Historians and history journals love anniversaries, and for those born in my gen (X), we’re approaching 50 years since the fall of Phnom Penh (April 17) and Saigon (April 30) — the end of the Vietnam War. The American Historical Review has just published its March 2025 issue (possibly behind their paywall–subscribe!), with a stunning cover featuring an animated photo restoration of a northern Vietnamese soldier’s portrait and an amazing HistoryLab collection with essays on Teaching the Vietnam War and this incredible playlist of Vietnamese pop music from the war by Jason Gibbs, a music historian of Vietnam and a librarian at San Francisco Public Library. I attach my piece “The Kaleidoscopic Approach: Researching and Writing Full-Spectrum Experiences of War with Texas Tech’s Virtual Vietnam Archives.”
Growing up as kids, we never really question how history made the circumstances of war or shaped the social landscapes of childhood — playing war in dirt lots, shooting guns made of sticks, being “good guys” and figuring out who were the “bad guys;” only decades later, reflecting back, do I think about those childhood friends, and also strangers from Asia, new kids on the bus, who later showed up in college classrooms at the University of North Carolina, also new streams of Amerasians, Hmong and other refugees that via help from church groups like Lutheran Family Services settled around Raleigh, Durham and Fayetteville (Fayette-nam) when I was in college. My own family, a Go Navy! family, was only minimally impacted by the war in Vietnam, an uncle who served in Vung Tau, Dad served on boats offshore with transits through Yokosuska and photoslides from a brief shore leave in Bangkok — all happened when I was a wee baby. I volunteered to teach English in Vietnam with the amazing nonprofit Volunteers in Asia in 1993 with the same general enthusiasm most of my gen had for exploring the now-open Socialist bloc — how exciting, and how wonderful that we were in our 20s, young, and had not been incinerated in a nuclear war. The world, at least for us in that moment, seemed to be coming together and opening to new possibilities. Then came 9/11, wars in the Middle East, and … well, we got older, and the world ground on.
Since 2004, I’ve had the privilege of teaching students in Riverside, CA, and every other year I teach “The Vietnam Wars” where I encounter so many children whose lives, many more directly than mine, were touched by the war. It’s not unusual for a 40-student class to have students of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Hmong, Chinese-Vietnamese, Chinese-Cambodian, Chinese, Russian, Filipino and other backgrounds with parents (and now grandparents) who experienced the Vietnam War. UC Riverside is one of the most ethnically diverse campuses in the U.S., and we’re a 30-minute drive from Little Saigon.
Respect to the military and diplomatic historians out there who parse the “lessons” of the war in these specific terms, but I tell my students at the outset I really don’t know how to teach “war.” Instead, the course deals with exploring Vietnamese experiences under colonial rule, post-1945 decolonization, and in the civil conflicts and differing ideas of an independent Vietnam that led to the fighting in the 1960s and have had repercussions ever since. I’m also interested in students, especially those with connections, explore the war in connection to their elders’ lived experiences. This might include the war’s impacts in Laos and Cambodia, the bases in Thailand, Korean forces in Vietnam or any number of other projects. And one online archive, Texas Tech’s Virtual Vietnam Archives, is a treasure trove of materials. The Kaleidoscope piece explains how I do it.