Month: April 2020

Links for Vietnam Conflict, 1968-1975

Conflict Summary, “The US Anti-Vietnam War Movement 1964-1973” (International Center on Nonviolent Conflict)

My Lai Massacre

The Pentagon Papers — the digital collection (National Archives)

Vietnam Veterans Against the War (The Sixties Project)

FYI: Special Forces in Vietnam

Course member Philip F sent some links you might enjoy looking at, relating to our study of the Vietnam War this week:

The Navy Seals in their original format were part of the UDT teams (nicknamed “Frogmen” which the Seal members still call each other, often) that came ashore on Normandy Beach early on and then were used to some extent in Korea. However, their modern day predecessors were established by President Kennedy during Vietnam. Most people are not aware of their participation then, but are more focused on the role of the Green Berets. Some interesting links and books are listed below:

Navy Seals:

https://navyseals.com/nsw/navy-seal-history/

In Vietnam, One Navy Seal received the Medal of Honor for saving another Navy Seal who also happened to receive the Medal of Honor, which was very unusual:

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/never-give-up.html

Three books of interest:
First Seals by Patrick K. O’Donnell (2014);
The U.S. Navy Seals, From Vietnam to Finding Bin Laden by David Jordan (2011)
Trident K-9 Warriors by Mike Ritland (2013) about Special forces dogs

The Green Berets had a truly unique and different role in Vietnam than the Navy Seals:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/11/the-green-berets-and-the-montagnards-how-an-indigenous-tribe-won-the-admiration-of-green-berets-and-lost-everything.html

Ballad of the Green Berets:

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/staff-sergeant-barry-sadler-hits-1-with-ballad-of-the-green-berets

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG3izg9FXEE

Hopefully some of the above you will find both interesting and useful.

Follow-Ups from April 9 re: Vietnam War up to 1967

We had a good discussion in our Zoom class today, including a review of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, and a presentation on the early years and strategy of the Vietnam War.

Part of the conversation talked about American internment camps during World War II, and someone recommended Farewell to Manzanar as a first-person memoir of life in the camps. I second that, and also recommend JARDA, the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive, a rich online collection about the Japanese-American internment experience (1941-1945).

We also discussed the extent to which fears of Communist subversion and espionage in U.S. government and research (not to mention in television, Hollywood, business, education, and other spheres of life) were justified or exaggerated. We can all agree McCarthy wasn’t making good-faith attempts to keep Americans safe. The Rosenbergs, we know in hindsight, weren’t innocent. I mentioned a cache of documents declassified from Soviet archives, known collectively as the VENONA Project, which showed — unbeknownst to many except in the intelligence community at the time — how hard the Soviet Union was indeed working to gather American secrets and destabilize American society through misinformation and propaganda campaigns. Two historians named John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr wrote a book based on the declassified VENONA cables, back in 1999 — here’s a NYT review of the book.

For more on the Vietnam War, here’s a roundup of good books and movies mentioned in today’s discussion.
Books: Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Films: The Green Berets (1968), Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Forrest Gump (1994), We Were Soldiers (2002).
Documentaries: many good ones, including Ken Burns’ Vietnam (2017)