Last Tuesday we began our look at the Vietnam War by listening to Mr. Kramer lecture about the background to the conflict and then watching from 30:30 until the end of the video embedded below.
During the lecture we also looked at these documents (Time Magazine Article, Reader's Digest Article) to get a better sense of what Communism looked like in both North and South Vietnam. We also looked at this correspondence between President Kennedy and a concerned citizen by doing a creative piece in our notebooks, trying to write the next letter in the correspondence.
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Today in class we continued to explore America's escalating involvement in Vietnam first by exploring the Tonkin Gulf Incident, looking at the resolution and Johnson's speeches while asking whether he made his case. We complicated our judgments by looking at what Robert McNamara later said about it in the film Fog of War.
After going over some key people and strategies found in this presentation, we watched some CBS news reports from the war, reflecting on the footage in creative ways (visual, poetry, collage). The assignment for this weekend in addition to reading the assigned chapters from The Things They Carried is to find quotes from the novel to use as captions for at least three of your responses from today.
