Television The Vietnam War, 10 part documentary series by Ken Burns. BBC showing it in the UK, PBS in the USA.

ZAGREB RED

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Just watched the first 3 episodes, excellent so far. Very balanced as it contains interviews with a lot of people from North Vietnam including the army and civilians who were around at the time. It starts off with some background on the French colonial days in Indochina and only really gets to the start of US troops being deployed to Vietnam in episode 3. I have seen a fair few documentaries on this subject over the years, but never one which is so objective and in-depth with contributions from people from political, military and civilian viewpoints on all sides. Already I have heard a great deal of things in this series which are totally new to me, especially in terms of the situation on South Vietnam and their government, social problems etc.both before and around the time of the war beginning. There is a lot of background information also on JFK's and Lyndon Johnson's struggles with how to approach the "South east Asia problem" it's very insightful.
Would recommend this to anyone with interest in this subject. Superb. I studied some of this as part of O level/Higher Modern Studies at school - long time ago ! - and am always interested in books and documentaries on the subject.
 
I watched the first episode the other day and really enjoyed it, learning so much more about it that I had no idea about before. I love a good history documentary and can't wait for more.
 
I can assume it's all factual or a bit of hearsay throughout the documentary?
 
Was hoping this would have dates/times for the BBC. Back to kodi...
 
Guardian reader said:
I cannot agree with this reviewer's: "The Vietnam War review – Ken Burns makes a complex story immediately comprehensible"

I am familiar with the work of Burns, and his glossy, pop documentaries cannot do what is claimed for a profound and disturbing event. Baseball, maybe. Hell, no, and the Vietnam War was a jump straight into hell.

Ken Burns produces the video-equivalent of coffee table books.

His past historical series are expensive kitsch, having little historical value beyond viewers seeing some interesting archive photographs.

His whole career has been in doing this for Public Television in the United States, an institution so cautious, so safe, so unflinchingly patriotic, so unquestioning that much of its programming resembles pabulum for babies.

I lived through the war and protests and horror, and I would not give Ken Burns five minutes to lay out his interpretation.

I understand from other reviews that he is basically using the "tragic mistake" line, the line which can be easily swallowed by most now – again, much like baby pabulum - eliciting little controversy or anger or truth.

But it most certainly was not a mistake.

It was a deliberate war of aggression which Lyndon Johnson - always a loyalist to folks like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI or the Pentagon and CIA - started firing up as soon as he was safely in office, having lied to everyone in order to get there.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was no mistake. It was a deliberate fraud to provide an excuse for war.

And what a war.

It was a true holocaust. Americans killed about three million people there, many of them in the most horrible fashion, as with napalm, early cluster bombs, and carpet bombing. It left the country a savage wreck with land mines and Agent Orange spread everywhere.

It helped kill at least a million more in Cambodia, a land it kept bombing and sending troops secretly into until its neutral government fell, making way for the horrors of the Killing Fields, something, by the way, America did nothing to stop.

No, throwing prisoners out of helicopters was not a mistake.

The CIA’s Project Phoenix – in which belly-crawling American special forces slipped out night after night to cut the throats of village leaders and other non-military figures, killing somewhere between twenty and forty thousand in this way – was not a mistake.

And those American helicopters taking off from the embassy at the shabby end, with the desperate hands of Vietnamese associates being pried or gun-butted off the landing gear as they took off to leave them all to their fate, was not a mistake.

Nor were the countless incidents of rape and murder by troops or the thousands of women left with no support for their Amer-Vietnamese children.

And all for what? For Captain Ahab seeking "the damned white whale."

The war displayed American values at their most raw and vicious. What we see today in Trump and others is almost child’s play by comparison.
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Sorry, I've been watching this and it's striking me as just another artful attempt to whitewash one of the greatest crimes of modern history. It has not yet been mentioned once that by the end of the war, the death toll in Indochina was between 4-5 million or that the land and societies of Viet, cam, Laos had been intentionally devastated by carpet chemical bombing. Nor is it mentioned in this review.

The fundamental reality of the mass murder of women, children and elderly people - the worst in any theatre of war other than the Nazi Holocaust - is not front and centre in this telling, as it would be had it been perpetrated by any other country.

So American and British perceptions of what actually happened in the Vietnam war will likely remain unchanged from what they were back in 1996, when a Johns Hopkins public study asked Americans how many Vietnamese casualties they would estimate there were. The average guess was about 100,000.

The people who conducted that study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German popular and political culture if, when you asked Germans today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 100,000? What would that tell us about German political and popular culture?
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SteveJ said:
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Reading that it's incredible to think about the country Vietnam has become today. The recovery is genuinely astonishing, can only hope the current war-torn countries of the Middle East and elsewhere will be looking in similar shape in 40 years.
 
I don't have any expertise, mate; I'm just tired of wars being portrayed as 'tragic, well-intentioned regrettable mistakes'. For example, here in Britain WWI is sold to us as the war of poems and poppies; history is written by the propagandists.
 
I've only watched the first two so far but I think those comments are slightly unfair to be honest. They've been very open about the levels of death and destruction and people's reasons for being there, it hasn't been an American "we meant well but fecked up" exercise. I think they've given a fairly good account of every sides point of view so far.
 
2cents said:
Reading that it's incredible to think about the country Vietnam has become today. The recovery is genuinely astonishing, can only hope the current war-torn countries of the Middle East and elsewhere will be looking in similar shape in 40 years.
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Even moreso given the fact that my country was under embargo until the 90s. The recovery came at a steep cost environmentally though, and in vast swaths of the country people are still living under the poverty line, although I guess you can say that for most of SEA countries.
 
InfiniteBoredom said:
Even moreso given the fact that my country was under embargo until the 90s. The recovery came at a steep cost environmentally though, and in vast swaths of the country people are still living under the poverty line, although I guess you can say that for most of SEA countries.
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Had no idea you were Vietnamese! Great, great country dude.
 
Snowjoe said:
I've only watched the first two so far but I think those comments are slightly unfair to be honest. They've been very open about the levels of death and destruction and people's reasons for being there, it hasn't been an American "we meant well but fecked up" exercise. I think they've given a fairly good account of every sides point of view so far.
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Would agree with that - I've watched the first 8 - it strikes me as a warts and all account of the whole tragic period. It's made by people from the USA, but there seems to be no attempt to cover up or sugar coat atrocities such as murder, rape and torture committed by US military personnel. They also focus on the incompetence and stupidity of US military and politicians and talk about racism within the US ranks and how widespread it was. The fact there are contributions from all sides involved is very noticeable I think.
 
The actual war doesn't interest me as much as the schism in American society the war and intersecting issues caused, between 1965 and 1975. The anti-war protests on college campuses and major cities, including the capital. The shootings at Kent State and Jackson State. Draft dodging and draft card burning. The fracture of the left into liberal and moderate factions (the 1968 Democratic Convention is the epitome of this). President Johnson refusing to run for re-election, his otherwise excellent presidency tarnished by the war escalation and the "credibility gap". The intersection between the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement. The assassinations of MLK, Bobby Kennedy, Fred Hampton. Riots inflamed by racial and anti-war tensions. The Stonewall Riots and the birth of the modern LGBT movement. Nixon appealing to the "silent majority", riding a tough-on-crime and Southern Strategy agenda into the White House. The way that returning 'Nam vets were left to rot after they came back home, ostracized by the public and forgotten by the government. Watergate was the cherry on top of a lost decade in American politics and society. From a historical perspective I consider this 10 year period as one of the most tumultous the country has ever faced, and with documentaries like these my fear is that the documentary narrative won't do the history due justice.
 
SteveJ said:
I don't have any expertise, mate; I'm just tired of wars being portrayed as 'tragic, well-intentioned regrettable mistakes'. For example, here in Britain WWI is sold to us as the war of poems and poppies; history is written by the propagandists.
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Ok well it's always good to hear more than one side.
 
Meanwhile, in a previous war...

Ta-Nehisi Coates said:
But even that partial sense ran contrary to the way the civil war was presented in the popular culture, as a violent misunderstanding, an honourable duel between wayward brothers, instead of what it was – a spectacular chapter in a long war that was declared when the first Africans were brought chained to American shores.

When it comes to the civil war, all of our popular understanding, our popular history and culture, our great films, the subtext of our arguments are in defiance of its painful truths. It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding “African slavery”.

That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilisation, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honoured through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms. The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry, and so strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day.
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adexkola said:
The way that returning 'Nam vets were left to rot after they came back home, ostracized by the public and forgotten by the government.
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The US military personnel committed some horrendous acts during the 2 decades but I do believe they are also some of the biggest victims of the war. Growing up I had plenty of talks, anecdotes and account of the war from the North's veterans, both officers and soldiers alike and the stand out thing was a sense of pride and didnt come across any who were haunted by the actions they committed during the war i.e killings, urban terrorism etc... Then the last 10 years living abroad I've come across veterans from the South as well and while they are bitter and living with a huge sense of regret, most didn't come across as troubled by their wartime deeds. Both sides believed they were fighting for a just cause, for home and family and faith. That is denied to the Americans who as you said came back to vilification from the public when they just signed up for what they thought to be their duty.
 
InfiniteBoredom said:
The US military personnel committed some horrendous acts during the 2 decades but I do believe they are also some of the biggest victims of the war. Growing up I had plenty of talks, anecdotes and account of the war from the North's veterans, both officers and soldiers alike and the stand out thing was a sense of pride and didnt come across any who were haunted by the actions they committed during the war i.e killings, urban terrorism etc... Then the last 10 years living abroad I've come across veterans from the South as well and while they are bitter and living with a huge sense of regret, most didn't come across as troubled by their wartime deeds. Both sides believed they were fighting for a just cause, for home and family and faith. That is denied to the Americans who as you said came back to vilification from the public when they just signed up for what they thought to be their duty.
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Totally agree. Returning soldiers were told to change to civilian clothes before getting off planes. They weren't fast tracked into jobs, and GI Bill benefits weren't immediately available to them. A lot ended up homeless, wracked with physical and mental maladies. Not excusing the fecked up shit they did over there, mind. Weird times those must have been.
 
Grew up with this War always in the daily news bulletins but was too young to really take it in. It'll be very interesting for me to know more about the background to the conflict from all points of view.
 
I might be alone with this, but I just can't watch a Ken Burns documentary. The zooming in on stills constantly annoys me
 
adexkola said:
Totally agree. Returning soldiers were told to change to civilian clothes before getting off planes. They weren't fast tracked into jobs, and GI Bill benefits weren't immediately available to them. A lot ended up homeless, wracked with physical and mental maladies. Not excusing the fecked up shit they did over there, mind. Weird times those must have been.
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Hard to comprehend all the young African-Americans from the Southern states, guys from poor, uneducated backgrounds fighting and giving their lives for a country that still treated them as second-class citizens, to put it euphemistically. The guy who came back from a 13 month tour in the Marines talking about how no cab driver would pick him up at the airport/railway station (forget which) when he arrived home, then when a policeman stopped a cab driver and pretty much demanded the guy took him home, the cabbie replied he didn't want to drive into one of Boston's black suburbs. Quite incredible. His colleagues also frequently referred to him as (the N word) and he was faced with Confederate flags in the barracks.
Interesting to listen to some of the accounts from US troops who went over there with a notion of fighting International Communism and "saving" South Vietnam who very quickly realised the truth of the situation was very much removed from that. I don't think I could ever imagine what it must have been like to have dropped into that nightmare scenario at the age of 18 or 19. Agreed, you could never justify what went on with the rapes, murders and torture, but to put young kids into a hellish war like that and expect them to cope with it just defies belief.
The whole thing was just a tragedy on so many levels for so many people involved on all sides, it runs so deep for a lot of people who lost someone - or more than one person - to such a senseless waste of lives. Hard to make any sense of it all from any point of view. The fact that the North Vietnamese troops and guerilla fighters interviewed often stated that they knew the USA didn't actually believe they would ever win the war and they just had to wait them out illustrates what a total waste of lives the whole thing was. People sacrificing their lives for the whims of politicians.
 
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Not sure why, but the episodes of this on the iPlayer are a lot shorter, 55 minutes compared to 90 minutes for the unedited ones broadcast by PBS. PBS have edited versions which cut out bad language, graphic images but they only seem to be about 10 minutes or so shorter than the unrated ones.
 
InfiniteBoredom said:
The US military personnel committed some horrendous acts during the 2 decades
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Horrendous acts are a commonplace of wars of this nature. Young, conscript soldiers dumped into to a foreign land to fight for a cause they hardly understood, in swamps, marshes and jungles, without knowing the country or its people, or being able to distinguish friend from foe, in constant fear of their lives, losing comrades to trip wires, booby traps and ambushes, often despairing of seeing their homes again, can't be expected to behave like boy scouts no matter what flag they salute.
 
adexkola said:
The actual war doesn't interest me as much as the schism in American society the war and intersecting issues caused, between 1965 and 1975. The anti-war protests on college campuses and major cities, including the capital. The shootings at Kent State and Jackson State. Draft dodging and draft card burning. The fracture of the left into liberal and moderate factions (the 1968 Democratic Convention is the epitome of this). President Johnson refusing to run for re-election, his otherwise excellent presidency tarnished by the war escalation and the "credibility gap". The intersection between the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement. The assassinations of MLK, Bobby Kennedy, Fred Hampton. Riots inflamed by racial and anti-war tensions. The Stonewall Riots and the birth of the modern LGBT movement. Nixon appealing to the "silent majority", riding a tough-on-crime and Southern Strategy agenda into the White House. The way that returning 'Nam vets were left to rot after they came back home, ostracized by the public and forgotten by the government. Watergate was the cherry on top of a lost decade in American politics and society. From a historical perspective I consider this 10 year period as one of the most tumultous the country has ever faced, and with documentaries like these my fear is that the documentary narrative won't do the history due justice.
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I think the fallout from all that was swept under the rug to some extent under the denouement of the Cold War and economic ups and downs following the 70's, but it's boiling up to the surface with a vengeance now. Add in the knock down effects of the War on Drugs escalated by Nixon and all that implies, including the prison industrial complex, and you have a period of time that will be one of the most formative in the nation's history. Along with FDR's time in office encompassing the Great Depression and WWII and of course the Civil War.
 
I binge watched the whole series last week. Such a senseless loss of life, especially considering Robert McNamara knew as early as 1965 that the war was unwinnable. I am convinced that there was too much money wrapped up in military contracts to put an end to the war, though this is not explored in the documentary.

I was a bit disappointed they didn't go into better detail of fighting tactics on both sides. I expected to hear a more detailed account of the trip wires and booby traps and the tunnel rats on the US side but these were only mentioned in passing. A lot of American ground fighting seemed to entail trying to take hills that had no strategic value, often even if they took a position they would leave and it would be retaken by VC or North Vietnamese forces.

I agree that the polarisation we see in US politics today stems from the Vietnam war and the anti war movement (left) and the sense of betrayal that the pro war supporters (right) felt towards them.
 
This is simply brilliant, I am on episode three and will just binge it all.

Feck me what a mistake the whole war was.
 
Thanks for reminding me, need to get back to this was around 4 eps in I think.
 
Carolina Red said:
I’m using this as part of the curriculum for my military history class in a couple months.
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I find it weird how they let it get that far.

I almost believe they understood somewhere along the road that they had fecked up royally, but at that point they were just too heavily invested in the whole thing.
 
Is this a white-washed story of American heroism or do they mention war crimes like the My Lai massacre?
 
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