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The video helps to explain the feelings the narrator had when he was drafted. One-thirds of the soldiers were drafted and this was "their average age was 21" while in World War II, "the average age was 26." When the narrator is drafted in The Things They Carried, he thinks the letter is a mistake because he is enrolled in graduate school. He decides to leave for Canada and finds a place to stay in Northern Michigan. He suspects the old man who owns the inn knows what he is up to (sneaking off to Canada). He struggles with knowing he needs to go to Vietnam. He even contemplates suicide.

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The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.

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Blowin' In The Wind - Bob Dylan | Live at The Concert for Bangladesh

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Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. 

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Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. 

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When I read that more than 150,000 things have been left at the wall, I wondered if any of the things that were left was something that one of the soldiers carried.

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Cartoonist Depicts U.S. Escalation in Vietnam · HERB: Resources for Teachers

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Primary resources, classroom activities, graphic organizers and lesson plans produced by the American Social History Project designed for use in K-12 classrooms.

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U.S. Bases in Vietnam during the Vietnam War

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U.S. Bases in Vietnam during the Vietnam War

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This map makes me realize how widespread the war was how close they were to other countries like China, Laos, and Thailand. In the book, The Things They Carried, I learned that what "they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of specialty."The platoon leader, Jimmy Cross, was responsible to carry and read maps.

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Vietnamese Movement in the Vietnam War

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Letter from a Vietnam soldier from a hospital in Japan to his friend and his family in the U.S.

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Letters about combat situations make up the largest section of the project.
Vietnam War, Okinawa

Pat Jasper wrote this letter during the Vietnam War to his friend Ron VanOeveren and his family in Omaha. Ron says he was a close friend of Pat's since early grade school. Ron tells us that:

"Pat was a proud Marine, and ready to serve his country. The letter does not reveal the hardships Pat endured that night, alone on the hill. Pat drowned scuba diving off the coast of Monterey, California, while saving another diver's life."

Hospital bed in Okinawa, Japan
Marine Pat Jasper

Dear Mr. and Mrs. VanOeveren, B.J., and Jeff, Well, I didn't last too long in Vietnam. I was there only a week before I was Med-EVACed out. I'm in a hospital in Okinawa now. Two days after I reported into my outfit, they sent me out on patrol. It was an O.P. 27 miles northwest of Danang. We were supposed to be out for 5 days, but on the fourth night, the V.C. hit us hard. I won't go into all the details of what happened, you might say we got wiped out. Out of the 14 of us on the hill, 8 are dead and 3 of us are in the hospital. I've got a hole in my leg about as big as my fist, plus some small pieces of shrapnel in my foot and my shoulder blade. I feel pretty lucky - when I was on that hill with all those dead Marines around me, I felt like the luckiest person in the world. I stayed in Danang for two days before they sent me here. A couple of hours before I left, my C.O., 1st Sergeant, and the chopper pilot who got us off the hill came to the Danang hospital to see me. They said I did a real good job on the radio. When we got hit, I guess whoever was monitoring back in the company area went and woke up the 1st Sergeant. So anyway, they gave me my purple heart and promoted me to Corporal. So I'll be here in the hospital for 5 or 6 weeks, and then I'll go back to 'Nam and try my luck again. Say hi to Ron and Linda for me, and write when you can. Pat

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WAR LETTERS: COMBAT - Vietnam War, Okinawa

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Letters about combat situations make up the largest section of the project. Pat Jasper wrote this letter during the Vietnam War to his friend Ron VanOeveren and his family in Omaha. Ron says he was a close friend of Pat's since early grade school.

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The Vietnam War was waged from 1954 to 1975. Find out more about the major events, places, and people involved in this great conflict.

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The Lessons of the Vietnam War (1991)

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Trailer for Ken Burns' PBS Vietnam documentary. 

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Trailer for Ken Burns' PBS Vietnam documentary. 

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The Vietnam War | The full 18 hour US version | PBS America

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This letter makes me realize that being in the military and having young children is complicated. The dad in The Things They Carried wants to tell his daughter the truth about killing the Vietnamese soldier on the trail, but knows she is only nine and too young to hear the story. This letter shows this girl from Texas does not fully comprehend her father's situation as she writes about her normal life at home. However, she does reveal her mother is worried every time she hears a news report about the war.

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The picture of the tunnel helps to show how complicated blowing up these elaborate underground tunnel complexes. Before blowing up the tunnels, the men had to search them. The men would draw numbers to find out who would have to strip off his gear and crawl in not knowing what would happen. The tunnels are like underground villages. I thought they would be empty or just filled with weapons.

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During the war in Vietnam, thousands of people in the Vietnamese province of Cu Chi lived in an elaborate network of underground tunnels. The tunnels were used by Viet Cong guerrillas as hiding spots during combat, as well as serving as communication and supply routes, hospitals, food and weapon caches and living quarters for numerous guerrilla fighters. The tunnel systems were of great importance to the Viet Cong in their resistance to American forces, and played a major role in North Vietnam winning the war.

The Cu Chi tunnels were built over a period of 25 years that began sometime in the late 1940s during the war against the French. The excavations were used mostly for communication between villages and to evade French army sweeps of the area. When the National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency began around 1960, the old tunnels were repaired and new extensions were excavated. Within a few years the tunnel system assumed enormous strategic importance, and most of Cu Chi district and the nearby area came under firm Viet Cong control.
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The secret tunnels, which joined village to village and often passes beneath American bases, were not only fortifications for Viet Cong guerillas, but were also the center of community life. Hidden beneath the destroyed villages were underground schools and public spaces where couples were married and private places where lovers met. There were even theaters inside the tunnels where performers entertained with song and dance and traditional stories.

But life in the tunnels was difficult. Air, food and water were scarce and the tunnels were infested with ants, poisonous centipedes, scorpions, spiders and vermin. Most of the time, guerrillas would spend the day in the tunnels working or resting and come out only at night to scavenge for supplies, tend their crops or engage the enemy in battle. Sometimes, during periods of heavy bombing or American troop movement, they would be forced to remain underground for many days at a time. Sickness was rampant among the people living in the tunnels, especially malaria, which was the second largest cause of death next to battle wounds. Almost everyone had intestinal parasites of significance. Only about 6,000 of the 16,000 cadres who fought in the tunnels survived the war.
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Throughout the course of the war, the tunnels in Ch Chi proved to be a source of frustration for the U.S. military in Saigon. The US and Australian tried a variety of methods to detect and infiltrate the tunnels but all were met with failure. Large scale ground operations involving tens of thousands of troops were launched. They ravaged rice paddies, bulldozed huge swathes of jungle, and villages were evacuated and razed. The Americans also sprayed chemical defoliants on the area aerially and a few months later ignited the tinder-dry vegetation with gasoline and napalm. By a strange twist of fate, the intense heat of the napalm interacted with the wet tropical air only to create cloudbursts that extinguished the fires. The Viet Cong guerrillas remained safe and sound inside their tunnels.

Unable to win the battle with chemicals, the US army began sending men called 'tunnel rats' down into the tunnels. Armed only with a gun, a knife, a flashlight and a piece of string these tunnel rats would enter a tunnel by themselves and travel inch-by-inch cautiously looking ahead for booby traps. The job of a tunnel rat was fraught with immense dangers. The entrance holes in the ground were barely wide enough for the shoulders. After a couple of meters of slipping and wriggling straight down, the narrow tunnel took a U-turn back towards the surface, then twisted again before heading off horizontally further. The light from the battery powered lamp wasn't enough to pierce the darkness inside the tunnels, and there was no room to turn around and retreat. The tunnel rats, who were often involved in underground fire fights, sustained appallingly high casualty rates.

One of the entrance to the tunnels. Photo credit

The Americans then began using German shepherd dogs trained to use their keen sense of smell to locate trapdoors and guerrillas. The tunnel people responded by washing themselves with American soap which gave off a scent the canines identified as friendly. Captured US uniforms were put out to confuse the dogs further. Most importantly, the dogs were not able to spot booby traps. So many dogs were killed or maimed that their horrified handlers then refused to send them into the tunnels.

Finally, by the late 1960s, the American began carpet bombing Cu Chi destroying several portions of the tunnels along with everything else around. The gesture was militarily useless by then because the USA was already on its way out of the war. The tunnels had served their purpose.

The 120-km long complex of tunnels at Cu Chi has since been preserved and turned into a war memorial park. The tunnels are a popular tourist attraction, and visitors are invited to crawl around in the safer parts of the tunnel system. Some tunnels have been made larger to accommodate the larger size of Western tourists, while low-power lights have been installed in several of them to make traveling through them easier and booby traps have been clearly marked. Underground conference rooms where campaigns such as the Tet Offensive were planned in 1968 have been restored, and visitors may enjoy a simple meal of food that Viet Cong fighters would have eaten.

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Tourists entering tunnel system. Photo credit

Booby trap. Photo credit
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Besprechungsbunker / meeting room. Photo credit

Making weapons. Photo credit

Cu Chi Tunnel model. Photo credit

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The Underground Tunnels of Cu Chi, Vietnam

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During the war in Vietnam, thousands of people in the Vietnamese province of Cu Chi lived in an elaborate network of underground tunnels. The tunnels were used by Viet Cong guerrillas as hiding spots during combat, as well as serving as communication and supply routes, hospitals, food and weapon caches and living quarters for numerous guerrilla fighters.

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The center of the photograph where the soldier is holding his arm up and seems to be talking to the sky makes me think about a part in the book when the narrator says that even in the middle of being attacked, there are moments where one cannot ignore the beauty of nature. He writes, "...but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds and immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs--the whole world gets rearranged--and even though you're pinned down by the war you never felt more at peace" (34). I wonder if that is what the soldier in the middle of the photo is experiencing. A moment of peace in the middle of what is probably the worst thing he has every experienced.