Monday 4/4: Respite for Writing
Instead of class:
● Select one prompt from among the list below, and use the respite from class to write an essay (of a few paragraphs) in response to it.
● Be sure to identify which prompt you are writing on at the top of your essay
● Email your essay to Mark, PVDClementeVets@gmail.com
VIETNAM UNIT WRITING PROMPTS
DIRECTIONS: Please write a short essay in response to one (or if you wish, more) of the following prompts – but at least one. Aim for at least one page but no more than three (1.5 or double spacing) and use this opportunity to extend and clarify your own thinking about the topic you choose. Upload to Google Classroom as indicated under the April 1class portal.
1. What decisions and assumptions led the US into Vietnam? Do you see any lessons we might learn from the Vietnam experience?
2. We have read several chapters from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Our discussions have covered the experience of war, coming home, what defines courage, and how do you tell a “true” war story. Choose one of these areas. What is O’Brien saying to readers and what’s your response to his perspective? What shapes your perspective?
3. What was combat like for American soldiers in Vietnam? Draw on some of our secondary source readings (Baritz, Bilton/Sim) as well as Tim O'Brien, to reflect on this. In what ways was that experience similar or different from what WWII infantry like Paul Fussell faced?
4. In our class discussions we sought to understand events like the My Lai massacre -- why they happened, whether they violated principles of Just War, and where the final moral responsibility rests. What is your view on the causes of and responsibility for what happened at My Lai?
5. Our syllabus included two poems, Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It” and Bruce Weigl, “Song of Napalm”. Pick one of the poems and explicate it for us. What do you take away from the poem and why? Make sure your discussion shows your readers how the poem makes you see and think what you do.
6. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial breaks from iconographic tradition in form and content. In what specific ways does this particular monument differ from more traditional kinds you have encountered or studied? How does it nevertheless capture or speak to elements of the Vietnam experience? Was this the right monument for this war?
7. In the previous unit we used Junger to examine the external, social factors that impact a soldier’s homecoming; in this unit we have talked about Homecoming internally as well, specifically about post-combat states like PTSD and Moral Injury. What aspects of the Vietnam experience may have led to a soldier carrying an internal legacy of PTSD or Moral Injury? How can creative works ( such as O’Brien’s stories or Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial) provide a mechanism for reckoning with such legacies?