From
1954-1975, the United States of America was involved in a land war in Asia: the
struggle for the future of Vietnam.
Vizzini’s remark gets passed around frequently, often with regard to the
Vietnam War, sometimes Afghanistan and other places, because it seems to ring
true. The US lost the Vietnam War, and
the locals won it. Right? Ken Burns and Lynn Novick remind the viewer
that Vietnamese lost the war
too. It was a civil war, between two
different ideologies with their own foreign allies. Although The
Vietnam War is very America-centric, the documentary strives to show us
both sides of the Vietnamese perspective as well through interviews with the
people who were there, and in so doing strives to be a definitive history of
what the Vietnamese themselves call “the American War.”
Ken
Burns’ signature style is all over The
Vietnam War, from Peter Coyote’s narration to the music choices and even
the digital zoom, which Burns and Novick use infrequently this time. When so much of the visual evidence is film,
you don’t need the illusion of movement.
While the stylistic choices frame every episode of the documentary, the
interviews tie the entire series together.
This time, the only interviews shown on camera are all people who lived
through the events themselves: American and Vietnamese veterans and their
families, diplomats, civilians, journalists, and anti-war demonstrators. No historians. These categories are only summaries of the
kinds of people interviewed for The
Vietnam War, because some people such as John Musgrave and William Ehrhart
are veterans who became anti-war activists once they returned home and left the
service. William Ehrhart--called Bill in the show--teaches history and English
at my High School, and I had to privilege of getting to know him, even though I
never took Dr. Ehrhart’s classes. There
is also writer Tim O’Brien, who was against the war before he was drafted. We also hear from Tran Ngoc Toan, a colonel
in the South Vietnamese Marine Corps who spent years in a re-education camp
after the war. His voice is invaluable
in the final episode, which covers the fall of Saigon. Not incidentally, there is a tendency in
English language documentaries to have an English voice speak over
foreign-language interviews. That does
not happen here. Vietnamese interview
subjects tell the story in their own words, either in English or
subtitled.
Ken Burns’ signature
documentary style is a great pleasure to watch on TV, and fortunately for
everyone well-suited to history storytelling and education. So many TV documentaries these days on
networks like the History Channel or even NHK are overly elaborate, full of
flash that drowns out the substance of the subject matter and diminishes the
educational value of the production. The Vietnam War does not have that
problem. Burns long ago learned how to
create a TV history documentary that would be mostly a recitation of events
punctuated by interviews with historians and people who were there, but
enhanced by music and visuals. One would
think when it came to visuals, Burns and Novick would have been spoiled for
choice. As you watch each episode of The Vietnam War and see films and
photos, you naturally assume that everything you see ties into the events
described by the narration. That may not
actually be the case. Despite the
ubiquity of cameras in wartime Vietnam, not everything was filmed or
photographed. The truth is tv historical
documentaries tend not to use film footage that aligns perfectly to the
description, but instead use some stock footage that is close enough.
How
then, does The Vietnam War hold up as
history? It holds up well enough. As a list of events, Burns and Novick leave
out plenty of things that they could have described, such as a Viet Cong raid
on the US Embassy in Saigon, or they could have interviewed more Vietnamese and
made the documentary equally about America and Vietnam. Nowhere in the entire show does the narrator
ever mention other American allies who participated: Australia, The
Philippines, Thailand and South Korea.
We could say a lot about South Korea and the Vietnam War, because the
war helped shape the Republic of Korea Army’s sense of self. Given that
Thailand and the Philippines are located in Southeast Asia, one would think
their role, or the opinions of those countries’
leaders might be significant in shaping American policy. The viewer can forgive these omission if they
so choose because Burns and Novick’s thesis remains intact. In Ken
Burns’ own words: “A good deal of the problems
we have today had their seeds planted in the divisions it (the war) would
produce.” In other words, for Ken Burns and Lynn Novick the
documentary was always about the United States, and they approached everything
from that angle. Even if we forget this, we can always look at what the show
does well. The purpose of history is to
provide an understanding of what happened in the past, who did it, why they did what the did, how
everything happened, and how the past created our present. The
Vietnam War answers these questions very well.
Without
the interviews with people who lived through the war, the film would lose its
impact and significance. In the very
first episode, one of the interview subjects, an American Marine Corps veteran,
mentions that people have a hard time discussing the war, when they talk about
it at all. He in fact befriended a man
for some time before finding out they were both former Marines who had been in
Vietnam at the same time. Burns and
Novick got dozens of people to tell their stories, and in so doing turn their
film into a primary source; a historical account produced by people who had
been there, moving forward in history and describing development of the war and
the civilian reaction to it.
When the interviewees
describe the changes in their outlook, the audience is transported back to the
heady days of the late sixties and early seventies, so that we might understand
what everyone alive then was thinking.
It is very hard to contextualize another person’s experience, and even
harder still to fully assimilate any wisdom that way. Perhaps that is why Americans struggle to
even agree upon the lessons we are supposed to learn from the Vietnam War. Burns and Novick never outright say what they
think those lessons are. One lesson the
US government seems to have learned is delivered in the final episode when
South Vietnam collapses. Throughout the
war, American policy makers failed to disengage our country from Vietnam
because they feared as soon as they did so, North Vietnam would take the South
by storm and conquer it at a stroke. And
that is exactly what happened in 1975.
After watching all of that happen once, I think American policy makers,
military thinkers and even some civilians realized the human cost of foreign
policy failure. So, for some Americans a
clear lesson of the Vietnam War is that if we fail to uphold our promises to
other nations, we can rescue some elites like Nguyen Van Thieu, but not the
rank and file who will suffer. If you
talk to Americans responsible for crafting our policies in Afghanistan and the
Middle East, they may refer to the Fall of Saigon as an example of what they
fear happening in response to American failure again.
People who bandy about The Princess Bride line I opened with
tend to forget something: it’s meant to be ironic. Vizzini dies seconds later
because someone else outsmarted him. In other words, Wesley went in against a
Sicilian when death was on the line and won.
Does that mean it is actually safe to get involved in a land war in
Asia? Well, no. It means you cannot define the world with
aphorisms. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
needed eighteen hours to tell the story of the Vietnam War. Saying “never get involved in a land war in
Asia” and leaving it at that is lazy.
Why never? And what about all the
wars that Westerners won, such as the French conquest of Vietnam to begin
with? Or further back, the Aryan
migrations into Central Asia. If the
Vietnamese are naturally invincible fighters, then the war shouldn’t have ended
with half of the Vietnamese defeated. But it did, and Americans tend to forget
that, or they remember but focus on American problems and write the Vietnamese
out of their own history. Burns and Novick
then tell a broader story. No
stereotypes or cultural posturing (save that which the interviewees might
indulge in), just history as real people made it.
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