I looked up Baldwin Wallace College on Wiki... interesting, quite a history. Was Kent State nearby?
***I took a college course ... “The History of Vietnam”. It was the fast version, very birds-eye view***
I imagine you were lucky it was an abbreviation. My memory of 'nam is captured in the Mel Gibson movie 'We Were Soldiers'. I can bring myself to watch it but it wrenches my gut. I refuse to watch 'Platoon'!
Our finest and our best thrown into a pit needlessly.
Kent State was about 35-40 miles southeast of Cleveland.
The Vietnam course at school was not anything like your experience, I’m certain. I’ve had a couple of friends confide as to what went on in the real world. It was more of a view of the strategies and the “who done it” kind of thing (thinking Nixon/Kissinger/Ho Chi Minh) with an overview of the situation from the time that the French were there to the US involvement to our departure.
Two friends give me some first-hand knowledge of the battlefield. One was a guy with whom I was drinking and he opened up about it, the other was a Marine on hill 55 that gave me a short book that his CO wrote that described a multitude of situations that occurred during their service in theater.
The first guy spoke only of Tet - he was on a base, basically in charge of keeping the beer cool in their underground makeshift cooler area - until Tet. His description, and I fail to tell it as he did, was that the VC just kept coming and coming and he and the folks on the base just kept shooting and shooting.
The story of Hill 55 was better written out, but it took Mac’s CO some 30 years to finish writing it. I have an autographed copy. It is a synopsis of his diary with situational descriptions written in.
Truly, a more important education that that class at BW, even though I really liked the class. I missed the draft by maybe 3 or 4 years tops.
If you haven't read the entire book, it is worth reading. The movie was quite accurate but was only the beginning battle. The follow on had a large number of our troops moving from the first location to another location. They were ambushed and badly mauled on the way. It is practically a miracle any got out alive.
It was an ugly open to our part in an ugly war.