EWTON - Anne Paulet, a Boston College visiting assistant professor, had good cause for the jitters. It was St. Patrick's Day and she had asked the 88 students in her ''History 111: Vietnam'' class to ''please, please put off drinking green beer'' for the afternoon, in exchange for two hours sitting, thirsty, in a dark lecture hall.
On a St. Patrick's Friday in any other class at BC, she might have been lecturing to the wall. But the room was packed. Students sporting green sweaters and green hair clips fairly tripped over each other to find seats. Only one slipped out early.
Paulet introduced the guest speaker, Mark Kannenberg, a Vietnam veteran and the father of a student in the class. Kannenberg began by asking students to raise their hands if they had relatives or family friends who fought in Vietnam. Almost all did. Then he asked how many of those relatives and friends spoke openly about their experiences. Not one raised a hand.
That exchange at least begins to explain why Vietnam War classes are among the most popular on today's campuses, where most of the Class of 2003 was born while Ronald Reagan was president, long after the '70s - and the war - were over. These classes are a safe way to probe a topic that is at once family secret, national tragedy, and romantic myth.
''With the students I've had, their curiosity is coupled with a tentativeness about asking fundamental questions, a reverence toward this awful thing that's happened to this country,'' said Christian G. Appy, a Vietnam scholar who taught a history course on the war at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1991 to 1999. ''To many students, it's like a death in the family. They're afraid if they ask too many questions they might insult someone.''
Some students want to know how America, the world's only superpower for most of their lives, could lose a war. Some are seduced by the '60s and early '70s, which they imagine as an almost idyllic time before cynicism swept the nation. Others look with fascination at an era in which 2.7 million young men grew up not in dorm rooms but in rice paddies, helicopters, and hospitals.
The topic's popularity is undeniable. This year, 480 professors are teaching the history of the war in American colleges and universities, compared with 351 in 1997 and 157 in 1986, according to CMG Direct of Wilmington, Mass., which compiles faculty lists and sells them to book publishers.
''It's one of the largest enrollment courses at every place I know of that offers this course,'' said Robert K. Brigham, a Vassar College professor and Vietnam scholar. A class on Vietnam at Brown University, for example, draws more than 300 students every year.
Paradoxically, while the war's scars are still visible on the culture, a typical 20-year-old knows almost nothing about it. He may have seen ''Full Metal Jacket,'' ''Platoon'' and a Rambo movie or two. He has heard uneasy jokes about life ''back in 'Nam.'' But his high school American history course devoted just one class to Vietnam before review for the final. And the veteran in his family only whispers about Vietnam, if that.
Most college students sign up for a Vietnam course with little more than a sense that the war was one big mess. A decade ago, James Reckner, a history professor at Texas Tech University, asked 100 students to name the general most closely associated with Vietnam. Only one could identify General William Westmoreland. Reckner speculates that today, not one new student would be able to volunteer Westmoreland's name.
''Students arrive here totally knowledge-less, other than what they've seen in movies,'' said Reckner, who presides over a mammoth archive of Vietnam-related materials at Texas Tech.
American high schools have all but abdicated responsibility for teaching about the war, Reckner said. And vets are notoriously reticent. Even after his midterm in Paulet's class, Boston College senior Joseph Serrano, a marketing major from Connecticut, can only say that his father served in the Army in Vietnam, ''in charge of a bunch of people, doing something.''
''It's been a taboo subject in our family,'' Serrano said. ''He's a very forthright guy, and for him to be so elusive is strange. That's one of the reasons I took the course.''
Junior Adam Langton, an economics major from St. Louis, said he finds the subject of Vietnam protests enthralling even though he considers himself politically conservative.
''There was a lot of energy, and there seemed to be this optimism,'' Langton said. ''You can feel it, even in the music. You could attach yourself to a grand cause.
''It would be interesting to live in a time like that,'' Langton added. ''There was a sense of romance about it.''
It's about more than sit-ins and marches. Cradled all their lives by virtually uninterrupted peace and prosperity, most students have never had reason to think beyond the pile of dirty laundry in their closet.
In contrast, those who came of age during the Vietnam War were forced to look outside themselves and outside their national borders. Many baby boomers developed deep political sensibilities that still affect them today.
Coddled though they are, many young people sense that they've missed that transcendent experience.
Brown University senior Neel Parekh has taken three classes on the Vietnam War. ''I obviously have some sort of obsession,'' he said.
''A lot of our generation feels that there's no real bond between us, that we never went through this experience where we had to evaluate who we were and what was our role in the nation,'' said Parekh, a political science major from Poughkeepsie, N.Y. ''War is a great stage for that dialogue. People's parents had Korea or Vietnam. All we had was the '80s.''
Contrary to conventional wisdom, campus activism is as widespread today as it was in the Vietnam era, according to Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York, who surveys attitudes among college students. ''This is a generation that has a higher percentage of people believing an individual can make a difference than ever reported before,'' Levine said. ''And so the '60s have become, for lots of them, a golden era.''
By comparison, though, the themes of modern-day activism are numerous and fragmented, Levine said, touching on minority issues, financial aid, and administrative policy, to name a few. And the question of whether sweatshirts with the college's insignia are made by underpaid laborers hardly feels epic. So young people continue to idealize the Vietnam era.
''There's a longing among our generation to excel, but we haven't found a way to have an impact,'' said John Reimers, a Brown senior from Virginia who took Professor Charles Neu's seminar on the war. ''I don't know what there is for us to change.''
Students respond not only to the Vietnam War's allure but also to its destructiveness and danger. ''They haven't looked at war close up before,'' said Neu. ''The waste, the viciousness of it comes as a shock to them.''
In her BC class, Paulet has emphasized that many of the soldiers who did brave, stupid, heroic, or violent things were just 18- and 19-year-old kids trying to figure out how to behave in an unnatural situation. That sobering thought has given pause to many in the class, like sophomore Timothy Libutti, 20, a political science major from Rhode Island.
''You'd be given a backpack and a rifle and dropped into a rice paddy and told to go fight the enemy,'' Libutti said. ''I can't imagine me or any of my friends doing something like that. I don't consider myself mature enough.''
Ignorant as they are when they arrived in the classroom to study Vietnam, many students end the semester claiming, with some justification, that they understand the conflict more fully than do their parents. First, they have access to information not widely available until recent years, and second, they lack many of the baby boomers' ideological prejudices.
''I'm a younger generation so I can be more objective,'' said Jarret Wright, a sophomore history major from Yonkers, N.Y.
Although Trinh Bui, a junior at BC from California, was born in South Vietnam, she is so Americanized that she can't say exactly where she was born. Bui's father, who fought under the late South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, shocked his daughter one day recently by calling to admit to her that ''he didn't know much'' about the politics behind the war, she said.
Of older Vietnamese-Americans, Bui said: ''You could say they lived through it but that doesn't necessarily tell you they know what happened.''
University of Kentucky Professor George Herring, who has written on Vietnam, points out that as long as many professors are baby boomers, Vietnam courses will proliferate. Vassar's Brigham added: ''We've only begun to understand Vietnam in a critical sense, so I don't think it's going to go away.''
Students hope he's right.
''Every day I love going to class and learning more about it,'' said Michael Tuohy, a senior at BC. ''I think that's actually a first.''
Marcella Bombardieri i s a member of the Globe Staff.
