Release date: Aug. 26, 2004

Election Brings Out Old Wounds, Says Prof, Vietnam Vet

As rival perspectives on the Vietnam War dominate this year's presidential election campaigns, students at Emory University's Oxford College will have a first-hand view of what the conflict and its aftermath were like from someone who was there.

Vietnam veteran and Oxford English professor Lucas Carpenter was drafted in 1968 just after starting graduate school. He served three years in the Army, including a tour of duty in Vietnam from 1969–70, earning a Bronze Star and rising to the rank of sergeant. After his discharge, he went to the University of North Carolina where he joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the group founded by Sen. John Kerry. He later published his first book of poetry, “A Year for the Spider,” based on his experiences in Vietnam.

This year's presidential election has brought to the forefront many of the old cultural wounds that remain from that era, he says. Both the Bush and Kerry campaigns have worked to portray their particular versions of the Vietnam War, Carpenter says. Outside groups such as the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," have attempted to neutralize Kerry’s credentials as a highly decorated combat veteran. As a result, Kerry's campaign has had to fight charges that his anti-war activities following Vietnam were unpatriotic, he says.

"The swift boat attack ads illustrate the split that characterized America at the time. Some involved felt the war was a noble purpose and victory could be accomplished, if not for the betrayal by traitors at home protesting the war. And then there were those like me and Kerry who were radicalized by what we saw and experienced. As a result, we wanted to do everything in our power to stop it when we came home. It is a divide that persists with veterans today," Carpenter says.

Carpenter says that although the Vietnam War seems like ancient American history to his students, many of them had family members who were involved with the war, and many are eager to learn more about it. He often uses the conflict as a touchstone in his contemporary literature classes, and this semester, students will discuss the Tim O'Brien novel "The Things They Carried," a story based on the Vietnam War.

"Enough time has elapsed for perspective and historical truth to evolve. I teach it from a perspective that the United States entered Vietnam with good intentions, but that the war quickly unraveled and the U.S. administration knew we had no chance of a clear victory. But, while looking for an honorable way out, hundreds of thousands died," says Carpenter, the Howard Candler Professor of English

With the United States embroiled in another war, students are able to draw some parallels between what happened then, and what is going on now in Iraq, he says. "The only good thing to be said about the Vietnam War is that it teaches us how easily we can be drawn into a quagmire by using military force to bestow freedom and democracy on a country that has never known either, a lesson we appear destined to learn yet again."

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