Washington and Lee University
This year's program on American history will explore the causes, conduct and consequences of the Vietnam War. With one of the strongest faculty we've ever assembled, we'll probe the lessons of Vietnam and ponder as well what is perhaps the war's strangest irony: how the Communists won the war only, ultimately, to lose the peace. Anyone who has traveled recently to the rollicking capitalist marketplaces of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) can attest to this curious fact.
Why are such Monday morning reflections important? The answers are obvious. Vietnam is still embedded in America's national psyche. As a people, we have never successfully put the encounter behind us. Especially for the generation of the 1960s and '70s, strong emotions - sorrow, anger and guilt - endure. The war we fought in Vietnam (and at home) was the longest and one of the bloodiest in our nation's history. Families, along with the social compact, fractured in arguments over the war's conduct and mission. Human costs were profound, witnessed by 58,000 names carved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Five times that number returned home wounded. Enemy combatant losses totaled at least 10 times ours. Civilian casualties were vastly greater. What was the monetary cost? It is generally assumed that somewhere between $150 and $200 billion was expended fighting a war we did not win.
Why did we fail? Were Washington's Cold War assumptions wrong? Did we understand our adversary? Were America's military strategy and tactics flawed? To what extent was policy shaped by the personalities of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon? 
What roles did public opinion, the media and the anti-war movement play? The questions haunt us also because they still apply.
Faculty for the program include W&L emeritus professor of history Barry Machado; George Herring, author of America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam; and David Robarge, chief historian for the CIA. Alumni veterans of the conflict will share their stories. The program anticipates a trip to Vietnam in 2010. Our Vietnamese guide will spend the week on campus with us.
