Reading Tim O’Brien’s deeply moving short story “On the Rainy River” as a springboard, this discussion course will offer an interdisciplinary critique of the Vietnam War, the antiwar movement, and Ken Burns’ 2017 PBS documentary. With consummate artistry, O’Brien dramatizes his distress, anguish, and increasing doubts about the morality and necessity of the war, a torment exacerbated by his community’s and family’s very different perspectives on Vietnam, U.S. foreign policy, “patriotism,” and the legitimacy of the domestic opposition. What lessons might that very polarized time be especially relevant in our own deeply-divided era?