PBS Vietnam War Documentary - Response to Episode Five

            Episode Five of the Documentary, “This is What We Do” (July-December 1967) is the most telling so far about what is missing from the Burns/Novick film. It also is the most exhausting episode. Several friends have told me they have stopped watching the series, not because they were not interested or didn’t learn anything from watching, but because so much of the film footage is about battles.It’s almost as if the filmmakers became intoxicated with battle scenes and stories, and forgot what they claimed was the purpose of the film. (It will be very interesting to learn how the numbers of viewers of the series changes over the course of the ten episodes.)

            In their Introduction to the book, The Vietnam War, based on the film series, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick write, “It’s been more than forty years now, and. . .we have been unable to put that war behind us. The deep wounds it inflicted on our nation, our communities, our families, and our politics have festered.”  In presenting their goals for the film, they write, “Most important, we wanted to understand what the war was like on the battlefield and on the home front, and we wanted to find out why. . . Americans have been unable to have a civil conversation about one of the most consequential events in our history.” Reviewing the photographs and texts of the book and the film so far, I believe Burns and Novick have succeeded in helping us understand what it was like on the battlefield but fail to help us much on understanding the home front and why conversations about Vietnam are still so difficult.

While appreciating the positive accomplishments of the PBS Documentary, Tom Fox, who served in Vietnam as a community worker in the nongovernmental International Voluntary Service, suggests that a place to start in figuring what went wrong is the very title of the series. Writing in National Catholic Reporter online, Tom commented, “However large Burns and Novick's scope, I fear their lens has been too narrowly focused on the military aspect of the conflict and not wide enough to adequately digest all its bitter lessons. Yes, the title is "The Vietnam War." I would have preferred something like "Vietnam, America and the War."

There is no magic in a title, but Tom’s preferred title would have kept reminding the filmmakers that their purpose was not simply to understand the war which can be viewed as primarily a military matter, but also to learn somethings about Vietnam and, very importantly as Americans, to view what was happening on the home front during the war in ways that help us achieve a more complex, deeper, more critical understanding of our own country’s history, culture and politics.

A serious problem with Episodes Four and Five's treatment of the home front is that, except for three nationally prominent figures, Senator Fulbright, Martin Luther King, and Dr. Spock, who voice anti-war views, and occasional snippets from a single anti-war activist Bill Zimmerman, the anti-war movement continues to be portrayed two-dimensionally and mostly with generalities. The film’s effect would have been very different if Burns and Novick had selected ten or a dozen individual American students, teachers, women, clergy, union and business leaders opposed to the war and had them tell their personal stories, as the filmmakers did very effectively with several veterans of the war. Then if the film had focused back and forth over time between the experiences and changing perceptions of those fighting the war and those fighting against the war, I believe Burns and Novick could have made a major contribution to our understanding of what was happening on the home front and to our learning lessons for the future. One has to wonder if major funding from the Bank of America and David Koch may have posed a serious restraint on their developing the film in this direction.

I can’t end this response to Episode Five without a brief comment on the October 21, 1967 demonstration at the Pentagon, in part because I know there are plans developing for a commemoration of that event a month from now. By the Fall of 1967 Americans paying attention to the war in Vietnam had plenty to be angry about. The numbers of American soldiers killed and wounded were growing. The numbers of Vietnamese killed and wounded were several times the American numbers. U.S. bombing campaigns and Agent Orange defoliant raids were resulting in enormous destruction and suffering. And several government  secrets and lies about the war already had become public. 1967 was the year that a majority of Americans had come to doubt the war. It was not surprising that by Spring/Fall 1967 the feelings and attitudes of protesters and the tone of anti-war demonstrations became more confrontational.

The challenge or problem is that greater anger and frustration are not very good bases for smart strategies. (That was true in the 1960s, and it's true today in the time of Trump.) In 1967, marching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon to confront the warmakers may have made sense. The loud, public calls to “Shut Down the Pentagon” (Jerry Rubin) or “Levitate the Pentagon” (Abbie Hoffman), and the call by some to physically rush the soldiers surrounding the building were not smart ideas. These “strategies” would certainly fail; they risked harm for no worthwhile, credible goal; and they sent a confusing message to Americans who were still making up their minds about the war that made the protesters appear to be against the soldiers (a wrong message which also got communicated by anti-war demonstrations “greeting” soldiers on their return home from Vietnam). What if after an overnight vigil at the Pentagon, we had gone home and at least some of us returned on Monday as “normal” visitors to the Pentagon determined to engage in conversations about the war with as many employees in the building as we could, before very likely being ejected or arrested.

Returning to the film, obviously choices get made about what vets or what activists to interview. If Burns and Novick had adopted the approach of involving more anti-war activists in parallel with the many veterans they involved in the film, they would have had to be as careful and sensitive in selecting representative activists who would be good communicators as it seems they were in selecting vets to participate.

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 their families to 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