Birth of a nation: 50 years later, Vietnam continues to shape lives

When Laura Palmer graduated from Oberlin College in the ‘70s, she had no intention of joining U.S. troops in the jungles of Vietnam.

“I was going to go to law school and get the Black Panthers out of jail,” Palmer said, referencing the black activist group that arose in the 1960s. 

Instead, she ended up traveling to Vietnam “with a pediatrician [she] had met illegally hitchhiking on the interstate” and, eventually, reported the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Palmer and a panel of others told the story of the Vietnam War from their own perspectives Tuesday evening at the University Club. The event, titled Vietnam: New Lessons from an Old War, a Half-Century On, hosted by the University Honors College, included five professionals —  journalists, politicians and veterans — engaged in a panel discussion and Q-and-A to a standing-room-only crowd. The evening aimed to uncover what was, and still is, the Vietnam War. Cindy Skrzycki, a senior lecturer in Pitt’s English Department, helped assemble the panel. 

Panelists included Bob Kerrey, a Vietnam veteran who received the Congressional Medal of Honor and was a former U.S. senator and governor from Nebraska; Peter Arnett, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the Vietnam War with the Associated Press; Edward G. Miller, author and Dartmouth College expert on Vietnam; Thomas J. Vallely,  Vietnam veteran and former director of Harvard’s Vietnam Program; and Laura Palmer, a Vietnam reporter and author.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Executive Editor David Shribman moderated the discussion in which the panelists shed light on a conflict that reshaped domestic politics and life in the United States. 

In the United States, the rise in popularity of television ushered in a new era of access for the media during the Vietnam War, bringing footage of war into the living rooms of millions of Americans nationwide.

“There was no censorship during the Vietnam War, and that affected the way it was viewed,” Arnett said. “You saw dead bodies and bomb blasts.” 

Women, previously unrepresented among the ranks of the press corps during wartime, were granted a new opportunity in light of shifting social norms and lawsuits against discrimination in newsrooms, such as the lawsuit filed by the female employees of The New York Times against the newspaper’s publisher in the early 1970s.

“There was a lot of access. The fact that I was 22 years old and able to get a press pass and hop on choppers opened up opportunities,” Palmer said. “Women earned a spot at the table.” 

Arnett agreed that the war aided in launching young journalists’ careers, which were “built on relationships with [journalists and political leaders] in Vietnam.”

One of the aims of the evening was to use the Vietnam War as a tool to teach older and younger generations alike about lessons that Americans should have, and still should, learn.

Kerrey said that it is important to take the time to acquire sympathy to better understand war and those involved. In this case, he said that people often overlook the more than 500,000 Vietnam civilian casualties.

“They don’t have their wall,” Kerrey said.

Most traditional Pitt students might only know Vietnam through the eyes of veteran family and community members and memorial tributes on TV, because the war, fought between 1962 and 1975 is too far in the past for 18- to 22-year-olds to fathom. 

Miller, born in 1969, was the youngest of the panelists and said he studies the war from a historical standpoint. After completing his undergraduate degree in history, Miller focused his graduate studies in the 1990s on the Vietnam War’s aftermath, seeking the perspectives of non-Americans. 

The war, according to Miller, is a global history event that bridges the experience of the Vietnamese and Americans, but the modern Vietnamese remember the war through a common narrative. The country’s communist party established a narrative of nationalist victory over foreign invaders, which is still unclear and up for debate today.

Many members of the largely under 40-year-old population are still coming to grips with the sadness tied to their country’s past, according to Miller.

Audience members attended the event to gain a better understanding of the war’s significance in U.S. history.  

Cornelia Davis, retired Pitt professor and former Pittsburgh board of public education arts and humanities chairwoman, said she was outside of the U.S. during the Vietnam War.

“And I was hoping that tonight’s event would provide me with a sort of introspective view on the feelings about the war in the U.S.,” she said.  

Skrzycki said the Vietnam War raised an abundance of questions about the morality of war, the fairness and unfairness of the draft as well as insight into the culture of protests.

“Vietnam was a fulcrum for change in the U.S,” she said. 

While the panelists posed various perspectives on the war, they all agreed on its heavy impact on their lives. 

For Vallely, the combat sparked a subsequent interest in the humanities, ranging from music to poetry, as he worked to move on from the war that he said largely created him. 

“I became a more interesting person,” Vallely said. “Ignorance is terrible. Before you embark on something, you want to learn as much as you can.”

Palmer, on the other hand, said the war provided a lesson in love. 

“Love has bonds that can’t be shattered and that bullets can’t kill,” Palmer said. “Wars don’t end. They come home, and the women and children carry on the fight.” 

As the war winded down in 1975, Palmer was sitting in the Continental Hotel in Saigon when she heard pounding on her door. The capital had fallen, and she boarded a U.S. Marine helicopter to evacuate “a country that [she] so deeply loved.” 

Clutching the hand of a fellow journalist, she “was forced to watch a country slip away.” 

“I call Saigon my hometown because that is where the rest of my life began,” Palmer said.