Vietnam: Oral Historians Among Us

A teacher explains how students come in touch with the subject

By Eric James Schroeder

	Eric Schroeder, UC Davis lecturer

Oral history can be a powerful teaching tool. I first learned this about 10 years ago in connection with a course I taught on the 1960s for the American Studies Program. The course focused on “movements” of that era, and it included the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women’s movement and gay liberation. I showed videos and assigned a variety of readings.

But a couple of weeks into the course I decided that I was neglecting perhaps the most valuable resource available—people. I asked students to do a 30-minute interview with a “participant” of a “movement” or an “event”—I use the quotations to show how loosely I construed these terms. The students chose to interview an amazing range of subjects—civil rights demonstrators, anti-war activists, Vietnam veterans, Black Panthers, women’s liberationists.

The exciting common denominator proved to be that a majority of the students chose to interview relatives—the subjects were the students’ mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, and in a few instances, grandparents. So the oral histories not only provided these students with a personal window on the 1960s but also put many of them in touch with a piece of their own family history. At the end of the quarter the students felt that this assignment had been the most valuable component of the class, citing the way it had given the history of the period an intimacy and immediacy that they hadn’t gotten from other course materials, not even from the documentary footage of the 1960s that they had watched in class.

This year the Veterans’ History Project sponsored by the Library of Congress provided another opportunity for a learning experience that reached beyond the confines of the classroom. Recognizing that as our veterans die their stories often die with them, the Library of Congress is seeking to archive interviews with veterans of conflicts ranging from World War I to the Gulf War. And to help accomplish this immense task, the Library of Congress is encouraging citizens to conduct the interviews. A perfect real-world task for the students in my course on the Vietnam War.

I had the students prepare for the assignment by reading Loren Baritz’s Backfire, a cultural history of the Vietnam War, and watch Hearts and Minds, a documentary about the war made in 1974. For the students—all freshmen in Integrated Studies, a residential honors program at UC Davis—this war was little more than a small footnote in their high school history class, so this wasn’t much preparation. But it was a starting point.

In this case, the students had few personal connections to the Vietnam War, so I had to supply many of the Vietnam veteran contacts. But regardless of whether the veteran was a family member or a new friend, all the students came back with stories and insight into what it was like for young men to go off to war.
They learned a lot about the war and about the Vietnam veterans themselves, including that they are schoolteachers, nurses, politicians, artists—regular sorts of people whom they encounter in their daily lives.

Importantly, the assignment brought the Vietnam War out of the textbook and into their lives.

Said student Holly Vranicar:

I interviewed my uncle and received a first-hand account that made the subject matter all the more relevant and touching. In fact, a lot of what I discussed with my uncle were things that I'd already heard about in class, but they had never truly sunk in. I heard him use slang from the era, say military terms that I'd only seen on paper before. All in all, the oral history project I completed was an excellent teaching experience since it made the war all the more real.

That the was became more real for them was a common thread I heard from the students in the latter part of the course. But the students also learned a lot about the veterans themselves from the interviews. Perhaps what was most important, they learned that Vietnam veterans are schoolteachers, nurses, politicians, artists—regular sorts of people whom they encounter in their daily lives.

One of the things that I’ve personally learned about oral history over the years that I’ve used it in my classes is that students often learn as much through the assignments that we give them to do outside of our classes as they do from being inside the class itself. Holly Vranicar makes this symbiosis clear: “Being part of this class was incredible. I learned so much about the Vietnam War, and a lot of that knowledge was gained through the interview I did with a veteran.

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