“I think that when Americans talk about the Vietnam War … we tend to talk only about ourselves. But if we really want to understand it … or try to answer the fundamental question, ‘What happened?’ You’ve got to triangulate,” says filmmaker Ken Burns of his celebrated PBS documentary series “The Vietnam War.” “You’ve got to know what’s going on. And we have many battles in which you’ve got South Vietnamese soldiers and American advisors or … their counterparts and Vietcong or North Vietnamese. You have to get in there and understand what they’re thinking.”
Burns and his co-director Lynn Novick spent 10 years on “The Vietnam War,” assisted by their producer Sarah Botstein, writer Geoffrey Ward, 24 advisors, and others. They assembled 25,000 photographs, feature close to 80 interviews of Americans and Vietnamese, and spent $30 million on the project. The resulting 18-hour series is a marvel of storytelling, something in which Burns and Novick take obvious pride. “The Vietnam War” provides lots of great vintage film footage, stunning photos, a solid Age of Aquarius soundtrack, and plenty of striking soundbites. Maybe this is what Burns means by triangulation. The series seems expertly crafted to appeal to the widest possible American audience. But as far as telling us “what happened,” I don’t see much evidence of that.
Like Burns and Novick, I also spent a decade working on a Vietnam War epic, though carried out on a far more modest budget, a book titled “Kill Anything That Moves.” Like Burns and Novick, I spoke with military men and women, Americans and Vietnamese. Like Burns and Novick, I thought I could learn “what happened” from them. It took me years to realize that I was dead wrong. That might be why I find “The Vietnam War” and its seemingly endless parade of soldier and guerrilla talking heads so painful to watch.
War is not combat, though combat is a part of war. Combatants are not the main participants in modern war. Modern war affects civilians far more and far longer than combatants. Most American soldiers and Marines spent 12 or 13 months, respectively, serving in Vietnam. Vietnamese from what was once South Vietnam, in provinces like Quang Nam, Quang Ngai, Binh Dinh, as well as those of the Mekong Delta – rural population centers that were also hotbeds of the revolution — lived the war week after week, month after month, year after year, from one decade into the next. Burns and Novick seem to have mostly missed these people, missed their stories, and, consequently, missed the dark heart of the conflict.
To deprive their Vietnamese enemies of food, recruits, intelligence, and other support, American command policy turned large swathes of those provinces into “free fire zones,” subject to intense bombing and artillery shelling, that was expressly designed to “generate” refugees, driving people from their homes in the name of “pacification.” Houses were set ablaze, whole villages were bulldozed, and people were forced into squalid refugee camps and filthy urban slums short of water, food, and shelter.
Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
I spoke with hundreds of Vietnamese from these rural areas. In hamlet after hamlet, they told me about being rousted from their homes and then being forced to drift back to the ruins, for deeply-held cultural and religious reasons, and often simply to survive. They explained what it was like to live, for years on end, under the threat of bombs and artillery shells and helicopter gunships. They talked about homes burned again and again and again, before they gave up rebuilding and began living a semi-subterranean existence in rough-hewn bomb shelters gouged into the earth. They told me about scrambling inside these bunkers when artillery fire began. And then they told me about the waiting game.
Just how long did you stay in your bunker? Long enough to avoid the shelling, of course, but not so long that you were still inside it when the Americans and their grenades arrived. If you left the shelter’s confines too soon, machine-gun fire from a helicopter might cut you in half. Or you might get caught in crossfire between withdrawing guerrillas and onrushing U.S. troops. But if you waited too long, the Americans might begin rolling grenades into your bomb shelter because, to them, it was a possible enemy fighting position.
They told me about waiting, crouched in the dark, trying to guess the possible reactions of the heavily-armed, often angry and scared, young Americans who had arrived on their doorsteps. Every second mattered immensely. It wasn’t just your life on the line; your whole family might be wiped out. And these calculations went on for years, shaping every decision to leave the confines of that shelter, day or night, to relieve oneself or fetch water or try to gather vegetables for a hungry family. Everyday existence became an endless series of life-or-death risk assessments.
I had to hear versions of this story over and over before I began to get a sense of the trauma and suffering. Then I started to appreciate the numbers of people affected. According to Pentagon figures, in January 1969 alone, air strikes were carried out on or near hamlets where 3.3 million Vietnamese lived. That’s one month of a war that lasted more than a decade. I began to think of all those civilians crouched in fear as the bombs fell. I began to tally the terror and its toll. I began to understand “what happened.”
I started to think about other numbers, too. More than 58,000 U.S. military personnel and 254,000 of their South Vietnamese allies lost their lives in the war. Their opponents, North Vietnamese soldiers and South Vietnamese guerrillas, suffered even more grievous losses.
But civilian casualties absolutely dwarf those numbers. Though no one will ever know the true figure, a 2008 study by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and a Vietnamese government estimate, suggest there were around two million civilian deaths, the vast majority in South Vietnam. A conservative killed-to-injured ratio yields a figure of 5.3 million civilians wounded. Add to these numbers 11 million civilians driven from their lands and made homeless at one time or another, and as many as 4.8 million sprayed with toxic defoliants like Agent Orange. “The Vietnam War” only weakly gestures at this civilian toll and what it means.
Photo: AP
Episode five of “The Vietnam War,” titled “This Is What We Do,” begins with Marine Corps veteran Roger Harris musing about the nature of armed conflict. “You adapt to the atrocities of war. You adapt to killing, dying,” he says. “After a while, it doesn’t bother you. I should say, it doesn’t bother you as much.”
It’s a striking soundbite and is obviously offered to viewers as a window onto the true face of war. It made me think, however, about someone who experienced the war far longer and more intimately than Harris did. Her name was Ho Thi A and in a soft, measured voice she told me about a day in 1970 when U.S. Marines came to her hamlet of Le Bac 2. She recounted for me how, as a young girl, she’d taken cover in a bunker with her grandmother and an elderly neighbor, scrambling out just as a group of Marines arrived — and how one of the Americans had leveled his rifle and shot the two old women dead. (One of the Marines in the hamlet that day told me he saw an older woman “gut-shot” and dying and a couple of small clusters of dead civilians, including women and children, as he walked through.)
Ho Thi A told her story calmly and collectedly. It was only when I moved on to more general questions that she suddenly broke down, sobbing convulsively. She wept for ten minutes. Then it was fifteen. Then twenty. Then more. Despite all her efforts to restrain herself, the flood of tears kept pouring out.
Like Harris, she had adapted and moved on with her life, but the atrocities, the killing, the dying, did bother her
Ho Thi A in 2008.
Photo: Tam Turse
Add together all the suffering of all of South Vietnam’s Ho Thi A’s, all the women and children and elderly men who huddled in those bunkers, those whose hamlets were burned, those made homeless, those who died under the bombs and shelling, and those who buried the unfortunates that did perish, and it’s a staggering, almost unfathomable toll – and, by sheer numbers alone, the very essence of the war.
It’s there for anyone interested in finding it. Just look for the men with napalm-scarred or white phosphorus-melted faces. Look for the grandmothers missing arms and feet, the old women with shrapnel scars and absent eyes. There’s no shortage of them, even if there are fewer every day.
If you really want to get a sense of “what happened” in Vietnam, by all means watch “The Vietnam War.” But as you do, as you sit there admiring the “rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage,” while grooving to “iconic musical recordings from [the] greatest artists of the era,” and also pondering the “haunting original music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross,” just imagine that you’re actually crouched in your basement, that your home above is ablaze, that lethal helicopters are hovering overhead, and that heavily-armed teenagers — foreigners who don’t speak your language — are out there in your yard, screaming commands you don’t understand, rolling grenades into your neighbor’s cellar, and if you run out through the flames, into the chaos, one of them might just shoot you.
Top photo: U.S. Marine stands with Vietnamese children as they watch their house burn after a patrol set it ablaze after finding AK-47 ammunition, Jan. 13, 1971, 25 miles south of Da Nang.
Nick Turse is the author of “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam,” one of the books suggested as “accompaniments to the film” on the PBS website for “The Vietnam War.” He is a frequent contributor to The Intercept.
Thank you for this, Nick. . .I think the documentary is one of the best ever produced about Vietnam but I agree there is very much more to the story.
Don’t know what you are talking about the documentary interviews civilians talks to and about them, talks about the death toll……so I’m thinking you watched something different…as a matter of fact I had never really thought about the Vietnamese civilian population when i thought of this was, this series made me realize how horrible it was for them and made me feel complete empathy for them
The German Nazis lost the war.
The American Nazis won.
The rest is lies.
OK, so after watching TWICE I have no idea what you’re walking about. The series STARTS and ENDS with the number of dead on all sides. 58000 soldiers, a million Vietnamese soldiers and vietcong and two million civilians. Again and again at each battle they count the dead where they know the. numbers and they mention the kill rations again and again and again. Literally ad naiuseum. I think your article is faux outrage. Not only that, they did a Herculean task of finding the Vietnamese counterparts of those telling the story on the American side. I’m not enamoured of the US government and certainly not of this war, but this documentary is a masterpiece. Do something of value? I’ll watch it too. Take potshots from the sidelines? No thanks.
The contradictions of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/10/02/viet-o02.html
I saw the 18 hours and I was cynical. Burns did NOT really address the war except from the safe quarters of the USA. he says 57,000 GI died, but never gives a whimper of the more than 2 million Vietnamese mostly civilians, who were murdered to make American kill rates justify further murders.
Sad, I cannot forgive Burns. he know better, he would get flack and little funding if he did tell the real truth. That’s about it ignorance, ethnocentrisms and millions of dollars !
“3000 Americans died on 911″.
I see that all the time.
I watched and the film continually had my mind projecting beyond what was being shown, trying to imagine the unimaginable wholesale horror and brutality experienced by the Vietnamese people. In this interview, Burns and Novick explain the process, decisions, constraints and limitations in putting this together over a 10 year period. They say many aspects are worthy of extensive documentaries on their own. I don’t think they’re trying to gloss over anything, just trying to cover a lot of material in a limited amount of time. The fact that Turse’s book is listed as a reference illustrates this.
https://youtu.be/i4ACye16wfQ
I wanted to like this, but I didn’t expect so many problems.
Burns and Novick, interestingly enough, choose not to interview US government officials. There’s nothing on Ellsberg, little on the air war, and the timeline jumps all over the place. They paint Nixon as committed to a withdrawal; there; nothing on Duck Hook or the Madman Theory, and seem to miss how Nixon’s strategy involved different kinds of escalation.
The 1970-1973 portions of the documentary are pretty dense; I can understand why they left some stuff out in this part. Why does the doc say that McNamara’s Dec. 1967 memo to Johnson (about the war being unwinnable) never received a reply?
I wanted to like it; feels like a missed opportunity, thiugh. The context is often missing, the threads aren’t brought together, and there’s no real analysis.
The Burns piece is has become a classic of “docuganda”, propaganda masked as a documentary.
What the Vietnam Memorial might look like if we counted the Vietnamese as equals…
https://vimeo.com/224185534
Phillip Jones Griffiths, the great photographer during Viet Nam made an observation that says it all…
“There is just one thing you need to know about Viet Nam….The Vietnam Memorial is 175 yards long, if the Vietnamese constructed the same type of memorial it would be 9 MILES long.” -Eldano
If Iraqis constructed a similar memorial, it would be miles long ..
Our government has mass-murdered well over 1,000,000 poor souls in Iraq alone.
I knew Burns wouldn’t dare cover the “deep state” truth of Vietnam — namely, the domestic machinations and assassinations that kept it running:
1. JFK had consulted with MacArthur, who told him anyone considering a ground war in Asian mainland “should have his head examined.” He told aide Kenny O’Donnell and otthers that he would not commit combat troops (above the 16,00 “advisers” that he did commit) to this meat grinder, and he could only withdraw after he was re-elected. Before he died, he had started the process, issuing NSAM 263, the first step in de-escalation — 1000 troops did come home by Xmas, after he was in the grave. But it didn’t take for LBJ to reverse this. Although we can never know for sure, the weight of evidence suggests that JFK was pursuing Cold War detente and would have done exactly what Nixon did later — Vietnamization — in 1965, had he not been killed. “Ultimately, its’ their (the South Vietnamese) war, and they have to win it,” he said at the American University. This is one of the main reasons that the CIA engineered his murder.
2. There was widespread, virulent opposition to MLK, but it was only after he openly opposed the Viet Nam war that he became intolerable to the right wing fanatics, who also whacked him. The conspiracy to assassinate MLK wa proven in a little-known civil trial won by his survivors.
3. Ditto for RFK, who was also going to re-open the invesigation into his brother’s death.
4. To his dying day, Nixon believed that the CIA had orchestrated Watergate — a soft coup, because the anti-Communist hardliners opposed de-escalation and Vietnamization. The case is made very well in David Oglesby’s classic book, “The Yankee and Cowboy War.” Gerald Ford was known as the CIA’s best man in Congress — he did his best to reverse Nixon’s de-escalation, but failed.
An honest accounting must add all four men as domestic casualties of the CIA’s Phoenix assassination program.
Let’s have that twisted Documentary on the DNC that caught us all by surprise back in the nineteen sixties… This is a history lesson about political ambitions, about Democrats that not only started our nation on the road to a terrible Civil War, but started most all other conflicts around the world that took so many of our loved one’s to an early grave. Let’s have that conversation, let’s expose how after these conflicts they refused to render aid, to end the suffering of our people short of being placed in a wooden coffin, buried, and than had words of sacrifice eternally inscribed to them one day a year or until such time as politicians are able to burn those chapters of patriotism from our minds.
There was never a sincere word of gratitude or apology for those who refused to die, that had to be trampled upon by our leaders every chance they got to cheat us out of the proper medical attention we required, compensation was never adequate for a life that could not support the dreams from those earlier years that were lost and put in jeopardy, newly minted patriots filled the void, into the front ranks they went, American citizens who gave it all and got little else for their troubles afterwards, it wasn’t just Americans doing the fighting though!
There was a public forum of criticism that rose up inspired by the rhetoric coming from the left, from Democrats, from politicians that lead the charge to taint the very evidence where soldiers stood true to their guns, to their word, that died not knowing the truth behind the message they fought for, where politicians themselves ran for cover, jumped over hurdles, schemed and conjured up lies in defense of having had bad judgement by their side, to deny these very people the proper treatment and compensation they deserved, they sacrificed it all only to be cheated outright by the very people that sent them into battle, they had little left to live for when all was said and done, what politicians feared the most from their constituents was their own privileges being taken away from them as a consequence of those direr needs those injured soldiers missing arms, legs, you name it, that came back psychologically impaired, missing more than all those other physical aspects put together. It was the Congress and the Senate that joined hands with the powers to be to down play those wounded and disabled claims coming from soldiers who took the battle to that perceived enemy according to our nation’s leadership, they became an invisible enemy for so many. People said our Flag was dishonored a reason, our sense of dignity was trampled upon, so much was just hearsay, principles and values could never be transfix to the problems as to why we actually went to war.
This war was never talked about in a public forum, insult was added to these injuries when our Vietnam Veterans came home, politicians did nothing to right this situation, instead they cheated these men and women in uniform, the government concocted lies, had special provisions enacted to protect the guilty, medical teams were assembled to lay blame the ills of our Patriots on issues our government labeled as congenital in nature, Veterans died in the streets because of this mistreatment, suicide was the alternative for them, dishonor was being whispered about, politicians embraced the horror of this development as a life line they could not do without if they were to maintain their own standard of living, they had to protect our Republic even though they were at fault yet again. It was our Veterans, our working class stiffs, our taxpayers that have always put their best foot forward whenever hard times came their way. The Vietnamese people paid dearly, it was the French who cried loudest though, America stepped forward, our people didn’t fair any better then the French. I’m still looking for those 5 Jokers in uniform where I tried to intercede with diplomatically to protect a fellow soldier from being killed by those on my left, I was the only casualty that evening, volunteering has it’s consequences even on your last day in Vietnam! Vietnam destroyed so many good things about us, it wasn’t exactly Vietnam… It was our Politicians in Washington, playing God with the French, and God knows who else.
Reference : Fred ->Kurt VanderKoi
Fred Said:
To your first point, it’s as if to say what the US did was okay because more people died afterwards. So I shouldn’t regret the death of a loved one because more will die next year too. I think your “foremost scholar” is talking about the Khmer Rouge; he probably also spends a lot of time in an air-conditioned office, detached from reality.
My Answer:
The Khmer Rouge Communists enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.[32]
The Vietnamese Communists, led by Le Duan, perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA Spring Offensive were killed or abducted on the road to Tuy Hoa in 1975.[40] Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,[41][42] while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000[43] (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions[41][44]). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.[45] Rummel estimates that slave labor in the “New Economic Zones” caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).[41][46] The number of boat people who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).[47] There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.[48]
The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.[50] The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.[51]
Fred Said:
To your 2nd point, nobody ever said the Communist didn’t kill people, but the US’s presence only added fuel (or should I say napalm) to an already volatile situation. Had we not supported France’s desire to recolonize Vietnam, and remained true to Ho Chi Minh (the man who helped us to defeat the Japanese) there would never have been a war – either against the French or the Americans.
My Answer:
In 1920 Ho Chi Minh co-founded the French Communist Party and was very active in the USSR Communist International (Comintern). IN FACT it was who Ho signed an accord with the French providing for French reentry into Vietnam .
Ho worked with French to eliminate non-Communist nationalist rivals.
Fred Said:
To your 3rd point, whether it was planned or not American committed atrocities. Isn’t murder still murder whether it was premediated or not? Your figure of 500,000 is bold and also an exaggeration. But putting that spin aside, the US’s presence only made the situation worse… for North and South.
My Answer:
From mid-1953 to early 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless “land reform” in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a “genocide triggered by class discrimination.”[6] Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 “landlords” were killed during the “land reform”, of whom 123,266 (71.66%) were later found to be wrongly classified.[14] The full death toll was MUCH greater because victims’ families starved to death under the “policy of isolation.”[15]
IN FACT during the period (1953-1956) the US presence in South Vietnam was minimal.
Fred Said:
Your 4th point is wrong. First, Ho was Vietnamese so he could not have “invaded” a country he was a citizen of. Also, he returned to Vietnam in 1941 to rout his country of the Japanese, with help from the OSS (today’s CIA). Also, Ho joined the communists in part because he was snubbed by Wilson at Versailles in 1919. China didn’t turn communist until 1949. Ho only accepted help from China and Russia after the US started bombing the North in 1964. However, as China and Vietnam had fought for millennia, Vietnam never had any interest in uniting with China or being run by it. She saw China as an invader, just like Japan, France and the US. Our best bet for stopping the spread of Communism would have been to support Ho when in 1945 he called for independence for Vietnam and read for the Declaration of Independence. He wrote Truman 11 times, but never got a reply. Finally, the South never solicited help from the US. We supplied the French, and after they were defeated we put Diem in power, and supported him.
My Answer:
Ho Chi Minh was an old Stalinist, trained in Russia in the early ‘20s, Comintern colleague of Mikhail Markovich Borodin in Canton [and a man who presumably] spoke with authority within the upper echelons of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. When the Vietnam Communist Party was established in 1930 Ho Chi Minh was present as the official representative of the Communist International in Moscow.
In 1959, Hanoi’s politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. “By Tet of 1959,” William Colby writes in his book, Lost Victory, “it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established.
In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To “hide” the fact that “there had been an invasion from the North,” as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict.
Originally part of the Vietminh and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the Khmer Rouge), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the Vietcong) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.
Thanks for the detailed and informed feedback. These are all interesting facts and figures but, I think, irrelevant. Are the atrocities committed by the US somehow diminished by the atrocities of others? To the contrary, I would argue that our presence in Vietnam, and the immoral acts we committed there, only set the stage for other atrocities, such as in Cambodia.
The land reform in the North this was a reaction to those Vietnamese who had betrayed their country in the process of working (profiting) from the French. Unlike the US and South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese government apologized for their actions and took steps to compensate victims.
Finally, I think your portrayal of Ho is inaccurate. Yes, he was a communist, but as pointed out in the Burns film, he was a nationalist first. In episode 1, there’s a quote from Ho who, in speaking to an American journalist, said: “You never had an empire, never exploited Asian people. Do not be blinded by this issue of Communism.” In the same episode, Ho is criticized by other communists for “being a nationalist first and a communist second.” This is reinforced in episode 8 by Bao Ninh (N. Vietnamese Army): “The Americans thought we were followers of Marx. No, you were wrong. We fought for this country so that there would be no more bombing, no more war. There would be no more death, no more destruction.”
I am sure Ho wasn’t blind to all pomp and circumstance exhibited by Stalin, Brezhnev, and Mao. He played along; he had to. But I wouldn’t conflate this with his goal.
Had we played our cards right and not looked askance at people of yellow skin, Ho would have been dancing to the Star Spangled Banner.
Thank you for your deep understanding, Fred. From a Vietnamese who lived through part of the war.
You really need to find out more from the Vietnamese sides. Your info about the Land Reform, re-education camps, etc. was warped and one-sided. My family was classified as landowners, as they indeed were, but they were simply denounced and they apologized publicly, and that was the end of it. They were not killed or starved to death, etc. Of course, they were also kind people, such that, when forced to denounce my family, the worst thing the “peasant” masses could come up with was that my great grandmother made the milk nurses (women hired to breastfeed my great grandmother’s babies when she was unable to feed them) wash before feeding. My family also opened their grain sheds to the “peasants” during the famine of 1945. And my grandfather joined the Viet Minh after serving as a high-ranking official in the French colonial government. You need to open your mind if you want to truly understand this war.
Nick, couldn’t agree with you more having served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 – 31 May 1968) at the USAF Hospital at the sprawling mega-base at Cam Ranh Bay. Though I have yet to read your classic critique of Vietnam, I did see your interview with Bill Moyers several weeks ago on YouTube. In the interview, you repeated a phrase I constantly heard from the wounded grunts on the ward: Shoot first and ask questions later. They said so casually and more as joke rather than a moral judgment on the prosecution of the war. We tried but failed to commit genocide against the Vietnamese people, and the presidents who got into this illegal war of aggression that we tried the Nazi elites during the Nuremberg Trials, especially Presidents JFK, LBJ and Richard Nixon, they were clearly war criminals. And though I was “in the rear with the gear” and therefore thankfully never personally committed or witnessed any war crimes, I did serve in a criminal war.
That’s a profound admission. It’s a pity that LBJ, Nixon, McNamara, et al. got away with it. Do you think this set the stage for Iraq?
Phillip Jones Griffiths, the great photographer during Viet Nam made an observation that says it all…
“There is just one thing you need to know about Viet Nam….The Vietnam Memorial is 175 yards long, if the Vietnamese constructed the same type of memorial it would be 9 MILES long.”
More like 5 miles…but still; that’s a lot.
If Iraqis constructed a similar memorial, it would be very long as well .. Last time I checked our government has mass-murdered well over 1,000,000 poor souls in Iraq alone.
We created a simulation of it. But due to technical limitations, this one goes up rather than out. https://vimeo.com/224185534
Afghanistan is The New Vietnam…. They never did anything to us. Now we are doing Vietnam to them. Just another phoney war for money to the connected 1% and position.. How many more of us and them will die in this “make work” war…?????? Watch our lie factory produce more sanitized epics to deceive & misinform.. Demand some accountability….. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
a must-read article by James Petras
Imperialism and the Politics of Torture
https://petras.lahaine.org/imperialism-and-the-politics-of-torture/
A response to Nick Turse:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/29/the-purposeful-killing-of-civilians-in-war-voices-from-vietnam/
And of course crushing anti-war resistance was a primary objective of the US government’s brutal suppression of dissent and the US government’s attacks on the Left:
The lessons of COINTELPRO
http://www.isreview.org/issues/49/cointelpro.shtml
Nick, will you interview John Pilger?
the brilliant Paul Street says:
He’s 10000% right.
– Nick Turse
Remember when Nick Turse was a guest on Bill Moyers’ program back in 2013?
see video and transcript here:
http://billmoyers.com/segment/nick-turse-describes-the-real-vietnam-war/
Did Turse know that Moyers was a DIRECTOR of the imperial think tank, the CFR (from 1967-1974)?
Did Turse know that Moyers was a member of the Johnson administration during the US destabilization of Indonesia?
Why does Bill Moyers get a pass? In the interview with Nick, Moyers disingenuously says:
Watch the body language of the two when Moyers says that.
Moyers is obviously lying. He knew of the bloodbath by the US in Indonesia. He would have known about the bloodbath by the US in Southeast Asia, especially during his directorship of the CFR for seven fucking years.
Nick–will you research and expose Moyers’ longtime service to the imperial ruling class and help shatter illusions that he’s some kind of “progressive” hero?
Outstanding analysis of the Burns dog and pony show. Thanks.
Knowing where it was to be shown and who was producing it, I knew that the Burns epic would be a propaganda whitewash of the war and the status of the yankee state as guilty of aggressive brutal war in the effort. The facts have proven the reality of my suspicions of what the show would prove to be.
Read the “Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,” by historian Alfred McCoy. Read Nick Turse’s “Kill Anything that Moves.” Read “The CIA as Organized Crime,” by Douglas Valentine who wrote extensively on our Phoenix Program of torture and assassinations. Read the material that has exposed the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a fraud. Examine what was left out of this documentary and then tell me how wonderful and balanced it was. I was incredulous when the narrator tells us in the last episode about how Vietnam’s countryside has “mainly healed,” only to in the next breath mention the still exploding ordinance maiming and killing and Agent Orange continuing to poison the populace. No mention of the CIA narcotics trafficking with the Hmong as it related to both GI access to heroin and heroin imports into the U.S. and Europe. No discussion of the refusal of the Dept of Defense to acknowledge Agent Orange related illnesses until thousands had died due to exposure. Instead we get feel good music and the glossing over of rampant war crimes by the U.S.
I served doing shore duty as a Navy radioman during some of the bloodiest periods of the war (October 1967 to November 1968). The 1000 enlisted men and 100 officers doing naval communications at our base, were never informed as to what we were doing in Vietnam. It was only after I returned to the USA and started participating in the anti-war effort that I had any sense of the massive destruction and suffering we were inflicting on a civilization that was much older than the European based nation that was “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” It appears pointless to say we, as a nation, shouldn’t do this or that. No powerful nation, or entity, including the Catholic Church (of which I am a member) has ever refrained from causing misery on a large scale to less powerful people. But maybe, just maybe, we can shorten the time of our killing and maiming of others by ceasing to think that we must follow the super powerful in our nation at the risk of being labelled “unpatriotic.” I don’t think the middle class, nor the lower class in the USA benefit one iota from crushing other peoples. Maybe all the powerful that favor these wars should, by law, have to name 10 of their relatives to fight on the front lines for the duration of the conflict, who then would be obligated “to serve”.
“But maybe, just maybe, we can shorten the time of our killing and maiming of others by ceasing to think that we must follow the super powerful in our nation at the risk of being labelled “unpatriotic.”
BRAVO!
You don’t seem to be watching the same documentary. Have ou watched all of it? To the person asking for the ‘Vietnamese’ side – they’ve interviewed people from all sides and from all stripes. There’s a ton of vietnamese side. Are you people watching? They detail atrocities, villages destroyed ‘to be saved’ and all the problems they faced. They repeated talk about the incredibly high kill ratios and how america only cared about the US part of the ratio.
Watching the 10 hours of Burns’ documentary re-activated all my memories of the horror of that Era in which I came of age. I was married in Hawaii after the Tet Offensive. My fiance was busy fighting outside Saigon for 2 weeks before flying out. Meanwhile I was demonstrating against the war in San Francisco. The war tore us apart and it tore the country apart. I have been grappling with the effects of that war for 50 years. I read the comments people have written you and wonder how many of them lived through that war, be it as soldier, protester, student or family member. I agree with you that the civilian casualties in that war, like so many wars are never discussed. I have yet to see a film of Vietnam through the lens of the Vietnamese (north or South) The only drama I know of that attempted to portray the horror of war through civilian eyes was Euripides play The Trojan Women over 2000 years ago. I am still trying to understand what happened there and why and what the take away is for us, and Burns provided a few more pieces to the puzzle. I have a son who knows nothing of that war, who was born many years after it and has no idea what happened, much less why. I try to explain it to him, but it always seems over-simplified because there is no way to capture every angle. I have criticisms of the documentary but like the Holocaust and other examples of man’s inhumanity (and humanity), no one can explain it fully, no matter how well intentioned and desperately we try. I hope we keep the conversation going though. By exploring the depths of it we may add to our own humanity!
Those mangled bodies on the battlefield and the mass graves at Hue didn’t do it for you huh?
I watched every episode. To state that it “glossed over” the civilian toll is beyond ludicrous. Sloppy reporting at best.
Of course, the Second Indochina War was horrible and stupid; and of course, countless civilians were killed or traumatised! But does vilifying U.S. working-class youths, who comprised nearly the entirety of combat-arms personnel in that war and all wars, accomplish anything apart from exhibiting one’s own classism? Soldiers’ stories are worth hearing, as are civilians’ stories. Both groups suffered mightily, thanks to a bunch of well-to-do corporate shills holding public office at Washington. Go denigrate the power elite, who created that war and all wars!
The americons could have resisted the draft and not fight a war
I’d like to hear the Vietnamese side of the story. Maybe they should hire a documentary maker and give him a budget and full access to the records.
Did Burns cover the Phoenix Program? That alone would make an interesting documentary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program
I hope that too, but it should started with the civilian Vietnamese who absolutely have no ties to the regime. I hope the statement by Le Duan, the one who launched and conducted the war: “… we fought for Mr. Soviet, for Mr. China …” would be analyzed.
Nick Turse’s book is a must-read.
Dear Effing–see above, mook.
Here’s another good analysis of the problems with Ken Burn’s approach:
http://www.newsweek.com/ken-burnss-vietnam-great-tv-horrible-history-674433
In particular this neglected issue:
For example, one of the ardent backers of the Vietnam War, perhaps the least known, was the “development economist” Walt Rostow, national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson from 1960 through 1969, who never admitted the war was unwinnable after playing a major role in ramping it up:
I think this is an excellent piece, but I also think the Burns documentary is about the best we’ll ever see from the country that still lives in a state of denial about Vietnam. The best result of the documentary is articles and discussions like here, on this page. Maybe, eventually, they’ll help the world’s greatest country to recognize that it’s not so great and that it owes one huge apology to the Vietnamese.
As Marine Karl Marlantes said in episode 5: “We have to recognize our [aggressive tendencies]. I worry about a whole country that doesn’t recognize them. Think of how many times we get ourselves in scrapes as a nation because we’re always the good guys. Sometimes I think that if we thought we weren’t always the good guys we might actually be in fewer wars.”
Not since the ancient Greeks has there been a people so in love with themselves as the Americans. This view is derived from our superpower status and fueled by a media that, at every level, is imbalanced in favor of Americ. For example, there’s a Vietnam War memorial in Hanoi. But, Google “Vietnam War memorial” and all you’ll see are links to the one in Washington. Even the internet that was supposed to make the world flat shows a profound pre-occupation with everything American.
It should come as no surprise then that Americans see themselves as a superior race. The masses that died and suffer in Vietnam are no longer human but “collateral damage.” If you want to see real suffering, real sacrifice, real heroism, look no further, it’s trademarked “Made in America.”
Interesting propaganda…and by interesting, I mean ridiculous.
You make my point. Anything that doesn’t conform with your trademark (aka brainwashed) view of American greatness is “propaganda.” No one likes being wrong but listen to the words of Marlantes, if you want to make America great again.
Who said anything about America being great??
See? This is why your propaganda sucks.
Who’s “propaganda” am I espousing all knowing one?
“[Whose]”???
That’s not a denial…nice.
http://www.vietnamfulldisclosure.org/#!music/c9ce
And then there was episode ten, which dissolved into such an orgy of sentimentality and self-pity that I simply had to turn the damned thing off and go do something useful. Mentioning the Khmer Rouge briefly and calling the defense of Vietnam from their invasion “Vietnam’s Vietnam” without even alluding to how it was the US, in destabilizing the Sihanouk monarchy, started the ball rolling downhill, ultimately leading to the deaths of millions of Cambodians. The Burns whitewash reached its glorious conclusion.
I am truly sorry for all the draftees who died or were maimed in Vietnam. As to the volunteers, there and now in Iraq, Afghanistan and in a myriad of other places where the US is fighting its secret wars, I am reminded of what the great WW2 cartoonist Bill Mauldin wrote about Italy, how it reminded him of a dog that had been run over, that feelings of sorrow and pity were limited by the realization that had it not run out into the street where it did not belong, it would not have suffered its fate.
The many good men and women who fought honorably in our wars since Korea certainly deserve a better fate than the ridicule heaped upon them, but there is a reason why they are viewed suspiciously: The leaders who lied, who committed war crimes, and who ordered war crimes to be committed, have completely escaped responsibility for their actions. Like our present day police, the military and its supporters simply close ranks, shielding the criminals in their midst from justice, giving us no choice but to condemn them as a class. Until that changes, there will be no final peace, no real putting Vietnam behind us.
Beautifully said, Jeff. Yout comments stand in stark contrast to others on this page that contain the stereotypical American rationalizations. We’ve become as skilled in historical revisionism as the Soviet Union once was.
I was with alpha 196 a medical division, 1969. #heip doc,death valley # Aug 22,23,24,25,26,27,28.
The The Hmong People’s Sacrifice was NEVER mentioned …..
I had a Vietnam vet neighbor John. Sadly, John was diagnosed and died in about six months at age 64 from Agent Orange lymphoma. (While he was in the hospital, two others were inpatients there, suffering similar diagnoses from Agent Orange. And our community is a town of 24K people.)
Genetic testing confirmed that John’s lymphoma was definitely Agent Orange. He remembered being in the field when they sprayed it, stating that he could barely breathe. John’s three children were informed that they too might develop lymphoma, as the Agent Orange had changed their father’s genes. But they were given the “cheerful” information that if they did get lymphoma, it would probably be more treatable.
If John had been alive, I suspect that he would have scoffed at the Burns production of Vietnam War—especially since that it turned out that he died at the hands of his own government, fighting a war that all of them knew we would never win. And I find it overwhelmingly ironic that while Burns is trying to resolve the residual inner conflicts about Vietnam, we have moved on to more and more never-ending wars that we will never win.
Can we not put a stop to this madness?
But John did win the war. The North Vietnamese were ultimately bombed into appealing for armistice, similar to how the North Koreans were, with America promising to resupply the south one to one for any spent munitions and arms. But Nixon’s resignation in the wake of Watergate was seen as a opportunity by the Northern communists to test the shifting political climate of America.
Many democratic senators, who had participated in anti-war rallies, saw the political points they could gain by breaking our promise to the South Vietnamese worth having every American Soldier and every South Vietnamese Ally who died do so in vain.
They didn’t care about the millions of South Vietnamese who were forced, under threat of internment or death at communist reeducation camps, to become refugees in ramshack boats. They didn’t care about the further damage our culture would suffer having such a long and costly War crescendo in failure.
All they cared about was maintaining their position of power and securing channels that they could accrue more power through.
That’s what you got from the story above… That Democrats looked away as the North Vietnamese won? That the NV were bombed into appealing for armistice… Nice… Every American soldier.. the article is talking about the millions of civilians killed mostly by American bombs and bullets and you go on about how many Americans died and how their sacrifice wasn’t justified by the unified peaceful Vietnam that exists today. You bloodthirsty American types never fail to fill me with rage. One day it will be in your country and your homes that such carnage is being exacted… The south still hasn’t forgotten or let go of the Sherman march outrages… so let’s see what a modern conflict costing millions of lives will do
Right on!
“….breaking our promise to the South Vietnamese Ally.” You must mean the “Ally” and puppet government the USA installed when it realized Ho would have won an election in a unified Vietnam. And “further damage our culture would suffer”? You seem to have a case of typical American exceptionalism……whining about the blowback your own country’s monstrous behavior brought on itself while ignoring the unimaginable catastrophe your country brought upon the Vietnamese people. I’ll say it. Shame!
This story is a cheap shot and unfair. Maybe Nick Turse went for popcorn too often, because the version I have been watching has not glossed over much of anything – in fact it peppers its narrative with factoids about civilian casualties, Black and Hispanic American casualties, Kent State casualties. The post Nixon bombing pictures of Hanoi show flattened neighborhoods – there were surely people living in those buildings.
Tomonthebeach, actually, you are the one taking the unfair cheap shot. Our focus is and always has been on us, the guys wearing the “white hats”, the good guys. What a small minded, narcissistic, self-absorb, limited way of thinking. This is why we do all these SUPER expensive wars, that & we hate other people who we don’t relate to, who we hate and fear, like the vietnamese and the war protesters who would deprive us of our addictive rage and compulsion to murder. I say such nonthinker are afraid and cowardly to take a mirror and have a good and long look at themselves. Factoids pepper here or there isn’t focusing on the pain and suffering of those hurt in the war living in Vietnam. And implying what’s in the back of your head that there must be people that USED to live in those flattened building is just one of many quick factoids that don’t make their suffering and pain real or significant. You can’t change what you don’t understand, and passing over their experience is not giving us a chance to learn the history so we won’t be reliving it over and over again. Our provincial, myopic approach is so lame and frightening, and makes ‘hell’ go on and on in a deja vu endless tape. Insulting those you don’t agree with is such a stupid, lame reactionary trick to jerk people around to seeing it just from your limited view – just another unfair, cheap shot!
Agree.
Nevertheless, perhaps it would be good to emphasize exactly this aspect of war, of all wars. It is exactly civilians in all wars who pay the price, usually with no choice, and forever.
And, after all, America is still doing it today as we speak and still trying to cover it in glory.
I agree Tom. You don’t even have to watch this film closely to catch all the mentions of impacts on civilians. They are mentioned often. If you want to dive deep, Episode seven, “The Veneer of Civilization,” speaks frankly and at length about civilian casualties, free fire zones and atrocities. I think the author should watch again.
It is an amazing documentary! Thank you!
Did you watch the same series as I did? All of what you mention is supposedly missing was mentioned. The civilian toll, the free fire zones, the refugees, the wanton killing of women, children and elderly people, the body counts and the impact on the civilian population is mentioned all over the series. I am not a huge Ken Burns fan, but this was good documentary work and other than not going after the people who got rich making the bombs, the bullets and the planes, did a good job of telling the US involvement in that war. I assume you felt this was a good way to promote your book and highlight what you wrote about. Not sure that gives your critique a whole lot of credibility, especially since your criticism is not valid.
Any documentary on war has to tread a fine line between telling what happened and the danger of dampening enthusiasm for present and future wars. Mr. Burns documentary handles this well, describing how the war was a mistake, perpetuated by dishonest politicians who bear little or no resemblance to the dedicated and forthright politicians of our era. Of course he is not going to dwell on civilian casualties – such casualties are depressing and have a tendency to cast war in an unfavorable light.
I think Mr. Burns generally manages to avoid these traps, and at the end of the series the viewer is left with a generally positive image of American soldiers, and their capacity to fight wars, if properly directed.
Two thumbs up, Benito!
Sadly yes. Well said.
Two enthusiastic thumbs up.
Even the old Vietnam Vets still sleep with a pistol under the pillow.
Civilian pain and suffering was covered quite a lot. I believe you are just moaning for the sake of publishing an article.
Your nitpicking about something that is not worthy. This was another phenomenal doc series from Ken Burns.
I disagree, Larry. His article is valid and if you don’t like it, that’s your choice. The series barely mentioned the abandonment of Phnom Pehn, Cambodia and the pathological reign of torture and murder that was the Khmer Rouge. All a result of Cambodian peasants empowering a mad man, Pol Pot, and his movement in reaction to the US destroying their villages. Barely a peep about this is inexcusable.
“I believe you are just moaning for the sake of ***selling your book***.”
1. Douglas Eugene Pike, foremost scholar on the Vietnam War and the Viet Cong (Texas Tech University) and director of the Indochina Archive (UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY) had this to say about the consequences of the Communist Victory in Vietnam.
“Even by the most cautions estimate, more Indochinese died violently since the end of the Vietnam War than during the war itself, perhaps by two million . . . . Human suffering has been on an unprecedented scale, far worse than the wartime days.”
2. Professor RJ Rummel, the world’s foremost expert on democide, has this to say about VIETNAMESE CIVILIANS KILLED
– Table 6.1a for the period 1960-1975, TOTAL CIVILIAN WAR DEAD (LINE 193), midcase 663,000
– Many civilians were killed by the communist. For example “The estimated range of refugees killed in one case (line 454) may seem relatively high but is probably conservative. Of the 200,000 refugees that fled the Highlands offensive by the North in March 1975, only 45,000 made it to Tuy-Hoa. MANY OF THE 155,000 MISSING WERE KILLED BY NORTH VIETNAMESE TROOPS”
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM
3. It was never American policy to commit atrocities. The communist North has admitted to killing as many as 500,000 in land reform alone (and laughingly claims they may have gotten a bit carried away.)
4. Ho Chi Minh joined the communist party in the 1920’s and was a devoted party apparatchik long before he returned to Vietnam to take over the country with the full support of the Chinese and Russian communists. He invaded the South long before the US engaged fully in the war (1959 according to documents obtained from the North), and the South sought help from the US to stave off the invasion because the North was well armed with communist arms supplied by China and Russia (as well as “advisers” from both countries.)
5. Ho Chi Minh The Man and The Myth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaLwFvhWdZE
It never ceases to amaze me how much effort people put into spinning, distorting, and rationalizing details about the Vietnam war.
To your first point, it’s as if to say what the US did was okay because more people died afterwards. So I shouldn’t regret the death of a loved one because more will die next year too. I think your “foremost scholar” is talking about the Khmer Rouge; he probably also spends a lot of time in an air-conditioned office, detached from reality.
To your 2nd point, nobody ever said the Communist didn’t kill people, but the US’s presence only added fuel (or should I say napalm) to an already volatile situation. Had we not supported France’s desire to recolonize Vietnam, and remained true to Ho Chi Minh (the man who helped us to defeat the Japanese) there would never have been a war – either against the French or the Americans.
To your 3rd point, whether it was planned or not American committed atrocities. Isn’t murder still murder whether it was premediated or not? Your figure of 500,000 is bold and also an exaggeration. But putting that spin aside, the US’s presence only made the situation worse… for North and South.
Your 4th point is wrong. First, Ho was Vietnamese so he could not have “invaded” a country he was a citizen of. Also, he returned to Vietnam in 1941 to rout his country of the Japanese, with help from the OSS (today’s CIA). Also, Ho joined the communists in part because he was snubbed by Wilson at Versailles in 1919. China didn’t turn communist until 1949. Ho only accepted help from China and Russia after the US started bombing the North in 1964. However, as China and Vietnam had fought for millennia, Vietnam never had any interest in uniting with China or being run by it. She saw China as an invader, just like Japan, France and the US. Our best bet for stopping the spread of Communism would have been to support Ho when in 1945 he called for independence for Vietnam and read for the Declaration of Independence. He wrote Truman 11 times, but never got a reply. Finally, the South never solicited help from the US. We supplied the French, and after they were defeated we put Diem in power, and supported him.
“Ho Chi Minh (the man who helped us to defeat the Japanese)”
You have that ass backward. Ho was trained and armed by the US in the 40s. The Americans helped Ho defeat the Japanese…not the other way around.
Ho played all sides of the war at one point, and was an avowed Marxist/Leninist throughout.
Wrong. The OSS went looking for Ho, and they worked together to defeat the Japanese. It’s not like Ho telegraphed the OSS and they came to his rescue. I know you would like to imagine it that way, but it’s not fact.
Also wrong about ” avowed Marxist/Leninist.” As stated in the Burns documentary, Ho was criticized by the Commies for putting nationalism before communism. Indeed, had Wilson met with him at Versailles it is likely he would never have turned to communism. Ho also quoted from our Declaration of Independence (not the Communist Manifesto) in Sep 1945 in the hope of creating a united Vietnam. He was with us from the start… sadly, aside from fighting the Japanese, we were never with him.
Ho was NOT trained and armed by the OSS??? You’re so full of shit.
Ho had been appealing to the US LONG before the 40s, and (repeating myself) played all sides of the war.
For you to assert that quoting the Declaration of Independence is mutually exclusive from being an avowed Marxist/Leninist is supremely absurd…especially knowing Ho’s thoughts, words, history in Russia, and implementation of a communist Vietnam.
Pardon me, full of what? As is said, the stronger the words the weaker the argument.
In addition to what I’ve already read on the topic, in the Burns film the point was also made regarding how quickly Ho and the Viet Minh had learned to use the guns provided by the OSS and picked up on combatant techniques taught by the OSS. If you missed it check out this wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh. Halfway down it, you’ll see a picture of Ho with the OSS Deer team.
Sorry that you had to “repeat yourself” all knowing one, but I made this point first in my initial response to Kurt’s post. It seems you’re too preoccupied with ranting your version of alternative history, to read what I already wrote.
It is true that American’s reason for going to Vietnam was to fight communism but, as we know today that was a complete misreading of the situation. As McNamara admitted years later “we mistook a civil war for communist aggression.”
Had we embraced Ho in 1919 and after WWII he would have been a devout following of American ideals. We didn’t, so he became a Communist instead. As stated in the film, his goal was to liberate his country; communism was only the mechanism for doing so.
“Pardon me, full of what?”
Shit….the word I used was shit. As in, “you’re being entirely disingenuous”.
Your assertion: “Ho Chi Minh (the man who helped us to defeat the Japanese)”
My refutation: “You have that ass backward. Ho was trained and armed by the US in the 40s. The Americans helped Ho defeat the Japanese…not the other way around.”
Your response: “Wrong. The OSS went looking for Ho, and they worked together to defeat the Japanese […] the point was also made regarding how quickly Ho and the Viet Minh had learned to use the guns provided by the OSS and picked up on combatant techniques taught by the OSS.”
You agreed with and restated my point while simultaneously rejecting it. Hence, “you’re full of shit”.
The OSS provided weapons and US guerrilla training manuals upon which Ho depended. Ho wouldn’t have been able to do anything to the Japanese without the US.
Regarding your last 2 paragraphs, I’m not sure that’s the case.
America’s reason may or may not have had anything to do with the domino effect, and Vietnam’s war was a civil war OF communist/anti-communist aggression.
Also, During the Versailles Conference, Ho was already delivering speeches on the prospects of Bolshevism in Asia and was attempting to persuade French Socialists to join Lenin’s Third Communist International. As early as 1923, Ho was in Moscow. An embrace by Wilson may or may not have made a difference.
Ho was probably always a communist.
Hey Asswipe, This is what I first wrote that you argued about: “he [Ho] returned to Vietnam in 1941 to rout his country of the Japanese, with help from the OSS (today’s CIA).” It would seem that you’re the one who contradicted and then agreed with. I guess that means you’re full of shit too. Congrats!
I love your binary interpretation of history… “Ho WOULDN’T have been able to do anything to the Japanese without the US.” Of course, without the help of the glorious US of A, Ho was completely and irrevocably lost, blind. Funny, he kicked our asses 20 years later.
You should read more on the subject. Ho only turned to communism after he was rejected at Versailles in 1919. The French Communist Party didn’t start until 1920.
I enjoy debate I can learn from. That’s not the case with you because you rant and act like an asshole. Get your shit together, please. Bye.
“This is what I first wrote that you argued about: “he [Ho] returned to Vietnam in 1941 to rout his country of the Japanese, with help from the OSS (today’s CIA).””
Clever revision….Are you lying through your fingers, or do you just have a very extraordinarily terrible memory??? Maybe you should work harder on your gaslighting…
Here’s your actual comment that I refuted:
____________________________________________________________________________
OraleHohms > Fred
September 29 2017, 5:03 p.m.
“Ho Chi Minh (the man who helped us to defeat the Japanese)”
____________________________________________________________________________
Face it…you got caught making an absurd statement and then tried to backtrack.
“As is said, the stronger the words the weaker the argument.”
“Hey Asswipe […] you rant and act like an asshole”
Haha….well that didn’t take long….
I think this piece by Nick Turse does justice to what Burns and his apparent reliance on the Koch brothers version of the war not just missed but did so intentionally, just as what we did to Iraq has been completely censored from the American public – the real impacts of the people and bodies left behind by our techno-war culture.
Much as is the case when a little kid starts playing shoot-em up war computer games, blowing bodies apart as s/he learns to become an ever more accurate killing machine, the bodies left behind – never mentioned or worse even their own post war trauma are no longer part of the national drama once the event closes down.
As part of my recent protest project where i was collecting images of protest – i felt it was necessary to do even a small balancing act. By this, I mean imagine that you have 10 grains of sand in front of you to represent the totality of the event.
To me, Burn’s presentation only covers 1 grain of sand and the other 9 are never shown. Just one of those grains of sand would be the decades it would take to remove the millions of mines that continued to kill and maim civilians after the wars closure that went on for another 30 years if not still happening.
Another grain of sand a thousand times larger than the other grains was the environmental impacts past down through generations of families of agent orange and the impacts to the soil and plant biologies that tore a paradise apart and is still doing so.
Another grain of sand is the generations of civilians that have come up after the fact who are still dealing with the trauma of those that survived.
And another was our carpet bombing impact on Cambodia that led to the Kmer Rouge.
Probably the most dramatic, which, since I missed the first show was the fact that of the long term political impacts of Truman turning the country back into the hands of the French after their desperate plea to be freed. What kind of arrogance will we have to go through to even for a moment begin to understand that those early folks that are now mostly gone whorshiped us as a nation, only to betrayed?
And then as a more recent story portrays another another form in how we as a society then framed these incredibly humble and hard working people – as epithets – Gooks.
During the Iraq invasion – I was doing an upclose look into Al Jazeera which America’s corporate media despised to the point of targeting a hotel where their reporters were holed up – but this is not about that – Al Jazeera had an online social media based website. It was almost unheard of for Americans in the U.S. to actually visit that site, however I did, as did very large numbers of U.S. military personnel stationed in the war zone. At the time AJ was known to have up to 70 million Arab viewers a day – not all on the website but still one of the largest in the world at that time – and all the time I could witness brutally ugly racial slurs constantly being used – one of the most regular ones – were to call Iraqi’s “Ragheads”. Openly using this degrading term followed usually by further filthy mouthed swearing and insults. Just imagine what highly conservative Middle Eastern people from nearly a dozen different country’s would think of this – our diplomats on the front line that were killing people and insulting them on their own social media sites?
This was exactly what we were also doing in Vietnam – Men were moving in with young Asian girls because their families had lost their abilities to make money so money for sex – just absolutely part of Burns war – was endemic part of that event – Not more than 500 miles away was Subic Bay among the largest of brothel cultures where over 70,000 Filipino women were on duty seeking money for sex as well as one of the major strongholds where drugs of any choice could be had – all of this was part of the war with an estimated 50,000 GI’s coming over to PI every week during the war for a bit of R&R. I happened to have a Filipino – upper class – coworker on the ship as a computer tech – he openly embarrassed for what the city of sin located just outside of the largest U.S. military base in the world was doing to his people. This tiny grain of sand just never appears – even when the fact it was well known in military circles that this place was the number one attraction for men – stories of people being executed for even attempting to document what married and single military personnel were doing there was used to threaten me if i dared even breath a word of this and the huge gambling networks – and open theft of military supplies that were part of this world at that time.
These are just a few of the grains of sand that will not be portrayed by Burns – or if they are underplayed if at best as Nick suggests.
I could barely stand watching a single episode and repeatedly had to change away from the event as i was uncomfortable if they were going to start walking into a village with weapons as i was not going to be able to confront the idea of looking at another villager who could at any second be torn apart by gun fire. At one point while station over a thousand miles away in Asia, I learned what it was to be the Ugly American living in Taiwan for 8 months where people who could not speak my language gawked at me as I walked through their city. If they approached it was always a petty thief with a scam and fake smile – the real question dawned on me – what was i doing in their country? I had no answer – I still don’t.
Nick, everything you mentioned is in the documentary. Having thus far watched 9 of the 10 episodes, and knowing they include everything you mentioned in your article…it seems like you’re simply unhappy that the documentary doesn’t devote most of its time to simplifying the complexity of the Vietnam war into a Vietnamese civilian perspective.
If there’s one major aspect that I would say is glossed over; it’s who profited from the war, who made those contract decisions, and how all that stacks up against Eisenhower’s MIC warning.
LBJ was part of the “8F Crowd” which formed RMK-BRJ. (Halliburton bought Brown & Root in 62′)
RMK-BRJ had a no bid contract, did 97% of the work, made hundreds of millions of dollars, and continued a war that was known at the onset to be completely unwinnable.
More US bombs were dropped in Vietnam than any other war (including WWII). How much did they cost; and who made money on them???
None of that was explored. To answer those questions would probably solve the riddle of the Vietnam war (and others since).
Agree.
Yes…the money question is SO much more important than that of lives lost.
Yes…it absolutely is if you ever want to put an end to the pointless wars that murder millions of people.
There are a lot of problems with this Ken Burns series, but among the worst are that it portrays the American involvement as an intervention in a civil war, rather than what it really was, an American effort to take over the colonial empire that France had created for economic reasons. A good discussion is here:
https://www.laprogressive.com/ken-burns-vietnam/
The reality is that if independent democratic elections had taken place in the country in 1956, then Ho Chi Minh would have been the elected leader. As an independent nationalist, Ho Chi Minh would have sought trade and development programs that put the interests of the Vietnamese people first and foremost. So why was this such a threat to the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon Administrations?
To understand that, you have to put it in context – the desire of the United States, post-WW II, to become the world’s leading imperial power, to run an economic empire that would deliver vast wealth to the politicallly connected. While this might seem undemocratic and unpalatable, there was a ready excuse for pursuing this policy – “fighting the communist menace”.
As usual, there is an absolute taboo in American media circles on discussing the economic agendas behind foreign wars, both covert and overt, that Ken Burns loyally sticks to. Running the numbers on tin, tungsten, rubber, oil, and cheap labor? Asking how profits would be impacted if French and American corporations were not given preferential access to natural resources in Southeast Asia – let alone Central Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Central America, South America, the Congo?
And if anyone wonders why Bank of America and the Koch Brothers sponsored this PBS series, well isn’t that obvious if one thinks about it for even a few seconds? Look at Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria and think about the economic agendas behind those wars, which are no different from Vietnam. And if all these wars fail, then there goes the grand imperial project, down the toilet, like the British, French and Soviet Empires of the past. Leaving a world without any empires, imagine that?
So this ‘documentary’ is just part of the imperial PR game – because, as George Orwell said, “Who controls the present, controls the past. Who controls the past, controls the future.”
brilliant.
I don’t disagree, but as a historian, I find it simultaneously compelling, easy to believe, and astounding, that the government of American was so profoundly frightened of Communism that it would go to this extent to quell its spread. After WWII, America was faced with Communism in Eastern Europe, and communism in Asia. The containment policy of Truman put us in an untenable position, and as we made promises in Southeast Asia, we tried to keep them, only to fail profoundly profoundly profoundly.
So true. Ordinary people want to believe they have some stake in each of these wars. But the reality is as you say, they are only intended ‘to deliver vast wealth to the politically connected’. This was also startlingly true of all the European colonial projects. Working stiffs back home benefited not one jot from all the looting overseas.
The war for profit and/ or resources snatch narrative has its own factual problems. In fact it borders along the conspiracy theories like building seven at the World Trade Center. No sadly Vietnam and the U.S. intervention was truly political cowardice from the people who should’ve been the adults in the room recognizing the fools errand but instead they gave into political fears of being seen as soft on communism.
What Nick Turse is getting at is the United States military conduct during the war in the masking of how to reduce our casualties by killing anything that moves and anything dead and Vietnamese was a dead North Vietnamese or VC combatant and was counted as such. A My Lai Massacre every week indeed! To get a complete story of how some of these search and destroy assaults,harassment and interdiction artillery fire, and aerial bombardments were carried out you need to read the book The Perfect War by Dr. James Gibson. Dr. Gibson details the way in which firepower was used in place of boots on the ground to kill the enemy. Unfortunately bombs and artillery shells don’t discriminate between civilians and combatants.
Agree with Nick Turse. I’ve never liked Ken Burns’s sentimentality — he’s a showman, not a historian.
glosses over?
Many things can be said about the illegal evil of the US attack on the vietnamese.
1. an illegal invasion
2. agent orange
3. MyLai massacre
4. the immoral draft
5. the fraud of the false flag of tonkin
6. the war for rubber
7. avg 35 americans killed every day for 4 years
8. carpet bombing civilians in Hanoi
9. PTSD no recognized
10. criminal politicians and warmonsters and wallstreet thieves lying and pushing their crap onto Americans
ok. This should be enough to get you started on your 100 hour documentary.
enjoy.
Sounds like you’re watching a different series than I am.
Free-fire zones and an over-emphasis on kill-ratios resulting in heavy civilian losses are mentioned repeatedly in the episodes I’ve seen so far.
My Lai has also been mentioned several times and American vets have also discussed torture and mistreatment of civilians.
Overall, the series is a pretty strong indictment of several U.S. administrations and how they continually lied to the American public.
I’m 73 and VietNam has scorched my soul and my brain for 50 years. I will never forget seeing a huge blown up photograph of the child running naked down a village road with napalm on her back when I was 22 and attending an anti war march in NYC. I have loathed our corporate military ever since. But Ken Burns could look thru his Beatle haircut at that picture all day and never once see its truth. The guy is a muppet. He makes millions of dollars from sucking at the corporate trough. Of course he’s going to soft peddle his “facts.”
There’s an entire segment on the photograph in episode 9.
Big whoop. It doesn’t undo the effect it had on me and my opinion of my country’s military at the time, north the effect it had one the young girl who was burning.
Maybe you should actually watch the series.
He did, and the acclaimed book he spent a decade researching on the Vietnam war was suggested as an accompaniment to the series.
He didn’t watch the one I did, like I did. I saw and empathized with the portrayal of the sadness, the murder, the terror wrought on the Viet Namese people during he war in this series. I disagree with the writer of this piece. I will watch Mr. Turse’s as well. Another great one, with a lot more early history of the corrupt and inept policies, stretching back to the 40s is Year of the Pig, free on YouTube. I’d offer a better lesson, instead of MR. Turse’s views of our apparent lack of coverage of the victim’s plight (as noble and necessary as that is), is that we have not learned a damn thing, and apparently, year on year, find it easier continue to commit even more carnage, as our guts to protests or even to cover it on the news, dissipates. We are damned if we do not turn, admit our sins and reconcile, to the people we terrorized, and the generations of Americans, soldier and protester we lied to and sacrificed.
Above all and in this case too, PBS knows how to dutifully churn out entertainment w/ decent ‘production values’. And their entertainment output can tilt all the way to the serious end of the continuum, as in this instance.
On the other hand , Nick Turse’s courageously researched & irreplaceable book ,’Kill Anything That Moves’ fully covers the same subject dramatically glossed by Ken Burns … but refuses to avert its gaze for a microsecond , much less hours on end.
No question though, as far as overall viewer comfort goes… in this ‘apples vs. oranges’ comparison , the PBS series leaves Mr. Turse’s unwavering craftsmanship behind in a cloud of dust.
-J.Joslin (Detroit, Michigan – just South of the Canadian border)
I’ve been waiting to hear an intercept reporters view of that documentar. Thank you for your insight.
Gee, Nick. Guess you missed the destroyed cities, towns, villages, rice paddies, and forests. And the Agent Orange that left the dioxin that is still in the soil and the water. And the 2 million count of Vietnamese killed at the end of Episode 9. Maybe you were getting yourself a snack.
Ken Burns makes me puke the way he waxes nostalgic for wars.
I was born in 1957
been lied to my entire life by my own Gov.
Do not understand the criticism
of Ken Burns Vietnam
“IT” has exposed more lies about the War
than ANYTHING before it ..
THANK YOU KEN !!!
“Exposed more lies about the War than ANYTHING before it”? That’s just not true. It’s another lie, in fact.
I agree with Larry. I’m deeply impressed with the Burns effort. Very timely too. it could have been 30 hours and some of the criticisms could have been dealt with. I think it adds to public understanding and that’s always a good thing. And BTW, I do agree that profiteering from war is the real crime, but damned if I know how to stop it.
No…KILLING & WOUNDING civilians is the “real crime”.
Would you feel better if the Vietnam War had been non-profit?
Thank you. Important because, of course, the US is still at it.
It seems amazing to me that America believes that it can create all of this suffering in the world and for literally no purpose other than shallow self interest and still expect to live a peaceful and secure existence at home.
Does anyone feel safer? How is the quality of life at home shaping up? Yet people want to believe that the continual eroding away of their culture, society and future is just some random event..?
Now that is truly insane…
First, i read Nick Turse’s book years ago and i would highly recommend it. Second, I agree with his take on this series. It’s good in that it knows the target audience and will keep them interested in the documentary.
But I see this war as one of the invader from the 20th century leaving his devastating footprint on an agrarian civilization that hadn’t changed much in hundreds of years. These people had no idea what they were in for when the decision was made on this side of the ocean to arrive on their shores.
Obviously the death. The suffering. The fear. But what about all the debauchery that came to their country courtesy of these western culture warriors? We certainly did a number on these people. Unconscionable, really. Thankfully time marches on and I read a fact about Vietnam today. 70 % of the country is 30 years of age or younger. The scars won’t be quite so deep with this majority of the country. And they will only fade further as the years continue to to push on. Thank God for that.
No, the scars will be there for many generations. During 2009, I attended a work conference in Saigon, I had seen many desperate things already in South Africa where I was born and raised as a privileged white child, and also in Australia amongst the aborigines. No single experience has affected me more than when I was looking in the market for a gift for my wife, when a young girl, without arm limbs, came up to me to beg. She typified the many in the city outside, who had been born after the war who were without limbs, which I understand has been brought about from the absorption of the land of toxic chemicals from agent orange.
Thank you for this article.
I grew up with WWII civilian refugees. What lessons? Sorta simplistic. There are two people in war. Those with guns, and those without guns. And the stories we tell are told through one of the perspectives. And that will effect not only how we see the past, but will become the assumptions and world view of how we act now.
And it seems that with Burns the essential view point is through the world of men with the guns.
Exactly.
I agree with Nick Turse that Ken Burn’s documentary glosses over the scale of the human tragedy in Vietnam.
I would go even further and say the documentary is about par for the course as an American explanation of the relationships between the US and any other non American group. Mainly that the US world view is blindly and pathologically narcissistic and self centered. This is a reflection of US society as a whole and is it a surprise the country elected Donald Trump who is the personification of that?
The whole documentary strikes me as the Michael Bay/Roland Emmerich style, lots of whiz bang technology shots, large explosions and glaring obvious manipulative emotions and the trite use of music to reinforce the contrived emotional moments.
This documentary also reinforces the skewed perception of war by mostly focusing on the military side of the conflict. It has all the political drama in the US but barely scratches the surface of the politics of South Vietnam which like politics in Afghanistan and Iraq has more to do with the military failure than any combat. It also doesn’t cover any of the huge intelligence apparatus that ran a parallel war all across south east Asia.
There wasn’t any mention of how the US worked with local warlords and criminal gangs to control and there was very little references to the fact that the minority Catholic south Vietnamese governments spent more time fighting the majority Buddhist political opposition as they did fighting the National Liberation Front.
Another well documented book about the extent of the covert intelligence war in Vietnam is Douglas Valentine’s “The Phoenix Program”. This book details the nuts and bolts of the US/South Vietnam intelligence programs before and during the war.
Alfred McCoy’s book, “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade” contains a detailed account of the secret war in Laos in the Vietnam era which the documentary pretty much skips over.
Another important factor left out was how is how the US suppression in the Philippines was the training ground for the methods used 5-6 decades later in South Vietnam. And the fact the US used tens of thousands of mercenaries ( many were Filipinos trained in counter insurgency to fight Philippine Nationalists) in combat and covert roles and we worked with the British to adapt methods of political suppression the British used in Malaysia.
Patrick Mcneal with all due respect not everything can be shown and covered with equal focus… Now in episode 2, Burns’ did talk quite a bit about the tensions between Catholics and Buddhists in S. Vietnam that led to the overthrow of Diem’s government in 1963. He also spoke quite openly about My Lai and the use of naplam against civilians, and showed how S. Vietnam corruption under Thiem helped create the Vietcong. For the most part based on what I’ve seen, Burns has done a really good job covering all angles of the conflict and shown very little bias in any shape or form.
Apparently you do not own a television.
We see what we want to see. I’ve watched it all, and to me it in no way minimizes the destruction of Vietnam by the US. In fact, the number of civilian casualties has been talked about routinely in every single episode. And the entire “plot” of the series revolves around the lies the government told about the war. I’m not sure how you could deny that.
Agreed.
Last night’s episode largely covered that topic again….they again mentioned the millions of dead civilians in Vietnam, and thousands in Laos and Cambodia. They also delved deeper into My Lai (and a few others like it).
Above all and in this case, too, PBS dutifully churns out entertainment w/ decent ‘production values’. And their entertainment output can tilt all the way to the serious end of the continuum, as in this instance.
On the other hand , Nick Turse’s unwavering , courageous research & irreplaceable book ,’Kill Anything That Moves’ which covers the same subject Ken Burns dramatically glosses … doesn’t avert its gaze for a microsecond , much less hours on end.
No question though, as far as sheer overall comfort goes… Mr. Turse’s work is left in a cloud of dust by the PBS series.
-J.Joslin ( Detroit, Michigan, South of the Canadian border)
PBS dutifully churns out entertainment w/ decent ‘production values’. Agree 100%. And is what I found unnerving about it. Was KB so eager to gain an audience to associate with Bank of America and the D Koch? He did thank Bank of America on the late show with S. Colbert.
I apologize for not having read it sooner; I ordered your book, “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam,” after the Burns documentary began. It’s supposed to arrive today.
I’ve never really enjoyed the Burns documentaries I’ve managed to slog through, every one always just put me off wanting to watch more. I did watch the first couple episodes of this Vietnam series but stopped when he covered soldier’s heroin addiction. It felt like a propaganda white-washing of U.S. Government involvement in the SE Asian drug markets.
I grew up near an Air Force Base and met several airmen who came home with habits they could no longer afford. I was told how doses that were usually snorted and could be purchased in Vietnam for a quarter – cost them $10 each here in the US. A habit costing 50 or 75 cents a day in Vietnam could run $20 or $30 a day once soldiers returned. The airman who told me all this said it actually made some of them think about volunteering to go back, or turning to crime. (Note: U.S. didn’t begin drug testing its soldiers until the late ’70s, and I know that because I was in the USAF myself at the time.)
Thanks, Nick! I may not always like the way your books make me feel while reading them, but I also don’t get any empire-smoke blown up my ass. :)
I’m DVR’n the whole series, so I’ve only watched up to Ep.#3.
For a different perspective, Please watch Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, Chapters 6-7 , which pretty much covers the same time span as the Burns doc.
The last half hour of ep.#3 was also covered in the Mel Gibson movie, We Were Soldiers.
So far, the message of the Burns doc. has been, bad decisions were made..
Yeah we already know that..besides, there have been many Hollywood “Protest” movies already made about the same stuff Burns is talking about, so , besides the real historical footage and audio recordings, What else is there besides..”bad decisions were made”…? recursive redundancies
I watched a few episodes and couldn’t take it anymore. The takeaway is that it was all just some big misunderstanding and gosh darn bad luck. Like Iraq
Lessons were going to be learned, it was said.
Seems the only lesson they learned was: “We can do whatever the **** we like, wherever, whenever, and there’s not a g*d d*m thing anybody can do to stop us ..”
Any American war “documentary” that doesn’t grapple fully and in an unflinching way with the actual reasons America’s political, military and business leaders decide to rain down death and destruction on another nation, and the life and death effects of those decisions on the citizens and inhabitants of those lands, is no better than government sponsored propaganda. IMHO.
As a general proposition I agree with 24b4Jeff below without having watched the Burns-Novick “documentary”:
Congress and their underwriters don’t want the American people to be forced to grapple with the consequences of their decisions, or the indifference of the American people to those consequences. Most American filmmakers don’t want to, or can’t get the funding to. If they did and were honest, Americans would realize maybe America’s conception of its “national interest” has nothing to do with the will of the American people, or anything remotely resembling a legal or morally compelling justification for engaging in war with on other human beings “in service of that national interest”.
It is one of the reasons the American people (including its service members) have to be brainwashed constantly (in myriad ways from sporting events to national holidays) to unequivocally and reflexively heap praise on the service members for their “service” to this nation without every being afforded the opportunity to directly confront the meaning and effect of that “service” upon other human beings.
Other than the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Civil War and WWII America hasn’t fought wars in its existential defense. America has been making war on somebody constantly since its inception. And the proper questions re: why are only ever asked, even remotely, in academia and by a handful of journalists. That history is barely available or taught in American schools except at the college level and then only to those who seek it out. That’s not accidental.
I will not be watching Burns and Novick’s $30 million propaganda piece for that reason.
My father represented veterans for 35 years in their claims against the VA for pension and benefits. I adjudicated those claims for 1 year. My family is full of veterans and my father, a veteran, had many friends who were as well. I have known many veterans, combat and non-combat, in my lifetime. I can tell you that the vast majority of the men and women, the combat veterans or medical personnel that actually had to spend any amount of time killing or being under imminent threat of being killed or having to try and patch those bodies back together: a) don’t like to talk about the implications of those actions, b) don’t see themselves as heroes, and c) know the truth about what it is they did and why they did it. Not all, but the vast majority. They struggle with that soul crushing reality for the rest of their lives.
My mom’s youngest brother was a combat Marine in the Vietnam War. His life has never been the same since he returned (and he returned physically intact). Divorce, drug and alcohol addiction, estranged from his children and grandchildren, poor health . . . actually a very gentle soul until he was put in a position to have to do things he knew were wrong, do things to other human beings on the other side of the planet who were no threat to his fellow citizens, family or friends and/or “way of life” at home–or otherwise be killed in another’s lands.
Now multiply that one destroyed American life by millions of destroyed Vietnamese lives, try and have simple human empathy for the Vietnamese people, and you’ll only begin to scratch the surface of and grapple with the soul crushing implications of the consequences of the decisions our politicians, military and business leaders make, and America’s service members have to carry out.
Those are situations our politicians and leaders should stop putting our fellow citizens into. The American people need to wise up and demand they never ask that of its citizens except in the event of an existential threat to our borders, lands and our people in them. But I think we’re a long long way from that world (maybe as a people, maybe as a species, IDK), and I fear we don’t get there until either an epic military defeat of America, or economic bankruptcy due to our militarism, because quite frankly, the American people aren’t capable of grappling with this nation’s history or its consequences on others (it would shatter their self-image and shatter the entire mythology around what it is to be “American”).
Either way I’ll pass on the Burns-Novick “documentary” as I do on 99% of American war porn/propaganda.
“I think we’re a long long way from that world (maybe as a people, maybe as a species, IDK), and I fear we don’t get there until either an epic military defeat of America, or economic bankruptcy ”
As a species, my feelings exactly, not just for past and the current America empire but the next empire(s). America has killed millions some deserving in “necessary” wars many perhaps more innocent in “evil” conflicts. If We all as a species do not find a new path for obtaining resources and population density, the next round with war or one of the other horsemen can mean billions of innocent dead. We must quince the fire of totally self-interested empires or innocent deaths, we have seen nothing yet. We as a species must rise above our instincts, fears and greed or face the consequences of them. America is just the present face of the elemental fire of human nature we have not yet learned to control let alone master. I believe we can, I could be wrong.
There is a story, believed to be of Cherokee origin, in which a girl is troubled by a recurring dream in which two wolves fight viciously. Seeking an explanation, she goes to her grandfather, highly regarded for his wisdom, who explains that there are two forces within each of us, struggling for supremacy, one embodying peace and the other, war. At this, the girl is even more distressed, and asks her grandfather who wins. His answer: “The one you feed.”
The film does {attempt to] ‘grapple’ with these issues, albeit in a kind of always-epic Burn’s trademarked all American civil war-like ‘view from nowhere’ approach to where lesser angels fear to tread, imho rr.
While I do appreciate Nick’s take on the film’s short-shrift of civilian casualties, last nights episode did cover the My Lai massacre in such gruesome detail I, too, had to turn away. As vivid a reminder of the results of “American war porn/propaganda” as any in modern history.
The recordings of LBJ and Nixon alone are worth the price of admission. .. while the implications for the future (today) are unmistakable.
The sponsorship is interesting; Bank of America say they want to promote ‘dialog and understand’ while, I suppose, David Koch just calls it philanthropy work.
The soundtrack will take you back. But at times it seems oddly dis-jointed to me and, contrary to Nick’s article, there were no tracks from the ‘Age of Aquarius’ (mores the pity). ..a little too much beachboys and not enough Yo Yo Ma, imo double r.
A trailer after last nights segment pans-out to a modern Vietnam city, bustling and busy with smiling people going about their lives with little memory of the war and Lynn Novick remarking how ‘resilient’ people are and ~ what a piece of work is man.
I agree, I have no idea what these commenters are talking about. It seems like the only story they want to see on Vietnam is that US troops were monsters, end of story. Many were–but they were 18 years old and actually believed their government–until they got there.
vs.
So your suggesting the Burns-Novick “documentary” starts in the 1850s and goes until the US withdrew, and attempted to grapple with such nuanced and complicated historical aspects of Vietnam as French Colonialism, Japanese occupation and collaboration of French, post-WWII decisions by UK, US an Soviet Union, Vietnam’s internal “politics” during that entire time, the coup against Diem, the morality and/or even basic sanity of the Cold War and proxy wars fought in its name, or in service of the “domino theory” . . . .
What I’m getting at is the “actual reasons” America has been at war, with the exception of the 4 wars I noted, have not ever been about anything other than America and its western allies attempts at creating a world where they write the rules, particularly economically, and their military and economic proxies enforce them.
Call it what you want (empire, colonialism by other means . . . .), but I’ve never once seen a documentary on Vietnam or any other American military misadventure that ever really talks why it is this nation has military bases all over the world, and why it has been in military conflict with some people some where almost constantly since its inception. And to be quite frank, if one is to be honest about those “reasons,” they aren’t morally or otherwise justifiable not as “anti-communist” endeavors or preserving America’s pre-eminent “economic hegemon” role in the world.
Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler understood precisely those “reasons” and tried to tell people. That’s what I’m getting at. You think Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler is a household name in America? You think the truth he tried to tell the American people is understood or accepted as the truth by a majority of the American people? Until it is, I’d argue you’ll see more Vietnams, more Afghanistans, more Iraqs, more Syrias, more Libyas . . . until such time as this nation folds, because the “reasons” that cause our leaders to keep taking those sorts of actions are accepted amongst that class as legitimate and moral means to obtain ends we never really get to democratically discuss, debate and vote on in this nation.
Moreover, and as a general proposition I don’t think the medium or format of a “video documentary” really has the ability to “teach” anyone anything properly contextualized historically and otherwise given the limitations (time, dialogue, video footage, requirements of “narrative” to make it “entertaining” enough for people (en masse) to watch . . . .) of the medium or format.
But you are free to disagree, I just have never found much value in learning about a topic by watching a “documentary” because I guess I’ve never found too many of them, on any issue, that aren’t limited in serious ways.
There is an “unedited” version of the TVW documentary available for viewing at the PBS website. I viewed it, no language bleeps, no photography “blurrs”. You don’t want to see the My Lai scenes again, unless you have a puke bag ready.
Thank you for telling this story. I agree with you and the majority of my friends who were in Vietnam agree, as well. Several of them had to deal with heroin addiction and others still carry horror in their minds.
Nick,
Thanks again for your input on the Vietnam War. I downloaded this article and slipped it into my copy of Kill Anything That Moves as an appendix. As you learn more please share. If you keep on working, I expect you to become the final word on that nightmare that probably will prove to be the beginning of the end of the empire.
Last words by Salvador Allende
QUOTE
These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.
UNQUOTE
Santiago, 9/11 – 1973.
Hint:
https://www.google.com/search?q=ad+1982+empire+f28+twin+towers
Jacob “Nabucco” Price
The solution to the Kryptos “riddle in a riddle” is:
PEOPLETOCREATEASAFERFREERWORLDANDSURELYTHEREISNOBETTERPLACETHANBERLINTHEMEETINGPLACEOFEASTANDWEST
To me, the series represents Burns and Novick walking a tightrope, telling as much of a horror story they could tell without being offensive. Offensive to whom? To PBS, its Congressional underwriters, sponsors such as David Koch, and the American population as a whole, a population that largely remains deluded about the magnitude of our crimes in Vietnam. So while civilian relocations, killings, and other abuses are mentioned often, several times per episode, even, there is never a spotlight placed on the actions of the US military.
Sure they said we had free fire zones, but it was not pointed out that such a policy violates the Geneva Convention and thereby gives our military commanders the status of war criminals. Sure they said we used Agent Orange, never mentioning even once that its use constituted chemical warfare. After WW2 we hunted down and executed the SS participants in the massacre at Lidice to the man, but when US soldiers did precisely the same thing, scaled up by a factor of ten at My Lai, one person got a slap on the wrist and the majority of the American people expressed outrage that he was even put on trial. But the parallel was not made, instead it was “shit happens”, repeated over and over. It is one thing to present historical facts dispassionately and from multiple perspectives, but quite another to fail to put those facts into perspective by comparing the worst of our actions with the worst of those of our previous enemies.
For me, the series did little but to open old wounds. I saw no sign of an attempt to come to grips either with our defeat or to atone for the criminality of our leaders. And thus it becomes even more clear to me why things like Iraq and Afghanistan happen, and will continue to do so as long as we can afford to outspend everyone else on weaponry. The only glimmer of hope for the world is that we will bankrupt ourselves as a result of our penchant for increases in military spending coupled with tax cuts.
As soon as the solution to the CIA’s Kryptos “riddle in a riddle” is unveiled, America will come to terms with its past and become a beacon of hope to the world. Hopefully this will occur before any nuclear apocalypse.
I’m confident that from its ashes will raise the Phoenix.
#Kryptos #BerlinClock
Good post, mirrors my thoughts on the series. Yet another reminder that Nuremberg-type trials and The Hague are only for mass murderers from non-western countries.
There’s a double standard. But Germany was a western country.