Ken Burns achieved renown with lengthy film histories of the Civil War, World War II, jazz, and baseball, but he describes his documentary The Vietnam War, made in close collaboration with his codirector and coproducer Lynn Novick, as “the most ambitious project we’ve ever undertaken.” Ten years in the making, it tells the story of the war in ten parts and over eighteen hours. Burns and Novick have made a film that conveys the realities of the war with extraordinary footage of battles in Vietnam and antiwar demonstrations in the United States. (...)
For those under forty, for whom the Vietnam War seems as distant as World War I or II, the film will serve as an education; for those who lived through it, the film will serve as a reminder of its horrors and of the official lies that drove it forward. In many ways it is hard to watch, and its battle scenes will revive the worst nightmares of those who witnessed them firsthand.
Asked why he and Novick took on this project, Burns said that more than forty years after the war ended, we can’t forget it, and we are still arguing about it. We are all, Novick added, “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy.” Their aim, the filmmakers said, was to explore whether the war was a terrible mistake that could have been avoided. They might have added that some consider it no mistake but the result of a deliberate policy. Nonetheless, she and Burns do provide answers to some questions Americans may still be asking about the war. (...)
From the very start, they strongly suggest that the US could not have won the war. To prove this point, which is still disputed, mostly by military men, they cite the private statements of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and many of their top advisers, who said that the measures they were taking were inadequate. It was feared that the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for more troops and more bombing would not convince the enemy to give up its goal of reunifying Vietnam—and might in fact lead to a larger war with China. The presidents and their advisers nonetheless persisted, unwilling to give up what Kennedy called a “piece of territory” to the Communists.
Burns and Novick say the US was initially “trapped in the logic of the cold war.” As Kennedy’s phrase suggests, the war was never really about South Vietnam. Rather, Washington viewed it as a piece on a chessboard, or a domino whose fall to communism might have caused the rest of Southeast Asia to fall. Before the commitment of American combat troops in 1965, Burns and Novick make clear, there were several occasions when the US could have withdrawn without much public opposition. One was after the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, since his successor, General Duong Van Minh, favored a French proposal for a negotiated settlement and a neutral Vietnam. Another came after Johnson’s victory in the 1964 election, when the military junta that had taken power in Saigon earlier that year fell apart, leaving a vacuum of authority. “This is the year of minimum political risk for the Johnson administration,” Vice President Hubert Humphrey said. In other words, the war could have ended in 1965, if not before.
Burns and Novick suggest that the strategy the Americans adopted was primarily responsible for the enormous casualties on both sides. When General William Westmoreland took command of the first regular American troops in 1965, he knew that the NLF controlled three quarters of the South Vietnamese countryside. Although he never told the press, he had no hope for “pacification” unless his troops could kill more North Vietnamese soldiers than could be replaced, a threshold he called “the crossover point.”
Since US troops could rarely find the enemy, much less “take and hold” the vast jungles of the highlands, his strategy was to deploy small American units to serve as “bait” for North Vietnamese attacks and then kill the enemy with artillery and air strikes. The “body count”—or the “kill ratio”—became the standard measure for whether progress was being made. As a result, commanders on the ground often inflated the number of enemy soldiers killed to please their superiors, who in turn inflated the figures even more. Meanwhile many American combat troops were killed and wounded.
The “body count” did worse than mislead. It changed the nature of the war, as many American soldiers killed indiscriminately. The filmmakers show a helicopter gunner shooting a man in black pajamas running away in his rice field. They show the famous footage of Morley Safer watching as soldiers torched a village, and footage of soldiers blowing a hole in a hut where grain was stored and killing the people hiding there. Commanders designated enemy-held territories as “free fire zones” and shelled them every night, even though many civilians lived in those areas. We also see troops calling Vietnamese “gooks” or “slopes.”
The voiceover rarely editorializes, but the film suggests how the standard of the “body count” helps explain how the My Lai massacre—when American troops killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in March 1968—could have occurred. In late 1968, General Julian Ewell sent troops and aircraft into the densely populated Mekong Delta, killing 10,899 people in six months and seizing only 748 weapons. (The army inspector general later estimated that roughly half of those killed were in fact unarmed civilians.) Ewell was made a three-star general and given command of the largest army field force in Vietnam.
At the heart of the documentary are lengthy interviews with a number of American veterans, taking them through their war, often with archival footage of the battles they fought. A large number of these men came from small towns; many had fathers or uncles who had served in World War II and some had gone to West Point. As teenagers, they had always aspired to military service, and they couldn’t imagine not signing up to protect their country. Generally they knew nothing about Vietnam, but they wanted to show that they were warriors, as their dads had been. They went through basic training and were transported by air to Vietnam, where they were sent into battle in a land totally unfamiliar to them. We see some of them slogging through elephant grass and triple canopy jungles, always fearing a booby trap or an enemy ambush.
All of the men interviewed were brave and decent soldiers. One gave up a Rhodes scholarship to go into active duty out of loyalty to his friends. Several tell of their fears and anger. Many were wounded. Eventually some changed their minds about the war. (“What are we doing here?” “Are we fighting on the wrong side?”) One of them began to sympathize with the antiwar protesters and joined the peace movement after he left military service.
These segments of the film are the most affecting and yet these soldiers aren’t entirely representative. Not all American troops were as honorable as they were—or as articulate. Furthermore, as the filmmakers note, eight of ten Americans sent to Vietnam never saw combat. The majority were what the combat troops called REMFs, or Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers—public relations officers, construction men, and the like—who had good food, access to swimming pools, the run of the well-stocked post exchanges, and the liberty to go to Saigon to drink and pick up girls.
For those under forty, for whom the Vietnam War seems as distant as World War I or II, the film will serve as an education; for those who lived through it, the film will serve as a reminder of its horrors and of the official lies that drove it forward. In many ways it is hard to watch, and its battle scenes will revive the worst nightmares of those who witnessed them firsthand.Asked why he and Novick took on this project, Burns said that more than forty years after the war ended, we can’t forget it, and we are still arguing about it. We are all, Novick added, “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy.” Their aim, the filmmakers said, was to explore whether the war was a terrible mistake that could have been avoided. They might have added that some consider it no mistake but the result of a deliberate policy. Nonetheless, she and Burns do provide answers to some questions Americans may still be asking about the war. (...)
From the very start, they strongly suggest that the US could not have won the war. To prove this point, which is still disputed, mostly by military men, they cite the private statements of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and many of their top advisers, who said that the measures they were taking were inadequate. It was feared that the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for more troops and more bombing would not convince the enemy to give up its goal of reunifying Vietnam—and might in fact lead to a larger war with China. The presidents and their advisers nonetheless persisted, unwilling to give up what Kennedy called a “piece of territory” to the Communists.
Burns and Novick say the US was initially “trapped in the logic of the cold war.” As Kennedy’s phrase suggests, the war was never really about South Vietnam. Rather, Washington viewed it as a piece on a chessboard, or a domino whose fall to communism might have caused the rest of Southeast Asia to fall. Before the commitment of American combat troops in 1965, Burns and Novick make clear, there were several occasions when the US could have withdrawn without much public opposition. One was after the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, since his successor, General Duong Van Minh, favored a French proposal for a negotiated settlement and a neutral Vietnam. Another came after Johnson’s victory in the 1964 election, when the military junta that had taken power in Saigon earlier that year fell apart, leaving a vacuum of authority. “This is the year of minimum political risk for the Johnson administration,” Vice President Hubert Humphrey said. In other words, the war could have ended in 1965, if not before.
Burns and Novick suggest that the strategy the Americans adopted was primarily responsible for the enormous casualties on both sides. When General William Westmoreland took command of the first regular American troops in 1965, he knew that the NLF controlled three quarters of the South Vietnamese countryside. Although he never told the press, he had no hope for “pacification” unless his troops could kill more North Vietnamese soldiers than could be replaced, a threshold he called “the crossover point.”
Since US troops could rarely find the enemy, much less “take and hold” the vast jungles of the highlands, his strategy was to deploy small American units to serve as “bait” for North Vietnamese attacks and then kill the enemy with artillery and air strikes. The “body count”—or the “kill ratio”—became the standard measure for whether progress was being made. As a result, commanders on the ground often inflated the number of enemy soldiers killed to please their superiors, who in turn inflated the figures even more. Meanwhile many American combat troops were killed and wounded.
The “body count” did worse than mislead. It changed the nature of the war, as many American soldiers killed indiscriminately. The filmmakers show a helicopter gunner shooting a man in black pajamas running away in his rice field. They show the famous footage of Morley Safer watching as soldiers torched a village, and footage of soldiers blowing a hole in a hut where grain was stored and killing the people hiding there. Commanders designated enemy-held territories as “free fire zones” and shelled them every night, even though many civilians lived in those areas. We also see troops calling Vietnamese “gooks” or “slopes.”
The voiceover rarely editorializes, but the film suggests how the standard of the “body count” helps explain how the My Lai massacre—when American troops killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in March 1968—could have occurred. In late 1968, General Julian Ewell sent troops and aircraft into the densely populated Mekong Delta, killing 10,899 people in six months and seizing only 748 weapons. (The army inspector general later estimated that roughly half of those killed were in fact unarmed civilians.) Ewell was made a three-star general and given command of the largest army field force in Vietnam.
At the heart of the documentary are lengthy interviews with a number of American veterans, taking them through their war, often with archival footage of the battles they fought. A large number of these men came from small towns; many had fathers or uncles who had served in World War II and some had gone to West Point. As teenagers, they had always aspired to military service, and they couldn’t imagine not signing up to protect their country. Generally they knew nothing about Vietnam, but they wanted to show that they were warriors, as their dads had been. They went through basic training and were transported by air to Vietnam, where they were sent into battle in a land totally unfamiliar to them. We see some of them slogging through elephant grass and triple canopy jungles, always fearing a booby trap or an enemy ambush.
All of the men interviewed were brave and decent soldiers. One gave up a Rhodes scholarship to go into active duty out of loyalty to his friends. Several tell of their fears and anger. Many were wounded. Eventually some changed their minds about the war. (“What are we doing here?” “Are we fighting on the wrong side?”) One of them began to sympathize with the antiwar protesters and joined the peace movement after he left military service.
These segments of the film are the most affecting and yet these soldiers aren’t entirely representative. Not all American troops were as honorable as they were—or as articulate. Furthermore, as the filmmakers note, eight of ten Americans sent to Vietnam never saw combat. The majority were what the combat troops called REMFs, or Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers—public relations officers, construction men, and the like—who had good food, access to swimming pools, the run of the well-stocked post exchanges, and the liberty to go to Saigon to drink and pick up girls.
by Frances FitzGerald, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Larry Burrows
