I decided it would definitely be interesting to get students not just to retell past events, but also to look at the ways that past events get retold differently. I chose the Vietnam War because there is a stark difference between the way our school's history textbooks discuss the war compared to the way it's discussed in A Young People's History of the United States, adapted for younger folks from Howard Zinn's book.
This was also a great chance to read through difficult texts together. Some students are especially quick to rely on translators instead of looking for context or word clues that could help with comprehension. Reading as a group means I can point out everything that the students DO know about English.
One thing we focused on was the massacre in My Lai. This was a situation where American soldiers killed unarmed South Vietnamese civilians. The textbook tells students that 250 people were killed, a single American lieutenant was responsible, he was incarcerated for his crime, and shows no pictures. The People's History tells us the murder count was 450-500, that Lt. Calley was sentenced to life in prison but served only three years house arrest, and that this incident was just one distillation of the U.S. government's larger anti-Vietnamese, colonialist narrative.
When I drove away from school, NPR was covering the recent killing of 16 Afghan civilians by a U.S. soldier. The language surrounding this was so shockingly similar to what we had read about My Lai. The military and media were quick to point out that this soldier had suffered a brain injury on a previous tour of duty. Just like the textbook's minimization of the events at My Lai as the tragic actions of a troubled individual, as opposed to the fruition of ongoing American policies.
When we were reading a bit more about Lt. Calley on Wikipedia in class (don't worry, we question the validity of Wikipedia's facts, too), we came across a powerful quote from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, released in regards to the scapegoating nature of Lt. Calley's conviction:
We intend to tell who it was that gave us those orders; that created that policy; that set that standard of war bordering on full and final genocide. We intend to demonstrate that My Lai was no unusual occurrence, other than, perhaps, the number of victims killed all in one place, all at one time, all by one platoon of us. We intend to show that the policies of Americal Division which inevitably resulted in My Lai were the policies of other Army and Marine Divisions as well. We intend to show that war crimes in Vietnam did not start in March 1968, or in the village of Son My or with one Lieutenant William Calley. We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for attempted genocide.
I pulled up BBC coverage of the Afghanistan killings for students to read, which includes this:
"This is not the first time something like this has happened," a young man called Salih Mohammad said to me in anger. For many villagers, the actions of the American soldier were part of a larger narrative of night raids and battles between Nato-led troops and the Taliban in which civilians end up being collateral damage.
It even uses the word "narrative," which we had been using the previous day to compare and contrast the different retellings of My Lai. A sad validation of the real-world applicability of critical pedagogy...
