Welcome to the website for Haverford College’s Viet Nam Wars oral history project. 

This website collects eight interviews centered around the period of the Viet Nam Wars.

These interviews were conducted by students at Haverford College as part of a history course on the Viet Nam Wars taught by Professor Nguyen Diu Huong in the Fall of 2018. The course focused on the period of Vietnamese history beginning in 1945, when Viet Nam declared its independence, and ending in 1975 with the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army. Pairs of students from the class were matched with interviewees with significant experiences relating to the period, including five American veterans of the conflict, one South Vietnamese veteran, one Cambodian civilian who lived in Vietnam after 1975, and an American peace activist. They then conducted interviews, noteworthy clips of which are included on the pages of this website. The students then used their interviews as the basis for a research paper, a reflection paper, and a presentation. The research papers expanded on themes from the interviews using scholarly sources, comparing the experiences of individual interviewees with what historians have written about the period.

Under the “Interviews” tab, you will find a page for each of the interviewees. These pages include brief biographies of the interviewees, clips from the interviews conducted with them, links to research and reflection papers, quotes from student reflections on process, and other material related to each interviewee’s experience.