In praise of the 10-part television series on “The Vietnam War”
Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched recordings of every episode of a new 10-part American television series titled simply “The Vietnam War”. The script was written by Geoffrey C. Ward and narrated by Peter Coyote with direction by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. In the USA, the series was broadcast by PBS while, here in the UK, it was shown on BBC4 (two episodes at a time over weekly intervals). The whole thing runs to seventeen and a quarter hours.
I was a young adult at the time of the Vietnam War, so I remember all the major events and all the controversy. Indeed I spent three months in the USA in the summer of 1970 in the middle of it all. As someone who is British, I acknowledge the wisdom of Harold Wilson, our Prime Minister from 1964-1970, in resisting American pressure to commit British troops to the war.
In 2006, I visited Vietnam [my account here] and, during my journey, I read a novel by a former North Vietnamese soldier who is one of the 74 interviewees in the television series [my review here].
I’ve been enormously impressed by this series: the stunning – and often very disturbing – visuals, the eloquent – and often intensely moving – personal testimonies, and the balance provided by so many ground-level views from both American and Vietnamese participants.
Perhaps the major theme of the whole series is that, from an early stage, the most senior political and military figures in the United Sates knew that the war could not be won but felt that America as a super-power could not lose face by giving up on the South Vietnamese. And a result, so very many died unnecessarily: 58,318 Americans and anything between 2-4 million Vietnamese. Richard Nixon is revealed to have cynically blocked a peace initiative to assist his presidential election campaign.
Another theme, on the other side of the conflict, was the utter determination – and indeed ruthlessness – of the North Vietnamese leadership (notably Le Duan) which sacrificed huge numbers of young fighters to advance the Communist cause.
The series contains so many memorable incidents that it is invidious to single out one, but I was stuck – perhaps because I was unfamiliar with it – by the story of American soldier Hugh Thompson Jr who tried to halt the My Lai massacre and highlighted it to his superiors only to suffer ostracism as a result.
If you failed to see the series or cannot find it on catch-up-up TV, you can buy the DVD set.