Roger That: Vietnam War Comes Alive For Elmira Students

-Roger Neumann, Star-gazette

With a wall of photos of this area's Vietnam War dead as a backdrop, Denny Wolfe sat at a round table and surveyed the 10 young faces that looked back at him.

For an hour and a half or so on Thursday morning at the Vietnam Veterans War Museum on Davis Street in Elmira, he was their teacher.

"You can't go anywhere else in the world and have a better advantage to make something of yourself than you do in this country right here. Don't forget that," he told the group from Elmira's Alternative High School in the booming voice of a former Army sergeant.

"And the reason you have that right is because these guys (indicating the photos on the wall behind him) and the guys before us who served in the military of this country gave us that right."

Wolfe was the right man for this mission. A former crew chief and door gunner on Huey helicopters in Vietnam, he has been there and done that. He's a charter member of Chapter 803 of the Vietnam Veterans of America and director of the museum, where he seems right at home among the displays of uniforms, helmets, weapons, patches, medals, models and more.

His talk was part of a unit on veterans being taught this month by Deb Muth at the Alternative school. She said she scheduled the unit to finish just before Veterans Day, Nov. 11.

"With Veterans Day coming up, I wanted it to mean more to the kids than just a day off from school," she said.

She took the idea for the study from a teacher she worked with at Corning's West High School in her previous job.

"The feedback in the past was just phenomenal as to what the kids learned about serving our country," she said.

In addition to Vietnam, the unit includes reviews of World War II, the Korean War, Desert Storm and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since Muth teaches English, the lessons include readings of short stories and poems, and writing assignments. Each student is expected to interview a veteran or someone on active duty and write about that person.

Muth's unit plan also calls for students to write letters and create holiday greeting cards for troops in Afghanistan. And she plans a drive for items to fill care packages for troops in that war.

Her written plan says the "guiding question" for the unit is, "What does it mean to serve one's country and why should we honor those who do?"

Nate Walton, a junior whose father, Lawrence Walton, served in Vietnam, said, "It's very important to serve your country. You're doing it for your family, really, for the freedoms that we live with every day. If it wasn't for the people who served, we wouldn't be able to do the things that we do."

Of the visit to the museum, he said, "We're interested in knowing what it was like while they were there and after; the after-effects from the war."

Wolfe talked about all that. He mentioned the post traumatic stress disorder that keeps the war alive for him in nightly dreams. He talked about the defoliant Agent Orange that our government used for years and that now is being blamed for many illnesses that affect veterans ("The government is slowly killing a lot of us") and the controversial role of actress and activist Jane Fonda ("She, in our eyes, became a traitor") and even about the deadly anti-war protest at Kent State.

"The children of your generation need to know what happened and why," he said.

Muth said she has seen the children of friends go off to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of whom now suffers from PTSD.

"It's pretty tough to see that happen and see the effects on the family," she said.

Wolfe, who has lived with PTSD for more than 40 years, said, "We need to make sure that people never forget what we did."

People like Muth are helping to make sure they don't forget.