How a Vietnam Vet Teaches the History of the Vietnam War

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed (12-2-04):

A glance at the fall issue of the "Michigan Quarterly Review": How a veteran learned to teach about Vietnam

Keith W. Taylor, a professor of Vietnamese cultural studies at Cornell University, writes about his 30-year journey from fighting in the Vietnam War to teaching about it.

Within a year of returning from a tour of duty in Vietnam, in 1972, Mr. Taylor began graduate study in Vietnamese history. However, rather than grapple with the country as he had left it, he focused on Vietnam's ancient history. For his own understanding of the war, he deferred to the antiwar campus left, whose arguments resonated with his own bitterness, he says.

But as an academic, he says, he felt a kind of nausea whenever he was asked to explain the conflict to students. "It was 25 years," he writes, "before I began to understand that this nausea came from the dissonance between the interpretive grid I had acquired for the war and what I felt in my heart."

He dissects three "axioms" central to that interpretive grid, which he sees as the dominant understanding of the war in academe, handed down from the antiwar movement. Those axioms are "that there was never a legitimate South Vietnamese government in Saigon, that the U.S. had no legitimate reason to be involved in Vietnamese affairs, and that the U.S. could not have won the war under any circumstances."

Mr. Taylor argues against each of those contentions, and redirects his bitterness at the "poor strategic thought and deficient political courage" of those who prosecuted the war.

"The tragedy of Vietnam," he concludes, "is not that the United States intervened when it should not have, but rather that the intervention was bungled so badly that the Vietnamese who believed in us were ultimately betrayed."

The article, "How I Began to Teach About the Vietnam War," is not online. Information about the journal is available at http://www.umich.edu/~mqr/current.htm