it difficult to evaluate each student's individual contributions. Perhaps because most of the class is spent on the Vietnam War, most students have chosen to interview veterans of that conflict. I encourage students to find their own interviewees, but I also maintain a list of possible subjects. Veterans' organizations have been especially helpful. With just a little effort, I also compiled a list of faculty and staff members at my university who were combat veterans and willing to schedule interviews. On this campus alone, we found some fascinating subjects, including one of the few Marine Corps lawyers to be wounded in Vietnam and a former navy medical corpsman who provided graphic description of combat and battlefield injuries.	4
Within a few miles of the university, students have interviewed marine snipers, helicopter pilots and gunners, medics, special forces officers, fighter pilots, and officers up to the rank of brigadier general. The thirty-five oral histories completed so far have covered the Vietnam War chronologically, from the early 1960s through the fall of Saigon in 1975.	5
Several students have gone above and beyond the call of duty. After we studied Tim Page, a talented and zany Vietnam War photographer, one student grew so fascinated that she tracked him down near London and arranged to interview him. Then she prepared a travel grant application. The Honors Program and the College of General Studies were so impressed that they underwrote the trip. She returned to school with a detailed oral history and memories of a spring break she will never forget.	. . .