We encourage you to develop additional lessons to supplement Regret to Inform, and to share these with other teachers on the website. Below are the outlines of some follow-up activities.

• Additional questions.
  If you decide to show this film as an introduction to a longer unit on Vietnam, use it to generate a list of questions that students want to pursue about the war. Use these questions to guide your inquiry.
  
  
• Letter writing.
  Have students read the letters that Barbara Sonneborn wrote Jeff Gurvitz, twenty years after he was killed. Allow them to write a letter to a loved one who has died. Sonneborn's letters are posted on the web at www.pbs.org/pov/regret/bg_barb.html.
  
  
• Agent Orange.
  Norma Banks' husband died of the effects of Agent Orange poisoning. As she says in the film, "Sometimes the effects of a war don't happen right away." Encourage students to research the lingering effects of Agent Orange—on Vietnam vets, and on the people and environment of Vietnam. Ask students to think of how they might be able to make a difference on this issue.
  
  
• Land mines.
  Land mines continue to maim and kill in Southeast Asia—indeed the area where Jeff Gurvitz was killed is still infested with mines. Encourage students to learn more about the global movement to ban landmines and about solidarity efforts to help rid regions of mines. See the excellent video, Arms for the Poor, available from the Teaching for Change catalog, www.teachingforchange.org.
  
  
• Herbicides/defoliation.
  Encourage students to research the use of herbicides in the escalating war in Colombia. As of the writing of this guide in early 2001, the United States government is providing Colombia with large amounts of broad-spectrum herbicides—poisons which kill anything that's green—to spray over vast stretches of the countryside, including fragile rainforests. The alleged aim is to stamp out coca production in the country.
  
  
• Memorial.
  Tell students that they have been given the task of constructing a memorial to the women—both Vietnamese and American—who were affected by the war between the United States and Vietnam. Have them work in small groups to design this memorial.
  
  
• Trial.
  Organize a trial to address the "crime" of the killing of Jeff Gurvitz: Who killed Jeff Gurvitz? If we are to prevent future Jeffs from dying, then this is a vital question. Assign students to represent various "defendants": the U.S. government, for ordering Jeff to war; the schools Jeff attended, for not teaching him the history of the war, which might have led him to question the U.S. role there; Jeff himself, for choosing to go into the armed forces even though he knew that he might have to kill or be killed in a war he didn't necessarily agree with or even understand; the "Viet Cong," for attacking Jeff's unit; Racism, for being a key attitudinal "virus" that infected American consciousness and allowed for, if not caused, the war; the Capitalist System—the first factor listed by historian Marilyn Young in summarizing the origins of the war. As she writes, "[T]he war grew out of the necessities of maintaining a global capitalist system, of the daily specifics of decision making, of the requirements—individual and national—for 'credibility' as defined by men who played zero sum games against a demonized communist Other. And for these reasons so many died." Because students tend to personalize blame, it's especially important in trial activities such as this that at least one "defendant" role prompts students to think systemically—to reflect on the extent to which individuals' actions can best be understood In the trial, the teacher plays the prosecutor and students in small groups, the defendants.
  
  [For a model of this kind of a trial role play, that also includes a "system" role, see "The Trial of Columbus," pp. 87-94 in Rethinking Columbus, Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson, eds. 2nd edition, Rethinking Schools, 1998.]
  
  
• Children's books.
  Have students write and illustrate children's books on one or more of the women's stories in Regret to Inform or other aspects of the war. Help them make arrangements to take these to elementary schools to read to the children there and to lead discussions. Obviously, many of these may be inappropriate for small children. Nonetheless, I've found that the attempt to write children's books on difficult subjects helps students decide what is most essential and to explain themselves clearly.
  
  
• Metaphorical drawings.
  Students can use imagery and language from the film, and/or from their own writing on the film, to construct metaphorical drawings. For example, Diane Van Renselaar says that her husband imagined a navy attack squadron as a "flying football team." Nguyen Thi Hong says that "The cruelty that we experienced was longer than a river, higher than a mountain, deeper than an ocean." Both these descriptions could become metaphorical drawings. Also ask students what pictures enter their minds as they think back to the film—these could spark ideas for metaphorical drawings.
  
  
• Research the "enemy."
  Have students assess the tenacity of the U.S. government's Vietnamese "enemy" by reading from source documents—for example, the 1945 Declaration of Independence of Vietnam, speeches of Ho Chi Minh, documents on the National Liberation Front. An excellent source for these is Vietnam and America: A Documented History, edited by Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young, and H. Bruce Franklin [Grove Press, 1985.] See also Barbara Sonneborn's moving description of her visit to Que Son, where Jeff was killed, available on the web, at www.pbs.org/pov/regret/bg_barb.html. This letter is titled "Khe Sanh."
  
  
• Interviews.
  Encourage students to use the film to generate interview questions to ask of Vietnam veterans or of others who are old enough to remember the war. Have them conduct and write-up the interviews.
  
  
• Research "Friendly fire" as metaphor.
  After Barbara Sonneborn completed Regret to Inform, she received a phone call from someone who had been with her husband Jeff when he was killed. She learned that, contrary to what she had been told by the U.S. military, Jeff was not killed by North Vietnamese fire, but by "friendly fire"—a U.S. mortar attack that fell short of its target. Sonneborn writes, "I was deeply shaken by this news. Why wasn't I told?" Students digging deeper into the phenomenon of friendly fire—a macabre oxymoron—will uncover important aspects about the nature of the war. For example, many U.S. officers were killed in fragging incidents, an intentional form of "friendly fire." Sonneborn urges us to think about the lie that she was told about her husband's death as an example of "the series of lies" told to justify and continue the war.
  
  In the film Hearts and Minds, Daniel Ellsberg, of The Pentagon Papers fame, states that every American president, from Truman through Nixon, lied about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He catalogs the variety of these lies, and remarks that it was a tribute to Americans that their leaders felt that they had to lie in order to sell the war—but it was unfortunate that it was so easy for them to get away with it.
  
  Divide students into five groups representing each of the presidents Ellsberg claimed lied to the American people: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Have students research Ellsberg's claim. Each group should attempt to discover the truthfulness or duplicity of American policymakers during these five administrations.