The Newest Vietnam Teach-In
Skating around the brutality of Communism.

By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, the author of Hollywood Party and editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute
May 8, 2001 8:30 a.m.

ometimes the debate over whether to preserve a difficult past or wipe the slate clean brushes up against those who know little or nothing in the first place. Consider Vietnam: Echoes from the Wall, an “interactive educational tool” and a project of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial fund, the group responsible for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Released with much fanfare and massive corporate sponsorship, Echoes comes billed as the first “well-balanced and comprehensive” educational treatment of Vietnam and will be given to every middle school in the country.

Poor public-school education has left many of these students unable to find Vietnam on a map, but while they might learn something from Echoes, they will not emerge with comprehensive knowledge of the “tumultuous period,” which Echoes rightly says “continues to cast a lingering shadow on politics and culture.” Nor will they get a particularly balanced perspective from what is more of an ideological project than historical enterprise.

Susan Griffin, high on the list of experts responsible for Echoes, is executive director of the National Council for Social Studies. Expert Gary Marx is executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. Neither group could be regarded as a repository of balanced knowledge on Vietnam or anything else. Leading the expert list is Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History, the only historical work formally excerpted. In Why Vietnam Still Matters, a book included in the package, Karnow says, “the war was unwinnable” and could have been avoided had we realized that the Vietnamese Communists “were not part of some global communist machine but were basically nationalists.”

In his entry, George McGovern acknowledges that Ho Chi Minh was a Communist, “but he was even more fundamentally a Vietnamese patriot … seen as being like George Washington.”

These collector’s items are balanced by actual Vietnam veterans such as Jim Bohannon, who explains that the war was indeed winnable, that it was not a civil war but a war of aggression directed from Hanoi, and that if the students want to understand it they should bone up on the history of Southeast Asia. And yet, that is not exactly what this interactive tool allows.

Rather, it promotes “teams and team learning structures” through which “multiethnic and gender cooperation and understanding is increased.” In this process, “no idea is too silly to put forward” and straw polls keep “the consensus process moving forward.” Students fill out “historical head worksheets,” then fill in a picture of a hollow head. What they will use to fill it in is a mixed bag. Consider, for example, the definition of the Cold War.

“The period from 1945 through 1991 when the world democracies, led by America, waged an economic, ideological struggle against communist expansion, largely led by the Soviet Union.” This makes it seem as though the democracies are the aggressor. According to Echoes, Communism is “a doctrine supporting state ownership of property and the means of production. Often associated with revolutionary seizure of power versus a democratic process of elections.” A glance at the Gulag Archipelago or The Black Book of Communism would confirm that Communism is rule by terror, but neither volume can be found anywhere in the Echoes bibliography. Also conspicuous by its absence is The Vietnamese Gulag, by Doan Van Toai.

Students are told that under Vietnamese Communism, people are not free to express their views. But the myriad brutalities and privations endured under a regime more oppressive than the USSR receive little detail. The experts might have cited this poem by To Huu, the regime’s official censor:

Long live Ho Chi Minh
The guiding light of the proletariat
Long live Stalin
The great eternal tree!
Peace grows in his shadow!
Kill, kill again, let your hands never stop…

The treatment of the war itself keeps a finger on the guilt button. My Lai, where in March of 1968, U.S. forces killed as many as 500 civilians, receives extensive description. The guide does say that during the Tet Offensive, Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces massacred 3,000 civilians in the city of Hue, beheading some and burying others alive. While Echoes observes that American soldiers were prosecuted for My Lai, it misses the crucial point that My Lai was an aberration while Hue was part of a deliberate Communist terror campaign, a foreshadowing of the genocide in Cambodia.

The actual battle of Hue, in which the 1st and 5th Marines fought house-to-house, is treated only in a combat chronology. At the battle for Lang Vei, also in 1968, American troops captured a special-forces camp, were driven out, and then retook the camp. In 1969, troops of the 101st Airborne captured Ap Bia Mountain, also known as Hamburger Hill, after 11 assaults. In these and other battles, such as the Siege of Con Thien in 1967, U.S. soldiers fought bravely, sometimes in fierce hand-to-hand combat, under difficult conditions and against great odds. But when they returned home they were vilified and caricatured. Their bravery and sacrifice in battle deserves a more detailed and respectable treatment from a teaching guide that bills itself as comprehensive and balanced.

The program’s “team activities” include watching such movies as Born on the Fourth of July, The Green Berets, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Heaven and Earth (making three by director Oliver Stone), The Deer Hunter, and The Hanoi Hilton, the most accurate of the lot.

An appendix for the home-front section includes the lyrics to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” by Peter Seeger, with no background on this longtime apologist for Stalinism. Worse, Echoes accepts the self-description of “anti-war movement,” when in fact it was nothing of the kind. It was a movement against American involvement in Vietnam — one that offered no anti-war resistance or pacifist activism when the Soviet tanks of the North Vietnamese rolled into Saigon in 1975. In fact, New Left stalwart Tom Hayden, mentioned in the guide, celebrated that occasion, which the movement helped make possible. Echoes admits that his ex-wife Jane Fonda traveled to North Vietnam during the war but does not mention her anti-American harangues or show her joyously perched on enemy weaponry. It conveniently omits Fonda’s attacks on singer Joan Baez for criticizing the Vietnamese “reeducation camps.”

The “anti-war” movement said the North Vietnamese were basically nationalists, but history confirms they were pro-Soviet Communists. The movement said they were peaceful but they were aggressive, invading Cambodia in 1979. The movement said American withdrawal would lead to peace, but it did not. While other Asian countries prosper, Vietnam remains a Stalinist police state, and one of the poorest countries in the world, precisely what American involvement intended to prevent. But the “legacy” section of Echoes has more to do with American guilt than with Vietnamese reality. This cheats the students out of valuable material.

“Study the pictures of the girl burned by napalm,” says an activity section. The girl in the famous Nick Ut photo, instrumental in ending congressional support for the war effort, is Phan Thi Kim Phuc. Used for years by the Vietnamese Communist regime in anti-American propaganda, she defected to Canada in 1992 while en route to Cuba, a move she describes as an “escape,” explaining that “life is nothing in Cuba or Vietnam.”

A balanced, comprehensive treatment of Vietnam might include something like that.