For 10 intense weeks last quarter, 18 UC Davis freshman lived the sights, sounds and brutal realities of the Vietnam War.
They immersed themselves by interviewing veterans, analyzing art and literature that evolved from the war, trekking in the rain to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the state Capitol, and tasting C-rations and Vietnamese cuisine while viewing Rambo in the student lounge.
At the start of the class, many in Eric Schroeder's Integrated Studies seminar found the American conflict in Vietnam was a vague mystery skipped over in high school history classes. They wondered why the mention of a conflict from four decades ago brought haunted expressions to their parents' faces. And why was the war being compared to the one in Iraq today?
By finals, the students had replaced spotty concepts with an in-depth understanding of the time and the place. Most importantly, they met real veterans who brought history home to the classroom.
On one drizzly February day, the students were focused on three classroom visitors, starting with former machine gunner Mike Kelley, who described his wet feet and the leeches dropping from trees into his hair. "You want to know what it was like in 'Nam? Go out and lay down on the Quad in this rain," Kelley said. "It never stopped raining, and you never got dry."
Former U.S. Special Forces intelligence officer John Nesbitt said after nearly three years of patrols, infiltration missions and living among Hmong and Montanards, he knew that his luck had run out and it was time to leave.
And Chuck Lewis, a former platoon sergeant who is now an attorney with PG&E, remembered when he was ready to stop killing. "I had a sense that I had done enough shooting and it wasn't doing any good," Lewis said. "They weren't going to give up their freedom."
Despite the tales of combat, friends' deaths and painful transitions to civilian life, the three veterans viewed their war experience as the most vital time of their life -- and told the class that they supported the military. That came as a revelation to some students.
"I was most struck by the responses the veterans gave to my question of whether they felt that young people today should have the same experience that they did," Scott Homrighausen, 19, of Yorba Linda, wrote in a class journal. "It seemed they unanimously agreed that young people today should not have to fight in combat like they did. However, they all agreed that young people should participate in basic training and serving in the military. I have never really considered this notion of universal service."
Stories feed oral-history shelves
Homrighausen interviewed machine gunner Kelley for an assignment. His interview, with the others from the class, is now part of UC Davis' new oral-history archive in the Pacific Regional Humanities Institute, located in Voorhies Hall. Last fall the institute officially joined the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center as a regional partner for the Veterans History Project. Its role is to collect and archive video and audio tapes and create hard-copy transcripts, all accessible to the public.
Although the public is encouraged to contribute oral histories, the center is also counting on efforts from UC Davis classes such as Schroeder's to fill its archival shelves, says the project director, Jan Goggans.
UC Davis students are accomplishing two goals by recording and transcribing veteran stories, Schroeder says. They not only are creating a public record of recent history for others, but also actively engaging in a rich learning experience. Schroeder says he has discovered that oral history interviews are a powerful teaching tool. Ten years ago, while instructing an American studies class on the cultural history of the 1960s, he asked students to interview relatives to get a personal window on the era.
"At the end of the quarter the students believed that this assignment had been the most valuable component of the class, citing the way it had given the history of the period an intimacy and immediacy that they hadn't gotten from other course materials, not even from the documentary footage of the 1960s that they had watched in class," Schroeder said.
But when he assigned interviews for the class on the Vietnam War and culture, Schroeder found students had few personal contacts with veterans to complete the assignment. He reached out to campus and Sacramento-area veterans for volunteers.
Among them was Nesbitt, a UC Davis alumnus who attended graduate school in the Department of Art before entering a teaching career at Sacramento-area high schools and colleges for many years. Now he works for the Vietnam Veterans of California in Sacramento, counseling veterans about jobs.
Another was Phil Knox, assistant director of Student Special Services on campus, who for 28 years has administered the Veterans Affairs Office for men and women returning to school after a stint in the military. Knox served in the U.S. Army in Ethiopia and Germany from July 1969 to July 1972.
"There's nothing like talking to a veteran who offers real, live experiences," Knox said.
Unlike most of her fellow students, Holly Vranicar, 19, of Concord, was able to interview a close relative in Roseville. "Tuesday I interviewed my uncle, and it turned out that the Tet Offensive had just begun as he landed in Pleiku," she wrote in her journal. "I listened to him talk from 9 a.m. to almost 2 p.m., just listening and listening as stories poured out of him."
Afterward, Vranicar said she "felt like a large stone had been placed on my chest. I was mentally exhausted, after poring over pictures, after being a silent bystander of his memories, and I almost felt like crumbling beneath the emotion I'd felt."
By the end of the class, students had new thoughts about how they could pursue their educations at UC Davis.
Chris Knight, 19, of Glen Ellen, reflected on Schroeder's warning at the beginning of the class that university education is disconnected -- "That we learn something in a class and then it passes through us and we are an empty slate before the next quarter's classes."
Knight says this wasn't the case with the Vietnam War class.
"Now I have found that the specificity of the topic does not reflect the power of the class to cling to you and to force its application in your life," he wrote in his journal. "I learned so much about the relationship between men and war -- two things intertwined in the most entrancing ways."
He agrees with Schroeder's American studies students from a decade ago that hearing people talk about how an era affected them creates an absorbing classroom experience.
"Part of my feelings may have to do with the subject matter, which I find so moving and important that I am inherently interested in it. But even war movies do little justice to conflict, as I feel videos and books cannot capture the human element," he wrote.
"To my mind, the veterans were more than teachers, they were treasures."
• To hear more about the students' reactions to this class and listen to veterans' oral histories, see the special Web report "The Vietnam War Through New Eyes" at http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/vietnam/default.lasso.