The Vietnam War, by Burns and Novick, an exchange

The Vietnam War, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

from pbs.org:

“Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides—Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. THE VIETNAM WAR features more than 100 iconic musical recordings from greatest artists of the era and haunting original music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross as well as the Silk Road Ensemble featuring Yo-Yo Ma.”

 

The full series was broadcast on PBS in the United States starting late September 2017. Slightly less than 34 million people saw the first ten episodes in the US. In Europe, a nine-hour version was broadcast at the same time.

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From: Foggy
Date: Thu, Sep 21, 2017
To: Lennon
Cc: Wildthing
Subject: Vietnam by Ken Burns
Attachment: When a Candidate Conspired with a Foreign Power to Win an Election

Hi Lennon,

I watched the first six episodes last night and this afternoon. I am dubious of Hollywood History lessons, but was pleasantly surprised to see that Nixon was called out for sabotaging the 1968 peace talks between Johnson and the Vietnamese. Burns gave a pass to Kissinger however, who profited from this incident to become secretary of state under the felonious Nixon. See attached …

I’ll be interested to see how Henry gets treated in the next episodes.

I also have little faith in the idea that looking from different angles will somehow reconcile Americans. This is propaganda at its worst. I also don’t like much the coverage of the Tet Offensive. The Vietnamese rightly executed collaborators and showed all these Catholics that they were safe nowhere, to the immense embarrassment of their American mafia dons. Remember I supported the winning side in Vietnam and have little patience for the losers now governing the world.

Best,
Foggy

PS: I put Wildthing in copy.  See our website (under construction):
http://zeroparis.org/

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From: Natural
Date: Sep 21, 2017
To: Crusoe, Wildthing, Foggy
Subject: VN and PBS

Mes chers amis-

I hope and trust all are well.

I write to ask if any of you have seen some or all this “new” Ken Burns 10 part docu on the US [“American”] Vietnam war.  I saw about one hr, two different nights. From about ’64 to ’67.  Mr. LBJ’s great society legacy.

Full disclosure, I’m not a big fan of Burns.

Tho I do not denigrate his research.

And there are interviews showing a fair cross-section of voices, both US and Vienamese [N & S].

But there’s still something that rubs me the wrong way.

If there’s someone out there who cares to comment, please do.

Happy [j]new year! I say ya can’t get enough new years! Gung hey fat choi.

Peace.
Natural

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From: Crusoe
Date: Sep 22, 2017
To: Natural, Foggy, Wildthing
Subject: Re: VN and PBS

Natural, I watched episodes #3 and #4.  I agree that it is very interesting in that it consists of a chronologically organized report from many sides (North Vietnamese regulars, Vietnam Cong veterans, South Vietnamese veterans, civilians who suffered terrible losses, American GI families, grunts and officers in the field, draft resisters, anti war activists and McNamara and pres. Johnson. However, I’ve read a critique that at its inception, the filmmakers treat the war as a sincere but mistaken enterprise, which is blasted as dead wrong. I’ll be interested to see if in it’s treatment of the war in the 1970s, it delves into sinking morale, fragging, and the GI Movement with its publications (like Zero) and military and civilian supporters (like the LMDC of the ACLU) and organizers.

Crusoe

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From: Wildthing
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2017
To: Natural, Crusoe, Foggy
Subject: Fwd: Vietnam by Ken Burns

Got this from Foggy today.

Am watching…  There are quite a few factual errors (e.g., not mentioning that the U.S. financed the French until their defeat at Dien Bien Phu by paying their military expenses; also, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was not “passed unanimously” as Peter Coyote intones–Oregon’s Wayne Morse and Alaska’s Ernest Gruening voted against it…).

Anyway, we have only watched through episode 4 (of 10!).  Lost in all the details is some attempt at an explanation for why all this was (and still is) happening.

Wildthing

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From: Natural
Date: 22 Sep 1017
To: Wildthing, Crusoe, Foggy
Subject: RE: Vietnam by Ken Burns

Dear friends-

Thanks for looping me into the talk.

I agree with all that you’ve stated.

I had no illusions that burns would provide an anti-imperialist [with updated p.s. as in Afghanistan etc.] piece.

Please don’t expect an explanation from him!

Your comments are on the $.

Peace.
Natural

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From: Crusoe
Date: Sep 22, 2017
To: Natural, Foggy, Wildthing
Subject: Re: VN and PBS

I just received Wildthing’s and Foggy’s comments. In fairness, Burns does say, probably not strongly enough, that so many Americans were delusional and victims of propaganda; and he also shows that McNamara and Johnson were lying to the public. Most revealing was the clip of the major who said that the North Vietnamese were the best soldiers he’d encountered; and the ones of GIs who said they wondered whether they were on the wrong side.

Crusoe

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From: Wildthing
Date: vendredi 22 septembre 2017
To: Foggy, Squirrel, GungHo, Natural, Crusoe
Subject: U.S. Military Used Nerve Gas to Kill Vietnam War Defectors, Report Says – latimes

It will be interesting to see if this gets mentioned in the Burns documentary.

http://articles.latimes.com/1998/jun/08/news/mn-57863

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From:  Wildthing
Date:  Sep 22, 2017
To: Foggy, Squirrel, Natural, Crusoe, Quaker
Subject: Burns/Vietnam

And this was not mentioned either…

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From:  Foggy
Date:  September 22, 2017
To: Wildthing, Crusoe, Squirrel, Gungho, Quaker, Natural
Subject: RE: U.S. Military Used Nerve Gas to Kill Vietnam War Defectors, Report Says – latimes

Hello All,

I agree with Wildthing, Tailwind was never mentioned as well as “Les soldats blancs.” Even more disturbing, neither was Chile, the Chinese invasion of the North, the economic conditions of the Paris treaty, the real number of “advisors” in Vietnam running the Phoenix program, and so on. It’s as if Kissinger gets another pass so that we can all be reconciled under the new CIA. The limited amnesty program wasn’t mentioned either, and Jimmy Carter never existed.

Take a look at the new site:
http://zeroparis.org/

Your comments and additions on each article would be great. I’ll put your initials infront of your comments if you like.

Love,
Foggy

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From: Lennon
Date: 22 Sep 2017
To: Foggy
Subject: Vietnam by Ken Burns

HI,

Interesting article.

I don’t think it’s propaganda and I don’t agree with you on the TeT massacres.

Looking at Vietnam now it looks more as if the South won. Unfortunately experience has now shown us that hard-line Stalinist economic policies will always lose out in the end. On ne peut pas faire la bonheur des autres malgré eux.

Looks like Macron doesn’t like us oldies. OI wouldn’t mind him taking money from us if he were to use it well, but that I very much doubt.

Good luck to both of you with all your work .

Lennon

P.S I like that photo on the web site

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From: Squirrel
Date: Sep 22, 2017
To: Crusoe, Foggy, Wildthing
Subject: Re: VN and PBS

Hi Crusoe,

Frau picked up on the same things you did although Arte cut the 18 hours down to nine so we didn’t see the whole thing. She was really pissed off when she heard Walter Cronkite say we fought for democracy, on which she made a Freudian Slip and said “fighting for pornography” which Frau claims is one and the same in the US.  I saw nothing about deserters or the GI Movement in the reduced version. But they do cover the disintegration of the Army: drugs, racial conflict and there is a sentence about fragging.

Frau says the documentary won’t help because “the Yanks will just continue with all their wars” and we both agree that young people won’t take much of an interest in it. Vietnam for them is much further away than WWII was for our generation. And there’s no draft; just a professional ‘mercenary’ army.

When we were in Vietnam, one of the things that broke my heart was to see all those badly wounded ARVN soldiers left to fend for themselves as best they could: pariahs of society, legless, armless, jobless. Ànd from North to South, the vestiges of the war which continue to take lives and deform babies but the pride of the Vietnamese like this 16 year-old girl in the North who told me “We Vietnamese are strong. We beat the Americans.” She thought I was French.

I answered Wildthing.  I often wondered how many of the defectors killed in Operation Tailwind were listed as MIA and used to refuse compensation to Vietnam which had been promised in the Paris Peace Accords? How many of them are still alive and well with their Vietnamese families in Vietnam? At the end of the series they talk about Vietnamese children fathered by GIs. That can’t be easy to live with either.

Squirrel

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From:  Natural
Date:  Sep 22, 2017
To: Foggy, Wildthing, Crusoe, GungHo
Subject: RE: U.S. Military Used Nerve Gas to Kill Vietnam War Defectors, Report Says – latimes

Dear friends:

I am in strong agreement with all your comments.

This list of “facts” conveniently omitted or white washed by Burns could go on and on.

Since when was he anointed the historian of the USA?  With funding from a Coke [misspelled on a accident] bro.

Yes Henry the K. continues to get a pass. He’s one of the biggest war criminals from that era still not tried in court.

What happened to us?

Oct. 8 is the 50th anniversary of Che’s assassination.

I’m signing out on this. Peace and love to all.

Natural

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From:  Crusoe
Date:  Sept. 23, 2017
To: Natural, Foggy, Wildthing, Squirrel
Subject: RE: U.S. Military Used Nerve Gas to Kill Vietnam War Defectors, Report Says – latimes

À propos of your mention, Natural, of David Koch, I noted that his name looms large in the credits, as it does on NYC’s Lincoln center.

Americans seem incapable of learning lessons, when it comes to aggressive exhibitions of “exceptionalism.”

After Vietnam came Iraq and Afghanistan. And here comes trump’s attacks on Iran, North Korea and maybe even Venezuela!

Furthermore, there’s a direct line in my view between the Mai Lai massacre, Nixon ‘s commutation of lieutenant Calley’s sentence and Bush/Cheney, et al.’s torture program. The Nuremberg Code is for everybody except ourselves.

Our collective correspondence these last couple of days, and a brief reference in the film to the difficulty Americans had determining which side the Vietnamese were on, has reminded me of what a law school classmate told me a year ago:  that when he was in the Air Force reserve and flew into Da Nang air base, he discerned in one day that the U.S. was going to lose the war. He could see the hatred in the eyes of the Vietnamese who were working for the Americans on the base.

Crusoe

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From: Squirrel
Sent: samedi 23 septembre 2017
To: Wildthing, Foggy, Crusoe, Natural, Quaker
Subject: Re: Burns/Vietnam

I don’t know whether you guys got this or not. It is a mail I sent to an Army buddy (the guy I deserted with) in response to his comments on the Ken Burns documentary. I’m resending, just in case it didn’t go out. I know it’s long but I’m just getting started.

Vergangenheitsbewätigung (the word the Germans use for their work on coming to terms with what they did and atoning for the sins of their fathers)

I’m sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you but your last mail troubled me. I needed time to think.

I may have given you the wrong impression of Frau. She is anti-militarist and anti-war and unforgiving of her parents and grandparents and their generations for what they did. I guess she is the German equivalent of what is called “the Jew hating Jew” or “the Nigger hating Black.” She and those around her called their fathers murders their whole childhood. She believes it takes more courage to say “no” than to go along with what you are told to do and for her all soldiers are murderers (we disagree on this too). She thinks you have to be a coward or an idiot to put up with someone yelling at you all day. She has a big heart and we disagree on a lot of things which often paints me as narrow-minded, intolerant, elitist and so on.  Her opinion on East Germany is that it should have remained East Germany…there is little love for the “Ossies” in the West who have cost them an arm and a leg.

I am not a pacifist. And I am a patriot which is a non-starter for someone like Frau (although she won’t hesitate to affirm the Germans have the best Constitution in the world or to promote German ‘Kulture’).

As to the debate sparked by the Ken Burns documentary. I believe there would have been no war had we not got involved. The Geneva Peace Accords called for elections which Ho Chi Mihn would have won and he would have set up some sort of pluralistic socialist society without being forced to run to Moscow and Peking. And even if there were a civil war, we should not have got involved. So, for me, Vietnam was an imperialist, racist war of aggression which we created and we are responsible for what happened. We were the bad guys. Or as an Air Force General, ret., said in the documentary: “We were fighting on the wrong side.”

Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” paints a pretty good picture of how we pulled off the sabotage of the Vietnamese peace process.

Have you read Nick Turse’s 2013 book: “Kill Anything That Moves!”? It is not just another compilation of US war crimes. It demonstrates, once again, war crimes and crimes against humanity are things we committed on a daily basis. We hanged thousands of Germans and Japanese after WWII for what we did in Vietnam. We dropped more bombs and killed more people in the South than the North.  “We had to destroy the village to save it.” We have not done our Vergangenheitsbewätigung.

Because we never faced up to this, nor brought criminals to justice, we repeat it over and over again. There is no prescription for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is not too late to go after some of these people.

Do you remember in Fort Polk those mock Vietnamese villages where we practiced ‘Search and Destroy’? After one training I asked “What if there were civilians in there?” A Black dude was outraged. “They’re just Gooks, man!” He said. The Drill Instructors approved. If he’s still alive, I am sure he is all for “Black Lives Matter.”

Yes, there were Vietnamese who supported us although it is estimated, conservatively, that 50% of the South supported the NLF. Roughly three percent fled the country after the war. Thieu and Ky and all those other corrupt bastards we put in power after we had them kill Diem, ran off with the treasury. For those left behind, it was not pretty.

Once, when I was in Vietnam, one of the things that broke my heart was to see all those ARVN we left behind to miserable lives: armless, legless, homeless, jobless. One cul-de-jatte (legs amputated at the ass) tied to a board, using his hands to get down street in Saigon, looked at me with such hate, despise and desire for vengeance and, at the same time, eyes imploring me to explain why “I” left him to his fate, I could not bare it. Meanwhile, those who were on the ‘right side’ were taken care of like the heroes they were, such as this double arm amputee with a pencil attached to his stub to punch in on the cash register. Most Vietnamese have moved on. But I spoke with many former ARVN soldiers and officers and every discussion was between the lines because they still live in fear and shame. That too is something we must answer to; that is do our Vergangenheitsbewätigung.

I know Vietnam from the Chinese border to the Mekong Delta and everywhere massive war cemeteries and scars. In Dong Hoi, where pilots systematically dropped their unused ordinance before returning to the carriers or Da Nang,I watched every morning as men tried to dig a trench to lay pipe but had to wait at every stage for one of them to check with a metal detector to make sure there was no bomb under the surface. It is the same all over; worse in the South.  I was across the street from the bombed out Catholic Church they left as is, as a reminder.

I don’t really like the Vietnamese. I respect them but I couldn’t live with them. But I atone for our collective fault and I have dedicated my life to trying to stop us from doing it over and over and over again. And I encourage all of us to do our Vergangenheitsbewätigung. I feel shame, as an American, for I am an American, for what we let out leaders do, Democrat or Republican, day after day.

I don’t think the Ken Burns’ documentary will have any effect on the younger Americans. It’s too long ago. But for our generation, I was hoping it would help us deal collectively with our past and heal some of the wounds which have kept us divided for nearly 50 years.

I’m going to stop here.

Yours, The Squirrel

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From:  Foggy
Date:  Sep 27, 2017
To: Squirrel
Subject: Re: Burns/Vietnam

Hello Squirrel,

Yes, publish (I’m glad to see it online). Sorry for the delay in responding. This is a very interesting exchange. I find you are a bit too apologetic. You don’t have to feel sorry about anything.

Fra thinks Americans are incapable of dealing with their own brief history, if we have one!

My French friend told my high school buddies in 1965 that we shouldn’t worry about losing our « first » war, no two French historians would ever agree on how many wars France has lost.

A +,
F

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From:  Squirrel
Date:  Sep 27, 2017
To: Foggy
Subject: Re: Burns/Vietnam

Hi

Frau says she agrees with Fra and says hello. I will have to see the whole 18 hours. Arte cut it down to nine and I had to watch it in German. I put an adapted version of the exchange on my blog. Good news is, now I can take it easy when they play the national anthem.

Squirrel