Ken Burns - The Vietnam War

Ken Burns 10-part series on the Vietnam War started airing this last Sunday. Episode 3 was last night. I believe there will be reruns to catch up on PBS either as the week goes on or this weekend.

So far it is very interesting. When I was in school, Vietnam was still too close and too personal to really be evaluated with any kind of detachment or objectivity, as is currently the case with the Bush and Obama administrations. Like it or not, it takes time.

Anyway, in the opening episode they talk about the Vietnam war prior to President Kennedy, which largely focused on French colonialism and the actions of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations in Vietnam.

Episode 2 was pretty tough on John F. Kennedy, who wrote that he did not believe that war could be won, but was unwilling to withdraw America troops because he thought it would spoil his reelection chances in 1964. I didn't know about that. It was positively chilling.

Episode 3 got started on Lyndon Johnson, who was a really nasty piece of work for more reasons than just his decisions and actions related to the Vietnam War.

Episode 4 is tonight. If you are interested in contemporary American history, this documentary is a must see.

Here is a piece by George Will with his thoughts on the program:

Is anyone else watching this? What do you guys think?

 

I guess I am interested more in the politics and the historical lessons learned, if any, than I am in the entertainment elements of this series.

For anyone who shares that perspective, feel free to join me in a discussion of this here.

 

This one is different in that a lot of the people he is interviewing are still alive. None of the people in the Civil War documentary were, as far as I can recall, so he had actors read letters and diaries from people during that time. Not so much of that this time around.

 

Yes, I have also found it quite educational. I don't think I every fully understood how much of a role the Vietnamese hatred of being a colony to France (or anybody) really was the primary motivation for the Vietnamese.

By 1975 the communism espoused by Russia and China was not looking so attractive anymore, unless you aspired to live under an oppressive totalitarian dictatorship. To be fair, I don't think the Vietnamese people were ever all that enamored with it either. As described in episode 1, they first and foremost just wanted their own independence, free of French colonialism. It was never their desire to be a proxy battlefield for the great powers of the Earth to bomb to smithereens while working out their ideological differences on.

 

Missing from Ken Burns’ ‘Vietnam’: The patriotism and pride of those who fought
By Bing West
September 19, 2017 New York Post

To understand Ken Burns’ 18-hour Vietnam documentary, listen to the music. The haunting score tells you: This will be a tale of misery. And indeed, Burns and his co-author Geoffrey C. Ward conclude their script by writing, “The Vietnam War was a tragedy, immeasurable and irredeemable. But meaning can be found in the individual stories . . .”

The film is meticulous in the veracity of the hundreds of factoids that were selected. Everything depicted on the American side actually happened. But that the chosen facts are accurate doesn’t mean the film gets everything right. Indeed, the brave American veterans are portrayed with a keen sense of regret and embarrassment about the war, a distortion that must not go unanswered. And the film implies an (absolutely) unearned moral equivalence between antiwar protesters and those who fought.

Burns’ theme is clear: A resolute North Vietnam was predestined to defeat a delusional America that heedlessly sacrificed its soldiers. The film follows a chronological progression, beginning in the ’40s. Right from the start, harrowing combat footage from the ’60s is inserted to remind the audience that a blinkered America is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the French colonialists. The main focus of the documentary is the period of fierce fighting from late 1965 to 1972.

Against a gripping assortment of close-up photos and combat video, dozens of American and Vietnamese voices offer snippets of personal insights about history, geopolitics, families, ideologies, politics, battles, casualties and, above all, frustrations.

Most of the interviewees talk in the lugubrious tones of the defeated. We all know the story ends badly. But when it’s over, we aren’t told why we lost. The music is more memorable than the pictures, and the pictures are more compelling than the narration. We are deluged by sights and sounds but not enlightened as to cause and effect.

An American lieutenant who fought there in 1965 is quoted at the end of the film saying, “We have learned a lesson . . . that we just can’t impose our will on others.” While that summarizes the documentary, the opposite is true. Wars are fought to impose your will upon the enemy. If you don’t intend to win, don’t fight.

Our civilian and military leaders were grossly irresponsible. At the height of the war in 1968, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford is quoted as telling President Lyndon Johnson, “We’re not out to win the war. We’re out to win the peace.”

Our senior leadership granted the enemy ground sanctuaries in Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam and bombing was severely restricted.

The film points out that we grunts called the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) the Dead Marine Zone because we were pounded from North Vietnam and forbidden to attack. The real lesson: Never fight on the enemy’s terms.

The documentary includes a modicum of footage about the South Vietnamese military. The South Vietnamese soldiers I fought alongside were brave and determined. Yet in 1973, sick of the war, Congress forbade any further bombing in Southeast Asia. Military aid to South Vietnam was slashed, while Soviet-built tanks and Chinese-made artillery poured into North Vietnam.

It is moot whether South Vietnam could have survived had our aid continued. The video of our panicked final pull-out in 1975 is flat-out depressing.

The film casts the antiwar movement in a moderately favorable light. Air Force pilot Merrill McPeak is quoted as saying, “the antiwar movement itself, the whole movement towards racial equality, the environment, the role of women . . . produced the America we have today, and we are better for it.” (What do you expect from an AF guy???)

Are the protesters the real heroes here? What about the valiant US soldiers, 75 percent of whom were volunteers?

This documentary succeeds in vividly evoking sadness and frustration. But that is not all there was to the story. “The Vietnam War” strives for a moral equivalence where there is none. The veterans seem sad and detached for their experience, yet 90 percent of Vietnam War veterans are proud to have served. So, there’s a large gap between what we see and the attitude of the vast majority of veterans.

Their sense of pride — so vital for national unity — is absent from the documentary. And that’s a glaring omission. - Bing West served as a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam. He is the author of “The Village,” which has been on the Marine Commandant’s reading list for 45 years.

Maj. Lynn Lowder, Silver Star, Marine Force Recon / A following thought on Bing West's review below of Burn's Vietnam piece.

West is pro-vet for sure and I think he's spot-on. Were I able, I would still go back and do it all again...even knowing how it ended. That year defined us...we are warriors. I'll never be a full-fledged civilian nor do I want to be one...ever. Warrior tribe defines us...those like us...Foreign Legion, Caesar's legions, on and on; THAT is whom we are and where we belong, IMHO.

One more point...remember the Killing Fields, Pol Pot, the Vietnamese boat people flowing out to see, the Montagnard purge, the re-education camps, etc.? Where was the moral outrage within academia, Hollywood and our high-moral civilian brethren counterparts in America on those situations?

Well, none of that will be deeply explored in this series and all of that supports the notion that bad things were going on in that area of the world, geopolitical influences of communism were of high concern and our political leadership failed miserably. If you go to battle, bring maximum violence and strike decisively to win. In the end, the credit goes to the warriors in the arena. Not with the 20-20 hindsight folks decades past that period. I have infinite respect for the NVA.

In fact, I contrast that with the disdain I still hold for our political leadership, our spineless flag grade officers who knew better but wimped out and those of our generation who feigned a position of the war being immoral when most were driven by simple rank self-preservation...those same people who then heaped scorn on warriors who reminded them of whom they were not and never will – or could - be...us. SF

 

Ken Burns played the race card last night, apparently without merit, when he suggested that black people were sent to Vietnam in numbers that exceeded their population numbers. Here are the stats:

 

That article is one perspective, but perhaps one that has not been sufficiently included in Ken Burns documentary. I am enjoying watching it as well and I am learning a lot. He will get awards for this. But it does not follow that this is the gospel or the final word on the Vietnam war, although I am sure there will be some people who will try to treat it that way.

Burns has done a very impressive job here, but this was such a complex conflict, which was actually a battle in a larger (cold) war against communism, that even with all the work he has done on it, it cannot possibly be complete in any sort of absolute sense. Based on what I have seen so far, I believe the article above helps to round out the perspective on this in a helpful way. I may have other such posts later.

 

In fact, it was apparently an entirely self-interested politically motivated decision for John. He wrote that he knew we couldn't win, but he did not think he could win re-election if he made the decision to withdraw. So he decided to stay in based on that.

So much for Camelot.