ASA 2 Section 1
Blog 5
10/17/15
Whenever the topic of the Vietnam War comes into conversation, it would always has the correlation of "some old war that was summarized in two pages of a high school U.S. history textbook," but the war was more than just a summary. It represented a period of trauma for the Vietnamese and American soldiers, a patriotic "fight" against the enemies in red, and most importantly America's forgotten mistake.
The United States had always held the ideal that is often referred to American exceptionalism, where the "land of opportunity" is unique in the sense of how much "freedom" it gives to its citizens. Prior to the Vietnam, rhetoric strategies by the government created the patriotic feeling of needing to defend democracy in a foreign land from the Reds. The war only ended in fatal losses on both sides, yet the U.S. failed to admit the mistake of the war in order to keep its clean status as an exceptional nation, which explains the erasure of the war's history from our high school curriculum.
Question: How can reform the way we present our past without erasing the important details?
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