I have to admit that I have not been able to watch much of the Burns-Novick Vietnam War series. Getting dragged back into that time and those events is too painful, too gut wrenching. I want to watch, but after a few minutes I realize those old feelings of anger and powerlessness are building again and I turn off the sound and images. Pet a cat. Move around. Do something else other than watch the insanity of a half-century ago, fully aware that those same scenes are now playing out in many different parts of our world.
I do have to thank a former neighbor for pointing me to the Facebook page of Doug Rawlings of Veterans for Peace, which features individual essays on each segment of the Vietnam series as they’re broadcast.
He’s a good writer, and he writes from the depth of his experience. My friend forwarded Doug’s essay on Episode Seven, which aired this week.
Here’s a bit of it:
EPISODE SEVEN
“THE VENEER OF CIVILIZATION”
Every episode is replete with images of the killing machine grinding away — B52’s float like geese thousands of feet above the terrain lazily letting their payload out to nonchalantly ravage the countryside as F-4’s swoop in and 155’s and 175’s pound away day after day. More ordnance than all of World War II let loose on a country the size of Massachusetts. By this time the viewer can’t be blamed for being numbed by it all. But now, in 1968, the bodies start piling up like cordwood, and we are locked into an Hieronymus Bosch painting of our own design. To break us out of our stupor Burns and company flash street scenes from all around the world of student riots and police clubbings (the Beatles’ “Revolution” screams away). Our chopper crewman from the previous episode recounts what it was like in an Australian hotel room (he was on R&R) to watch a cop who looked like his father beating on a kid who looked like him. From that moment on, he tells us, he was politicized. Note that the really bizarre part of R&R (I, too, went to Sydney) was going back. There was no excuse now — you knew full well what you were heading into. There were reports of guys deserting at this point, but not many. Meanwhile, the voices of Simon and Garfunkel singing from “What A Time It Was” wafts out of the TV screen. We are trapped. It is 1968.
Whether you’re watching the Vietnam series or not, do read Rawlings’ commentary. Highly recommended.
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I strongly recommend this series. It does not merely reopen old wounds; it gives viewers a chance to revisit a crucial point in modern history. It is from the point of view from multiple perspectives, including the Vietnamese who wanted to have no part of joining the Viet Cong. And the video is incredibly well edited. Some scenes look recent. It is not grainy like the JFK assisination video.
That being said, Ian is spot-on correct. It is gut-wrenching, and I was not alive in that era. Some of the torturous looks on the faces of children are impossible to bear. Imagine if your child or pet was shot to death in front of you.
It’s that bad. But it is our history, and we have to learn from it. Or it will repeat.
Especially under Trump. We might not go to war with NK. But it took ISIS only 2 years to come out of nowhere. We are human, and war is in our history. Arguably, it is part of our nature. We have no choice but to learn from it if we want to END IT.
But again, Ian is right.
So far, I have watched eight episodes of the series at
http://www.pbs.org/
I opt to view the series through the internet because we do not get a good PBS signal for in Hilo. It also allows me to stop to take an occasional break, and to start the series early in the evening, so that I have time to settle down a bit before going to sleep. Watching is indeed very disturbing.
The New York Times recommends this article, which offers a very critical analysis of the series:
http://www.publicbooks.org/burns-and-novick-masters-of-false-balancing/
I think it’s important that you see the series. It’s a must for a political person. Lots to learn for the present and future.
Also recommended, from 2003:
http://www.toledoblade.com/special-tiger-force/2003/10/19/DAY-1-Rogue-GIs-unleashed-wave-of-terror-in-Central-Highlands.html
“Though the farmers were not carrying weapons, it didn’t matter: No one was safe when the special force arrived on July 28, 1967.
No one.
With bullets flying, the farmers – slowed by the thick, green plants and muck – dropped one by one to the ground.
Within minutes, it was over. Four were dead, others wounded. Some survived by lying motionless in the mud.
Four soldiers later recalled the assault.
“We knew the farmers were not armed to begin with,” one said, “but we shot them anyway.”
The unprovoked attack was one of many carried out by the decorated unit in the Vietnam War, an eight-month investigation by The Blade shows.
The platoon – a small, highly trained unit of 45 paratroopers created to spy on enemy forces – violently lost control between May and November, 1967.
For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians – in some cases torturing and mutilating them – in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public.”
Daniel Ellsberg (who inexplicably is not included in the series) has this to say:
“I think there were some some major omissions that are quite fundamental that disturbed me quite a bit, although the overall thing is very impressive.
“First of all, the repeated statement that this was a civil war on which we were taking one side, I think it’s profoundly misleading. It always was a war in which one side is entirely paid, equipped, armed, pressed forward by foreigners. Without the foreigners, no war. That’s not a civil war. And that puts — it very much undermines, I’d say, a fundamentally misleading statement at the very beginning in the first five minutes or so of the first session.
“I don’t see anything in the Pentagon Papers, 7,000 pages, that could be called good faith by anybody, in terms of the American people, our values, our Constitution. This was a war, as I say initially, to keep Vietnam a French colony. And that was not admitted to the American people. It was well known inside. We preferred that they be at war, and there was never a year that there would have been a war at all without American money in the end. So I thought that was extremely misleading.”
I remember the summer of ’67, my husband and I, in Bangkok, ran into a former pilot who had been stationed in Germany with us. Over dinner, a very disillusioned West Pointer on RR from Viet Nam. Not watching. I protested at the Capitol with my children later when we returned to the States. I bet the same corporations that made money then, still are over America’s continuing death and destruction efforts. Disgusting!
I was in the US Army in Vietnam for more than a year in 1968-1969. The notion that the war involved American good faith is ridiculous. Good faith would have been allowing the promised 1956 elections or getting out at any time in the 1960s when we saw we weren’t wanted.