Oral historian Jason Stewart will be leaving the Vietnam Archive on July 15, 2011, to pursue a teaching career in Mississippi. Jason has been with us for nearly three years, and we will certainly miss his hard work and devotion to the mission of the archive. Jason has been a strong advocate for America’s Vietnam veterans, and we greatly appreciate all he has done to help record their history. Please join us in wishing Jason and his family the absolute best in this transition and in all their future endeavors.

The Spring 2011 issue of the Friends of the Vietnam Center Newsletter is now available online.  This issue contains articles on many of the Vietnam Center and Archive events held this spring, including our 3rd annual Film Festival, the first half of the 2011 Guest Lecture Series, and the 7th Triennial Vietnam Symposium, as well as a special rememberance of DaNita Buckley.

If you would like to receive a full color printed version of this newsletter in your mailbox, please consider becoming a friend of the Vietnam Center.  Membership information can be found on our Firends of the Vietnam Center webpage.

Links:

Newsletters: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/friends/newsletters.php

Membership Information: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/friends/

Today is the Army’s 236th birthday!  So happy, happy birthday U.S. Army.  To celebrate the day we have created a small exhibit with Army materials from our collection.  To view the exhibit click on the link below.

http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/Army/army11.htm

In June 1971 the New York Times published the “Pentagon Papers,” officially titled the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Taskforce.  The release of these documents had a profound effect on American public opinion regarding the war, and has provided historians with an invaluable look at US policy making with regards to the Vietnam War.  Today, 40 years after the NYT publication, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released the entire official Report, including 2,300 pages of previously undisclosed material not included in the Senator Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers.  Hardcopies of the records will be available at the following locations: the National Archives facility at College Park, MD; the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, MA; the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, TX, and the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, CA.  The records are also available online in their entirety at http://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers/.For more information about the Pentagon Papers and the release of the records, see:

• The NARA Press Release regarding the release of the records
• The Pentagon Papers page on the NARA website

Also this week, Vietnam Center and Archive Director Stephen Maxner will accompany Mr. Tran Van Tuan, Minister of Home Affairs of Vietnam, and Dr. Vu Thi Minh Huong, the Director General of the State Records and Archives Department of Vietnam (the National Archivist of Vietnam), to Washington DC to meet with the Archivist of the United States, Mr. David Ferriero.  Following the meeting, the delegation and Dr. Maxner will return to Lubbock to discuss collaboration and joint projects between the Vietnam Center and Archive, the Vietnam State Records and Archives Department, and NARA.

The Vietnam Archive is proud to unveil its new program and online exhibit “Techsans in the Vietnam War.” We created this program to honor Texas Tech grads who served in the Vietnam War. Anyone can nominate a veteran for this program. The requirements are that the honoree graduated from Texas Tech University, before or after their service, and served in Vietnam between 1960–1975. If you nominate someone for this program, please assist us by filling out our Techsans in the Vietnam War Biographical Submission Form (available at the link below) and sending us images. If we have documents or images of an honoree in our collection, we will include them on their page, but the more information that you can provide to us the better. If you participate in this program, please consider donating your original images and documents to the archive, as we would love to be able to preserve materials from our TTU grads.

Once we receive your nomination, biography, and images, we will create a web page honoring or memorializing the Tech grad in our “Techsans in the Vietnam War” online exhibit. Please be aware that we want these pages to be well crafted, which means that we may take some time to put up an honor/memorial page, especially if we receive numerous requests at one time. We also reserve the right to exclude information or images from pages for any reason. If we receive a name with no images or biographical information and we are unable to find any information in our collection, we will add the name to a page in the exhibit that lists Tech grads that served and/or died in Vietnam and they will not have an individual page until we receive more information.

To start this program, we have memorial pages for three Texas Tech grads who were military officers who served and died in Vietnam. Please click on the exhibit link below to see the memorial pages for Lieutenant Lee Roy Herron, 1^st Lieutenant Louis K. Breuer IV and Major Samuel B. Cornelius.

To nominate someone for this program please contact Amy Mondt at vietnamarchive@ttu.edu.

To view the exhibit or find the Techsans in the Vietnam War Submission Form click this link. www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/TTU

For all the men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice for us and our freedoms, thank you.  Happy Memorial Day from the Vietnam Center and Archive staff.

Vietnam Memorial Wall Ryan Aranda - 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Air Cavalry Division Association Collection

LeAnn Thieman, nurse, author, and participant in “Operation Babylift,” will speak this week as part of our 2011 Guest Lecture Series.  LeAnn’s lecture will be held on Thursday, May 12th at 7:00pm in the Lanier Auditorium of the Texas Tech University School of Law.  Admission is free and open to the public.  The lecture will be followed by a book signing in the auditorium atrium.

The mission of the Vietnam Center and Archive Guest Lecture Series is to enrich the intellectual and cultural life of students, faculty, and the community at large by bringing distinguished individuals to campus for presentations on specific aspects of the Vietnam War, its lasting impact on American politics, society and culture, and on contemporary issues in Southeast Asia.

This lecture series is funded in part by a generous grant from the Helen Jones Foundation.  For more information on the 2011 VNCA Guest Lecture Series or about LeAnn Thieman see http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/GLS.

May 6 – 12 is Nurses Week; a week dedicated to saying thank you to nurses for all that they do for their patients and communities.  In honor of this week, the Vietnam Center and Archive has developed an online exhibit titled National Nurses Week – Celebrating the Nurses of the Vietnam War.  To see the exhibit please click on the title above or use the link at the bottom of this post.

1st Lieutenant Cheri Hawes, US Army Nurse Corps, at desk for Emergency Room, 91st Evacuation Hospital, Chu Lai, Vietnam

In addition to the exhibit, the VNCA is hosting LeAnn Thieman, the third speaker in our Guest Lecture Series.  Thieman is a nurse with over 30 years of experience who volunteered to help with Operation Babylift in the final days of the Vietnam War.  She is also an author in the popular Chicken Soup series and will speaking at the Lanier Auditorium at the Texas Tech Law School on Thursday May 12th at 7:00.  The lecture is free and open to the public.  For more information about LeAnn or the guest lecture series, please visit the Guest Lecture Series site.

LeAnn Thieman

For all the nurses, thank you for all that you do.

National Nurses Week – Celebrating the Nurses of the Vietnam War

www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/nurses/

Guest Lecture Series

www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/LectureSeries/2011.htm

Texas Tech University’s President Guy Bailey presented a special Lifetime Achievement Award to Vietnam Center founder Dr. James Reckner during the annual Global Vision Award ceremony to recognize the individual or office especially active in promoting campus internationalization during the previous year.  TTU’s Office of International Affairs hosted the award ceremony at the International Cultural Center, and this year’s event was held on April 21.

The Office of International Affairs selected Dr. Reckner because of his pioneering contributions to establishing the Vietnam Center and his dedication to the institution over many years.  Thanks to his efforts, and the dedicated staff he assembled, the Vietnam Center and Archives now hold one of the major collections of related documents in the world, and the Center organizes and hosts major events related to the Vietnam era. Dr. Reckner has also worked tirelessly to create a number of partnerships between Vietnamese institutions and TTU.  In addition, he has led initiatives to assist Vietnamese institutes of higher learning in a number of ways, such as establishing scholarships to allow Vietnamese students to attend university in their home country.

The annual Global Vision Award, first given in 2003, was created to recognize a faculty member, administrator or organization whose contributions inspired students to study and experience cultures abroad, as well as encourage a broader understanding of the world.  It has since expanded to recognize a broader achievement in promoting campus internationalization.

See more images from the award ceremony on our Facebook page

The Vietnam Center and Archive and the Texas Tech University Libraries present the 3rd Annual Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Film Festival from April 6th-13th.  This year’s festival features four films: Green Dragon; Rashomon; The Toll of the Sea; and Kim’s Story: The Road from Vietnam.  Each film will be shown twice at different dates and times, and all showings will be held in the Formby Room of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library.  Admission is free and open to the public.

Green Dragon tells the story of a group of Vietnamese refugees in 1975 at Camp Pendleton, and the Marines assigned to protect them as they await sponsorship in the United States.   Wed. 4/6 3:15pm; Tues. 4/12 7:00pm.

Rashomon is a classic Japanese crime mystery that depicts the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband through the very different perspectives and accounts of four witnesses: the rape victim, the rape victim’s murdered husband speaking through a medium, the bandit/rapist, and the narrator. Wed. 4/6 7:00pm; Thurs. 4/7 3:15pm.

The Toll of the Sea is the tragic love story of a Hong Kong girl who saves a drowning American man and falls in love with him. Show Times: Thurs. 4/7 7:00pm; Wed. 4/13 3:15pm.

Kim’s Story: The Road from Vietnam is a documentary film based on the inspirational life story of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, “the girl in the photo” who was severely burned in a Napalm attack on her village of Trang Bang, South Vietnam in 1972.  Show Times: Tues. 4/12, 3:15pm; Wed. 4/13 7:00pm.

Kim Phuc, the subject of Kim’s Story, will be speaking as part of the VNCA’s 2011 Guest Lecture Series on Thursday, 14th of April at 7:00pm in the Allen Theatre of the TTU Student Union Building.

For more information on the film festival or each of the films, including a complete list of show times, see http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/2011filmfestival.

See also: 2011 APAHM Film Festival Poster