Welcome to the digital exhibit of My Viet Nam Story: Oral History Project at UC Irvine! The project expands and diversifies our efforts to capture, document, and preserve valuable eyewitness testimonies while they are still available. 

Working from spoken testimonies of those who participated in or witnessed historical events, the project attempts to illuminate the lives of individuals and communities whose voices and perspectives may be marginalized or neglected in conventional interpretations of the war.  By examining the war at the personal level, the project emphasizes profound social and cultural changes and lasting political, economic, moral, and intellectual legacies that the war brought about in the postwar era.

Interviewers of the project conduct research and oral history interviews with narrators who had first-hand experience of living through the war era.  Those interviewed consisted of American, Korean, and Vietnamese veterans involved in the conflict, Vietnamese citizens who experienced violence on their homeland with their own eyes, as well as Americans who witnessed and protested against the war in the US.  The stories of various veterans include descriptions of their arduous training before deployment, a shared sense of duty to their country, and adjusting to civilian life after the war ended.  The stories of the civilians demonstrate a great change in social norms and cultural standards as a result of the war, and how these fluctuations affected their lives both before and after the Fall of Sài Gòn in April 30th, 1975.

The project strives to include all viewpoints of the Viet Nam war era out of courtesy for those affected by the war.  We hope that these exhibits highlight the voices of those who lived through this time.  The interviews serve as a basis for these digital exhibits which expand on the themes from the interviews using scholarly sources, comparing the personal experiences of the narrators to what historians have written and documented about the war.  These interviews along with other related materials such as the transcripts and field notes will be housed at the Special Collections at UCI Libraries and can also be accessed through the Calisphere.

A number of interviews of the project are conducted by students at UCI as part of the upper-division history course “The Viet Nam War Seen Through Oral History” taught annually by Professor of History Nguyễn Dịu-Hương.  The students learn about the history of the Viet Nam War and conduct their research through a multitude of mediums.  After learning about the Viet Nam war, each student receive training on oral history theory and methods alongside the best practices on interviewing.  The students have opportunities to visit the Orange County and Southeast Asian Archive at the libraries of the University of California, Irvine where they access a plethora of primary and secondary sources pertaining to the Viet Nam war.  Guest speakers are invited to the campus to elaborate upon the war experience from both the Vietnamese and American perspective.  The students also visit the Museum of the Republic of Vietnam, as well as attend the flag salute ceremonies at the Viet Nam War Memorial in Little Sài Gòn in Orange County to understand how the war permanently changed those affected by it in the present.

If you are interested in sharing your story of your life in Viet Nam during the war, please feel free to contact us via the Google form under the tab Contact Us, or email us at myvietnamstory@gmail.com.