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.
