Overview

For American children raised exclusively in wartime--that is, a Cold War containing monolithic communism turned hot in the jungles of Southeast Asia--and the first to grow up with televised combat, Vietnam was predominately a mediated experience. Walter Cronkite was the voice of the conflict, and grim, nightly statistics the most recognizable feature. But as involvement grew, Vietnam affected numerous changes in child life, comparable to the childhood impact of previous conflicts--chiefly the Civil War and World War II--whose intensity and duration also dominated American culture. In this protracted struggle that took on the look of permanence from a child's perspective, adult lives were increasingly militarized, leaving few preadolescents totally insulated. Over the years 1965 to 1973, the vast majority of American children integrated at least some elements of the war into their own routines. Parents, in turn, shaped their children's perspectives on Vietnam, while the more politicized mothers and fathers exposed them to the bitter polarization the war engendered. The fighting only became truly real insomuch as service in Vietnam called away older community members or was driven home literally when families shared hardships surrounding separation from cousins, brothers, and fathers.

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Chris Sorensen is the AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator of Brian Lies' Bats at the Beach, Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, and Margaret Peterson Haddix's Sent. Other narrations include Patricia Wood's Lottery and Jodi Picoult's Songs of the Humpback Whale, among many others. Joel P. Rhodes is a professor of history at Southeast Missouri State University. He is the author of several books, including Growing Up in a Land Called Honalee: The Sixties in the Lives of American Children, The Voice of Violence: Performative Violence as Protest in the Vietnam Era, and A Missouri Railroad Pioneer: The Life of Louis Houck.

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