According to event sponsor James Ziegler, the media center is scheduled to hold its first ever Vietnam veterans event on Friday, April 29th. Over the course of the day, students participating in this event will have the opportunity to greet and converse with several veterans who have experienced the Vietnam War. Ziegler said the event will begin at 8:30 a.m. and will end at 2:30 p.m.

“There’s going to be, over the course of the day, a little over 20 Vietnam veterans that are in attendance,” Ziegler said. “The goal is to give students an opportunity to meet with veterans who experienced the war first hand, lived through it, and give students an opportunity to help bring what we’re studying in class to life by interacting and speaking with these guys and hopefully giving students a very well-rounded perspective of the war.

According to Ziegler, a broad spectrum of veterans will be attending. Such examples include an actively anti-war poet and career military men who have retired as major generals.

“We have guys who enlisted in the military, guys who went through West Point and other people who were drafted as well, so it is really a wide spectrum and all of those views being represented will make it a good learning opportunity for students.” Ziegler said.

Since this event was intended to be an enrichment experience for current students enrolled in U.S. history, Ziegler said student attendance to the event will be mostly restricted to U.S. history students, with the exception of a few English classes that hope to learn about the anti-war poet.

“We have so many U.S. history students: we’re going to have 180 kids down there in the library,” Ziegler said. “Since we have so many, we didn’t want to open it up to too much more than that, at least for the first year. Now, future years, we may open it up to an even larger group, but there’s just so many kids in U.S. history we thought that we don’t want to overdo it.”

According to Ziegler, he got the idea for this event from a past teaching experience that Ziegler said he wanted to pass on to CHS.

“I had a temporary teacher position at Lawrence North (High School) last year, and it was something I tried out over there,” Ziegler said. “We had only 13 veterans last year, but it went really well. When I asked the students what their favorite thing we did all year was, as least when I was teaching the class, probably 60 to 70 percent of the kids all said the Vietnam veterans event, and so it was something that I wanted to recreate here at Carmel.

Although Ziegler said he spearheaded the creation of this new event, Ziegler said he couldn’t have done so without the assistance provided by other members of the CHS staff.

“I initiated it with the other U.S. history teachers, and they liked the plan. So I kind of got the ball moving. Mrs. Taft and the media specialists have all been extremely helpful in the process, and so everyone’s kind of pitching in. But I can’t say enough about what Mrs. Grimble and Mr. Shearin ended up doing for the program. They’ve been extremely helpful, and all the U.S. history teachers have also gotten behind it.” By Tony Tan <[email protected]>