Sunday, December 10, 2017

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War: A Review


 “You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" - but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"-- Vizzini, The Princess Bride

            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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