I might watch it @ some point...
Anyone watching?? Interested?
Strolling down a street in the city of Da Nang, Vietnam last month, I came upon a sidewalk shop selling shiny wood caskets. When I stopped to take some pictures, the elderly owner came out, smiling, and asked where I was from.
“America,” I told him, and he broke into a wide grin. Was I here during the war? he asked. I was, I said, in the Army. Then he raised his arms like he was firing a rifle. “I fought for Ho Chi Minh!” he exclaimed. I chuckled, struggling for an appropriate response. “Well,” I finally said, “I fought to stay alive.”
Nearly 50 years after the war’s end, Americans, including Vietnam veterans, are still struggling to explain how we got involved in that disastrous, and ultimately futile, war. And that goes for Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, directors of The Vietnam War, a much-heralded 10-part, 18-hour epic series that debutted Sunday night on PBS.
Burns says he began thinking about revisiting the Vietnam War decades ago, but decided the national psyche wasn’t ready for it. A previous major PBS series on the conflict in 1983, based on a book by a veteran Vietnam correspondent suggesting that the war was less than honorable, provoked a loud right-wing backlash. So he decided to wait.
Now, Burns says, it’s time to talk—and get over it. “With knowledge comes healing,” he told Vanity Fair. “The seeds of disunion we experience today, the polarization, the lack of civil discourse all had their seeds in Vietnam,” Burns told The New York Times. “I can’t imagine a better way to help pull out some of the fuel rods that create this radioactive atmosphere than to talk about Vietnam in a calm way.”
Good luck with that, as we said in ‘Nam. While the TV critics have been agog with praise and wonder over the series’s cinematic mastery, depth of research (some 80 interviews of participants on all sides) historical sweep and emotional punch, some veterans and longtime students of the war are already taking critical aim at the series’s fuzzy treatment of the war’s central question:
Why did we get involved in the first place? Who thought that was a good idea?
Burns strives to give everyone’s strongly held, divergent views equal weight, but before long, he’s waist deep in a historical big muddy, wandering among competing theories that obscure the root cause of a war that killed an estimated minimum of 429,000 U.S. and allied soldiers and 533,000 communist troops and civilians between 1954 and 1975. Many estimates soar far above those. Millions more were wounded.
“Many veterans fear that this new documentary will misrepresent what really happened and why, substituting [the] ‘many truths’ which Burns says he will present,” Chuck Searcy, an Army Intelligence veteran of the war, said in an email to friends this week from Vietnam, where he has spent the past several years helping to rid the countryside of buried U.S. munitions that are still killing people. “It may permit us Americans, once again, to evade the harsh reckoning that is long overdue, and allow us to remain in denial about what we did in Viet Nam, and why.”
At an early screening of the film’s highlights in Washington, D.C.this spring, Burns said that, “for us, the war begins in 1945,” not 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson dispatched the first U.S. ground combat unit to South Vietnam. Good start. But in episode one, he stakes the proper context for the starting point in France’s mid-19th century conquest and colonization of territories that would eventually become Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. For the next 80 years France plundered the region for its rubber, tin and other resources, impoverishing its workers while creating a servile class of French-speaking native bureaucrats to carry out its orders, all largely financed by the opium trade. By the early 20th century, Vietnamese patriots began organizing a resistance. One of them was Ho Chi Minh.
Directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary "The Vietnam War" premieres on PBS on September 17 at 8/7. Maarten de Boer/Getty
As Burns and Novick movingly show, Ho had hopes that America would come to his aid at the end of World War II, during which French hegemony over Vietnam was interrupted by Japan’s five-year occupation of the country. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signalled during the war that the era of colonialism was over, and, as the Burns-Novick series shows, Ho and his band of rebels had enthusiastically helped America’s wartime secret service, the OSS, fight the Japanese. But with Roosevelt dead at war’s end, his successor Harry Truman let the French back in, and the revolution was on, in earnest. The French colonial army fought on—financed largely by the U.S.—for nine bloody years. But in 1954, after a disastrous defeat to Ho’s Soviet- and Chinese-backed guerrillas at a place called Dien Bien Phu in northern Vietnam, the French surrendered.
The Viet Minh might well have swept to victory throughout the country, but at a 1954 peace conference in Geneva, it accepted the “temporary” partition of Vietnam into a communist-led North and U.S.-backed South, pending elections in 1956. Two years later, the dictatorial regime installed by Washington in Saigon, honeycombed with French-trained bureaucrats and landowners, cancelled the elections knowing that Ho Chi Minh would win. And now the American war was on.
Burns and Novick know all of this—indeed, they explicate the turn of events with admirable force and verve (aided by the stellar and precise writing of historian Geoffrey Ward). But then they quickly abandon the groundwork they’ve laid putting the Vietnamese struggle in an anti-colonial context. “By Episode Two...the war has been framed as a civil war, with the United States defending a freely elected democratic government in the south against Communists invading from the north,” notes Vietnam scholar Thomas Bass in a slashing essay that has been circulating for weeks as a kind of anti-establishment samizdat beneath the tide of gushing advance praise for the series. “American boys are fighting a godless enemy that Burns shows as a red tide creeping across maps of Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.” If Burns meant to make sardonic use of the Cold War-era graphic, the gesture was lost on Bass, author of a highly praised book on one of North Vietnam’s top spies in the south.
“The historical footage in episode one…which disputes this view of the war, is either ignored or misunderstood,” Bass wrote last month in the tiny Mekong Review, an independent literary quarterly founded in 2015. The fact is, “defeated French forces regrouped in southern Vietnam after 1954, which is when U.S. Air Force colonel and CIA agent Edward Lansdale began working to elevate this former colony to nationhood,” Bass continues. “The U.S. installed Ngo Dinh Diem as South Vietnam’s autocratic ruler, aided him in wiping out his enemies and engineered an election that Diem stole, with 98.2 percent of the popular vote.” (Oddly, although the influential Lansdale is shown in a photo standing right next to Diem, nothing is said about him.)
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