Whether he knew it or not, Army Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, was philosophically and tactically in sync with “Uncle Ho,” except for the tiring part. He told Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings,”We’re killing these people at a ratio of 10 to 1.” Hollings, a Democrat and a decorated World War II veteran from Westmoreland’s home state of South Carolina, responded: “Westy, the American people don’t care about the 10, they care about the one.” So there it is, the whole shebang that was the Vietnam War summed up in two quick takes from both sides of the aisle, but fabled documentarian Ken Burns does not do short and unsweet. He and co-director Lynn Novick tend to the exhaustive, a style they have employed previously to explain the Civil War, World War II and even baseball.
President Johnson visits soldiers at the Cam Ranh Bay base, South Vietnam.
For Vietnam, they have come up with a whopper that was 10 years in the making. Beginning in September, PBS will roll out a 10-part, 18-hour documentary The Vietnam War that the blurbs say will be a “gripping cinematic journey that promises to be a major cultural event.” The “Ones” and American veterans take center stage in Burns and Novick’s retelling of the last war fought by a U.S. draft military, but the “Tens” and North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong survivors also share the spotlight. Their takes on the pluses and minuses of the Americans they fought along the jungle trails and paddy dikes will be jarring to a U.S. audience. According to the promo material, the series “will open up conversations — sometimes painful and long overdue — about the legacy of the war and what we can learn from it today.”
Long Khanh Province, Republic of Vietnam….SP4 R. Richter, 4th Battalion, 503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade, lifts his battle weary eyes to the heavens, as if to ask why? Sergeant Daniel E. Spencer stares down at their fallen comrade. The day’s battle ended, the silently await the helicopter which will evacuate their comrade from the jungle covered hills.
Well, now. Another conversation on Vietnam would hardly seem necessary after all the books, movies, songs, posturings, laments, “stab in the back” excuses, and barstool rants that have endlessly poured forth on the subject. But based on a screening last week at the Motion Picture Academy of America of a two-hour episode, Burns and Novick appear to have pulled it off. There is new material here in just the one segment — on power struggles in North Vietnam, on China’s involvement, on the divisions on the homefront in the U.S. and also in Vietnam. In Burns and Novick’s telling, Ho Chi Minh was a figurehead who lost out in a power struggle with Le Duan, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam (VCP), at a Hanoi party meeting on Nov. 22, 1963 — the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
President Richard M. Nixon visited U.S. troops of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division at Di An, 12 miles south of Saigon.
It was Le Duan (pronounced lay-zwan), a former clerk with the Vietnam Railway Co., who ordered regulars of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) into South Vietnam to bolster the Viet Cong against the U.S. troop buildup that he saw as inevitable. The outmaneuvered Ho would remain the national icon; Le Duan was the power. Burns and Novick have their narrator, actor Peter Coyote, intone: “Le Duan gave the order to escalate.” The first phase of the new strategy was to destroy the Army of the Republic of (South) Vietnam, the much-maligned ARVN. Then would come attacks on the cities, aimed at setting off revolts that would force the Americans out.
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Ken Burns: Vietnam
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Originally Posted by patrickt
