I went to a couple of different American high schools in the 90s. Both were nationally ranked, both were awfully expensive, both sent their graduates on to those oh-so-elusive Good Colleges. We were taught much more about the shit-show that was French Indochina 1945-1954 than we were America's own little horrorshow from 1954 to, uh...1975 officially (wink wink).

The paradigm our instructors (some of whom at least were left leaning and intelligent people with doctorates who certainly knew better) were required to teach was that, once again: America had to go in and bail those goshdarn Europeans out of a mess they created while simultaneously trying to Teach a Lesson to those conniving little Asians. At the same time, a lot of student types were getting pretty worked up at home, and also some other malcontents (the Civil Rights people and what-have-you) were also causing some problems so we had to pull out before we really got a chance to teach that lesson and then the soldiers, who had just been over there being good soldiers, were treated terribly by a lot of ungrateful people when they came home and then a few years later was Reagan. Hooray!

I remember this one kid, whose dad was a swinging dick at the Board of Trade, stood up and said, more/less verbatim to our instructor, "Dude, even my dad was protesting the war back then. Do you know how fucked up shit had to have gotten for my dad to start giving a shit?"

Anyway, to the posters who are saying "Wow your educational system is terrible!" I say, "Well yes, it is, but the way we teach the Vietnam War is absolutely not evidence of how terrible the educational system is. It's an example of the educational system working exactly the way it has been designed to work."

People who are still mining OMG ORWELL for more examples of how America is now omg so totally like 1984 should consider moving over one slim volume on their dystopian literature bookshelf and thumbing through Brave New World for a few minutes.