Yorkship Family School Collection, Division of Armed Forces History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

The Yorkship Family School Collection in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian consists of letters, photographs, and keepsakes shared by Mrs. Jerry Davis’s 1968 fourth-grade class and their pen pals in the fourth platoon of Company A, First Cavalry Division, serving in the Vietnam War. This fourth-grade class at Yorkship Family School is a remarkable case study in socializing children to war. Not only was the teacher, Jerry Davis, such an exception to the largely unrealized potential of how elementary school curriculums commonly approached Vietnam—when the amount of teaching time devoted to the war varied tremendously by school, individual teacher, and year—but, moreover, it speaks directly to how making the war real to children helped them to reconcile a bitter national controversy and better understand Vietnam’s place in American history as adults.