What Really Happened in Vietnam: What Our Textbooks Do Not Want Us to Know.

Who chooses what information sticks in students' memory for a lifetime?  My guess, textbooks and of course, actually living through an event.  Textbooks glorification of American "good" overshadows any controversy in American history.  It becomes all too easy to overlook the items that are glazed over due to controversy because the authors do not put emphasis on the events, instead they focus on less important details of history.  For example, the Vietnam War is widely unknown by students today due to textbooks' descriptions that eliminate any vivid detail or discussion.  It is not only the text that the authors choose to censor; the images are chosen as uncontroversial, not for their historical impact.  In my freshman English class, I chose to write a research paper on the protests against the Vietnam War due to my lack of knowledge on the topic.  It was one of the most interesting paper topics that I have written on; it even got submitted to a textbook!-Should this not alert us to something very telling about our students?  If students are engaged and find a topic interesting, aren't they more likely to work harder (without event thinking about it)?  So, why shelter students, sure it might cause students to question things, but that's what supposed to make our country so great-being part of a democracy.  Back to my paper topic,  while researching, I encountered the same pictures that Loewen presented in the text that have been eliminated from textbooks due to the controversial nature of the picture; however, these are pictures of war; they are a reality; the students should see all sides to the nature of war, not be sheltered, hence stunting true learning.   The pictures I encountered and the first hand accounts that I read have left a burning impression of the war in my mind just as it did with Americans that lived through the War.