PBS Vietnam War Documentary – Commentary on Episode Ten

Episode Ten deals with the end of the war, with the Vietnam Memorial Wall and memories, and with some of the war’s legacy issues.  There’s much in this episode that stirs me, brings tears to my eyes, renews my anger at the war, and reminds me of lessons yet to be learned to prevent future wars.

The film’s images of tragic division among Vietnamese at the war’s end– victorious NVA and southern NLF fighters and fearful, fleeing south Vietnamese reminds me of what Madame Nguyen Thi Ninh told my wife and me in March on our visit to Vietnam. Leaning close to us as a way of making sure we knew what she was about to say is very important, she said, “More terrible than all the bombing and violence is the way America divided Vietnamese society, divided Vietnamese as a people.” Madame Ninh supported and served the National Liberation Front  and her country in several posts, including after the war as Vietnam’s Ambassador to the European Union; her brother served as a Captain in ARVN, the U.S-backed South Vietnamese army.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have said that the Vietnam War was a tragedy, which certainly is true. While there is wisdom in the film’s publicized slogan that, “There is no single truth in war,” Burns also has said, “At the war’s end, a country disappeared.” That is not true. As the film repeatedly reveals, while never having the courage to explicitly acknowledge, the “country” that disappeared at the war’s end was created and sustained by the United States  Even when the U.S. provided Saigon with more than a half million American soldiers and massive aid and weaponry, “our side” wasn’t winning. As Episode Ten dramatically reviews, when the U.S. withdrew, ARVN collapsed and the Saigon regime of Generals Thieu and Ky fell.

            Duong Van Mai Elliott, who worked on the Rand Corporation’s Pentagon Papers study and most of whose family fled at the war’s end, is quoted saying, “There were many mistakes made by the Americans, but the biggest mistake was creating the sense of dependency.” The film shows that it was much more than “a sense of dependency.” From our earliest involvement supporting the French, America’s war, rationalized by anti-Communism, was a war against Vietnam’s independence. What the war’s end actually marked was the completion of the Vietnamese struggle for national independence. Vietnam is one country and after one hundred years, in Spring 1975 it was finally free from foreign military control and occupation.

            There were two other images in Episode Ten that particularly stuck with me. One was of U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin resisting preparations to evacuate, as he stubbornly insisted that Saigon was not about to fall. While the film suggests he may have been suffering mentally from a bout of Pneumonia, Martin’s view also represented how deeply and dangerously delusional U.S. policy was. The other image, which also appears in the book, The Vietnam War, by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (page  561) is of Henry Kissinger and five other white men in suits standing and sitting comfortably in the White House,  joking and laughing aloud, at the same time as Saigon is falling and Vietnamese dependents of America’s War are fleeing for their lives.

           The aftermath of the war was bound to be difficult and painful. While the film makes a point of acknowledging that the “bloodbath” so loudly and often predicted by defenders of the war never happened, the process of recovery and reconciliation was very hard, including the forced reeducation for many supporters of the Saigon regime. At the time this was happening, the same NLF woman leader my wife and I met in March publicly criticized her government's reeducation program as being much too rigid and lasting too long.

Other legacy issues include unexploded ordinance which has claimed many thousands of Vietnamese lives, mostly of children, since the end of the war, and the multi-generational effects of massive spraying of Agent Orange. The U.S. government has been shamefully slow and reluctant in dealing with the effects of Agent Orange on American soldiers. Inspiringly, many American veterans are involved partnering with and supporting Vietnamese who are working on addressing these ongoing effects of the war. Both the film and the accompanying book could have informed us about how to make contributions to American/Vietnamese projects, like the Mine Action Center in Dong Ha or Peace Trees Vietnam, dedicated to healing these wounds of war. Unfortunately, they didn’t do this.

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The other major issue I need to comment on is how the anti-war movement is portrayed, not just in Episode Ten, but in the whole eighteen hours of the film. Frankly, given Burns and Novick’s claim that one of the film’s two major goals is to understand what was happening on the home front during the war, their portrayal of the anti-war movement is pathetically weak, two-dimensional and, at some points, deliberately biased.

In my responses to the other nine episodes, I’ve cited specific examples of when and how Burns and Novick ignore or provide very sketchy treatments of significant actions and persons in the anti-war movement starting with their failure even to mention the self-immolation of three Americans - Alice Herz, Norman Morrison and Roger LaPorte in 1965.

Burns and Novick give almost no film time to tracing the growth of draft resistance and resistance within the military, and none to the role of religious communities and women's organizations in inspiring and expanding the anti-war movement. Their treatment of Martin Luther King's decision to publicly oppose the war is simplistic and much too brief. While they interview and quote dozens of veterans, except for one activist, Bill Zimmerman, they don’t do interviews or personal stories of any war resisters.

The growth of anti-war demonstrations from a few hundred participants to thousands and more than a million in the Vietnam Moratorium deserves much more attention, including interviews with some of the persons who organized these demonstrations, as well as with participants. Just as debates about military strategies were a focus in the film, so there should have been more attention to debates about strategies within the anti-movement.

As Todd Gitlin writes in his essay on the anti-war movement in Geoffrey Ward’s book accompanying the film, “The millions who passed through it –and they were many millions – were as various as America itself.  .  .  .the movement encompassed members of the armed forces and the clergy, women’s groups, trade unionists, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, nurses, teachers, social workers, scientists, architects, and city planners.” The various, multiple stories about the movement are told poorly if at all in the PBS film.

As I skimmed through  the index to Geoffrey Ward’s book which also pretty closely reflects what is and isn’t covered in the film, I was shocked by how few, if any, references there are to national organizations that played major roles in educating and organizing Americans in opposition to the war. Assuming you may be familiar with at least some of these and without going into details about what each organization did, here’s a list of several national organizations with the number of references in the book's index:

American Friends Service Committee – 0; Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace – 0; Catholic Peace Fellowship and Protestant denominational peace fellowships – 0; Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors – 0; Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam – 0; Fellowship of Reconciliation – 0; Institute for Policy Studies – 0; War Resisters League - 1; Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom – 0; and Women’s Strike for Peace – 1.

Here is a partial list of organizations formed in the1960s explicitly to educate and mobilize opposition to the war and how many times they are referenced in the index:

Coalition to Stop Funding the War - 0; Chicano Moratorium - 0; Committee of Liaison (with American POWs) – 0; Indochina Peace Campaign – 1; Indochina Summer – 0; National or New Mobilization Committee to End the War – 0; Resist – 0; Student Mobilization Committee – 0; Vietnam Moratorium Committee - 1; We Won’t Go – 0.

Several important existing national organizations developed strong anti-war positions as the war developed, including the Leadership Council of Women Religious, National Student Association, National Council of Churches, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (Reform). None of these organizations are referenced in Ward’s book or in the film.

 There is a special page in the book, which features a photo of Jane Fonda sitting and expressing solidarity with a North Vietnamese artillery battery, a clearly insensitive spontaneous and counterproductive act for which Fonda apologized many times. Accompanying the photo is text listing several Americans who visited Hanoi during the war, including Cora Weiss who organized the Committee of Liaison to carry mail between American POWs and their families.

The juxtaposition of the photo and names of anti-war activists angered many vets and clearly was intended to associate anti-war activism with disloyalty to country. The anti-war activists whose names appear in that text, including Jane Fonda, and the millions of Americans who opposed the war in Vietnam don’t deserve that biased, shoddy treatment. In failing to portray and personalize the anti-war movement in the way they successfully do with many veterans, Burns, Novick and Ward fail to accomplish the goal of promoting understanding about what was happening at home during the war.

The film makes a major contribution to understanding what happened on the battlefields of Vietnam, including some of the ways the war affected soldiers. Even in that focus, the film fails for not including more about thousands of Vietnam veterans suffering PTSD, homelessness and suicide.  

We have a lot more work to do in understanding and overcoming divisions in our society - divisions that didn’t start with the war in Vietnam but got deeper during it, and recently are exacerbated by Donald Trump, first as candidate and now as President.

During the Vietnam War, as National Youth Secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Ron resisted the draft, led an interfaith/interracial mission to Saigon focused on repression, carried mail from between their families and American POW’s in Hanoi, and coordinated national peace marches on Washington, DC in November 1969 and May 1970. Ron lives in Everett WA and can be contacted at ronyoungwa@gmail.com