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American Nation shows them happily surrounding President Johnson when he visited the American base at Cam Ranh Bay during the war. stocks, and generally ravaged <a href="http://www.putianb2b.com/"><strong>莆田外贸</strong></a> the countryside of South Vietnam.” All this was nike air max turbulence “in addition to the normal ravage of war.”15 Any photograph of an American soldier setting fire to a Vietnamese hootch (house), a common sight during the war, would get this point across, but no textbook nike air max 87 uses any photograph of any wrongdoing by an American. Indeed, no book includes any photograph of any destruction, even of legitimate targets, caused by our side. Only Discovering American History, an inquiry textbook, treats the My Lai massacre as anything but an isolated incident. In addition to leaving students ignorant of the history of the war, the silence of other textbooks on this matter also makes the antiwar movement incomprehensible. Two textbook authors, James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, are on record elsewhere as knowing of the importance of My Lai. “The American strategy had atrocity built into it,” Lytle said to me. Davidson and Lytle devote most of a chapter to the My Lai massacre in their book After the Fart. There they tell how news of the massacre stunned the United States. “One thihg’was certain,” they write, “the encounter became a defining moment in the public’s perception of the war,”’6 Plainly they do not think high school students need to know about it, however, for their high school history textbook, The United 240 ?L I E S MY T E A C H E R TOLD ME StatesA History of the Republic, like seven other textbooks in my sample, never mentions My Lai. If textbooks omit all the important photographs of the Vietnam War, what i nike air max women mages do they include? Uncontroversial shots, for the most partservicemen on patrol, walking through swamps, or jumping from helicopters. Seven books show refugees or damage caused by the other side, but since such damage was usually l nike air max womens ess extensive than that caused by our bombardment, the pictures are not very dramatic What about their prose? Sadly, textbook authors also leave out all the memorable quotations of the era. Martin Luther King, Jr., the first major leader to come out against the war, opposed it in his trademark cadences: “We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. . . . We have corrupted <a href="http://anfu.putianb2b.com/"><strong>莆田安福市场</strong></a> their wo nike air max turbulence men and children and killed their men.”17 No textbook quotes King. Even more famous was the dissent of Muhammad Ali, then the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Ali refused induction into the military, for which h women nike air max is title was stripped from him, and said, “No Viet Cong ever called me ‘nigger.’” All twelve textbooks leave out that line too. After the Tet offensive, a US. army officer involved in retaking Ben Tre said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” For millions of Americans nike ireland store , this statement summarized America’s impact on Vietnam. No textbook supplies it.’3 Nor does any textbook quote John Kerry’s plea for immediate withdrawal: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”19 Indeed, the entire antiwar movement becomes unintelligible because textbooks do not allow it to speak for itself. They exclude the antiwar songs, the chants?Hell, no; we won’t go!” and “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”and, above all, the emotions.20 Virtually the only people who get quoted are Presidents Johnson and Nixon. In a typical passage in The American Pageant, Nixon says, “America cannot?and will notconceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions, and unde nike air max turnaround rtake all the defense of the free nations of the world.” The passage does not help to clarity the war or the opposition to it. Even Pageant’s auxiliary reader quotes only Johnson and Nixon as primary sources on the nike air max womens Vietnam Warnot a word from those who fought in or opposed it. Having excluded the sights, the sounds, and the feelings of the Vietnam era, textbook authors proceed to exclude the issues. Frances FitzGerald, who, in addition to America Revised, wrote Fire in the Lake, a fine book about Vietnam, called the textbooks she reviewed in 1979 “neither hawkish nor dovish on the warthey are simply evasive.” She went on to say, “Since it is re nike air max turbulence ally quite hard DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE . 241 to discuss the war and evade all the major issues, their Vietnam sections make remarkable reading.”21 <a href="http://anfu.putianb2b.com/"><strong>莆田安福</strong></a> To some degree, defining the issues is a matter of inter women nike air max pretation, and I would not want to fault textbooks for holding a different interpretation from my own. Perhaps we can agree that any reasonable treatment of the Vietnam War would discuss at least these six questions: Why did the United States fight in Vietnam? What was the war like before the United States entered it? How did we change it? How did the war change the United States? Why did an antiwar movement become so strong in the United States? What were its criticisms of the war in Vietnam? Were they right? Why did the United States lose the war? What lesson(s) should we take from the experience? Simply to list these questions is to recognize that each of them is still controversial. Take the first. Some people still argue that the United States fought in Vietnam to secure access to the country’s valuable natural resources. Others claim that we fought to bring democracy to Vietnam’s people. Perhaps more common are analyses of our internal politics: Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, having seen how Republicans castigated Truman for “losing” China, did cheap nike air max 90 not want to be seen as “losing” Vietnam. Another interpretation brings forth the domino theory: while we know now that Vietnam’s communists are antagonists of China, we didn’t then, and some leaders believed that if Vietnam “fell” to the communists, so would Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Yet another view is that America felt its prestige was on the line, so it did not want a defeat in Vietnam, lest Pax Americana be threatened in Africa, South America, or elsewhere in the world.” Some conspiracy theorists nike ireland go even further and claim that big business fomented the war to help the economy. Other historians take a longer view, arguing that our intervention in Vi nike air max wright etnam derives from a cultural patte nike air max turbulence rn of racism and imperialism that began with the first Indian war in Virginia in 1622, continued in the nineteenth century with “Manifest Destiny,” and is now winding down in the “American century.” They point out that GI’s in Vietnam collected and displayed Vietnamese ears just <a href="http://www.greentownfc.com/blog/blog.php?do=showone&uid=5354&type=blog&itemid=4824 61"><strong>MBT Men's Sport 2 Walking | Internet Marketing Classifieds</strong></a> as British colonists in North America collected and displayed Indian scalps.23 A final view might be that there was no clear cause and certainly no clear purpose, that we blundered into the war because no subsequent administration had the courage to undo our 1946 mistake of opposing a popular indepen- 242 ?LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME dence movement. “The fundamental blunder with respect to Indochina was made after 1945,” wrote Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, when “our Government allowed itself to be persuaded” by the French and British “to restore France’s colonial position in Indochina.”!4 Perhaps the seeds of America’s tragic involvement with Vietnam were sown at Versailles in 1918, when Woodrow Wilson failed to hear Ho Chi Minn’s plea for his country’s independence. Perhaps they germinated when FDR’s policy of not helping the French recolonize Southeast Asia after World War II terminated with h women nike air max is death. Since textbooks rarely suggest that [he events of one period caused events of the next, unsu nike air max 2009 rprisingly, none of the textbooks 1 surveyed look before the 1950s to explain the Vietnam War. Within the 1950s and 1960s, the historical evidence for some of these conflicting interpretations is much weaker than for others, although I will not choose sides here.