On my round-the-world trip back to the USA and then back to Kuwait this October, I stopped for 9-days in northern Vietnam. I had wanted to travel to Vietnam for several decades, especially after I took a history seminar on the "Vietnam War" in Bethel College in Kansas under Dr. James Juhnke in 1984. (I have even been considering stopping my current employment in the near future and going there to teach English, i.e. hopefully y to empower someone.)
VIETNAM AND MY EDUCATIONAL TRAINING
Two and a half decades ago, the debacles and lessons of the American-era of the Vietnam Wars of the 20th were relatively fresh. However, as I personally had been too young to have been drafted into that Vietnam War disaster, I needed to spend part of my adolescence and college years acquiring information about the 1960s and 1970s systematically, i.e. as a student of history. The historian Juhnke, whose wife also taught literature at Bethel College (BC), also had us read popular fictional literature as well as took time to show and discuss films about those war years--and various American memories in the wake of the Great Quagmire.
Dr. Juhnke, himself, had run as the Kansas Democratic Party's Peace Candidate in 1972. Thanks to this seminar under Dr. Juhnke, taken during my senior year at BC, I was already quite familiar (from an academic perspective) with popular film, documentaries, fiction and non-fiction of the immediate post-Vietnam era by the time I received my Kansas state teaching certification in history later the next year.
For example, I knew that the Coppola classic movie Apocalypse Now was based much more on the writing of Joseph Conrad, set in the Congo at the turn of the last century, rather than resembling Vietnam and Cambodia of the 1960s and 1970s.
In those same college years, I had also written a paper on chemical weaponry used in wars of the 20th century, so I was quite ready to discuss the use of napalm, tear gas and other weapons of war in Southeast Asia-had anyone asked me to do so.
Sadly, no school district in Kansas ever asked me to teach American and world history over the subsequent decades. This was:
[1] partially due to the fact that in the state of Kansas one generally has to
volunteer to do sports coaching along with one's regular duties as social
science or history instructor, and I had decided never to coach after my own
high school football injuries had left me unable to do many sports as an adult
(, i.e. I felt that their is too much pressure to play hurt and get hurt in the name
of a game).
[2] partially due to the way the old-guard school boards in Kansas often
selected particular archetypes of yuppies to teach back in the 1980s.
Therefore, I moved to Germany in a sort of exile for the next few years, where I sought an international school position to teach social studies.
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