Page 8
The Behrend Beacon
Texas Tech is home to premiere institute
for study of Vietnam War
by Chris Vaughn
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Nguyen Xuan Phong cupped his hand to his mouth and caught
his breath, his presentation in the process of being overtaken by
raw pain.
"I haven't spoken of this publicly in almost 30 yeas," he
said.
A fomier minister in the South Vietnamese government who
never left the country, Phong continued, almost preaching a ram
bling but captivating sermon of the causes, the casualties and
the consequences of the Vietnam War, on him, on veterans, on
the people of his nation.
"In conclusion, I have four words to add," he
said, addressing the Vietnamese government that
silenced him. "As Moses said in Exodus, `Let
my people go."'
His remarks, expected to be all but perfunc
tory, were stunning in their impact on the room,
which rose to cheer him for an unflinching, and
risky, speech.
It is all the more stunning that Phong, who
knew the Vietnam peace talks from the inside,
chose to break his silence in Lubbock, a city best
known for dust storms and cotton gins, Buddy
Holly and Big 12 football.
But every three years, a disparate group of Viet
nam experts from around the globe arrives for a
conference organized by the Vietnam Center at
Texas Tech University, which has quietly built
itself into a destination site for those wanting to study one of the
nation's most trying periods.
n'here are people from 11 countries in Lubbock to talk about
the Vietnam War," said the center's founder and director, James
Reckner. - That's fairly bizarre."
Reckner seems surprised by the developments of the past 12
years. The center has amassed the world's most complete re
search collection about the war aside from that of the U.S. gov
ernment, and the triennial conferences attract dozens of major
players from the period.
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the classified history of the
buildup in Vietnam known as the Pentagon Papers in 1971;
Luu van Loi, former assistant foreign minister for Vietnam and
a close friend of Ho Chi Minh; Gen. Nguyen Khanh, former
South Vietnam prime minister; and Phong made a lineup of
living history, not to mention one that would create instant fric
tion.
Reckner opened the conference with a warning: "We will
have civil discourse. If anyone should be uncivil, the officers of
the Lubbock Police Department will escort you from the con
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People laughed, but Reckner didn't. The Vietnam War, or the
American War to the Vietnamese, can still generate a barrelful
of nzd-hot emotions.
The fact that someone is as likely to argue as to agree is what
draws many professors here.
Reckner organizes an exotic. tension-infused conference. Men
who spent years in communist re-education camps, active-duty
Vietnamese officers, former prime ministers and ambassadors.
American combat veterans and bowtied professors all share the
stage.
He enjoys having participants from the war at the confer
ences because they provide a constant reality check to academ
ics who know the war through books and classrooms.
`This is the only place I know where anybody is welcome,"
said Keith Taylor, a Cornell University professor and an expert
in Southeast Asia. "Most conferences are specialized, where
people already agree on things. Most of my colleagues, most of
my students, aren't prepared to be in a mix like this."
A few hours later, Taylor was forcefully informed by an Army
veteran that he was flat wrong - about everything.
The first conference was in 1993. Twenty-four speakers came,
none from overseas. Former CIA director William Colby at
tended, though he had to pay his own hotel bill. The conference
dealt exclusively with military topics.
This year, almost 100 presenters attended from I I countries,
including Canada, France, Denmark, Poland, South Korea and
Australia. Their lectures topics included Lyndon B. Johnson,
Amerasians, combat medicine, women in war and Vietnam
ese-Chineserteatiers. This time, the speakers' hotel bills were
covered.
Wilbur Scott, a sociology professor at the University of Okla
homa who served in Vietnam, was particularly pleased to see
the conference draw more anti-war viewpoints, something that
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Friday, April 26, 2002
-James Reckner, director of tthe Vietnam
Center at Texas Tech University, on
keeping emotions under control at the
annual Vietnam conference
may have been missing in previous conferences.
"I'm still a participant in this with my own strongly held
views." Reckner said. "I'm a hard-core conservative. At the
same time, I'm an educator. I believe in the classic liberal idea
of education."
Reckner came to Texas Tech in 1988 after a brief teaching
stint at Texas A&M.
Shortly after he arrived at Tech's history department, Reckner
asked 100 freshmen a series of questions about post-World War
Il history. Only one could identify the general most associated
with the Vietnam War, Gen. William Westmorland.
"1 knew I had to teach a course on the Vietnam War," he said.
"But I went to the library to prepare and found that our resources
were remarkably sparse. They weren't enough
to support an undergraduate course, let alone a
graduate course."
The university gave Reckner $3OO a year
to buy materials for the library, but he struck out
on a far more ambitious plan - to create a place
to gather and preserve material from the war, a
place to study the war.
He called his idea the Vietnam Center. In
October 1989, the board of regents approved the
plan. The first donation to the archives were the
letters from a Slaton, Texas, boy to his mother,
from Vietnam.
"In the first years, we didn't get much sup
port," he said. "The Vietnam Center was my
hriefi-ace then "
Twelve year later, if "center" implies build
ing, it shouldn't. The Vietnam Center is in the basement of the
math building, and the archives are in an annex of the main
library.
Plans for a free-standing building have been delayed because
of the $2O million-plus cost, all of which must be raised pri
vately.
But the staff numbers 36, although half of those are under
graduate and graduate students. The budget, for the first time
boosted by federal money, has hit $1.25 million.
Its collection includes 20,(X/) books, 30,000 photographs, 4
million pages of documentation and several thousand detailed
maps of Southeast Asia.
Berkeley still has a notable collection of Vietnam-related ma
terial, as does Cornell. But in the view of many people, Tech's is
incomparable. Much of the reason, they say, is because the cen
ter is in Lubbock, where Vietnam wasn't a dirty won' in 1989.
"The climate here was conducive," said Ed Marolda, senior
historian with the Naval Historical Center in Washington. "I'm
not sum it could have been done anywhere but the Southwest."
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Air Force cadets face
hackers in cyberbattle
The military's might increasingly depends on computers,
but that created a target for the enemy.
Air Force Academy cadets are finding out this week how
hard it can be to protect computers from bad guys.
They are playing defense against some of the best hackers:
computer experts from military and intelligence agencies.
It's the second annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a compe
tition involving the Air Force Academy, the Military Acad
emy at West Point, the Naval Academy, the Coast Guard
Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School.
Students at each school are being attacked by the profes
sionals and scored on how well they defend their systems.
The competition began Monday and ends Friday.
Computer defense is critical for the military, which has 2
1/2 million computers and is finding the number of cyber
attacks is exploding.
In 2000, there were more than 23,000 attempted attacks,
but officials refuse to say who was attacking. Last year,
attacks jumped to more than 41,000, said Army Maj. Barry
Venable, spokesman for Colorado Springs-based U.S. Space
Command, which oversees computer defense.
Attacks are up, but the military has gotten better at de
fending their systems, Venable said. "We have information
superiority," he said.
In a classroom at the Air Force Academy, 20 cadets are
learning how to have that superiority. Two weeks ago they
were given 13 computers and told to build defenses for them.
The computers were typical of the computers sold to con
sumers, full of holes that can be targeted by hackers to cap
ture systems.
These computer science and computer engineering ma
jors built such defenses as firewalls and e-mail protections,
and studied hacking tools.
For many of the cadets in the exercise, it's the first time
they have applied their book knowledge to defending com
puters.
"It's raw experience you can't get in the classroom," Steven
Norris, a 21-year-old senior, said - Ibesday. "You have to
make mistakes. It's like a mechanic learning to fix a car in a
book. You have to touch a car."
Norris and some of his classmates spent five hours or
more a day in the lab this week, monitoring and responding
to attacks by the "red forces."
By late Tuesday, the aggressors successfully broke into
one of the cadets' systems, costing them points in the com
petition.
Cadet Jay Ford, 22, a senior, plans to fly jets, but he finds
value in the exercise. - • •
"The problemis always there. Computer security needs
to be a mindset, not just a series of Phttices," he said.
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by John Diedrich
The Gazette (KRT)
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