The Vietnam war was practically a forbidden subject in most of the commercial media -- movies and television documentaries -- probably because no one was really certain about why we were fighting and dying. The PBS series, "The Ten Thousand Day War", finally gave us an historical summing up, and Oliver Stone's bitter "Platoon" reflected the feelings of many Americans.
I guess by the time this series was released in 1999, enough time had passed that we can now look back on that long, long engagement with more objectivity and less passion, because this documentary is sometimes pretty candid. For instance, the air war against North Vietnam "failed" -- period. President Johnson's program of "winning hearts and minds" was tried in earnest before being given up.
Westmoreland's entire strategy of encircling enemy strongholds and demolishing them with massive firepower, simply didn't work. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army were as slippery as eels. Their strong points were mainly underground, with bathrooms, living quarters, hospitals, gas traps, and other facilities. Imagine an Iwo Jima as large as almost an entire country, immune to bombardment. For most of the war, the communist forces followed Sun Tzu's maxims: strike where the enemy doesn't expect it, then fade away. Or, as one of their leaders put it, "When they advance in force, we withdraw. When they halt, we harass. When they withdraw, we follow." The communists avoided pitched battles until the Tet offensive, and that was a mistake that accomplished nothing on their part.
I don't want to give the impression that this series is a polemic against the American presence in Southeast Asia because it's not. It simply states facts rather more plainly than we're used to. The political angle, while not neglected, is treated as secondary in interest to the particular battles and the evolution of the war itself. The Mai Lai killings get one sentence. George Wallace's Vice Presidential candidate in 1968 was General Curtis LeMay, whose professed goal was to "bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age," which is where North Vietnam already was. Their arms came from the USSR or China, or were captured on the battlefield or improvised. They had no industry to speak of. But Wallace and LeMay aren't even mentioned. Nor is the officer at Khe San who announced to the press that "Marines don't dig in." I don't make these points here in order to be critical of our policies at the time, but only to emphasize that they could have been included if the series were intended as a lengthy diatribe against the government's policies.
Yet, for all its estrangement from the emotions of the period, it isn't really as neatly done as Series One and Two. The overall presentation is chronological but it's still confusing. The narration jumps back and forth in time. It's not divided into as many crisply described sections as the earlier series -- the commanders, the leaders, the men, the weapons, and so forth. The result is a kind of jumble in which unfamiliar military units move around like pieces in a game of chess being played in three dimensions.
It's also a little confusing, at least to some of us who know so little about the war, because some of the battles I had thought were important -- Ia Drang, for instance -- are skipped over in favor of engagements I'd never heard of. On the plus side, again, at least for me, there are no talking heads from either side. I don't know why but I usually find it a distraction when the broader narration stops while we listen for a minute or two to testimonies from either experts or participants.
In the end, it's not quite like any other documentary I've seen on the Vietnam war. It does cover battles that most of us are liable to know little about, if we've heard of them at all. And it's surprisingly -- and refreshingly -- blunt.
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