When I did come back to Kansas and taught German and Spanish in high schools from1990 to 1992, I was aware that many lessons from America's Vietnam War were not being taught in social science and history classes across the state. The story was the same throughout most of the USA.
By late 2000, when I went to Texas A & M University to try and complete a PhD in Political Science, I was surrounded by an astounding number of both undergraduate and graduate level college students who had never taken a course or seminar in American Vietnam War history.
This is one reason why I researched among the Oral History Archive at Texas A & M University in autumn 2001 (just as America's War on Terror was fired up) and wrote a long article on the memories of the Vietnam War era, especially as revealed in oral history interviews collected by a hand-full of A & M students and professors over the prior two decades:
"In the Long Shadow of the Vietnam War: American Post-Vietnam War Era Individual, Collective and Cultural Memory Since Vietnam", http://www.geocities.com/eslkevin/vietnammemories.html
Historically, outside of West Point, the University of Texas A&M produces the largest crop of generals and high ranking officers in the U.S. military. However, the students at the third largest university in the USA as a whole were lacking sufficient and well-rounded study of (1) the Vietnam War era, (2) its effect on America over the long term, and (3) the important lessons to have been acquired by a generations of young Americans.
Since I had lived in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s when the Nazi era and the Holocaust were all being discussed in the public domain, this lack in the USA for its Vietnam memories some 3 decades after the war has been shocking. Such a world of ignorance is easily manipulated by neo-cons, conservative revisionists, and the like! Recall, Texas A & M was the university which was taken over by neo-cons and Reagan-era leaders, like Bob Gates, during the 1990s and 2000 period!AMERICA'S DOLCHSTOSS LIE
One amazing thing I had learned in my listening and reading of oral histories of the Vietnam era in College Station, Texas was how interested the families of cadets and others at the university had been when provided opportunity to public debate and discuss the war, especially after the Tet offensive of 1968.
However, by 2001, it was clear to me that, aside from the few Korean cadets I was teaching English to at A &M University, a generation of ROTC-, national guard- and military leaders all across the USA had been proceeding with life as though the Rambo-type film myths of their parents' was a reality and that Americans had lost Vietnam because:
(1) Americans didn't have the will to kill-i.e. not tough and run by bleeding hearts.
(2) Politicians wouldn't let the military win.
(3) American people had turned its back on the military early on.
These false beliefs or false memories make up America's version of the Nazi-era propaganda concerning the loss of WWI.
This big conglomeration of lies in 1920s and 1930s Germany is known by historians as "the Dolchstoss" Theory or Lie.
"Dolchstoss" means in English "the stab in the back".
In the German version, certain groups in Germany are called un-German and are blamed for the loss of German territory etc. after WWI through the Treaty of Versailles. These evil groups identified in this great German lie included socialist politicians, Jews, left-wingers, homosexuals, pacifists, and "bleeding heart" liberals.
The American Version of the theory is that the Great U.S. Military had had its hands tied behind its back in the war with Vietnam.
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