![\"A](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/STOP-THE-WAR-IN-VIETNAM-NOW-e1432907968292.jpg\")
<\/a>\u201cThere still seems to be an immediacy with the Vietnam War because politicians will access it. How many times is Vietnam invoked as an analog about what\u2019s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, with mentions of a quagmire \u2013 that Afghanistan is not going to be another Vietnam?\u201d says Cathy Schlund-Vials, director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute and an associate professor of English. \u201cBut it\u2019s very much in the past. I wanted to bring up a conversation of what was this war?\u201d<\/p>\n
The exhibition, which continues through Aug. 9, includes selections from the University’s Archives & Special Collections that include the Poras Vietnam War Memorabilia Collection, Alternative Press Collection, and University Photographs Collection. The works include prints, paintings, and photographs by professional artists, as well as anti-war posters and pamphlets produced by UConn students at the time.<\/p>\n
Schlund-Vials says that many of today’s students know very little about the Vietnam War. When she teaches classes covering the war, she provides her students with context for the war, and also the history of student protest culture: “I want to highlight that there is a long history of student protest, and there were particular investments with a conflict that was highly unpopular.”<\/p>\n She hopes students look at the parallels and some of the disjuncture they recollect with Iraq and Afghanistan. “Of course, it\u2019s very different,” she says, “because there was a draft [during the Vietnam War].”<\/p>\n She notes that the news cycle at the time also allowed for more concentrated engagements with the war. “Now we\u2019re dealing with a news cycle that\u2019s overwhelming. [Today\u2019s] students know the images and the iconography of the war, but they don\u2019t understand the conditions that brought it into being, the politics; that it was a very different conflict in many ways.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the works on display at the Benton is the poster \u201cSTOP THE WAR IN VIETNAM NOW!\u201d(circa 1970), featuring a detail from Pablo Picasso\u2019s \u201cGuernica,\u201d one of the most famous anti-war paintings from 1937 that protested the Spanish Civil War. \u201cHANOI- ITS [sic] THE SAME WAR \u2013 KENT,\u201d a 1970 poster, references the shooting of four students at Kent State University during the Vietnam War protests. There are also copies of the Nov. 12, 1969 edition of \u201cUConn Free Press,\u201d a student publication, displaying a map of the planned protest march in Washington, D.C. The march started from the U.S. Capitol Building, and moved down Pennsylvania Avenue to the area known as The Ellipse, directly across from the White House.<\/p>\n For Schlund-Vials, looking more closely at the Vietnam War was not just a part of her scholarship, it also was a journey through her past. She and her twin brother were born in Thailand near Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base, which was used during the war by allied pilots including Americans, following a liaison between her Cambodian mother and an American serviceman. She and her brother were later adopted by a U.S. Air Force master sergeant and his Japanese wife seeking to adopt AmerAsian children.<\/p>\n While doing graduate work at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, focused on Asian and Jewish-American writing \u2013 \u201ctwo model minorities who are oftentimes compared to each other but rarely discussed\u201d \u2013 she researched a chapter comparing Holocaust narratives to Cambodian genocide narratives. This led to her book, War, Genocide, and Justice<\/em> (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), which included a study of the connections between the Khmer Rouge \u2013 the Cambodian Communist followers of the North Vietnamese Army\u00a0\u2013 and the U.S. bombing of the Cambodian countryside during the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n \u201cThe conditions that brought me into being were connected to that,\u201d Schlund-Vials says. \u201cI find I\u2019m marching more and more back to the war, because there are so many assumptions made about it.”<\/p>\n She says her research has brought her to the realization that people’s individualized recollections have nuanced the war: \u201cWhen I talk to Vietnam War veterans, what they remember about the war is not the Hollywood treatment of the war. They remember the Vietnamese translator, the families they got to know, or the children they would see around the base.”<\/p>\n Schlund-Vials wanted the Benton exhibit to recollect and honor those memories, but also to take the protest movement seriously. “That\u2019s what it ended up becoming,” she says. “Everybody had a relationship to this war at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>