SAVING VIETNAM

The black granite slabs of the Vietnam Wall stand seemingly below ground, like a long grave, and form a dark scar on the land. A remembrance of the American servicemen and women who perished during the 10-year Vietnam War, the Wall reveals the outcome for many young American troops. However, those more than 58,000 names cannot explain the complex war that continues to divide Americans over our nation's military involvement in Southeast Asia.

Close to the surface, those national wounds still haunt our country, and the differences of belief about the war continue to divide the generation affected by Vietnam. The wounds of America’s longest war may heal, but the Vietnam generation will carry the remembrance of tragedy forever. On the eve of the 30-year anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of America’s involvement in the war, Vietnam lingers like a scar, reminding us of the injury, trauma, pain and grief of a historical period that will remain in our memories and national fabric forever.

The window of opportunity to gather stories from the American troops who fought on the Vietnam battlefields is narrowing. While America’s active combat involvement in Vietnam generally encompasses the years between 1965 and 1973, direct American involvement in Vietnam dates to 1945 and the presidency of Harry S. Truman. Before the passing of the generations that shaped events in those decades, scholars with Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Project are fighting against time to gather as many stories and archival materials as possible about American involvement in Southeast Asia.

A combat veteran who served two tours, James Reckner, Ph.D., never imagined that his life’s work would turn toward the Vietnam War when he accepted a position in 1988 in the Texas Tech University History Department. A historian of Theodore Roosevelt’s Navy, Reckner had imagined disappearing into the halls of ivy, spending quiet summers researching and writing, living the life of an academic. While Reckner has just completed has second naval history book, this one about the U.S. Navy at the beginning of the 20th century, his lasting legacy lies in his contributions to the development of the Vietnam Project. During the past 15 years, Reckner, as the longtime director of the project, has pursued his vision of creating an internationally renowned program dedicated to all aspects of the Vietnam War. The core of the Vietnam Project is the Vietnam Archive, which today is the most complete collection, outside the U.S. National Archive, of materials related to America’s involvement in Southeast Asia.

In his many years of work toward the Vietnam Project, Reckner continually has observed a generation gap among the young and old. “The emotions stirred by the war remain very real for older Americans; however, they are baffling to the generation that has come of age since the war.”

Reckner, who enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1958, had his first encounter with Vietnam in November 1963 when he was a first-class petty officer in the amphibious forces assigned to the Western Pacific. Those forces arrived off the coast of Vietnam days before the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. The sailors were prepared to evacuate Americans from Saigon should the capital become chaotic. “When the situation stabilized after the coup d'etat, we simply sailed away, without people in the country knowing we had been there. That’s the strength in having naval power close off-shore,” he notes. Called “the Old Man” by troops under his command, Reckner, then 28-years-old and a Navy lieutenant, returned to duty in Vietnam in 1968 and spent a year as senior adviser for a Vietnamese Navy River Assault Group in the southwest portion of South Vietnam. He then came home to spend the next 10 months doing his principal work in that day involving Soviet naval missile systems and electronic countermeasures. Again, as a lieutenant and senior adviser for a River Patrol Group, Reckner began his second tour in Vietnam in 1971, patrolling north of Saigon on the Saigon River in an area called the Iron Triangle. He left Vietnam, he thought for the last time, in April 1972.

“At the time, I believed in the cause, which was keeping a nation free from communism,” Reckner reflects. “Thirty years later, I still believe in the cause because I see what the people in Southeast Asia have gone through because of our failure in Vietnam. The reality is, no matter what the Vietnamese government says, in Vietnam today, certain basic freedoms do not exist. Our failure in Vietnam and Cambodia resulted in immense suffering for the ordinary people in these countries. I still think we were right to try to prevent that. The failure was one of leadership, of faulty decisions concerning the conduct of the war, and Lyndon B. Johnson's conflicting priorities. Attempting to conduct the war in Vietnam and the War on Poverty at the same time, President Johnson ended up losing both.”

Even with the archive of nearly 20 million pages of holdings, Reckner contends that a definitive explanation or understanding of the Vietnam War remains elusive. “There will never be a book that encapsulates the complete truth about the Vietnam War. It is very difficult for our generation not to be ideological, perhaps even more so for those who opposed the war, given its aftermath. Vietnam remains close to the surface in our country. It has been easy in the past to understand America’s wartime involvements because the goals were clearly defined and we always have been the victors. We are gracious victors. But we never have been the losers before,” he comments.

“Through the Vietnam Project, American veterans are able to deal with their past through us. In preserving all aspects of American involvement in Southeast Asia, the Vietnam Archive presents all sides of the war with equal vigor and care, including the anti-war movement. Our American veterans see that we preserve the records of their efforts in Vietnam, which have been overlooked or denigrated for many years. We finally are bringing honor and a degree of dignity to those veterans and their experiences.”

The Vietnam Archive has the mission of collecting, preserving and disseminating materials related to America’s involvement in Southeast Asia. The Archivist and Associate Director for the Vietnam Project, Stephen Maxner, explains that the primary focus of the archive is preserving the American veteran perspective. “We realize we have a narrow window of opportunity during which to work with those veterans. That generation is in their mid- to late-50s, 60s, 70s and some are in their 80s, so we want to work with them very specifically to collect their materials, conduct oral history interviews and basically preserve that aspect of their history of the Vietnam War,” Maxner says.

Additionally, the archive has a broader mission of collecting and preserving materials that focus on the theater of Southeast Asia. “We see America’s involvement in Vietnam within the context of the history of Southeast Asia as well as within the American context,” Maxner explains. “We have materials dating to the 19th century, and we have newspaper collections from Indochina that date to the 1860s during the French colonial period. We consider America’s involvement in Vietnam as a continuation of Western involvement in Southeast Asia. We see the Vietnam War as an event that occurred within the context of the Cold War and as part of the general U.S. military history of the 20th century, so we collect Cold War materials as well as materials that focus on World War II and the Korean War. We want to preserve all aspects and all perspectives of the war. We do not have a political agenda; our only agenda is to preserve all of the historical materials relating to the Vietnam War. We want to give everyone a fair voice to present his or her experiences of the war. With our holdings, the Vietnam Archive is very encompassing.”

Working very closely with the veterans and their families, Reckner, Maxner and the archival staff are being entrusted with precious items from the individuals whose lives were most touched by the war. Donations totaling 1,500 artifacts include personal letters, diaries, autobiographies, audio letters, personal films, photographs, slides and negatives, as well as artifacts, uniforms, military equipment, and some weapons. The donations eventually will be displayed at a future museum planned at Texas Tech dedicated to the Vietnam experience. “We’re collecting that unique material that typically would find itself given to a family member and probably ultimately just would be lost or thrown away,” Maxner says.

“It’s rewarding to know that people have taken notice of the archive. They trust us with their materials. They know that we will treat them with the honor and dignity they deserve. More importantly, we make those materials available to others.” Through the Virtual Vietnam Archive, anyone who has access to the Internet can find more than  2 million pages of materials, including 73,000 photographs and more than 250,000 individual documents related to the war. “We are one of the largest, if not the largest, online archive in the United States,” Maxner says. (www.vietnam.ttu.edu)

With what Maxner calls the most complete microfilm collection in the nation regarding America’s involvement in Southeast Asia, the Vietnam Archive collection includes presidential library materials dating back to President Truman, state department files, national security files, captured Vietnamese military and government documents, and U.S. military records.

Helping to put a face on the war, the Oral History Project of the Vietnam Archive captures the recollections of veterans’ service in Southeast Asia. “When you listen to someone talk about their experiences and what it was like to be a combat foot soldier in rice paddies, jungles and the delta, it really helps to bring the war to life. That exchange has emotion and sometimes a tragic note for what the men and women who served had experienced,” Maxner comments. With more than 1,600 participants from around the globe, archivists record and transcribe the oral histories, making them available online through the Virtual Vietnam Archive. “A person’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be able to listen to their veteran tell his or her own story in his or her own words. In this respect, we are also preserving family history that will be available for generations to come.”

For some of the veterans, the oral history interviews are the first time they have talked about their experiences in Vietnam. “The veterans will tell us up front that the interviews are cathartic and therapeutic for them. After American withdrawal from Vietnam, most veterans came home, got on with their lives and became productive citizens. They put their experiences behind them because they were not welcome to discuss them in most circles. Many did not reveal themselves as being Vietnam veterans until recent years. When they came back, they had to push their emotions all back, to keep it to themselves. Now that they can openly express their feelings and thoughts, they do so willingly,” Maxner says.

Maxner repeats Reckner’s assertion about Vietnam. “For people who think they can speak in absolute terms about the Vietnam War, we provide a tremendous amount of materials, tens of thousands of pages, that reveal that we never will be able to talk about that experience in definitive terms.”

Reckner’s efforts to create such an impressive collection came about serendipitously in 1989 with a single question he asked freshman students in his introductory history courses. Needing to round out a nine-question survey that asked students about their general knowledge of events since 1945, Reckner composed a 10th fill-in-the-blank question asking students to name the general they most closely associated with the American involvement in Vietnam. The results stunned Reckner. He discovered that only one of the 100 students tested knew the name General William C. Westmoreland, the leading commander of the U.S. military in Vietnam. “If you didn’t know the name General Westmoreland, then you didn’t know anything about Vietnam. The kids knew nothing about this event that had torn America apart only 14 years earlier,” says Reckner.

Disturbed by this lack of knowledge among his students, he was compelled to teach an upper-level, undergraduate research course about the Vietnam War. Finding few resources about the Vietnam War in the Texas Tech Library, Reckner convened a meeting of Lubbock-area Vietnam veterans to talk about what they might do, in a positive way, about their Vietnam experiences. From that first meeting in May 1989, the veterans launched what has become the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech. To help Reckner in his teaching efforts, the veterans immediately began collecting their own wartime materials and spreading the word to seek contributions from other veterans.

The first donation came from Lubbock business owner Phil Price, who gave a box of books to the archive, his collection of the Time/Life Series on the Vietnam War. “Those books now are among tens of thousands of books in the Vietnam Archive,” Reckner says. Another Vietnam veteran and at the time a Texas Tech graduate student, Dan Siewert followed with the first archival material, the letters he had written home to his mother during his time in Vietnam. A Slaton, Texas, native, Siewert was a Navy hospital corpsman with the Marines in the northern part of South Vietnam. During a battle, Siewert was badly wounded, medevaced out of the country and sent home, where he subsequently became involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “Those letters are still there in the archive, preserved. Some of the letters’ envelopes are covered in mud, so those letters became both artifact and archival material,” Reckner says.