Can Vietnam awaken us again? Teaching the literature of the Vietnam War - 1

Radical Teacher, Spring, 2003 by H. Bruce Franklin

 knew what I would never
know,
What the poisons and my fears
have removed forever from my
knowing,
The conceiving, the carrying
of a child,
the stretching of my womb,
my breasts.
The pain of labor.
The bringing forth from my
body a new life

I choose not to know
if my eggs are misshapen and
withered
as the trees along the river.
If snipers are hidden
in the coils of my DNA. (7)

Let me conclude with a fourteen-line
poem by Steve Hassett, who served as a
paratrooper in the First Air Cavalry:

And what would you do, ma,
if eight of your sons step
out of the TV and begin
killing chickens and burning
hooches in the living room,
stepping on booby traps
and dying in the kitchen,
beating your husband and
taking him and shooting
skag and forgetting in
the bathroom?

would you lock up your daughter?
would you stash the apple pie?
would you change channels (8)

(1.) Originally presented on December 28, 2002, to the Radical Caucus at the Modern Language Association Convention, this paper will (alas) probably be relevant for quite a while to come.

(2.) For an instructive history, see the Introduction to Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter, eds., The Politics of Literature: Dissenting Essays in the Teaching of English (New York: Random House, 1972).

(3.) This 1990 text written by George Donelson Moss and published by Prentice-Hall, a subsidiary of Viacom, had gone through three editions by 1998. Among the important studies that have explored how the war has been transformed into a trauma inflicted not by America on Vietnam but by Vietnam on America, see Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington, 1989); Fred Turner, Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (New York, 1996); Keith Beattie, The Scar that Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War (New York, 1998).

(4.) "Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome,"' Washington Post, March 4, 1991.

(5.) Turner, Echoes of Combat, 63; Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghost, and Its Legacy (Baltimore, 1997), 49.

(6.) My "Vietnam and America" course began in 1980, just as the war was being redefined as a "noble cause." The course is described in my "Teaching the Vietnam War in the 1980s," Chronicle of Higher Education, November 4, 1981, an article that instantly generated a firestorm of criticism but also helped initiate courses at other institutions. To provide an historical text for the courses burgeoning in the mid 1980s, Marvin Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young, and I edited Vietnam and America: A Documented History (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1984; revised edition, 1995). In 1996, I edited The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs, and Poems, which brings together a wide range of stories and poems, many by veterans, as well as some of the most popular and influential songs about the war, from Country Joe to Bruce Springsteen.

(7.) Reprinted in The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs, and Poems, ed. H. Bruce Franklin (Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin's, 1996), 277-279.