MURFREESBORO — For
the second time in two years, MTSU study-abroad students will venture to
Vietnam for a closer look at a complex and fascinating country in Southeast
Asia.
Dr. Derek Frisby’s “Public Memory and the Vietnam War” class
of two graduate students and six undergraduate students will leave Metropolitan
Nashville International Airport Friday, March 7, and will return Friday, March
21.
While last year’s excursion was a more general examination
of the country, Frisby said this year’s learning experience will hone in more
on the Vietnam War itself.
“On this trip, we’re going to focus a lot more on the
demilitarized zone,” said Frisby, a faculty coordinator with a joint
appointment to the College of Liberal Arts and the Office of International
Affairs. “We’re going to do some more in-depth studies of the battle for Hue
City as well as the battle for Khe Sanh.
“And, thanks to all the resources and the experience we
gained last year, we have a much better idea of where our MTSU casualties were
located, and we’ll be able to hit a number of those sites this time, as well.”
Those MTSU casualties include James T. Luscinski, who died
in Quang Tri province on Oct. 8, 1969, when his helicopter crashed during a
rescue support mission, and Kenneth Lee Kirkes, who was killed by small arms
fire in Quang Nam on Feb. 9, 1968.
Both Luscinski and Kirkes are among the members of the MTSU
community whose names are engraved on the university’s Veterans Memorial wall
in front of the Tom Jackson Building.
While students will stay in mostly urban hotels, part of
this year’s class will venture out from Hue City to the Laotian border for four
or five days to the site of the Battle of Hamburger Hill, where American and
South Vietnamese forces fought North Vietnamese forces May 10-20, 1969.
Frisby says students will interpret the battle of Hue City
by putting together a theoretical plan for establishing informational markers
at key sites. Each student will be assigned a particular aspect of the battle
for a virtual interpretive plan that will be posted online.
The students also will walk the trail taken by the so-called
“ghost patrol,” a group of two U.S. Marine squads that departed from their base
at Khe Sanh on Feb. 25, 1968, only to be caught in an ambush as they entered a
tree line outside the base. Seventeen Marines were killed and 10 more perished
in a March 30 attempt to recover the bodies of the dead.
Frisby said he believes this year’s students, like their
predecessors in 2013, will come to understand a less demonized view of the
Vietnamese people than was perpetrated during the war.
“I think our students came back with a sense that these
Vietnamese people are very resilient,” Frisby said. “They have an
entrepreneurial spirit today. That’s for sure. And we were just able to sort of
humanize the Vietnamese in ways I don’t think that past interpretations of the
Vietnam War have been able to do.”
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