The Truth of War Art Project
Names
Audio
This is a list of American fatalities in the Vietnam War used to convey the incredible loss of life in war. The list does not include names of Vietnamese soldiers or victims of collateral damage. Assuming each name takes about two seconds to read, the entire list, which is over 58,000 names long, would take over 32 hours to say aloud. If this list was complete and contained the names of the all the dead, including those killed in the civil wars in Laos and Cambodia, it would be anywhere from 1.5 million to nearly 4 million names long. A complete list could take three months to read. This shows that not only is war extremely costly, but has many unintentional side effects. The civil wars in Cambodia and Laos were the result of the destabilization of the region by the war in Vietnam.
Liam Foster
January 2016
Audio
This is a list of American fatalities in the Vietnam War used to convey the incredible loss of life in war. The list does not include names of Vietnamese soldiers or victims of collateral damage. Assuming each name takes about two seconds to read, the entire list, which is over 58,000 names long, would take over 32 hours to say aloud. If this list was complete and contained the names of the all the dead, including those killed in the civil wars in Laos and Cambodia, it would be anywhere from 1.5 million to nearly 4 million names long. A complete list could take three months to read. This shows that not only is war extremely costly, but has many unintentional side effects. The civil wars in Cambodia and Laos were the result of the destabilization of the region by the war in Vietnam.
Liam Foster
January 2016
The Truth of War
This project was an exploration of the Vietnam War and its origins, morality, and conclusion. Like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it came to us in 5 parts. We read the novel The Things They Carried, participated in a socratic seminar about aforementioned book, conducted interviews with Vietnam War veterans which were posted on StoryCorps, composed an essay about the Gulf of Tonkin, and took a final. The Things They Carried was phenomenal; read it. My thoughts on the seminar are below, as is the recording of our interview and my timed-write. In addition, I also read the Sorrow of War for an extra challenge. We were supposed to have a seminar on this work as well, but never got around to it.
Our seminar reflected on the meaning of truth in the context of war and its stories as well as the concept of psychological death as change and real death. I like the latter topic more and will focus on it. I usually dominate seminars and have trouble leaving room for others, but this time I felt that I did well. I helped to guide the discussion rather than being the discussion. While attempting to guide the discussion I sometimes lost everyone. If you are a guide and you do a great job guiding people for most of the time and lose them somewhere, you would probably get fired. I need to work on not getting fired. I also got a ‘yellow card,’ which is a warning to stop doing something in the discussion, for being too meta. For more, go here: https://xkcd.com/1447/. In our conversation we were contemplating whether or not someone dies after a life changing experience because the person they were no longer exists. People disagreed with me, explaining how memory keeps the old person alive inside of the new person so that any one person is like an ogre and contains layers. I challenged them to remember what they did in math several days ago, at which point I received the card. I was going to wrap it around to how because one could not remember who they were, the person they were was obsolete, oblivious, and, in a way, dead. I had lost everybody at this point in the whiteout of a storm that is my mind. Oops. In this seminar I learned about how everyone is a snapshot of a series of similarly minded individuals that are dead and are waiting to be born, while thinking about another kind of death. One can die while still living. They can change, and the attempt at the retrieval of the old person is just as useless and in vain as attempting to revive the clinically deceased.
We used the StoryCorps app to record a Vietnam War veteran’s stories and answers to questions we had come up with beforehand. Our interview went very smoothly except for a short interruption when someone walked into the room. Although the interview was quite easy, I was still able to learn quite a bit. The discussion with our veteran was quite intriguing. One point that our volunteer made that stuck out to me was that the military is the most pacifist organization on the planet because they know the true cost of war. This and his reasoning that military power is necessary because there needs to be a backup when negotiations fail lead me to think about the military differently. This interview fundamentally changed my viewpoint when it comes to war. Although my stance has changed little, the path that I take to get there has changed. Our interview, which was recorded in two parts, can be found below.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident is a controversial subject, and with the release of the so called Pentagon Papers, a large portion of the government account of the ‘attack’ has been thrown into question. Our task was to compose an essay in two hours that displayed how much of the account was incorrect and how much was trustworthy utilizing various historical thinking skills we learned in class. Before the essay, (and really everything else I do) I did a load of extra research. This is kind of a double edged sword because my extra research allowed me to not utilize the skills I learned to the extent expected in the project. These skills, however, allowed me to learn about the motivation behind the war. This lead me down into a deeper understanding of the motivations, mistakes, and misunderstandings behind the Vietnam War. I was able to use these extra sources to back up the ones I already had as opposed to replacing them. This is all shown in my timed-write, which is attached below.
The war was a mistake born from miscommunication, aggression, paranoia, and ignorance. We believed that the Vietnamese were going to side with the USSR and Red China. We were wrong and a brief history lesson would have taught us that Vietnam and China had been enemies for millennia. Vietnam only wanted to do what was right for its people. Students get annoyed at the concept of learning history because they cannot make the connection between the lack of knowledge of the history of Vietnam and the loss of millions of lives that resulted. My truth of war is in its preventability. With adequate knowledge of the other side's point of view, we can work things out without loss of life. While it is necessary to have a military as a backup for when negotiations fail, it should only be used when all else falls apart. There is no truth in battle, only in how it could have been prevented. There is no truth in death, only in life due to the ability to communicate with the animate. Communication, history, knowledge, and their pursuit are one key on a massively complicated keychain that is the human experience and its answers.
Our seminar reflected on the meaning of truth in the context of war and its stories as well as the concept of psychological death as change and real death. I like the latter topic more and will focus on it. I usually dominate seminars and have trouble leaving room for others, but this time I felt that I did well. I helped to guide the discussion rather than being the discussion. While attempting to guide the discussion I sometimes lost everyone. If you are a guide and you do a great job guiding people for most of the time and lose them somewhere, you would probably get fired. I need to work on not getting fired. I also got a ‘yellow card,’ which is a warning to stop doing something in the discussion, for being too meta. For more, go here: https://xkcd.com/1447/. In our conversation we were contemplating whether or not someone dies after a life changing experience because the person they were no longer exists. People disagreed with me, explaining how memory keeps the old person alive inside of the new person so that any one person is like an ogre and contains layers. I challenged them to remember what they did in math several days ago, at which point I received the card. I was going to wrap it around to how because one could not remember who they were, the person they were was obsolete, oblivious, and, in a way, dead. I had lost everybody at this point in the whiteout of a storm that is my mind. Oops. In this seminar I learned about how everyone is a snapshot of a series of similarly minded individuals that are dead and are waiting to be born, while thinking about another kind of death. One can die while still living. They can change, and the attempt at the retrieval of the old person is just as useless and in vain as attempting to revive the clinically deceased.
We used the StoryCorps app to record a Vietnam War veteran’s stories and answers to questions we had come up with beforehand. Our interview went very smoothly except for a short interruption when someone walked into the room. Although the interview was quite easy, I was still able to learn quite a bit. The discussion with our veteran was quite intriguing. One point that our volunteer made that stuck out to me was that the military is the most pacifist organization on the planet because they know the true cost of war. This and his reasoning that military power is necessary because there needs to be a backup when negotiations fail lead me to think about the military differently. This interview fundamentally changed my viewpoint when it comes to war. Although my stance has changed little, the path that I take to get there has changed. Our interview, which was recorded in two parts, can be found below.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident is a controversial subject, and with the release of the so called Pentagon Papers, a large portion of the government account of the ‘attack’ has been thrown into question. Our task was to compose an essay in two hours that displayed how much of the account was incorrect and how much was trustworthy utilizing various historical thinking skills we learned in class. Before the essay, (and really everything else I do) I did a load of extra research. This is kind of a double edged sword because my extra research allowed me to not utilize the skills I learned to the extent expected in the project. These skills, however, allowed me to learn about the motivation behind the war. This lead me down into a deeper understanding of the motivations, mistakes, and misunderstandings behind the Vietnam War. I was able to use these extra sources to back up the ones I already had as opposed to replacing them. This is all shown in my timed-write, which is attached below.
The war was a mistake born from miscommunication, aggression, paranoia, and ignorance. We believed that the Vietnamese were going to side with the USSR and Red China. We were wrong and a brief history lesson would have taught us that Vietnam and China had been enemies for millennia. Vietnam only wanted to do what was right for its people. Students get annoyed at the concept of learning history because they cannot make the connection between the lack of knowledge of the history of Vietnam and the loss of millions of lives that resulted. My truth of war is in its preventability. With adequate knowledge of the other side's point of view, we can work things out without loss of life. While it is necessary to have a military as a backup for when negotiations fail, it should only be used when all else falls apart. There is no truth in battle, only in how it could have been prevented. There is no truth in death, only in life due to the ability to communicate with the animate. Communication, history, knowledge, and their pursuit are one key on a massively complicated keychain that is the human experience and its answers.
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