So that was Vietnam episode 10 of 10

IT WAS a tough watch, wasn’t it? To see it all in one place, and in context?

Viewers from all points of view will feel it should have had more of this, less of that, but in general I’d say Ken Burns and Lynn Novick put a wide lens on the whole big mess of it, and came up with something people will be talking about for a long time.

Nobody comes out of the series looking very good. It takes on all the wrong things said and done in all quarters, over here and over there, even the contemptibly wrong (especially that). It’s about imperfect people working their way through the human condition, circumstances in which they often don’t have the whole story on what’s going on.

My friend Ron Hall, aka Stray Dog, wasn’t impressed. I heard from him this morning as he was on the road in Mexico.

He was surprised to see a veteran expressing guilt on camera about having followed orders to destroy rice stockpiles in the villages. It was always clear to Ron whether rice was for local consumption or would go to feed the Viet Cong. If the rice was stored in baskets, his outfit left it alone. If it was “bagged for transport” in canvas or burlap sacks, they destroyed it.

For him, he said, the series just reopened old wounds.

“They only interviewed the soldiers who protested the war and those who went to Canada, not one of us who did our duty and loved our country when it didn’t love us. I’m proud to be called a Vietnam Veteran, I will not be shamed into thinking otherwise.”

I quote him here with his permission, not that you can know much about a person from a line or two. To know more, see the documentary Debra Granik made about Ron. I know you’ll find it worthwhile.

 

I wasn’t surprised to learn a few things over the last two weeks, despite that Vietnam has been a special interest of mine for 45 years, and that knowing about it was part of my job at one time.

It was interesting to see and hear from combat veterans I’ve read, like Tim O’Brien (If I die in a Combat Zone, The Things They Carried, Going after Cacciato) and Philip Caputo (A Rumor of War, Means of Escape).

I was impressed by what Karl Marlantes had to say. Didn’t know he had two Vietnam books to his credit, so I looked them up this morning and put them in my Amazon cart. He gave up a Rhodes scholarship—quit Oxford to go to Vietnam! Here’s a C-Span Q&A with him talking to Brian Lamb.

 

Eyewitness testimony, how can that not be compelling? Even despite that two people standing side by side can come away remembering the same event very differently.

Listening to these guys you have to appreciate the confusion, the mayhem, how many absurd ways there were to lose your life, if not shot by your own guys then shelled by your own guys, napalmed by your own guys…

And then there’s “lied to by your own guys,” as in Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon… The clips the filmmakers culled from the Pentagon Papers and the White House tapes are some real beauts.

 

 

The one I feel bad about is Ike, a hero of mine from way back. I don’t think I was aware that he arranged for the French to use napalm against the Viet Minh in the empire-ending battle of Dien Bien Phu. American napalm dropped from American planes maintained by American ground crews, just no Americans aboard, that way Uncle Sam’s fig leaf could remain nicely centered over the ol’ bocce balls.

Did this really seem like a good idea to Ike? Providing arms and cash to lift up a defeated colonial power and put it back in the business of stealing other people’s resources?

He’s got some responsibility, too, for present-day Iran, by the way. He and the Dulles boys, who were whispering in his ear on behalf of the Brits who’d had their Iranian oil assets expropriated by Mossadegh. Read Stephen Kinzer’s All The Shah’s Men for the declassified yarn on that.

I’m sure you must know that Nixon had to top them all. Just stunning. The gold standard. We see him say one thing in a prime-time speech then the opposite on the White House tapes. Nixon and Kissinger, that legendary tag team of self-interested amorality in action.

 

Vietnam obviously has lessons and profound meaning at the individual level. It changed lives forever. As a nation, though, my take is that America learned exactly nothing. If the pols get a wrong idea in their heads tomorrow, count on them to write a blank check on a trillion-dollar war that can’t possibly end well. One side of the aisle will dive in with a brainless booyah and the other with a gutless me too.

And here’s a dirty little open secret: you can always count on the press to beat the war drum. The press is a business and its owners don’t want to be labeled in ways that are bad for business. Pols will always whip up fear and then respond to the fear-feedback loop they get from the public. And once they’re all fired up to lead the way over a cliff, the press simply isn’t equipped to call bullshit.

You get the story at face value: the government says This is coming for us, That’s coming for us, blah blah. Let’s not forget how the New York Times helped to lead the panic and grease the skids for the Iraq invasion. And it wasn’t just Judith Miller, either.

Karl Kraus said it best: “How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.”

Bottom line? Beats me. If you’re aware of one, do let me know.

The human tragicomedy goes on. I think you do what Stray Dog and a few million others did. All a responsible person can do is make their own best call with whatever truth they can discern at the time. Go with the head, the heart and a gut check, and live the best you can with wherever your call may lead.

Tony DePaul, September 29, 2017, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA

 

 

 

 

 

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About Tony

The occasional scribblings of Tony DePaul, 68, father, grandfather, husband, freelance writer in many forms, recovering journalist, long-distance motorcycle rider, blue routes wanderer, topo map bushwhacker, blah blah...
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6 Responses to So that was Vietnam episode 10 of 10

  1. Ed MacVaugh says:

    Buried in those statistics of the thousands of folks in-country were folks like me, fixing radios in a repair barge in Cam Ranh Bay. You do the best job you can, keep your head down and stay out of trouble and come home with a marketable skill. If you’re lucky, you come back with no diseases.

    Another group that would have made an interesting counterpoint would be the CID folks from the Army who really were the law enforcement folks in-country. They did their best to stop US supplied goods from walking away, into the hands of the VC or NVA.

    Lots of folks did their jobs well, resisted corruption and came back to serve longer in the military, or go back into civilian life, unthanked. I was most heartened by the attitudes of the folks whose country we pummeled for a decade. I hope they were representative of the folks in general who cleaned up the mess. I also appreciated the mention of the half US children left behind, and hope that they, too, were treated well.

    • Tony says:

      Hey, Ed. Your comment puts me in mind of our friend Rusty Barton, formerly of Virginia Beach, now living in Florida somewhere. If I remember correctly he was in civil engineering for the Air Force in Vietnam, a land surveyor. That has to be nerve wracking, looking through a transit level in a place where you’re not sure who’s friendly and who’s not. I would think it might be easy for someone like that to let his situational awareness slip a bit while trying to get his work done. But yeah, as you say, so many day-to-day jobs going on in the background. I think the film said only about 20 percent of the troops were actively trying to engage the VC or the NVA.

      Next time I get to Florida on the bike, I should look up Rusty and get his story.

  2. Duane Collie says:

    It was a good documentary, I enjoyed it even if probably could have had a couple hours cut out of it – seemed to get bogged down on specific battles at the midway point. As a student of that war, nothing really came as a surprise to me and I appreciated the great detail that Burns & Co. went into. One thing I did not know was Jane Fonda saying into the camera that “All the POW’s should be marched out and executed” on her trip to Hanoi. That was over-the-top, for sure.

    Going to the Vietnam Memorial – especially in the evening as the sun is setting – is the saddest place I think I’ve ever been to. All those names….58,000 of them. For what? For nothing….what a terrible waste.

    So answer me this? Why are we still in Afghanistan? Did we not learn from Vietnam? Why are we there and why are Americans not demanding we get out? Same corrupt kind of government, same civil war, et al…..

    • Tony says:

      Indeed, that’s exactly what I mean when I say everybody got fair treatment, warts and all. Nobody comes out of it looking good, just human, and trying, in often deeply flawed ways, to act on what they believe.

      We’ve all seen the photo of Jane Fonda sitting in the ack-ack gun in Hanoi, and her story is that as soon as she sat down and heard the shutters clicking she knew she’d made a terrible mistake. But this other thing was a clip unfamiliar to many, her saying the U.S. POWs should be tried and executed. You can oppose the war sensibly without saying contemptible things like that.

      And that clip of John Kerry testifying before Congress, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? That pitch-perfect speech, Kerry at his rhetorical best. But Burns and Novick showed more, the part where Kerry went over a cliff, smearing all veterans by yammering about war crimes he did not witness. Hearsay testimony! He looked like an ass.

      You can’t get away with hearsay testimony in Municipal Court, just while grandstanding before the brain trust that is the United States Congress.

      So… things like that, I see them and I give top marks to Burns and Novick. Clearly they did their best to tell the truth about all sides.

  3. steve lyon says:

    I’d read a lot about Vietnam and politics of that era, but when I watched this series, the most surprising lesson was the blatant lies from the very beginning of our involvement. I’d originally thought our involvement in Southeast Asia started out as a fairly noble anti-communism endeavor that gradually devolved into a corrupt clusterf!ck.

    Nope.

    Our involvement there was rotten to the core from the get-go. Fascinating, and scary.

    • Tony says:

      I was surprised to learn that de Gaulle threatened to bring France into the Soviet orbit if the U.S. refused to help reestablish French rule in Vietnam. I’d like to know more about that. There was just a sentence or two devoted to it in the documentary.

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