It is difficult to use a broad brush to describe how veterans will respond. The hardest part for me was watching North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong talking about killing Marines and soldiers. You will get a sense of the courage of the airmen over Hanoi and the soldiers, sailors, and Marines who slogged through the rice paddies and jungles, many of whom were just a step or two removed from childhood. It’s probably best left to fiction or a different kind of documentary. The series shows combat, to be sure, but the mellow compassion of men facing hardship together is hard to portray. There is one exception, and that’s the camaraderie and sense of brotherhood we all experienced in the common bond of service, whether you heard a bullet crack overhead or not. It’s more than just being too soon it’s hard to take pride in a war that by any definition we lost.
The Vietnam images are not still, black-and-white photographs or faded images, but sometimes vivid film, punctuated by interviews of all involved - communist soldiers, war protesters and, of course, members of the armed forces who fought there. Other strife-ridden periods of our past - the nobility of the Blue and Gray or the Greatest Generation, the subjects of previous Burns documentaries - could evoke sentimentality despite the terrible carnage they engendered. For those who served or protested or watched from the sidelines, there is no cause for nostalgia. There is little to celebrate during that period. The series is broad in scope, ranging from the French colonial era starting in the mid-1800s to the fall of Saigon in 1975, including the shameful cut-and-run by Washington that left our South Vietnamese allies to slaughter from the North. I don’t believe that was the intent of the series, though, and it does give a panorama of the war in a way that only a documentary can. As a veteran and sometime student of the war, there were no major surprises, and I had long ago given up on making sense of the Vietnam morass. The documentary heaps ineptness upon ignorance upon immorality by policymakers and the military brass - all guided by an archaic worldview shaped by the Cold War and the post-WWII can-do attitude. Because the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund was one of the sponsors of a panel discussion hosted by WHYY Tuesday, I was permitted to watch all 18 hours of the 10-part series. I was pretty sure I would be in a state of funk after watching The Vietnam War: An Intimate History, the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary premiering on Sunday on PBS.
0 kommentar(er)
