Name: Vietnam War Artifacts

Class/Subject: World History (freshmen)

Date: April 15, 2013

Student Objectives/Student Outcome: Students will explore the cultural aspects of the Vietnam War through examining and analyzing several historical artifacts. Students will also answer questions on a worksheet pertaining to the artifacts.

Content Standards:18.A.4 Analyze the influence of cultural factors including customs, traditions, language, media, art and architecture in developing pluralistic societies16.A.4b Compare competing historical interpretations of an event.

Materials/Resources/Technology: In order to complete this lesson, I will need printed copies of primary documents (5-6 of each), worksheets, and a timer.

Teacher’s Goals: My goal is to provide students with experience working with primary documents and artifacts. In doing so, I hope to give students a better idea of what life was like and the culture surrounding the Vietnam War.

5 Min Before the Start of Class: Make copies of all documents and worksheets. Pull up a timer on the projector.

5 Min Introduction Activity: Read off the Jeopardy question from the desk calendar. 45 Min Lesson Instruction: Split the class up into groups. Pass out worksheets. Teacher will give a

very brief description of what each artifact is. Instruct students that each document is numbered and that each number corresponds with a section on the worksheet. Set the timer for 7 minutes. After 7 minutes, have the groups switch documents. At the end of the class period, each group will have analyzed all available documents and answered all the questions on the worksheet. There has been some extra time allotted for this portion of the lesson in case students need extra time at stations. The five stations are as follows:

1. Song Lyrics2. Veteran Art3. Famous Photos4. Soldier Testimony5. Vietnam Wall Memorial

0 Min Assessments: Students will be assessed through the completion of a worksheet to be turned in at the end of the class period. There will be roughly 3-4 questions about each document. The worksheet will be turned in at the end of the class period.

5 Min Closing: Give students the remaining time to tie up all loose ends, find solutions to any questions still unanswered, and turn in their worksheet.

Farris J Parker

Born: Wrightsville, Georgia, 1948Served in Vietnam, U.S. Air Force

31st Security Police Squadron, K-9 Section, Tuy Hoa Air Base,Sentry-Dog Handler and Trainer, 1970-71

From the Artist:

From two letters, 1987 and 1996:

I began working on paintings relating to my time in Vietnam out of a desire to project flashbacks into images. I wanted also to share my experiences with others. The influences on my work are both political and personal: as an artist, a black American, and a Vietnam veteran, I naturally

have been concerned with these issues. When the question is asked, What did you do in Vietnam? my response is: There it is; look at it; check it out; the art speaks for itself, and for us. The

subjects of my paintings are all small events; they deal with the day-to-day process of trying to survive under adverse conditions. The motivating sources of my work are more difficult to

pinpont: it is hard to recall memories and mixed feelings that I've worked so hard to suppress—moments that were intense, spontaneous, fleeting, jarring.

I started the Vietnam paintings some four or five years after I left active duty. I can only assume it took that long for my mind to decipher information and put it into concrete images. Vietnam

memories last forever; the slightest stimulus projects me back, in country. I can still tell by sound the difference between a Huey and any other kind of helicopter, especially at night.

Children Reaching and Playing is one of those small events. There were always local kids from Tuy Hoa around the base. GIs would throw c-rations over the perimeter fence to them. The

perimeter was guarded and mined. Sometimes cans got caught in the fence and kids would come close to pick them out. Once a girl came too close and stepped on a mine and was killed. That event took place inside the barbed-wire barrier, where the mines were buried underneath the

fence line.

Bombing Cambodia secretly, racial strife within the base—a lot went on on our side of the fence line. As a sentry, I patrolled the perimeter, mostly on night duty. I remember the fireflies and

tracers.

...How do you measure bravery? The Viet Cong were willing to do anything. I remember seeing a U.S. helicopter laying down fire one night, and a lone line of tracer fire rising from the tree line: one guy was trying to shoot down the helicopter, even though the tracers gave away his

position.

Neal Pollack

Born: Brooklyn, New York, 1945Served in Vietnam, U.S. Army

10th and 7th Finance Sections (Disbursing)Tan Son Nhut Air Base and Cholon

Finance Clerk and M-60 Machine Gunner, 1967-69

From the Artist:

I took hundreds of candid photographs because they show things as they are. I was particularly impressed with the ability of the Vietnamese people, especially the children, to function in their

eternally war-torn land. It was my intention to capture that other face in my photographs. My wood carving, 'Vietnam Campaign,' seemed to make the most concise statement on the colors of

the Vietnam Campaign Ribbon and thus, the Vietnam experience.

General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing  Nguyễn Văn Lém

Eddie Adams

It is almost dehumanizing to personally witness the execution, no matter what the victim had done. It mattered a little that the person about to be executed was a Viet Cong Guerrilla named Bay Hop responsible for killing twelve only that fateful morning. It matter a little that his group of guerillas had slaughtered the family of his executioner’s best friend in a house just up the road.

In Adams’s photograph, we see Loan firing a bullet point blank into Hop’s head; Hop, wincing, appears to be receiving the bullet. Ironically enough, it has been argued that Ngoc Loan was only interested in publicly assassinating the Viet Cong prisoner because there were AP press corps there to capture the image. For him, the photographic evidence of the execution was meant to teach the Vietcong what would happen to their forces if caught.

The photograph was published on the front page of the New York Times and, along with the NBC film of the same event, is credited with having provoked the civilian outrage that lead to massive demonstrations against the war.

Burst of Joy

By Slava Veder

The photograph depicts United States Air Force Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm being reunited with his family, after spending more than five years in captivity as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

Despite outward appearances, the reunion was an unhappy one for Stirm. Three days before he arrived in the United States, the same day he was released from captivity, Stirm received a Dear John letter from his wife Loretta informing him that their relationship was over. In 1974 the Stirms divorced and Loretta remarried. All of the family members depicted in the picture received copies of it after Burst of Joy was announced as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. They all display it prominently in their homes, except the Stirm patriarch, who says he cannot bear to look at it.

The Things They Leave Behind: Artifacts From the Vietnam Veterans

MemorialWhen the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened 30 years ago this month,

something unexpected happened: People started leaving things at the wall. One veteran has spent decades cataloging the letters, mementos, and other artifacts of loss—all 400,000 of them. By Rachel Manteuffel

Six white votive candles are left burning at the base of the wall after everyone has gone. There are only the candles and the flickers of light that dance above them. Lit from below, the names carved into the face of the wall don’t stand out as words. Instead you see fingerprints where a name has been touched, marked by the oils from living skin.

Bernie Pontones got here late, after the sweep-up. Bernie’s a sixtyish guy

with a long white ponytail, a veterans’ advocate in Grove City, Ohio. He

placed a candle in front of the wall for each of six men who remain in his

thoughts.

A teddy bear decorated with uniform name tapes was left by a member of a California

chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America.

Photograph from the book Offerings at the Wallcourtesy of Turner Publishing.

Ask Bernie about them and he’ll tell you what he remembers or has pieced

together: Greg, the kid he knew from church, was killed when a runway was

mortared and his plane flipped and burned. Sammy, who’d been in Bernie’s

platoon, turned to his buddy and yelled, “Get down!” instead of getting

down himself. Gerald, who trained with Bernie at Fort Benning, was in

country less than a month when he bought it. Bernie doesn’t know how. The

sergeant, who heard a noise and threw his grenade. It bounced off a tree

right back at him. His body shielded the blast for the rest of the men,

including Bernie. Robert, from high school—Bernie doesn’t know how or

why or when, but he died late in the war, when the end was in sight and

death seemed particularly cruel. Ron, who had volunteered for active

combat. They say he slipped in the rain, fell, and somehow detonated his

grenade. Damnedest thing.

Without Bernie to explain them, the candles have no story. They’re six

pieces of a puzzle that could depict anything at all.

The wall is about stories. The little ones are told in the letters and objects

left behind—eccentric items that speak of matters so intimate they may be

indecipherable except to two people—one living, one dead. Bullet casings

soldered into a circle. Five cans of fruit salad. A teddy bear, loved

threadbare. A harmonica. An ace of spades. A handful of gravel. A model

carousel. A toothbrush. Graduation tassels. They’re all pieces of a larger

story still under revision, about the meaning of an unpopular war conducted

in a small country among three superpowers with competing geopolitical

ideologies—a proxy war with inchoate objectives that killed a lot of people

and sent others home in varying states of disrepair.

That story is complicated.

But it’s one the National Park Service relentlessly pursues. Bernie’s candles are gathered up by park rangers and put into big blue boxes. The boxes are hand-trucked and golf-carted to a temporary storage room near the Washington Monument, where they await transport to the Museum Resource Center, or MRCE, pronounced “mercy,” a gleaming modern facility in Maryland that houses 40 historic collections from National Park Service sites around the region. The candles get 30 days or more of isolation and are checked for organic matter—flowers, potpourri, marijuana, unsealed food, tobacco, anything that might carry mold. That stuff is “deaccessioned”—thrown out to protect the rest of the collection.

Then the artifacts go into the cotton-gloved hands of Duery Felton Jr., curator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection, a decorated Vietnam veteran who has devoted himself to this work for 25 years.

Bernie’s candles will be examined, cataloged, wrapped in a plastic bag,

and put in a blue box. And there they’ll sit, with the hundreds of thousands

of other pieces of grief in the collection, until we’re all dead.

According to legend, the first object left at the wall was someone’s dead

brother’s Purple Heart, thrown into the cement as the foundations were

poured for the black granite panels. By the end of the opening ceremony 30

years ago this month, lots of people had laid down mementos. No one

anticipated that. No one had any idea people’s immediate reaction would be

to do what so many returning vets say they did in Vietnam: leave something

of themselves behind.

This impulse was an entirely new phenomenon, unknown at other

memorials. It seemed to be instinctive, long before anyone knew, or even

suspected, that the things they left would be kept.

The memorial’s design is such a great story you’ve probably heard all

about it. The vet, Jan Scruggs, who watched The Deer Hunter in 1979 and

then concluded that the names had to be remembered. His struggle with

Congress to get a plot of land on the Mall.

The design contest was open to everyone. Entries had to incorporate all the

names of the dead and missing members of the US military and had to make

no political statement about the war. As the planners put it: “The hope is

that the creation of the Memorial will begin a healing process.”

Essentially, the contest asked: Please design a piece of art that makes no

statement whatsoever while somehow attending to the psychic wounds of

hundreds of thousands of people. And—oh, yeah—leave room for almost

60,000 names.

Up in New Haven, Yale undergraduate Maya Lin and her classmates were taking a course in funerary architecture, and the contest became their final project. Lin came down to look at the piece of land where the memorial would sit, and she came up with the design we have today. The committee unanimously chose it. Somehow, over the objections of some veterans and Congress members and the Secretary of the Interior, her vision got built.

Lin’s design is really about the visitor’s experience at the memorial, a giant V carved into the earth like a knife wound. The viewer journeys below ground level with the names of the dead, emerging into the light again when leaving the names behind. The lettering is only about half the standard one-inch size for inscriptions. You have to get close to read it. The shiny black granite reflects you as you look at it. The carved surface invites you to touch it; when you do, a ghostly hand meets yours. Some early visitors were startled when they got their pictures developed to see themselves in the wall, taking the picture.

The memorial doesn’t leave you alone. It pulls you in. It encourages you to dredge up long-buried feelings and to experience them right there, in semi-public, alongside other mourners.

http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/the-things-they-leave-behind-artifacts-from-the-vietnam-veterans-memorial/indexp4.php

Dollar bills are often left as a symbolic fulfillment of a promise. Some are torn in two—one half is left at the

wall, the other kept as a remembrance. 

Photograph from the book Offerings at the Wallcourtesy of Turner Publishing.

Lots of letters are addressed to “Dad.” This one came with sonogram images of a soldier’s grandchild. A cast of the child’s hands was later left at the wall.

Photograph from the book Offerings at the Wallcourtesy of Turner Publishing.

Legend has it that the first object left at the wall was a Purple Heart. Many more have been left there since. 

Photograph from the book Offerings at the Wallcourtesy of Turner Publishing.

These were left with no explanation, but some military nurses have said they wore frilly undergarments to feel

feminine under their fatigues.

Photograph from the book Offerings at the Wallcourtesy of Turner Publishing.

Even before Duery Felton joined the staff at MRCE, his knowledge was valuable. When someone left a package of M&M’s, for example, he knew it might be because M&M’s were used as a placebo when morphine pills ran out. Photograph by Jeff Elkins.

Senator John Kerry on the Vietnam War

We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone on peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American.

We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first-hand how money from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.

We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.

We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.

We watched the U.S. falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings," with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater or let us say a non-third-world people theater, and so we watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the high for the reoccupation by the North Vietnamese because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't

retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 881's and Fire Base 6's and so many others.

Name: __________________________________ Date:_______

Period_______

Vietnam War Artifact Stations

A. Veteran Art

The artwork that you will examine at this station has been created by Vietnam War veterans. Art therapy is a popular technique for many soldiers who are trying to cope with civilian life after fighting in a war.

1. Farris Parker’s influences on his paintings are both _______________________ and _______________________.

2. Farris Parker served in Vietnam as a member of the :a. Navy b. Air Force c. Marines d. Army

3. Notice the colors used in the sculpture called “Vietnam Service Ribbon”. The three main colors are green, yellow, and red. What do you think each color symbolizes?

Green: _____________________________________________________________________

Yellow: ____________________________________________________________________

Red: _______________________________________________________________________

4. “Morphene, Anyone” looks like a package of _________________________.

B. Famous Photographs of Vietnam

A picture is worth a thousand words, but is the picture you see really telling the whole story?

5. Look at the picture called “General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Nguyen Van Lem”. In your own words, what do you think is happening in this photograph?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------_________________________________________________________________________________

6. Now, read the back of the paper. Did the picture tell the correct story? a. Yes, the picture tells the truth. b. No, the picture is misleading.

7. Look at the picture called “Burst of Joy”. In your own words, what do you think is happening in this photograph?

__________________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

8. This picture does not tell the true story. What really happened?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

C. The Things They Leave Behind

This article is about the things found at the Vietnam War Memorial and the way they have been preserved.

9. What did Bernie Pontone leave at the Vietnam War Memorial?a. Cigars b. Candy c. Candles d. Toy car

10. According to legend, the first object left at the wall was a ______________________ ___________________________.

11. How many names had to fit on the memorial? _______________________________12. After reading the articles and looking at the pictures, which item left at the Vietnam War

Memorial interested you the most? Why?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

D. Song Lyrics

13. True or False: “Born in the USA” is a patriotic song about successful people in America. ___________________

14. In “Born in the USA” Bruce Springsteen writes “You end up like a dog that been beat too much, Til’ you spend half your life just covering up.” What do you think this lyric is referencing to? HINT: The song is about soldiers coming home from fighting in Vietnam.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

15. “Ohio” is about the Kent State Massacre in Ohio. Using just what you have read in the song lyrics, what do you believe happened at Kent State University?

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

16. How many people died at the Kent State Massacre?

a. 4 b.6 c. 2 d. 3

E. John Kerry

Senator John Kerry is a Vietnam Veteran. He also ran against President George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election.

17. What three things does John Kerry believe we found out by going to war in Vietnam?

1. ____________________________________________________________________________

2. ____________________________________________________________________________

3.____________________________________________________________________________

18. True/False: John Kerry supports and believes in the work done in Vietnam.______________

19. What does Kerry believe that America LOST? ___________________ ____ __________________.

20. Take a look at the picture. The phrase written on the banner refers to:

a. the draft b. guerrilla warfare c. President Johnson d. My Lai