Because I was interviewed for the WNET documentaries “Legacies of War: Vietnam,” and “Legacies of War: Coming Home,” my wife Lynn and I were invited to Alice Tully Hall in Manhattan for the Sept. 14 preview screening of Ken Burns’ 10-part, 18-hour PBS documentary series “The Vietnam War.”
It was followed by a panel discussion moderated by ABC News’ Bob Woodruff with filmmakers Burns and Lynn Novick plus Vietnam veteran Roger Harris, former Saigon regime chief justice Phan Quang Tue and Pulitzer Prize winning photographer David Hume Kennerly.
Burns said he did the documentary, sponsored by Bank of America, because “we felt like this was unfinished business for our country, a traumatic event for our soldiers and our country.”
He added, “Our species is pretty bad at learning [from history] but maybe we can distinguish between the warriors and the policymakers and not blame the warriors…[And] you would hope that maybe this could pull out the fuel rods of disunity [in the U.S.] Perhaps we should skip to the reconciliation part.”
Burns showed seven clips from the series, which runs from Sept. 17-28.
He said it took him and Novick six years to produce it.
Watching the clips brought tears to my eyes: the sound of whirling chopper blades, rice paddies, firefights, torched villages, body bags, protestors screaming at troops, Kent State, Chicago, B-52 strikes, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Tet, the Embassy attacks, Buddhists aflame, McNamara, Westmoreland, Nixon, Dylan songs, Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner, 9-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack, the fall of Saigon, helicopters pushed into the sea, the Wall…
“It ended in failure,” a narrator says, “witnessed by the whole world.”
Vietnam veterans remember being called baby-killers, getting spit on, hiding uniforms in closets, not speaking about experiences, being scorned by World War II vets.
In one clip, a former female protestor admits: “It pains me to think of the things we said [to the troops]. I’m…sorry.” And she cries.
The panelists were unanimous in saying they hope reviewing the most divisive period in American history since the Civil War will cause policymakers to err in the future on the side of peace.
A narrator said the only thing pro- and anti-war demonstrators agreed on was that the almost 58,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam War should be remembered.
Harris, who grew up in Roxbury, Mass., served in the Marines in 1967-68 near the DMZ.
He said his mother told him he would make it home but he didn’t believe her. He went on to get a PhD and spend 40 years in the Boston public schools system.
Harris said of serving in Vietnam, “I’ve never been as afraid as I was then. That’s why I’m not afraid of anything now.”
A North Vietnamese veteran says “There are no winners and no losers in war.” Harris agreed, saying, “The greatest lesson that needs to be learned is for policymakers to develop respectful diplomacy skills…If you’re fortunate enough to make it back, you’re scarred for life…We have to figure out a way to end wars…I hope politicians, when they see this, realize war is the last thing they should ever vote for.”
Tue, whose family came to the U.S. in 1975, recently retired as an immigration judge in California.
He said, “I believe the message is very powerful and it will explain that no more Vietnams should happen. I think it’s very important that we learn peace is more important than war.”
Tue joked that Novick knows more about North Vietnam than he does. He said many Vietnamese families had sons fighting for both sides.
Novick said she spent almost a year in Hanoi researching archives with the help of a translator and government officials and that she and Burns wanted to present a balanced view.
“We also have to reconcile,” Tue said, referring to survivors in Vietnam. “It’s a nonpartisan documentary. We have to approach it in a nonpartisan way. Both sides have to be shown because they both had their own aspirations…It gives credence to Abraham Lincoln’s statement that a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Novick said the series will be shown in Vietnam with Vietnamese subtitles.
My book “Heroes to the End, (www.heroestotheend.com)” which focuses on Jan. 1-Aug. 1, 1972 and the NVA’s failed “Easter Offensive,” shows that myself and others were deluded into thinking we could create a second South Korean in Vietnam.
We underestimated the power of nationalism and the North’s desire to unify the country. Novick said, “no two situations are the same. Korea was seen as a situation to apply to Vietnam and it didn’t work.”
Burns said the series was augmented by access to declassified presidential audio tapes, some of which indicated President Lyndon Johnson was deeply troubled by the war at the same time as he was painting a bright picture for the media.
Kennerly, who was president Gerald Ford’s White House photographer, said reporters were a link to home and that troops in the field were always happy to see him.
“For me,” he said of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., “everything ends at the wall. Those were real people who got killed. For everybody’s friends and family, they’re all there.”
