Students Learning About Vietnam From Vets
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: Twenty-five years later, American high school students are learning about the Vietnam War as history. CNN's Jeff Flock reports the lesson comes not only from books, but from people who were actually there.</s>RET. CPT. ANNE RYCHLIK, U.S. ARMY: So this was my field jacket.</s>JEFF FLOCK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Anne Rychlik: Army nurse, Da Nang, 1970, visits Stevenson High, Lincolnshire, Illinois, 30 years later.</s>RYCHLIK: I think the hardest thing that I did was put people in body bags, people who weren't much older than some of you.</s>FLOCK: Painful history leaping from the pages of their books to real life.</s>RYCHLIK: Drugs were everywhere. You could get marijuana. You could get heroin. You could get anything you wanted. And I had two of my corpsmen come in with needles in their arms and die, 18 years old.</s>FLOCK: When John Bolger teaches Vietnam today, he brings in the people who were there. They bring real stories along with their pictures, bronze stars, boots.</s>RYCHLIK: Girls, you will note that this is the smallest size they come in. This is a size 5.</s>FLOCK: No bored looks here, but plenty of questions. .</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you ever have second thoughts?</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How did your family react act to you going to the war?</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Did people kind of think that, you know, you weren't really that important, and no, the actual soldiers were more important than you were.</s>FLOCK: Rychlik answers them all.</s>RYCHLIK: I'll tell you one of the most trying stories that I have, which -- let me see if I can get through this one.</s>FLOCK: It is the story of six dead GIs blown up by a land mine and brought to her</s>ER. RYCHLIK: Sitting on a bench at the back of the emergency room was a little boy about 12 years old, and they had brought him in because he was the one that detonated the mine that killed them.</s>FLOCK: A story no history book could do justice.</s>JEREMY EMMER, STUDENT: I had barely any idea of what happened in Vietnam.</s>FLOCK: They do now.</s>JESSICA HAYES, STUDENT: I just found out like two days ago when I started talking to my dad that we were studying Vietnam, I just found out that my uncle was in it, and like I didn't know. I didn't like -- nobody ever wanted to talk about it, I guess, in my family.</s>RYCHLIK: The first 20 years or so years you didn't talk about it, because people didn't ask. They didn't want to know.</s>FLOCK: Now they want to know. I'm Jeff Flock, CNN, in Chicago.