Columns

In Judaism, the period between the New Year and the Day of Atonement is known as the days of awe, when the observant delve into deep spirituality. It so happened that PBS broadcast the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War during the days of awe, so I watched it religiously. 

It is a magnificent work that can be streamed on the PBS website for those who missed the original broadcast or rerun of the ten part series. The effect of watching over two weeks was cumulative. I was moved to tears in almost every segment, but the end, a reading by Tim O’Brien over footage of grunts walking forward into the jungle, followed by John Lennon’s “Let it Be” was simply cathartic. 

The film summarized the experience of the Vietnam War as a tragedy, and Aristotle’s theory of drama certainly applies here. When I was in grad school at the University of Michigan, I took a class in literary theory from an old professor who claimed to have taught Arthur Miller all that he knew about tragedy. We spent a month parsing the Poetics and learning all about pity and fear. We were young. What did we know? 

The documentary is infused with pity for the victims of the war, but we have to bring our own fears into this contemplation of the past, the fear that the fool currently occupying the presidency has so little understanding of history he is bound to repeat its mistakes. I asked a friend if she was going to watch, and she answered, “No I lived through it.” We in our seventies survived many struggles on the home front, but only the combat veterans actually lived through the Vietnam War. 

Burns and Novick rightly keep their main focus on the war itself with rare footage of key battles fought at close range like taking hills that were later abandoned. Maps locate the action, shown in unrelenting grime and gore, revealing the ugly reality of body counts and kill ratios, false metrics meant to mislead the American public into believing that we were winning. 

Portrait narratives run through the series, individual testimonies that provide continuity and personalize the war. About half of the stars are Vietnamese, former Vietcong, army vets, and refugees, whose stories create a balance of viewpoints among the former enemies. The war was theirs; it was their country that was torn apart, their land poisoned by defoliants, their cities destroyed by bombs that are still exploding, and their families murdered, displaced and ruptured. The Vietnamese people bore the brunt of the war, and the film never lets us forget it. 

The film’s distinction is its focus on Vietnam, not only the people but also the country, the landscape in war and peace; the film itself is evidence and a product of normalized relations that began in 1995 under President Clinton. The film’s shortcomings derive from that same humanistic orientation at the exclusion of economics, a focus that could have tallied not just the body count but also the budget fallout such as the war’s effects on domestic spending. The prolonged and hugely expensive campaign undermined President Johnson’s “war on poverty,” increased the deficit, and led to inflation. That’s a movie that somebody else will have to make. 

The criticism has already begun and should continue because the subject is big and complex, and many will be dissatisfied because their version of the war was inadequately represented. But Burns and Novick had to pare down a long history and a huge amount of material to shape a coherent and powerful narrative. There are unforgettable moments like the women truck drivers on the Ho Chi Minh trail at night and the Vietnam veterans tossing their medals into a trash heap in front of the Capitol. Little known stories are brought to light, like the siege of Huê, and infamous slaughters like the massacre at My Lai get the attention they deserve. Indelible photographic images are given context and meaning. 

In the eyes of some, The Vietnam War failed to be definitive, but it’s a monumental achievement nevertheless, one that will educate generations to come if our democratic freedoms survive. My viewing ended the night before a day of fasting and contemplation that was much needed.