John Ernst, The Vietnam War Scholar

Date & Time: Thursday, July 1st at 5 PM
Location: Professor John Ernst's Office at Morehead State University
Interviewee: John Ernst, Vietnam War Scholar

Oral History Team:
Interviewer 1 – Dede Tran
Interviewer 2/Photographer – Tuan Anh Vu

Summary: After a two hour drive with the green and hills of Kentucky flanking both sides of our car windows, we arrived to the vacant summer campus of Morehead State University.

Greeting us from our car was John Ernst with a smile and an escort to his office where the books on the wars of the world were stocked without a gap to spare.


John Ernst is a historian, Vietnam War scholar and a professor of history at Morehead State University. Author of The War That Never Ends and Forging A Fateful Alliance. Trained at the University of Kentucky under one of the leading figures on The Vietnam War, George Herring, author of America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam. John has been a major contributor to the VNOH project, advising on interview questions, as well as participating in an interview with a former Vietnamese operative working with the CIA during the war.


The interview began with the interviewee questioning the interviewers. It'd seem that John, with a certain southern professor sensibility and charm, was just as curious about us, our Vietnamese American experience, as were we of him and his scholarly work. Our scripted interview questions were not only satisfied by his articulate answers but were branched outward to other engrossing and personal subjects by his candid thoughts and words.

John, having been too young for military service, experienced the war in black and white with Walter Cronkite on his grandparents' television set. He elucidated with a grain of franked humor about the America's relationship with The Vietnam War. From how the release of the film Apocalypse Now in 1979, shortly after the end of the war, captured the surreal and dark nature of the war for veterans -- and America, to Rambo and Chuck Norris in the 80s and 90s when an action hero meant a Vietnam Vet.


The reiteration of the importance of understanding the war through different vantage points in order for America to finally come to term with the impacts of the war, both in terms of human casualty and psychological cost, was a strong theme coming from this Vietnam War scholar during our forty minutes conversation. Thus, he applauded the Vietnam Oral History Project for our attempt to facilitate the views and voices that have been, in his words "lost rather than ignored" in the past.

Our conversation with John ended, not in his office but at our car, not because our words ran dry but by the long drive home and the sinking sun, not with a usual formal farewell and thank you but with a raincheck invitation for dinner.