In the halcyon days of their youth, before they signed up for Anthony Vitali’s U.S. history class, Damien Memorial School juniors Van Riva, Kaleo Hino and Joey Gum thought they had experienced the “utmost extreme” of teamwork collaborating on the tactical video game “Rainbow Six: Siege.”

The would-be band of bros had no idea.

As part of a schoolwide initiative, the first-year social studies teacher challenged his students — Riva, Hino and Gum among them — to conceive, research and execute a semester-long project for entry into the National History Day Contest. Each group of students had its choice of media — essay, documentary, website or exhibit — as well as the license to, as Vitali put it, “let their creative spirit go” as they explored a historical topic related to the theme of “Conflict and Compromise in History.”

Students from every history class would participate. The best projects would advance to regional and perhaps even national competition.

The gamers were game, though not overly ambitious at first. For while the trio are diligent, well-motivated students, they are busy ones, as well. Riva is a defensive lineman on the Damien football team and is a member of the Junior ROTC and National Honor Society, Hino does service projects with the school’s Leo Club, and Gum devotes several hours a week assisting the school’s maintenance staff.

“We did think at first, ‘Just do it and get it over with,’” said Gum, 17. “But once we got into it, we just kept going.”

Drawing on their common interest in military history, the three turned their focus to the Vietnam War and, in particular, the Tet Offensive, which is widely credited with turning the tide of the war in favor of the communist north.

Riva, 17, said he felt a personal connection to the conflict. His mother was born in Vietnam and fled with her family to the south during the war. His father was deployed to Vietnam while serving in the Navy.

The three friends spent long hours on their computers and in the library, mining academic databases in an effort to gain a comprehensive understanding of a deeply complicated and controversial conflict. The more they learned, the more they recognized the gaps in their knowledge and the harder they pushed.

“We started out just doing it to get a grade, but it turned out to be something bigger,” Riva said.

Soon the friends were meeting for research sessions on Saturdays and Sundays, even squeezing in extra study time between classes and extracurricular activities.

As the project progressed, the three decided to leverage their strengths to produce a documentary video, their own sub-10-minute homage to Ken Burns. While Riva and Gum focused on information gathering, it fell to Hino, 16, to edit the material in a way that communicated the weight of what they were learning.

“I tried to tailor the editing toward something that was more emotional and heartfelt,” Hino said. “As we were reading through everything that happened, it was like a nightmare that was clouded with gruesome imagery.”

Gum said the long hours of repetitive work took a mental toll as the group wrote, recorded, edited and revised their material, often turning to Skype and Google Docs to collaborate when they couldn’t be together.

The finished product, as one faculty member noted, looks not unlike something one might find on the History Channel, albeit with a decidedly fresh perspective. The Tet Offensive occurred 50 years ago this month, after all, long before the three young documentarians were bumps in their mothers’ bellies.

The documentary, then, is a glimpse at the Vietnam War and its impact from the distant eyes of Generation Z, an account untethered from the consensus narrative constructed across three American generations. When was the last time a filmmaker quoted Richard Nixon unironically?

“I’m proud of what they did,” Vitali said. “I’m proud of them.”

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.