One young woman informed me that her older brother, who had served in Viet Nam and had resisted talking to her about it, began to open up and volunteer information because he believed that her participation in the course had created at last some common ground for understanding. For those who were born during or after the conflict, a course on the Viet Nam war presents a world which is at once foreign and attractive, an immediate past which is both usable and accessible, as well as one imbued with a growing mythic significance. It is vital, therefore, that these assumptions be identified and considered. Consequently, it is important to integrate Vietnamese material into the syllabus wherever and whenever it is appropriate to do so. More about this later.
People bring to the course assumptions about the nature of war in general.
Therefore, it is essential that the teacher of the Viet Nam war be prepared to address the nature of war in general. From this I move onto assumptions about the nature of the specific war. In the minds of many students, the Viet Nam war exists as a kind of hellish fairy tale, populated by otherworldly characters in olive drab costumes acting out a cosmic morality play in a haunted jungle. Furthermore, strategic and tactical theory, whether that of Clausewitz or of more recent development, although virgin territory for most students, should be analyzed and discussed. To help the student understand the nature of the Viet Nam war, it is helpful to use, whenever possible, primary documents which lay out the various strategies and tactics either considered or actually employed in Viet Nam from the 1950s to the end of America's military involvement in the 1970s.