Senior Seminar: the Vietnam Experience

NORTHGREENVILLEUNIVERSITY

History 4390

Spring 2007

Senior Seminar: The Vietnam Experience

Dr. Jeffery B. Cook, Ph.D.

Office: 209 White Hall

Office Hours: Tues. 3-4; Wed. 9-12:30; Thurs. 12:15-4:30

and or by appointment

Phone: 895.8943

Fax: 895.8943

Email:

IM: JefferyBCook (aol)

Website:

Office Hours:

If you want to see me about something, please make an appointment ahead of time. While I do try to be around most of the time, other commitments come up. If you make an appointment, please keep it--neither of us wants to keep the other one waiting!

Course Description:

This course provides students an opportunity to study the Vietnam War in depth. The course is organized by topics within a chronological framework. Students will read two core texts, three other books, including a novel, several assigned scholarly articles, and key diplomatic, military, and other primary source documents (these documents will be available at the web site).

History 4390 is a college capstone course. As such, it demands that you drive this course forward, in discussion of the assigned readings, library work, and course projects. Don't expect lectures. And don't expect to let others do all the talking; informed participation is integral to the course's success and to your grade.

Course Objectives:

Goals of the course include:

• Surveying briefly Vietnam's long history of dominance

by othergovernments.

• Examining the early and continuing appeal of nationalism andVietnamese communism.

• Focusing briefly upon U.S. interests and involvements in Indochina between World Wars II and 1954.

• Examining and assessing U. S. presidential leadership and other national security and military decision makers associated with the Vietnam War, 1953-1975.

• Examining in depth the activities of the combat soldier.

• Viewing Vietnam and the war from many perspectives and over several disciplinary lines.

• Assessing the impact of the Vietnam War upon our nation, our diplomatic relations with Vietnam since 1973, and upon Indochina.

Methodology:

The seminar will meet weekly on Tuesdays from 12:15-3:00 in 205 Administration building. Discussion material for the seminar will be provided by the required reading listed below and available in the college bookstore. Suggestions for related readings are available at the course web site. This reading is not mandatory but merely provided in case the student would like further information on a particular topic. All students are expected to be fully prepared for discussions. Bear in mind that in a seminar attendance and participation will influence your final grade.

Course Requirements:

1. Readings: The student is to keep a journal of reactions to the reading assignments each week. These reactions should be about one page in length for each chapter and should contain a critical analysis of the main ideas, agreements,disagreements, etc. They are to be submitted at the end of each class (weekly).

Discussion Leaders:

Each week 1 or 2 students will be in charge of leading discussion. When it is your turn, please prepare a 5-10 minute commentary assessing the readings for the week. Please also prepare a list of discussion questions, and bring enough copies of that list for each student in the class.

2. Research Paper:

For this class each student will prepare a fifteen page formal research paper, worth 500points (proposal, bibliography, first draft, and final draft included), on a topic (of your own choosing, a partial list of possibilities is attached) concerning some aspect of the American War in Vietnam. Your choice must be specific, much more specific than you might think. In picking a topic for research, first look through the text and documents collection for ideas that you might want to consider as part of your investigation. Then look through the book's bibliography to find a subject of interest. To help assure that your topic is appropriately refined and to eliminate excess competition for sources everyone is required to submit a brief proposal indicating the topic to be researched, approach to be taken and the significance of your project. The instructor will consult with you before giving final approval for you to proceed.
The next step will be to develop a preliminary bibliography for your project. This will help assure you access to sufficient resources (books, articles and Internet web sites) to complete your project satisfactorily. Your preliminary bibliography must contain a MINIMUM of six sources, including at least one appropriate example of each of the following: a book, two primary sources, a scholarly article and a web site. Do not include encyclopedia articles, general text book titles, and articles from popular periodicals (such as Time and Newsweek) in your bibliography. Moreover be sure that each item listed is directly relevant to the research topic you have identified. In constructing your bibliography, look at titles found in the bibliographies of the books assigned for this class and consult suggestions made in encyclopedia articles and other books. Feel free to include book chapters from larger works (by specific title) if appropriate to your subject. Be as exhaustive in your investigations as you can be – and be sure to note where, exactly, you found the information in the first place (so that you can actually locate it once you need it). Don't be limited by resources available at the NGU Library.

As with any formal writing project the rules of good English composition apply. You should have a theme about your subject introduced in a thesis statement as part of your introductory paragraph. Develop your theme in the rest of your paper using separate paragraphs to explain and support your individual points. Select the points you will make carefully, everything should demonstrate and supporting your theme. The last paragraph of your paper should summarize your theme and various points. Sources should be cited appropriately in foot or endnotes. For more advice on historical research and writing I recommend William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style or similar works.

The paper will consist of fifteen typed pages. In addition you should use Times New Roman 12 point font, cite sources using either end or footnotes (not MLA inline citations) and include a bibliography containing primary sources, at least three books (other than encyclopedias), four scholarly articles (or three scholarly and two popular articles) and one internet source used in the research. Notes are included as part of the ten pages the bibliography is not. For the proper style of notes and bibliographic entries you should consult Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers or The Chicago Manual of Style.
Follow instructions and turn in a clean copy. You should proofread and have someone else read your work for clarity and errors in grammar and spelling. No proofreader's marks or hand written corrections should be included in your work. Sloppy work will be returned immediately for a rewrite.
Late papers will be accepted only in extreme circumstances and must be approved in advance.

Presentations:

During the final weeks of the course, you will present to the class the basic findings from your research. Presentations should be approximately 15-30 minutes long, and should be accompanied by an outline. Make sufficient copies to provide copies of your outline to all members of the course.

3. Vietnam Narratives:

In ways both small and large, the Vietnam War transformed people’s understanding of their world, each other, and even themselves. Through a close reading of a diary, memoir, series of letters, or other personal narrative of the Vietnam War, you should explore how one person's experience of the war changed their understanding of the nation, their place in it, or the meaning of its political, military, and social struggle.

You should offer a clearly stated thesis about the nature of this change, one that you demonstrate by offering evidence from your narrative. Where appropriate, you should place this individual's experience in its larger regional or national context by referring to material from the readings.

Your task is not to a make a list of what an individual did or said between 1966 and 1969; a summary of your narrator's wartime activities should make up a small introductory section of your paper.

Your essay must be roughly five to six typed, double-spaced pages, with reasonable fonts, margins, and spacing.

I. Choosing a Narrative:

Choose with care. Although all narratives are interesting in some way, they are not all appropriate for this assignment. You should spend some time leafing through the narratives on the shelves before you settle on one. Pick one whose writer isn't just reporting but thinking, analyzing what he or she sees and experiences. The more reflective and analytical your narrative is, the greater the chance that you will be able to write a thoughtful essay about it. Narratives do not have to be strictly military. Though there are thousands of soldiers' accounts from both sides, there are also narratives from the homefront that reflect an extremely wide range of experiences. There are thousands of Vietnam narratives available. Entering "United States--History--Vietnam, 1954-1975--Personal narratives" into the on-line catalog will produce a list of over a thousand narratives, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

II. Making an Argument:

The Vietnam era captures in miniature many of the most important themes in U.S. history: the meaning of democracy and of citizenship; the conflict over communism; the impact of social change and dislocation on many aspects of people's lives, including such basic questions as what it meant to be an American. The war caused many Americans to reflect on these and other matters. Building on lectures and readings, it should be possible for you to identify at least one thread of change running through your narrator's experiences, something that occupies a significant portion of his or her thinking. Trace that thread through the years of the war. For example, what evolution can we see in this man's understanding of what he was fighting for? Some of the course readings will offer useful models.

III. Writing (and rewriting) the paper:

This essay CANNOT be written in one sitting. You will need to read your narrative carefully, at least twice, and take notes on it. Set aside a special notebook or section of a notebook for this project: as you take notes and write down quotations on the left-hand side, jot down ideas and potential arguments on the right. Or buy a stack of 4x6 index cards and transcribe important quotations, along with the page numbers. Then you will need to sort through your notes and ideas and try to write a thesis statement. The key is to make an argument for which you have evidence, which means words written by your narrator that support what you’re arguing.

Don't be afraid to begin by writing informally. I often start my own work as a sort of memo to myself, without worrying about formal diction, grammar, or paragraphing. This is a good way to get your ideas together. The paper itself, however, must be clear, grammatically correct, properly cited, and carefully proofread.

Just below the title of your paper, you should give a full citation for the narrative you read in this form:

Charles W. Sasser and Craig Roberts, One Shot, One Kill: American Combat Snipers, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Beirut (New York: Pocket Books, 1990).

When you quote from the narrative in your essay, you don't have to repeat this citation, just put the relevant page numbers in parentheses after the quotation, like this: "Only the secondary radioman was between me and Sgt. Cook, so I could observe the precision with which Cook operated as he covered patrol's route. Cook straightened and replaced vegetation, dusted out the team's boot prints with tree branches, and walked backward most of the time. He would vanish from time to time, and then quietly reappear behind the radioman as though he was a ghost."(77) If you quote or use close paraphrases from other works, you must list those works at the end of the paper. You must also cite them where you use them in the text, like this: (Roberts, 308).

Proofread by hand. People relying on spell-checkers will be fed sea rations and muddy water for the duration of the class.

Revise. Your first effort will be just that, a first draft. Let it sit overnight, and then assess its strengths and weaknesses, big and small. Read it aloud, to yourself or to a friend. Where your evidence doesn't match your argument or where the argument itself is unclear, take a mental step back and ask yourself, "What does this evidence really tell me?" Don't be afraid to change your mind, that's what a revision is for.

4. Book Review:

Students are required to one brief book review (NOT BOOK REPORTS) based on Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam. This novel has been well received by critics in the American and international press. Your task in your review is to react to the story and the author as a writer in the context of our course. The review should be no more than three typed pages in length. It should not consist primarily of a summary of the novel, although you should be able to handle details of the plot, story, and characters accurately in both your review and in the class discussion.

Consider the following questions as you read the novel, and respond to them as your write your review. Does Bao Ninh offer a realistic picture of the war's impact upon the individual soldier? What is the impact of the novel upon you as a student of the Vietnam War? Explain to what extent the author's own war experiences seem to be reflected in the novel. Is the historical base for the novel easily discoverable? Use examples.

In addition, your review should feature your own reactions to the author, his story, his characters, and major themes in the novel. You should evaluate Bao Ninh as a writer, relate his book to other readings and relevant class topics as appropriate, and attempt to explain why this book was so controversial when it first appeared in the SocialistRepublic of Vietnam. Because of the restrictions on the length of your review, youare not required to utilize the comments of earlier reviewers of this work. Your review should be your own work and should not reflect the judgments of other readers.

In presenting your critical analysis, follow these guidelines:

Please use the following as the heading for your review, and do not use a cover page.

The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam. By Bao Ninh. (New York edition, 1996).

5. Attendance: Attend class take effective notes and participate in class discussions. Attendance almost always will be taken and is required. More than 2 absences will result in the loss of all attendance/participation points. Excessive absence will result in an "F" for the course.

6. Participation: Each student will be expected to discuss in class the assigned readings. Participation will be graded.

Course grade will be determined by averaging the following:

Reading Journals100 points

Research Paper500 points

Personal Narrative 100 points

Book Review 100 points

Attendance/Participation100 points

Plagiarism:

Plagiarism is copying from a source without acknowledging it. It is academically dishonest and should not be tolerated in any course. Plagiarism will result in an F for the assignment and could well jeopardize your grade for the course.

Turnitin.com:

I have a license agreement with Turnitin.com, a service that helps prevent plagiarism from Internet sources. I may be using this service in this class by either requiring students to submit their papers electronically to Turnitin.com or by submitting questionable text on behalf of a student. If you or I submit part or all of your paper, it will be stored by Turnitin.com in their database throughout the term of my contract with Turnitin.com. If you object to this temporary storage of your paper, you must let me know no later than two weeks after the start of this class. Note: If you object to the storage of your paper on Turnitin.com, I may utilize other services to check your work for plagiarism.

Cheating:

While cheating is the norm on most college campuses, it will NOT be tolerated in this class. Anyone caught cheating will receive an F for the course. Be honest and don't do anything that could be viewed as academically dishonest.

Disability:

If you are learning, sensory, or physically disabled, and need assistance in lecture, testing, etc., please contact me as soon as possible. I will help you anyway I can and matters will be held in the strictest of confidence.

Field Trips: Field trips will depend on student interest and the availability of dates when you and I are both free. These would be optional.