New PBS Documentary: "The Vietnam War"

[Salvage Sailor]

A reminder to the USMF Community in regard to Political Discussions

 

Aloha Everyone,

 

A refresher on the Forum Rules is in order here lest this topic go astray

 

3) Political and ideological threads.

There is a misperception among some of our members that just because we all collect militaria or have an interest in US military history that we all somehow have the same political viewpoint.

Knowing many of the members on here either personally or through private conversation, nothing could be further from the truth.

On this Forum we have the full political spectrum, including a few surprises. We have members of the conservative right, the liberal left, centrists, independents, Libertarians, greens, reds, monarchists, republicans (in the classic sense) and even an anarchist or two.

When the conversations on here shift to politics, the result is an endless thread that has very little to do with either collecting militaria or discussing military history.

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The founders of this Forum took pride in having as few rules as possible. But due to repeated situations where civil behavior was thrown aside in the name of political grandstanding, the following rule has been adopted by the Administrators in consultation with the Moderating staff:

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The bottom line is that this is not a political forum, and divisive and disruptive posts of this nature do not belong here. For those with a strong desire to express their political views, there is a wealth of other websites that will welcome such contributions.

[skautdog]

Interesting thread.

 

I was an Infantry platoon commander in VN (1st CAV, 1/9th, 62 INF PLT [Combat Tracker]).

 

I have not watched an episode of the subject program yet, but have been recording the series. After the butcher, politically biased job, Burns did on the CW series, I'm not expecting too much. I didn't read a consensus above to encourage me this production is much better.

 

Ken

[RustyCanteen]

I have hidden a few comments that were straying too far off-topic; I would ask that everyone read the rules posted by Salvage Sailor in post #64.

 

The Vietnam War, more than any other war perhaps in the history of the United States, is as hotly debated as perhaps it was when it was being fought. As with many things in life, everyone will have a different opinion, and a reason that they feel the way they do. We all have our 'Vietnam War' stories, and how it affected our families and friends, and how that legacy is still with us in the present day even. The range of opinions expressed and unexpressed, still to this day can divide families. I know of brothers and sisters who cannot agree with each other, and the result is that no one talks about it. This unintended legacy (unresolved divided opinion) of the war is perhaps a large part of why we as a country, still hold such sharply opposing views of a war that ended over 40 years ago, and will passionately debate them. One program is not going to make everyone agree on the causes, or who is to blame, or if there was anything to be blamed about. There is still a lot of feeling and hurt about the war that was never addressed for many people; it was just hidden and buried away but never resolved or coped with. However, this is not the time or the place to debate those opinions.

 

Please everyone, respect your fellow members and do not make any political debate out of this thread. It is ok to talk about the program and what it covers, but it is what has happened, and for better or worse nothing will change that. The only way to understand what happened and why everyone feels so differently about it, is to try to sit down and listen to the program and see what you think.

 

Again, we understand how everyone can feel in a topic as loaded as this is (Vietnam), but we are here to discuss the documentary and not debate the war again.

 

Thanks,

RC

[rufus_firefly]

James Michener, Kent State: What Happened And Why

After watching episode 5 featuring Kent State I dug out my copy which I haven’t read for about 40 years. Anyone interested should read this. I won’t summarize here but scanning through one name did get my attention - Bill Ayers.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana)

I would not want to repeat the Vietnam Nam experience.

[Forum Manager]

Only warning that is going to happen.

 

No more politics on this thread. If you have to argue with each other take it to pm's.

 

Any more politics and there will be no warnings just memberships being banned.

 

I am not going to waste any more time baby sitting this thread or having to waste my time cleaning it up.

[John Conway]

Due to a great deal of contact with Vietnam veterans I can say they are generally pretty disappointed in the series. Granted, it was a very complex conflict but at this point we can only hope for factual representation of Vietnam veterans. At this point nothing else really matters. These veterans deserve the same recognition as the very best of any American soldiers with "boots on the ground". There is no need to put any kind of "spin" on the truth of their service and valor. Our focus should not be on uniforms and equipment seen in the footage but upon the survivors of the conflict and well deserved positive recognition for a job well done in spite of the enormous opposition from both sides.

[Bluehawk]

Thank you for saying this...

Due to a great deal of contact with Vietnam veterans I can say they are generally pretty disappointed in the series. Granted, it was a very complex conflict but at this point we can only hope for factual representation of Vietnam veterans. At this point nothing else really matters. These veterans deserve the same recognition as the very best of any American soldiers with "boots on the ground". There is no need to put any kind of "spin" on the truth of their service and valor. Our focus should not be on uniforms and equipment seen in the footage but upon the survivors of the conflict and well deserved positive recognition for a job well done in spite of the enormous opposition from both sides.

 

[cutiger83]

Due to a great deal of contact with Vietnam veterans I can say they are generally pretty disappointed in the series. Granted, it was a very complex conflict but at this point we can only hope for factual representation of Vietnam veterans. At this point nothing else really matters. These veterans deserve the same recognition as the very best of any American soldiers with "boots on the ground". There is no need to put any kind of "spin" on the truth of their service and valor. Our focus should not be on uniforms and equipment seen in the footage but upon the survivors of the conflict and well deserved positive recognition for a job well done in spite of the enormous opposition from both sides.

 

I am hoping to go to dinner next week with a friend who flew helicopters in Vietnam. I want to talk to him about his perspective on the series.

 

I agree with you that we should not focus on the equipment or uniforms but rather on the men and women who served in Vietnam and the 58,220 men and women who died during the war.

 

I am curious what the veterans you spoke with said disappointed them in the series. What was not factual in the series or what in the series had a spin on it? I thought the series did show recognition for the soldiers who had “boots on the ground” so it would be interesting to hear another perspective on the series.

 

I am sure there are many different perspectives even from different veterans who were there. I am sure there are also different perspectives from the families who lost a loved one in the war.

[vintageproductions]

This is one of the Veteran reviews of the series, again the veterans views and opinions.....

 

Some months ago I and a dozen other local veterans attended a screening at the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta - preview of a new documentary on The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The screening was a one hour summation of this 10-part documentary, 18 hours long.

 

The series began showing on PBS Sunday Sep 17, and with Burns’ renowned talent mixing photos, video clips and compelling mood music in documentary form, the series promises to be compelling to watch. That doesn’t mean it tells the truth.

 

For many years I have been presenting to high school classes a 90 minute session titled The Myths and Truths of the Vietnam War. One of my opening comments is, “The truth about Vietnam is bad enough without twisting it all out of shape with myths, half-truths and outright lies from the anti-war left.” The overall message to students is advising them to learn to think for themselves, be informed by reading one newspaper that leans left, one that leans right, and be skeptical of TV news.

 

Part of my presentation is showing them four iconic photos from Vietnam, aired publicly around the world countless times to portray America’s evil involvement in Vietnam. I tell the students “the rest of the story” excluded by the news media about each photo, then ask, “Wouldn’t you want the whole story before you decide for yourself what to think?”

 

One of those photos is the summary execution of a Viet Cong soldier in Saigon, capital city of South Vietnam, during the battles of the Tet Offensive in 1968 Our dishonorable enemy negotiated a cease-fire for that holiday then on that holiday attacked in about 100 places all over the country. Here’s what I tell students about the execution in the photo.

 

 

Enemy execution by South Vietnam’s Chief of National Police, 1968

 

“Before you decide what to think, here’s what the news media never told us. This enemy soldier had just been caught after he murdered a Saigon police officer, the officer’s wife, and the officer’s six children. The man pulling the trigger was Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam’s Chief of National Police. His actions were supported by South Vietnamese law, and by the Geneva Convention since he was an un-uniformed illegal combatant. Now, you might still be disgusted by the summary execution, but wouldn’t you want all the facts before you decide what to think?”

 

The other one-sided stories about iconic photos I use are a nine year old girl named Kim Phuc, running down a road after her clothes were burned off by a napalm bomb, a lady kneeling by the body of a student at Kent State University, and a helicopter on top of a building with too many evacuees trying to climb aboard. Each one had only the half of the story told by news media during the war, the half that supported the anti-war narrative.

 

Our group of vets left the Ken Burns documentary screening . . . disappointed. As one example, all four of the photos I use were shown, with only the anti-war narrative. Will the whole truth be told in the full 18 hours? I have my doubts but we’ll see.

 

On the drive home Ernst asked the other three of us who had been in Vietnam, “How does it make you feel seeing those photos and videos?” I answered, “I just wish for once they would get it right.”

 

Will the full documentary show John Kerry’s covert meeting in Paris with the leadership of the Viet Cong while he was still an officer in the US Naval Reserve and a leader in the anti-war movement? Will it show how Watergate crippled the Republicans and swept Democrats into Congress in 1974, and their rapid defunding of South Vietnamese promised support after Americans had been gone from Vietnam two years? Will it show Congress violating America’s pledge to defend South Vietnam if the North Vietnamese ever broke their pledge to never attack the south? Will it portray America’s shame in letting our ally fall, the tens of thousands executed for working with Americans, the hundreds of thousands who perished fleeing in overpacked, rickety boats, the million or so sent to brutal re-education camps? Will it show the North Vietnamese victors bringing an influx from the north to take over South Vietnam’s businesses, the best jobs, farms, all the good housing, or committing the culturally ruthless sin of bulldozing grave monuments of the South Vietnamese?

 

Will Burns show how the North Vietnamese took the city of Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive, bringing lists of names of political leaders, business owners, doctors, nurses, teachers and other “enemies of the people,” and how they went from street to street, dragging people out of their homes, and that in the aftermath of the Battle of Hue, only when thousands of people were missing and the search began did they find the mass graves where they had been tied together and buried alive?

 

Will Burns show how America, after finally withdrawing from Vietnam and shamefully standing by while our ally was brutalized, did nothing while next door in Cambodia the Communists murdered two million of their own people as they tried to mimic Mao’s “worker paradise” in China?

 

Will Burns show how American troops conducted themselves with honor, skill and courage, never lost a major battle, and helped the South Vietnamese people in many ways like building roads and schools, digging wells, teaching improved farming methods and bringing medical care where it had never been seen before? Will he show that American war crimes, exaggerated by the left, were even more rare in Vietnam than in WWII? Will he show how a naïve young Jane Fonda betrayed her country with multiple radio broadcasts from North Vietnam, pleading with American troops to refuse their orders to fight, and calling American pilots and our President war criminals?

 

Color me doubtful about these and many other questions.

 

Being in a war doesn’t make anyone an expert on the geopolitical issues, it’s a bit like seeing history through a straw with your limited view. But my perspective has come from many years of reflection and absorbing a multitude of facts and opinions, because I was interested. My belief is that America’s involvement in Vietnam was a noble cause trying to stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia, while it had spread its miserable oppression in Eastern Europe and was gaining traction in Central America, Africa and other places around the world. This noble cause was, indeed, screwed up to a fare-thee-well by the Pentagon and White House, which multiplied American casualties.

 

The tone of the screening was altogether different, that our part in the war was a sad mistake. It seemed like Burns and Novick took photos, video clips, artifacts and interviews from involved Americans, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, civilians from south and north, reporters and others, threw it all in a blender to puree into a new form of moral equivalence. Good for spreading a thin layer of blame and innocence, not so good for finding the truth.

 

John M. Del Vecchio, author of The 13^th Valley, a book considered by many Vietnam vets to be the literary touchstone of how they served and suffered in the jungles of Vietnam, has this to say about Burns’ documentary. “Pretending to honor those who served while subtly and falsely subverting the reasons and justifications for that service is a con man’s game . . . From a cinematic perspective it will be exceptional. Burns knows how to make great scenes. But through the lens of history it appears to reinforce a highly skewed narrative and to be an attempt to ossify false cultural memory. The lies and fallacies will be by omission, not by overt falsehoods.”

 

I expect to see American virtue minimized, American missteps emphasized, to fit the left-leaning narrative about the Vietnam War that, to this day, prevents our country from learning the real lessons from that war.

 

When we came home from Vietnam, we thought the country had lost its mind. Wearing the uniform was for fools too dimwitted to escape service. Burning draft cards, protesting the war in ways that insulted our own troops was cool, as was fleeing to Canada.

 

America’s current turmoil reminds me of those days, since so many of American traditional values are being turned upside down. Even saying words defending free speech on a university campus feels completely absurd, but here we are.

 

So Ken Burns’ new documentary on the Vietnam War promises to solidify him as the documentary king, breathes new life into the anti-war message, and fits perfectly into the current practice of revising history to make us feel good.

 

Perhaps you will prove me wrong. Watch carefully, but I would advise a heavy dose of skepticism.

[cutiger83]

It appears this review was written before the documentary was fully shown on PBS. Several of the items he listed in paragraph that starts “Will the full documentary show…” were shown in the series. How can someone give a valid critique of a documentary when they have not watched the full series? IMO, too much bias entered into his opinion before he even watched the entire series. He even admitted “color me doubtful”.

 

For instance, he mentions the picture of the soldier being shot on the street. IMO, that picture was shown in the documentary as a way to show how much that picture affected people’s opinions at that time not as a way to speak badly about the war. Even the South Vietnamese soldier stated how much that one picture affected opinions.

 

Our country most definitely changed in 1968.

 

I am looking forward to talking to my friend next week....

[RustyCanteen]

I have seen some references in the news about veterans of the ARVN who felt the program didn't give them as much coverage as the US and NVA had. Also that it didn't give enough time to the South Vietnamese perspective.

[ssggates]

I’ve only seen the first two episodes, and they seemed well put-together. I’ll watch the others soon. I have to say that the Vietnam vets at my VFW post do not like the show very much. I think the anti-war undertones mentioned in vintageproduction’s turned them off.

[Sgt. BARney]

I really enjoyed the first 2-3 episodes about the run up to heavy US involvement. The episode was aptly named - Deja-Vu.

 

Also, I had heard in the ads for the series that Burns spent 10 years putting this together. Is that correct? That's basically the same amount of time that the US had combat troops in VN...

[vintageproductions]

We said if this got political again it would be closed.