I finished Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s documentary on Vietnam and it was absolutely gripping. I’m publishing a post that maybe 2 or 3 people will read and maybe none will read all the way through.
When something hits me like this, I guess I want to put something out in public just to know I did. If you have any desire to watch it, please do and consider not reading this because it gives a lot of it away.
I was stunned by how little I knew about the war that my Uncle served in. I remember asking him 15 years ago why we went, he said “If we didn’t who would have?”. I would have a different perspective today on his response and WAY more compassion.
It’s ironic that in 2001 I visited Vietnam, where I clearly stood out. And yet, every single person I met was kind, curious and generous. It’s memorable in that the people are nicer than maybe any other foreign country I’ve ever visited personally (Australia is a close second). It's hard to understand hearts that big given what happened.
For me the most powerful and insightful interviews were with John Musgrave. His riveting points which willingly let the viewer into completely what he felt about it all was beyond stunning (and he walked me through his own changing perception too).
That being said, the interviews with Vincent Okamoto, Bao Ninh, Roger Harris and Nguyen Ngoc were incredible too. There’s something uncommon about people who can hold both the clarity of duty and the bloody pool of pain of the war simultaneously in a discussion.
Understanding that even if Burns’ desire was to have a balanced view, it’s hard to believe that some endorsed narrative wasn’t unconsciously or consciously there, here are a few reflections:
- I have a completely new perspective of the men and women who served for the US in Vietnam. At one point we had a stunning 500,000+ troops there (about 20% were actively fighting according to the doc). The Vietnamese more or less did not want them there. The majority of the troops did not speak the language.
Enemies were woven into those who weren’t in the population. How do you distinguish which is which? Many of these kids (and they were kids) were 18-20 years old. They were still developing their moral compasses.
- I learned two unforgettable lessons that I never considered about fighting a war.
First, that life or death fighting can be a high. According to him (I can’t remember which one said it), the situation more or less requires your absolute and total attention. There’s nothing else on your mind. Before and after you face the depression and agony of it, during it that’s gone. It sounds exactly like a drug.
Second, was from Mr. Okamoto who talked about when he was shot and he thought for sure he would die. At that point, he said, nothing else really matters other than inflicting as much damage on the enemy trying to finish the job as possible. He talked about the incredible freedom of that feeling.
- I cried hardest in the last episode where they documented the Vietnam war memorial and how it was created. There’s a moment where one veteran who initially hated it ultimately went to visit it because his roommate, who was killed, was being honored and he had to go. His transformation about his perspective on it was deeply moving.
Related to that Nancy Bieberman’s apology of how she protested the war in that same episode was heart wrenching. It’s fascinating to see the perspective changes documented.
- I don’t believe that war crimes were happening as often and uniformly widespread as I thought before I watched it. I do believe that a huge percentage of those that fought witnessed some version of war crime during that time.
I know now that there was a massacre at My Lai where between 350-500 people died including many women and children. I learned that had Hugh Thompson, Jr and his crew hadn’t landed it would have gotten worse. He got in between the soldiers and the civilians and warned the soldiers that if they kept shooting civilians he’d start shooting them.
- Almost every person interviewed (on both sides) had friends who were killed virtually right next to them. I don’t know how an 18-25 year old (barely a year and half older than my 16 year old daughter) can see this for one year or two and ever really leave it behind.
The two things they said and in some ways repeated is you NEVER leave your wounded and you ALWAYS go back for the dead. I will never see Vietnam Veterans in the same light.
- One chilling part was when Mr. Musgrave said that he killed “one human being” and suffered from the guilt and remorse of that. It was his first kill. From that point forward he spoke about how he thought of killing as wasting the enemy by calling them the widely used slurs for Vietnamese people. It felt like that was how he made sense of it.
Honestly, I know people today who can’t tell the difference between a Korean, Japanese and Thai person (who each have features that are nearly unmistakably different). So I wouldn’t be surprised if at some level many of the population looked the same to them. I wonder if that changed their perspective about killing although I don’t recall that exactly being said in the documentary.
- The inclusion of many North Vietnamese in the documentary was brilliant. It humanized the enemy and on many occasions helped me understand why they fought as they fought. One particular interview about how a soldier would fight, walk 100’s of kilometers home then not long after go back to fight.
While our 18 year olds looked fresh faced, the pictures of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers were stunningly young. Their relentlessness and outmaneuvering in the face of the bombing devastation was incredible.
It was revealing when one of them talked about how the US going after their wounded was an opportunity for them to kill more soldiers.
At one point a highly placed officer in the US army said that he wished he had 200 of them to fight for him.
- It was illuminating to learn that before Vietnam we widely believed that our government didn’t lie. Seeing how presidents Kennedy, Johnson & Nixon in their own ways misled us about the war was chilling.
The documentary does a terrific job of showing just how much the governments on all sides were lying. They all had vested interests in making sure it looked like their cause was just and they were in fact winning.
- Richard Nixon’s motivation was almost singularly to get elected and to control the narrative. While the other presidents tried to hide facts, based on the evidence presented (again which is incomplete but felt representative) Nixon was an outright liar. His lying about the bombing in Cambodia and his role in the South Vietnamese backing out of peace talks right before the 1968 election were particularly egregious.
His conversations with Kissinger where he all but admitted that he knew the war wasn’t winnable but he wanted to time the outcome to give him the best chance of being elected were a heartwrenching look into politics. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if many of our current politicians use some form of this as an approach.
- Nixon won in 1968 with 43% of the vote and George Wallace (a known segregation champion) won 13% of the vote….of the DEMOCRATS! Nixon then destroyed his competition in the ’72 election. Like him or not, he was a brilliant, dirty politician. His silent majority speech was frighteningly savvy.
- Over a MILLION Vietnamese died in that war (estimates vary, this is the low end). Our bombings absolutely decimated the country and took a LOT of innocent lives.
- I finally learned what the Tet Offensive was. I literally didn’t know what happened, now I do.
- There was a wide group of people who ultimately opposed the war. I have a feeling that most of them peacefully protested the war. The documentary seems to show that they mostly weren’t so peaceful.
I was astonished at the HUGE numbers of people who protested. It reminds me that when there is a clear, simple, common cause, people can get behind it.
- I learned there was a group called the Weathermen who more or less looked to create conflict. They were widely unwelcome to the movement because it gave the pro-war side something to point to as it being a problem and detracted from the effort. Makes me see Antifa as something that while it’s understandable it may not ultimately be productive.
- I learned that like today there were plenty of people who felt differently about the same issue. They supported war and importantly supported our troops there and home. Trying to bridge the two groups is virtually impossible.
- There is a difference between watching a movie and watching a thorough documentary. Admittedly, much of my perspective on the war came from movies like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Deer Hunter and many more. For me there is a distinct difference between hearing it from people who actually went through it rather than people playing characters that may have gone through it or some combination of those that did.
For example, as brutal as the movie was, the scenes from the POW’s in Deer Hunter didn’t match the actual stories from POW’s. There’s almost a distance I can create between a movie and an experience.
It also dawns on me that if hearing the experience from someone who went through affects me differently (and perhaps more disturbingly) than a movie then certainly actually going through it would be WAY more damaging. I know that sounds basic, but it’s a realization that I had about the hell of war.
And on a side note, Donald Trump’s comment about John McCain as POW not being a winner was reprehensible. I can’t honestly imagine how that must have felt for the hundreds of men who endured torture and unspeakable treatment as POW’s.
- The last episode which documents how we pulled out of Vietnam was beyond difficult to watch. The hopeless families desperate to get out as the North Vietnamese army invaded was terrible in the context of our broken promise to help them came to life, a promise that we probably should never even have made.
- I’ve come to a point that I think people who are making decisions on war should only be people who really understand war. And I think the only ones who REALLY understand war are those that have been in it. It chills me to think that there are people making real decisions about war who don’t know the horror it involves.
More than anything else I felt tremendous compassion for the people fighting on both sides of the war, it was horrific.
I bristle at times when people say learn your history or your doomed to repeat it. I feel like it’s more of sentence to keep doing the same things. Like there’s not enough room to clearly see the present moment. This documentary certainly squarely challenged my position.
I’m irreversibly changed forever having watched it in ways that I’m not even aware of yet.