Tag: war

Vietnam in pictures

American Marine in Da Nang, Vietnam, August 3, 1965. (Image from the U.S. Marine Corps.)
American Marine in Da Nang, Vietnam, August 3, 1965. (Image from the U.S. Marine Corps.)

A slew of ideas and conflicts swirl around the Vietnam War: democracy, communism, dictatorship, freedom, colonialism, domino theory, chemical warfare, technology …. We’re supposed to look at wars through the lens of the “Characteristics of War”, but what do offense and defense mean in a war like Vietnam? A close examination of any of these words in the face of Vietnam leaves more questions than answers. The Boston Globe has a heartbreaking collection of images from the Vietnam War that give a remarkably multifaceted view of the conflict and its consequences. The photos are iconic and some are graphic.

A guerrilla in the Mekong Delta paddles through a mangrove forest defoliated by Agent Orange (1970). Photograph by Le Minh Truong © National Geographic Society (from the International Center for Photography).

The photographs in the Boston Globe were mostly taken by western photographers (some were from the U.S. military), whose journalistic culture inspired them to try to capture all aspects of the war, to tell the whole story, independent of their own allegiance. There were fewer North Vietnamese photographers and their job was to capture images that would promote their side of the war. Even so, some of their photographs are also amazing and offer another perspective.

Photograph taken by a North Vietnamese war photographer (from SmugMug).

National Geographic collected some of these photos in Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side. More photos are available from SnugMug.com, and National Geographic has a documentary on North Vietnamese photographers called, Vietnam – The Unseen War (a 5 minute preview is available on VEOH).

These images help tell the story of how powerful the media can be, particularly in a democracy. What’s also interesting is the youth of many of the combatants on both sides.

[googleMap name=”Vietnam” width=”490″ height=”350″ mapzoom=”4″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]Vietnam[/googleMap]

Corinth Mississippi in the Civil War

Stream of American History at the Corinth Civil War Interpretive center.

The Memphis to Charleston line was the only railroad that linked the East Coast of the Confederacy to the fertile Mississippi River Valley. At a time when the fastest way to move troops, supplies and commerce was by river or rail, the Memphis and Charleston railroad was essential (this was well noted in Robert Black’s “The Railroads of the Confederacy”). Cutting the railroad was an important objective of the Union. Cutting it at Corinth Mississippi would also cut the Mobile and Ohio Railroad line which linked the north and south of the Confederacy. Thus the Battle of Shiloh, where the Union could disembark its armies using the Tennessee River, and soon after, the Battle of Corinth.

The Civil War Interpretive Center in Corinth (this is also a good reference) does a nice job of presenting the details of the battles for the town, and their video presentation, with different images projected on multiple screens in a circular room was quite good (though there was a lot of information and you did not know quite which screen to focus on, so some students had trouble keeping track of it all).

Standing waves: turbulence in the stream of American history.

The most interesting part of the center is the Stream of American History which is a wonderful place to learn about metaphors. The stream starts with a fountain that overflows through 13 notches cut in the rim of the basin into a shallow water course that gradually widens as more states are added to the U.S. In the first reach of the stream there are impediments in the paved stream bed that create turbulence, harbingers of the war to come (they create nice standing waves which is an additional point in their benefit).

The 13th Amendment.

When the stream gets to its main focus, the civil war, large granitic blocks, cut into prisms and labeled with the names of the battles, break the stream into two before it finally merges again as it reaches the reflecting pool.

I threw my students at the Stream without telling them what it was. The only hint I gave was that it was a “large metaphor”. There were enough clues that they could figure it out. They wandered around it individually, with their pencils and notepaper for 15 minutes (I required that they write down their interpretation, then we got them together to pool their thoughts.

The stream is a very nice puzzle, and the National Park Service has a good key (pdf). It was a good way to end our immersion trip, and it gave the students something to think about on the long drive home.

[googleMap name=”Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center” width=”400″ height=”350″ mapzoom=”4″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]501 West Linden Street, Corinth, MS‎[/googleMap]

Video games and real war

“It’s going to be a constant question for us as a society and for the military whether or not, as they become more game-like, that creates an effect that makes it easier to kill people in a way that you might not want to make it easier to kill people.” – Clive Thompson on On The Media (2010)

On The Media had one of the most though provoking pieces this weekend that I have ever heard. It was based on the video footage of the tragic killing of two Reuters journalists in Baghdad, and the wounding of two small children in a van that came to rescue the injured, by a US helicopter gunship. The program dealt with the tragedy itself, the question of war crimes and the propriety of Wikileaks in publishing the video.

They also addressed the marked similarities between the video footage and scenes in modern video games. What was most interesting was that the interviewee, Clive Thompson, argued not that video games were becoming too much like war and desensitizing players, but that war is becoming too much like video games.

It’s been generally acknowledged that the further away the person is, the less you can see them, the more they’re just a blip on the screen, the easier it is to pull the trigger. – Clive Thompson on On The Media (2010)

Audio of the piece called “Virtual War” is below:

Shiloh (and the battle of)

We hiked in Shiloh on a beautiful spring day just about a week before the anniversary of that formative battle of the American civil war. Trail #4 traces the battle from the first contact of union and confederate pickets near what is now Ed Shaws Store and Peach Orchard Restaurant, all the way to the park center where General Grant formed his last line of defense.

[googleMap name=”Ed Shaws Store” description=”Start of Trail #4″ width=”400″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”13″ mousewheel=”false”]35.116, -88.362[/googleMap]

The hike winds its way across mowed fields and through rolling, forested tracts. With the leaves not yet on the trees this was the perfect time to make this hike. Two years ago, the last time the middle school did this trip, they did it a little earlier in the year in below-freezing temperatures. Apparently it was great for character building.

We weren’t quite as lucky in the character building department, it was a nice clear day, not too hot and not too cold. On the five mile hike and our students got a lot of practice navigating by compass. However, we had to take to the paved roads about a third of the way through in order to have lunch before meeting park ranger Paul Holloway for a demonstration of an infantryman.

Paul Holloway about to charge.

Mr. Holloway was superb, bringing into sharp relief the similarities and contrasts between soldiers in the two armies. He wore a brown coat, colors which could have been on either side, and demonstrated a rifle which was impressively loud, smokey and heavy.

Before sitting beneath a tree for our class discussion of what we saw that day we took in the visitor center and the movie, made in 1956, about the Battle of Shiloh. I though the movie was quite informative if a bit understaffed, but my students picked up on the fact that the amateur thespians kept stealing glances at the camera. Not to mention getting up and charging again after they’d been shot. They also detected a subtle bias toward the South from the narrator and in the content of the movie.

The rifle demonstration was extremely useful in setting the stage for the movie, but I though the five mile hike was also important because the students got the chance to feel the distance and then consider that what took us a couple of hours, took an entire day of hard fighting.

Confederate mass grave.

Amnesty’s letter writing videos

I showed my class two YouTube videos from Amnesty International that promote their letter writing campaigns. The videos use spare black and white imagery and signatures, written in the air, are used by victims of human rights abuses to escape their persecutors. The video above did provoke a few giggles, because, I suspect, the character animation has a bit of humor to it despite the seriousness of the issues being portrayed. The video below is more powerful. It more frankly addresses the fact that human rights violations are taking place and some of its subjects are children (e.g. child soldiers).

Not all of the students understood at first that the signatures were meant to be their own, and the purpose of the video was to encourage the viewer to write, but they cleared that up after a short discussion. I hope the videos have some long term effect, because pretty promptly after the brief discussion they tried to convince me that I should show the YouTube video of the “Evolution of Dance“.

“Imagine” “War”

One of the small group assignments last week was to pick two anti-war songs and present their meaning and context. They had a choice of music ranging in time from Frederick Weatherly’s “Danny Boy” to Green Day’s “Holiday”, but they chose two Vietnam Era songs, “Imagine” and “War”.

These turned out to be inspired choices. Not the least because both had music videos that closely reflected the songs’ different approaches to conveying the same message. Lennon’s “Imagine” is peaceful, aspirational, but somewhat subversive, while Edwin Star’s “War” is militant with its rejection of conflict.

The lyrics also provided an excellent contrast in the poetic use of language to convey meaning. After showing the two music videos, the students took the songs apart, stanza by stanza, and you can read the stridency in the punctuation and use of capitals in the lyrics of “War”:

WAR! good God y’all huh
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing…say it say it SAY IT!
WAR!…uh huh yeah huh!
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing…listen to me

We had a great discussion. I found this to be an excellent assignment that merged the poetry we’ve been studying in Language Arts with the history and peace education of Social World.


John Lennon – Imagine
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War today

Refugee camp in Dafur, Sudan (See below for image source)

One of the assignments in our discussion of the characteristics of war is to locate wars occurring around the world today. Foreign Policy magazine has a series of photos documenting 33 conflicts raging around the world today (I found the site via the Daily Dish). The focus is on the civilians who typically suffer the most in wars. From pictures of refugee camps in Pakistan to militants in Nigeria to Russian tanks in South Ossetia, the pictures are moving but not too graphic. What’s equally important though, is the brief description of the conflict beneath each picture.

Note: The image above is not from the Foreign Policy but from mknobil

C.O.D.: Call of “Duty”

The Call of Duty video games are pretty popular among the boys in my class (the gender stereotypes hold up very well with this one). Last week they tried to convince me that there was enough educational value in the games to allow them to bring it in for their overnight at school. They even created a PowerPoint presentation to convince me. Unfortunately, for them, it was not particularly effective. While there was a lot of information about the missions and the types of weapons there was not so much in the way of facts or concepts they learned (Subsequently, however, one student mentioned that he learned about favellas in the game. Though I don’t want to think about what they were doing in the flavellas).

I would really have liked to have had them talk about “Duty”, as in the title, and moral responsibility. I dropped a lot of hints but too no avail. They were not successful in their petition, but we did have a good discussion about the purpose of warfare (if any), and how to make a convincing presentation (consider your audience). I may let them try again next time.

As a side note, The Onion, has a great video on the next version of the game which will be even more realistic (you spend most of the time in the game sitting around and then you get shot in the back unexpectedly and the game is over.) The video may not be appropriate for middle schoolers however, because there is a scene where the soldiers are sitting around bored and talking about what soldiers often talk about.