Teaching the Vietnam War, Fifty Years On

Syrus Jin
April 30th, 1975, 10:45am. A tank crashes through the front gates of the South Vietnamese presidential palace in Saigon. Ninety minutes later, North Vietnamese troops raise a new flag bearing a gold star emblazoned on a blue and red field over the roof of the palace. The war, which had lasted for decades, was over. Since the end of the Vietnam War, scholars have debated, studied, and taught about this conflict, one of the most destructive in the second half of the 20th century. In 2025 on a cold February morning, I went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Its black granite walls feature the engraved names of American service members who died in the war. Fifity years since the fall of Saigon, I was curious about what people at the wall might have to say. Not everyone was forthcoming, and when I introduced myself as a historian, one couple asked for an ID.

Syrus Jin
Yeah, yeah, of course. Let me get you . . . I’m actually with the University of Chicago.

Speaker 1
Oh do you really? We’re from Central Illinois.

Syrus Jin
Oh, wonderful. We’re producing a podcast episode about the end of the Vietnam War. We’re coming up on the 50th year anniversary about the fall of Saigon. Can I ask you a little bit about what brought you to the memorial today?

Speaker 2
Today, I mean, he’s visiting Washington for the United States for  the first time, and so I just walking around the monuments and seeing seeing all of them today.

Speaker 3
All I just want to see the men that died for our country.

Speaker 4
So I’m active duty Army, and so seeing the war memorials is just something I wanted to take the opportunity to do.

Syrus Jin
What did you think of the memorial? Have you seen it before?

Speaker 4
I’ve not seen it in person before. No.

Syrus Jin
What was your experience just seeing it for the first time?

Speaker 4
It’s a it’s a huge loss of human life, and it’s, I don’t think impressive is the right word, but certainly one that comes to mind of how many men and women were lost over there.

Speaker 3
Amazing.

Syrus Jin
What about it felt amazing to you?

Speaker 3
Just the pure size of it and the beauty of it. I mean, I’m sad for all these lives that got lost in the war, don’t get me wrong, but it’s an amazing monument to them.

Speaker 1
I think it’s . . .

Speaker 5
Simple and moving.

Speaker 1
Yes, very, very moving just to look at those names and see them. See the names, and just quantify the lives that were lost.

Speaker 6
I, not having the background, not knowing, it actually gives me more information about, like, how bad it was actually, like, when you have, like, a single monument, you sometimes don’t even read the names. But when you know, present in this format, you understand how it’s, you know, growing and growing and includes more people. And I actually, at first I asked, is it really all the names? But when you come to that point, you see that it’s a lot of names, actually.

Speaker 2
This is probably the most effective war memorial I’ve seen. When you see the memorial, you don’t really understand what the Vietnam War was about in the same way, like, what all of these people who died, what was it for? I think that sort of, that sort of, like this, this lack of closure. Why did we have the Vietnam War? What was it for? What did we achieve? What other kind of memorial can you make for a war like that, you know?

Syrus Jin
Could I ask you, like, how you started to volunteer here?

Volunteer
I was talking to a friend who kind of knew my background and stuff, and she said, I would check out the Volunteer-in-Parks program here at the National Park Service. And when I saw Vietnam, I said, well, that just makes a lot of sense. And I’ve been here ever since. And it’s been, it’s been the honor of my life. Every time I am here talking to families or veterans or those that are just interested in the wall, I am honored to hear their stories or to help them. So that’s why I’m here, and that’s why I’m still here. It’s crazy to say, but this is my, this is my place of peace.

Syrus Jin
I feel like a lot of people say that the this memorial, in particular, is one of the most impactful. Has that been your experience? And why do you think that is?

Volunteer
When people finally get an understanding that it is by day, because, you know, they say, well, you know, where are the dates? Where—you know? But when you explain to them . . . my explanation is: this wall is a diary, okay. Where each day is a story, and each name in the day is a story. And that’s what the wall is about. It’s a diary, and it’s them—it’s these names that tell the story. We have five generals on this wall. We have 162 now Medal of Honor recipients on this wall. They’re all the same. They’re all the same.

Syrus Jin
How do we tell the story of the Vietnam War? What names tell that story? And what’s at stake? These unanswered questions circulated throughout my conversations at the memorial. Welcome to History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. I’m Syrus Solo Jin. In the March issue of the AHR, the journal explored these questions in a special forum entitled “The Vietnam War Fifty Years On,” which asked its contributors to explore one source that they use in the classroom to teach this conflict. The question that we investigate today is how we tell the story of the Vietnam War in a generation increasingly removed from it. First up, we hear from Thy Phu, a contributor to the forum, about how volunteers in Vietnam are using AI to restore war photographs in a digital age, one of which is featured as the March issue’s cover image. We then hear from three historians of the Vietnam War who also contributed to the forum: Jana Lipman, David Biggs, and Wen-Qing Ngoei. These scholars each discuss a source that they have used with students to teach the Vietnam War and also the challenges and opportunities of talking about this conflict fifty years after the Fall of Saigon. You’ll find their articles, and more, in the full March issue.

Thy Phu
My name is Thy Phu and I’m a professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto. I’ve been writing about photography since the very beginning of my career. But increasingly, I’ve been investigating what has transformed in the visual field, and how, in turn, that has reshaped our understanding of history and memory. I became increasingly fascinated by stories that I had heard coming out of Vietnam about postwar generation youth who had taken upon themselves of restoring images of revolutionary martyrs. So this is a generation that is quite familiar with Instagram filters, with transforming their faces, the backgrounds of their images, creating avatars, creating AI portraits of themselves. So this is a post war generation that is crafting kind of new images, and it’s certainly a generation that is highly sympathetic to the revolution and its cause. So sometime after, you know, in the mid 2010s, I think one of the first groups is called Project Team Lee, and they were working mainly in Photoshop. And so they started to volunteer their digital skills in order to repair damaged photographs. These photographs—they’re barely legible, some of them. You can barely discern these photos. They’re faded into all but invisibility. And I kept wondering, “What in the world were they doing?” This generation that supposedly has all these digital skills and who were busy kind of building the new Vietnam. What were they doing, turning to these degraded images, and what purpose did it serve in shaping this new postwar Vietnam period? What images did they care about, and what kind of cultural work was their creation of these images? What was it doing in terms of positioning themselves within this longer history of revolution in Vietnam? And through kind of the wizardry, the magic of the software, color is added, faces are reconstituted, skin is perfected. And then online, on social media, when these images are posted, they’ve subsequently used animation AI software in order to bring these subjects to life.

Syrus Jin
What was your first reaction when you saw one of these reanimated, reconstituted images?

Thy Phu
I think the word uncanny comes to mind quite a lot. There’s something about these technological methods of photo resurrection—I’m now calling it resurrection. And people have often observed this of AI itself, like there’s a particular kind of sheen or gloss to AI that makes it realer than real, and it’s a particular kind of reality effect. But there’s a specific kind of resonance that I think is tied to commemoration practices of Vietnam in particular that I find deeply fascinating, and it has to do with the desire for the transmission of spirit that is a distinct part of ancestral veneration, where portraits of the dead are not meant to capture necessarily the likeness of the dead, but serve as conduits for the spirit passing from one generation to the next. It has been like a fascinating exercise to go through kind of the social media posts that are made by the volunteers of these groups. There’s a whole bunch of groups in Vietnam. And so what is remarkable is that, as is the case within a lot of history of photography, is a before and after. So we see the before picture, and the before picture is usually black and white, if you even call it that: torn, faded, barely visible. Sometimes it’s a video animation that shows a slow process of improvement of the image. Then you can see the face coming into visibility, their flesh tones filling out the vibrancy of their uniform—olive and scarlet—shining through. And this is especially clear in the animation: flames erupting behind them. And as if to remind you that the past is still present with us, we see the eyes of the revolutionary martyr, eyes that had been obscured, if not faded out in the original image, they blink at you as if somehow they hold your gaze and yet they have to look away, and then they open again to look upon the viewer. And at the sides of the mouth they crease slightly in a dignified smile.

Syrus Jin
So what are your feelings on photo restoration, on photo resurrection, in terms of how we think about the Vietnam War and how it’s remembered?

Thy Phu
I think this is an ongoing debate about where to situate these technical tools in our archival preservation toolbox. So on the one hand, it poses a risk of distorting, completely altering beyond recognition, and I completely recognize those concerns. On the other hand, a larger number of museums and galleries are experimenting with AI and these digital tools in order to provide a more immersive, engaging experience for viewers. My positioning is to really take seriously how AI is then practiced or used and incorporated, and what the significance of that use is.

Syrus Jin
For educators who are thinking about visual media and teaching the Vietnam War, how might you suggest they approach using photographs in the classroom, or potentially even resurrected, restored photographs in the classroom? How do you think about this with regard to teaching?

Thy Phu
I think it’s important to think about who you’re teaching first and foremost. And so one of the first questions that I ask is, “what for you is a war image? What for you is a war photograph, and which war is most present in your mind and what are the particular visual archives that sit in your mind? All of our students come into the classroom with a set of images and a set of expectations about images. Don’t start off by assuming that there’s a universal message about a war image. We need to both situate that image within its history as well as situate the spectator in relationship to that history. That’s how I would teach photography and war.

Syrus Jin
Next up, we hear from David Biggs, Wen-Qing Ngoei, and Jana Lipman, all scholars of the Vietnam War who discuss how thinking, relating to and teaching this conflict has changed. Their conversations, collected in individual interviews, are interwoven here to demonstrate the remarkable alignments between them. As all three scholars assert, with 50 years comes new challenges, but also new opportunities in the classroom.

David Biggs
I’m David Biggs. I’m a professor of Southeast Asian history and environmental history at the University of California at Riverside.

Wen-Qing Ngoei
My name is Wen-Qing Ngoei. I’m an associate professor of history at the Singapore Management University, and I specialize in the history of US foreign relations with Southeast Asia.

Jana Lipman
My name is Jana Lipman. I’m a professor at Tulane University. I teach US history and I focus on US foreign relations, immigration, and labor history, and I’m really excited to speak to you today.

Syrus Jin
I asked all three scholars what their earlier impressions of the Vietnam War were from their own experience, and they all had a similar answer: movies.

Wen-Qing Ngoei
Platoon.

David Biggs
The Deer Hunter.

Jana Lipman
Apocalypse Now.

Wen-Qing Ngoei
Good Morning Vietnam with Robin Williams.

Jana Lipman
One of my friends said, you have to watch Rambo 2. And I was like, really?

David Biggs
I remember as a very little kid seeing the TV news, you know, and I think it was around the time that Saigon fell. I was five years old. And then later on, all the movies came out, The Deer Hunter. When I was in high school, it was Full Metal Jacket and Platoon.

Chris Taylor in Platoon, 1986
The hardest thing I think I’ve ever done is go on point. 3 times this week. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I’m so tired.

David Biggs
That’s when this whole mythologizing of the war kind of began to happen.

Wen-Qing Ngoei
So I grew up in the 1980s. I was born roughly around the time that Saigon fell. And so for me, a huge amount of the Vietnam War is movies. And Singapore, from I think the 80s all the way till the 2000s, is one of the top movie-watching publics in the world. And so we don’t do anything else here, or at least I didn’t do anything else in the 80s and 90s. We were just watching movies all the time. And my earliest impressions of the Vietnam War all had to do with these movies. And so I was really deeply immersed in it and I would say that actually, some of this stuff was formative for me being interested in American foreign policy. Although I still had this bizarre disconnect where “I’m so interested in this thing. It’s happening in Southeast Asia, but it has got nothing to do with us in Singapore!” Which made no sense, but thankfully, after becoming a historian, I understand why.

Jana Lipman
I was a high school student, and I wrote my first major research paper on the history of Vietnam War movies. My mom owned a movie theater, and I was really interested and excited about film. And I was in US AP History class circa 1990 or something, and I went and I watched Apocalypse Now, I watched Platoon, I watched The Deer Hunter. And in some ways it was the— I would now see is a pretty, extremely American-centric canon of 1970s and 1980s Vietnam war films. But I was really excited about this project. I remember it was the first time I went to a university library and I did research on Vietnam War films. And so that was really my entry into this topic and into this research.

Syrus Jin
I’m curious about how you might have taught the Vietnam War when you were first starting out as a faculty member, and how that might contrast with some of the challenges with teaching about it now, with the students that you see.

Jana Lipman
That’s a really good question. I’m teaching the class right now, and so maybe my students will have something to say. When I started teaching this class, which was about 15 years ago, I would say the students had seen all the films I just mentioned. They’d seen Platoon. They had seen Full Metal Jacket. They had seen Apocalypse Now. And I would also say that unlike many other things that I teach, I think the students thought they came into the classroom knowing something about the Vietnam War. Regardless of how much knowledge they had, they’d seen a lot of movies. They were familiar with it in popular culture. I surveyed my class last  two weeks ago, three weeks ago when I started teaching this seminar, and the students had seen none of those films. Instead, the only one they had seen was Forrest Gump. And, no, I don’t even register that as the movie about the Vietnam War, which might be because I haven’t seen it in years. So one is, the pop culture piece is no longer there, at least for my students, like they just don’t have that knowledge. They’re not interested in the war for that reason. That’s not what they know. But I was really surprised, because a large number of my students had grandparents who were veterans. And I would say, almost more so than maybe when I taught this class a few years ago. And I thought that was really notable. It’s also not controversial to them. To them, it’s not like a controversial issue. I’ve begun teaching Iraq and Afghanistan more, and that seems to—obviously, it’s much more recent. It’s more controversial, I think, for multiple reasons, because the interpretation is still being argued and debated, both politically as well as academically. But my students, I think, do come in with fewer preconceptions, and for them it’s not a controversial topic. I’d also say that I really changed the way I teach it. When I started teaching it, many years ago, I probably taught one class that was after 1975. Now I would say I have three classes before 1964, three or four classes that are 1964 to 1975, another few classes that are 1975 to the present. This is because my own research, I include now much more on Vietnamese American stories as well as on questions of memory. So it has shifted the way I’ve organized the class.

David Biggs
Well, my students today, they were born after the year 2000, like 95% of them. And except for descendants of former refugees and immigrants with ties to Vietnam, honestly, almost all of those students have almost no idea about the war. I think their interest in Vietnam today is . . . it’s more aligned with questions about decolonization, about civil wars generally, about the multi-ethnic experiences involved in a war, like what we’re seeing in Syria or other parts of the Middle East. I think their fascination today is the mystique of Vietnam. Because it’s a safe place to travel, the food. I think the most popular TV notion the students now have a Vietnam is Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and Vietnamese food, like, that’s what they’re always telling me now.

Anthony Bourdain in Parts Unknown, Season 4 Episode 4, 2014
I’ve been all over Vietnam, a place I feel a special connection to. My first love. A place I remain besotted with, fascinated by.

Wen-Qing Ngoei
So with regards to challenges, there are a few that come to mind, and so I’ll mention two of them. The first is the seeming remoteness of the history of Vietnam from the experience of a typical Singaporean student. And of course, we do have a lot of international students, but I’m talking about maybe the typical Singaporean student. I think that the Vietnam War is contained as a chapter in the Cold War. And the Cold War is seen as this sort of remote thing that happened in the past, decades before any of the people that I teach were born. I mean, I recently taught an undergraduate was born in 2005 and, you know, sooner or later, even their parents, parents of the undergraduates, will have been born after the fall of Saigon. So I think that’s one of the major difficulties. It is just this remote, contained, far away story that is foreign. And Singapore is popularly believed to have not been involved at all. We didn’t send troops to Vietnam, so that actually helps with this belief. But another part of this is because Singapore maintains its claim to have been neutral and non-aligned throughout its history. It’s something that people continue to believe today about Singapore. Another part of it is the widely held impression that Singapore’s prosperity came from being a peaceful country of hard working folks who produced consumer goods, and then everybody got highly educated and started providing services for the world. So Vietnam’s history is a stark contrast, right? It’s war and destruction. And so the impression that people get is that these two countries seem to have completely unrelated histories so, surely, Singapore was in no way involved. As a result, I tried to address these things, you know, curating my syllabus to do a few things for me. One of them was to demonstrate the ways in which Singapore’s history and geopolitics actually factored into US policymakers’ strategic imagination of the Southeast Asian region. A second thing that I did: I put into my syllabus materials that showed that British neocolonialism in Malaya, in Singapore, actually affected American policy in the region. And a third thing that I did was, you know, I tried to show that Singapore’s independent government sided with the US in Vietnam. And this one gets a lot of people talking, and kind of creates a little bit of chaos in the class sometimes. So I did all of this to bring home the point that, to the specifically the locals in my class, that the war in Vietnam wasn’t far away, but something that the country was implicated in. So that’s the first challenge. The second challenge is tied to what I think is a really vital reason for studying history in the first place, and that is to foster empathy for others. And I can imagine that this happens in other classrooms, in other countries, as it has for me here, as also when I briefly taught in the States.

Syrus Jin
I wonder if this is a good segue to have you walk us through the piece that you chose for the forum. Maybe you could tell us what it is and what are the uses or benefits that you’ve seen from employing it in the classroom?

Jana Lipman
So the piece that I wrote about is Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do. It’s a graphic memoir. I don’t want to use “graphic novel.” It’s not a novel, it’s a memoir. Thi Bui is a graphic artist and she starts with the birth of her child, and she uses that as an entry to talk about her parents and about her relationships to her parents. And it’s an emotional book. It’s a book that tells really complicated stories about the war in Vietnam. It is a book which is not chronological. It is constantly moving in time, and it’s constantly moving in space. So she goes from her contemporary life back to her parents’ life to different moments in her childhood in the United States to moments in her childhood in a refugee camp in Malaysia, back again to Vietnam. And so it’s a disorienting book as well. I really think it’s powerful for multiple reasons. One is it’s almost all Vietnamese actors, Vietnamese political debates. It really decenters the United States. And so most of my students are Americans, and so I really like giving them a text that moves away from an American story. I also really like that it’s not a simple story. There’s not one Vietnamese perspective in it. She has a grandfather who joins the Viet Minh and is very committed to the Communist Party in North Vietnam, and does not move south. Her father leaves and moves south and does not have a politics that identifies with the North Vietnamese.

Thi Bui at San Francisco Public Library, June 15, 2018
Many, many people from the South moved to the North to follow Ho Chi Minh. Many, many people left the North in fear of the rise of communism. And my father, 14 years old, was one of the people who left the North. I imagine the awe and excitement, that I felt for New York City when I moved there after college, must be something like what my father felt when he arrived in Saigon in 1955.

Jana Lipman
But at no time does he have a strong identification with the South Vietnamese government either. You also have her mother, who’s from a wealthier family in South Vietnam. And so I really think that it provides a much more complicated story about how people had to make choices, about how people’s political identities could change, about how people’s politics could be—not ambiguous—but that were not doctrinaire, right? That it wasn’t necessarily always ideological. For me that’s really important for my students to learn because of the simplification even up till now of sort of communist versus anti-communist. And I think this book does a lot to displace that. And then the book’s really personal. The students can really engage with it. The students are really able to connect because it’s about a young person. It is a story that is really compelling on an emotional level, and that brings them into the politics. So I have teenagers myself, and I think there’s something about the graphic novel format that is just approachable, that young people are really comfortable with the graphic book. That it’s a form they’re actually quite familiar with. It’s a form that large numbers of young people really feel very identified with. And so it’s a type of book that. . . . it’s a very low bar to entry as far as starting it. And then, because it’s such a compelling story, I think they get sucked in, right? Like they really get into the book. They get excited about it. It’s usually their favorite book of the semester. And yet, it is a painful book. It’s a book that deals with war, with violence, with family separations. It’s a book that is actually sometimes hard to follow because it moves around in time, and there are multiple generations. That’s why I say that it seems easy, but it’s not at all, right? It is, I think, one of the more profound books that I’ve read about both the war and memory. And I have a chance to really pull it apart, I think they recognize that they don’t understand it necessarily the first time they’ve read it, or that they need to go back and think about what is it saying about war, about politics, about immigration. So that’s why I would say it seems easy, but it’s not at all.

Wen-Qing Ngoei
So I picked a documentary entitled Cu Chi Tunnels, and it’s by a director named Mickey Grant.

Interviewee in The Cu Chi Tunnels, 1990
[Vietnamese.]

Wen-Qing Ngoei
It was filmed in the late 1980s and basically it’s made up of interviews with many Vietnamese who were communists, who dug the Cu Chi tunnels and or they made their lives in them during the war. So rank and file communists are its focus. Now this is not a substitute for scholarly analysis, but I see it as a valuable primary source that humanizes the interviewees. So let me tell you a bit about what I think happens because of screening this in class, which I thought was really helpful. One important thing is that when I do screen it in class, most of the students who don’t understand Vietnamese will have to look up into the faces of the interviewees, and they have to pay attention to their roles in the tunnel community. And here we get into the impact of that personal testimony in history teaching. What I did was, not only did I prep them by saying, look, the point is to actually pay attention. One thing that makes it easier for them would be, “pick somebody that you want to follow and watch for them turning up again and again,” so that you get sort of like a guide who takes you through these multiple testimonies in the different segments of the documentary. And I think that that was helpful to them, because they were able to sort of latch on to a couple. And then in the discussion afterwards, it was much richer. I actually followed the cook. I followed the artist. And so that made it a bit easier. So instead of thinking about Vietnamese communists as big, faceless mass of fanatical fighters, we’re introduced to a cook, to a medic, an artist, a performer, cameraman. And students begin to follow each person’s narrative. They remember quite a few of them. They start to follow the narrative as they keep reappearing in the documentary, and this is an important first step right in empathizing. So the more this humanizing occurs for the students, the more they encounter the catastrophic war at a human scale, and that’s something really valuable. So they’re not glimpsing it like they’re in a high altitude bomber, as I say in the essay. So this way, there’s a better chance that we’ve shifted them away from assuming that history is only made by great men. And that’s really, really significant as well, the idea that anyone outside these elite circles has no power, no agency, and no historical significance. I try to work against that. I checked in with former students about what they took away from the documentary and I’m happy to report that it seemed to work, or at least they wanted to make me happy by by saying so. One shared that the ordinary Vietnamese individual was clearly placed at the center of the story, and this resisted turning them into some unidentifiable member of, you know, fighting hordes of Asians that serve grand narratives. And a couple of my former students, who are now history teachers, what they noticed was that it was about personal and community survival, and that survival at its most basic was a driving force that was much more important than communism and ideology. And it was much more important to survive as an individual with those that you cared about than being part of some global communist struggle. I think a final thing that I would say about what I got from all of this was, despite the tremendous pressures of the conflict, my students found that, you know, the identities of these individuals were not completely stripped from them, that these individuals actually struggled to be themselves and not just merely puppets that were serving ideology and nation. So as I, as I put in my essay, these Vietnamese were “in” but not “of” the war. And I think that that’s an important takeaway.

David Biggs
I think the pedagogical challenge in an upper-division history class is always about trying to challenge students to go beyond stereotype or cliche ideas. I call my piece “The Kaleidoscopic Approach,” and that’s a reference both to this extreme diversity of experiences that students bring into my classroom, their connections, but also the insane diversity of sources that are now available for study on the war. All sides have declassified a lot of their materials. There’s no ongoing conflict like in Korea. You know, if you think about conflict zones around the world, I mean it’s actually really rare to find a place like Vietnam with its archives intact, with sites that people can visit. I think I like to draw attention to the Vietnam War, not just for the sake of studying Vietnam, but also to think about how we study war. It’s a good opportunity to challenge stereotype ideas about war and conflict. We’re on a quarter system at UC Riverside, so it means acting quickly to get students working with primary materials. And it also requires setting up some guard rails and guiding arrows so they don’t get lost in a collection. And the Vietnam Virtual Archives at Texas Tech—it’s an incredible source, but it’s not easy to use. The Archives was one of the first places in the US to digitize and present Vietnamese materials from the other side. There’s a lot of gold like that in this virtual archives, but it takes a lot of guidance and structuring for students to find it. I require students to pick an event, and it could be a day or a month and maybe a place, and then try to find a role or side in that event. So maybe it’s the women in the combat support units, or maybe it’s infantry soldiers or an official something. I keep telling them, “Get me to a day. Get me to a person. Tell me something that happened on a specific piece of ground somewhere.” And I’m really trying to break open those stereotypes so they can think about the war and, really, any conflict as something that is very much, I think, like a kaleidoscope, right? Every change, every perspective you see that conflict in different ways.

Syrus Jin
How have you seen student discovery of their own archival finds in assisting your desired learning outcomes?

David Biggs
Well if I’m teaching a class of 30 or 40, it’s a range based on what the students put into it. But in almost every class, there are a handful of students that just really. . . their eyes open, you know, they have these wonderful discoveries. And the hard work is really finding useful sources and figuring out a story thread. So that takes a lot of guidance, but once they kind of find their way to their story thread, I congratulate them. And after that, it’s pretty organic. They get hooked by the story. They want to know more about the characters that they’re writing about. And I emphatically tell them that finding a storyline in these sources, it’s hard work, no matter if you’re a student or a college professor and you know, it’s never easy. The key to me is that teachers, they really have to think about those guardrails and the arrows to help students sift and sort, to kind of structure that inquiry. And that requires a lot of planning. But you know, if students are putting in the effort and that planning will pay off, and they can find that archive gold.

Syrus Jin
Looking to the future as your students continue to get farther away from the Vietnam War, what do you think some of the challenges or the promises are with teaching or thinking about the Vietnam War? This is thinking about not only the obstacles that you might face, but the productive challenge that comes from teaching students who are more removed from it.

Wen-Qing Ngoei
They get younger and younger, and then I get older and older. And then some of the things that I reference, including movies from the time that I was growing up, they become more and more difficult to explain. But I do think that that becomes an opportunity where we can insert a movie into class, and then it becomes something that we can discuss. One of the best discussions that I had came out of just a few interesting readings about Rambo First Blood: Part II, and then watching Rambo, and then having a discussion about it.

Rambo from Rambo First Blood: Part II, 1985
Sir? Do we get to win this time?

Colonel Trautman from Rambo First Blood: Part II
This time it’s up to you.

Wen-Qing Ngoei
I mean, a movie like that, would you expect to be just, you know, sort of like a blood fest, people come away from it discovering that it’s way more political than they expected. So that’s one thing. It actually provides an opportunity. So I think, you know, the historian has to work smarter and more creatively on making connections. And, you know, another thing that I thought a challenge created promise was that then I had to think more carefully about “un-containing” the Vietnam War, right? Thinking about Vietnam War not as just one moment in history, but considering how it is one interlinked chapter in a longer historical development. And so history of imperialism, history of big power competition, of nationalism, social movements, state-making more. And I think this became a way that I also started to design my syllabus over the years, right? To think about how I can build it up into this particular contemporary moment by saying that it’s interlinked with all these chapters. You can’t see this present moment and a lot of its significance without the Vietnam War.

Jana Lipman
So I have multiple thoughts about this. One is there are opportunities when the students have fewer assumptions. That they can come to the material more openly and often are grappling with these questions about US intervention for the first time or about what it means. What is the role of the military? What is the role of the draft? Should the US not have a draft? When does the US military intervene? All of those questions, the students, I think, can grab onto a bit more to some extent with fewer assumptions. On the other hand, I think that one of the challenges, and this is true of any type of issue, making them feel the stakes. Making them recognize, really, what was at stake. What was at stake for people who were fighting, whether they were in the South Vietnamese Army, the US military, the North Vietnamese—for them to feel the consequences both on that moment in the 50s to the 70s, as well as the long consequences afterwards. Another opportunity is the opportunity to do research. One of the things that I really love about teaching this class is so much has been declassified because scholars have been so interested. There is so much declassified material, there’s so much cultural production, there’s so many oral histories, that I really feel that students can do excellent research, independent and original research, which remains true. I think that’s a huge opportunity that remains with teaching this topic and this particular war. And I also think it’ll be interesting how they connect it. Do they see this resonate if they think about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or does that even seem too far away? How does this relate if we think about the Middle East today, or what’s going on in Ukraine, or questions about our contemporary moment, what US military power is going to do or not going to do, how the government makes those decisions? I will have to think and learn about how it resonates in our contemporary moment. And I think we’ll have to see.

David Biggs
it’s a great question. It’s kind of funny. Teaching wars is really a staple of the historian’s courses Just students like everybody else, I think they’re attracted to the extreme stories. At least the intensity of the human experience and the changes that come out of wars. You know, if you’re immersing yourself, even as a historian with no personal ties to that conflict—in Vietnam’s case now, 50 years since it ended—are there some dangers of, you know, reliving or  experiencing some of this through the process of empathizing with the people we’re studying? And I think imagining what an experience would be like, how we would feel, that’s core to how people everywhere think historically. That sadness, that loss, and even the anger at the senseless violence and these extreme tragedies. And I think we always have to ask ourselves, why do we study war? One thing I learned in Vietnam is that we have to treat the dead, all of the war dead, and not just people on one side with absolute respect. For the last several years, I kind of bring up at the beginning, the first lecture in my class, you know, nobody’s read anything, and then I use a poem. I tell them the opening lines from the Tale of Kieu. This is a classic poem written sometime in the late 1700s after a 30 year long civil war. It’s about a woman caught up in the violence of that civil war. I bring up poetry to start my war course because I tell students sometimes what I found was that art or poetry was, in a sense, a more protected way of talking about these horrible tragedies. Would you like to hear my opening lines?

Syrus Jin
Yeah, sure. I’d love to hear.

David Biggs
I’ll just read these opening couplets. So it goes like this: [Vietnamese]. That means 100 years in this world, talent and fate are bound to be opposed. [Vietnamese]. After this great upheaval, and the imagery is of waves and coming and going, things that you will have seen that are [Vietnamese], which is like a pain in your gut. [Vietnamese]. These are lines everybody knows in Vietnam. And what those last lines mean is: What’s strange about beauty and its vulgarity is that the heavens are seeing jealousy of the world, to rosy cheeks, to beauty, and to youth. And so I open those lines, you know, just to challenge students, because they think they’re gonna get war and guns and bombs and everything else. But I say that for so many people who’ve really suffered in a war zone, sometimes poetry is the only way they can express it, because how can you express something that words can’t, can’t explain, and I think it’s important. I, you know, throughout the course, I, I really, I kind of challenge students to ask, why are they in those seats? Why are . . . why are we studying a war? What is it about war that is so interesting? So what’s great about studying the conflict in Vietnam, because that war is really definitively over, is that it’s a safe place to study these topics. And I hope that students come out of it with a more developed notion about war, about civil conflict, not just in Vietnam, but in the world generally, and hopefully they think a little bit more about this kind of kaleidoscope of perspective. I don’t want to overuse my kaleidoscope term, but I thought it was handy for the piece.

Syrus Jin
Those were my conversations with David Biggs, Wen-Qing Ngoei, and Jana Lipman about their essays in the AHR‘s forum “The Vietnam War 50 Years On.” In this episode, we also heard from issue contributor Thy Phu. You can find the forum in the AHR‘s March 2025 issue. History In Focus is a production of the American Historical Review in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by Daniel Story and me, Syrus Solo Jin. You can find out more about this and other episodes at historians.org/ahr. That’s it for now. See you next time.