PBS - The Vietnam War

[Aloha_Shooter]

This offers an interesting perspective: https://www.peakingat70.com/lets-tal...alse-narrative

Read and discuss amongst yourselves

Thanks for the link. Excellent posts about each episode as they come out. I liked Burns' documentaries on the Civil War and Baseball but don't think I trust his liberal instincts on Viet Nam.

[DenverGP]

If a fellow don't have air/cable TV... is there still a way to check this out?

http://www.pbs.org/show/vietnam-war-not-edited/

Looks like the first 3 episodes are up there now, and I believe they will all be as they are released.

Also looks like it's available on Amazon Prime video if you happen to be a prime member.

[JohnTRourke]

If a fellow don't have air/cable TV... is there still a way to check this out?

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/watch/

it streams. so watch it on your computer or hook the computer to your TV thru hdmi cable.

[Aloha_Shooter]

Another view on Burns' latest:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...certain-facts/

Like Peaking at 70, Stearman points out some facts inconvenient to the narrative established by PBS.

[Duman]

Those are good points. I thought the series avoided some of the atrocities committed by the north.

The series did point out that the Tet offensive nearly broke the back of the north.

The series reported on finding mass graves, but wasn't covered in great detail, as was My Lai.

The fact that Washington's micro-management of the war kept us from winning is not a secret.

[Martinjmpr]

Just finished the whole series.

I liked it. I think it was very well done and very fair-minded.

In addition to pointing out the failures of US policy, they also spend a lot of time showing the terrible mistakes made by the North, including the Tet and the two "mini-Tet's" that followed in 1968, as well as the disastrous 1972 Easter Offensive.

I think the people who come off the worst in that documentary are McNamara and LBJ, who both knew the war could never be won but kept it going because Johnson didn't want to be "the first American president to lose a war." As bad as Nixon was on so many other things, on Vietnam his primary goal was to end the war.

Two others who come off really badly in the documentary are Jane Fonda and John Kerry. Fonda is shown to be an easily-manipulated ditz and Kerry to be a grandstanding boob who, during his senate testimony, repeated allegations of "atrocities" that he didn't actually witness and only heard about second hand, as if he was actually there.

EDITED TO ADD: I'm actually a little surprised they didn't get either Kerry or Fonda to be interviewed for the series. You would think that Fonda, at least, would jump at the chance to give her side of things. Who knows, maybe they asked them but they declined.

I've done a lot of reading on Vietnam (dad was a professor at CSU who taught a Vietnam history class and when he retired I got to raid his library) and the documentary seemed pretty accurate based on what I've read.

[JohnTRourke]

So being a history buff, one of the books recommended with this in another forum (starts with AR) was Street without Joy by Bernard Fall about the French war in Vietnam (46-54). It was published in the early 60's.

Clearly not one American leader read it. We literally followed the French footsteps and made the exact same mistakes (with pretty much the same results).

it's depressing.

https://www.amazon.com/Street-Withou.../dp/0811732363

[Martinjmpr]

So being a history buff, one of the books recommended with this in another forum (starts with AR) was Street without Joy by Bernard Fall about the French war in Vietnam (46-54). It was published in the early 60's.

Clearly not one American leader read it. We literally followed the French footsteps and made the exact same mistakes (with pretty much the same results).

it's depressing.

https://www.amazon.com/Street-Withou.../dp/0811732363

Oh, hell yes. Street Without Joy is a "must read" for anyone who is wondering "how did we ever get into that mess?"

I'd also highly recommend two others:

https://www.amazon.com/Bright-Shinin...ht+shining+lie

Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie" which is a bio of John Paul Vann, an early advisor and ultimately a high ranking USAID civilian leader who was killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam in the early 70's, and

https://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-at-Wa...illip+davidson

"Vietnam At War 1946 - 1975" by Phillip Davidson. Davidson is a retired 3 star general and was Westmoreland's G2 (intelligence officer.) I think these two books, more than any other, give the "big picture" view about why and how the Vietnam war was lost.

As befits an intel officer, Davidson's book spends a lot of time talking about the enemy, specifically General Giap, who was the architect of most of the NVA's operations. Davidson also spends a lot of time talking about the struggles and conflicts WITHIN North Vietnam over strategy.

Essentially, there were many in the North who wanted to more or less ignore the South after the 1954 agreement that partitioned Vietnam into two countries and just concentrate on the "socialist revolution" (and rebuilding the shattered economy) of the North. But there were others who said that there was no point in working to "fix" the North while Vietnam remained divided and they wanted to put their efforts into subverting and undermining the South, equipping and training the Viet Cong, etc. These two factions struggled a lot during the war.

And of course the biggest problem was that there was never a South Vietnamese government that was worth a damn. RVN political leaders and generals spent more time fighting each other for power, suppressing internal "enemies" like the Cao Dai and the Buddhists, and figuring out how to loot the treasury and enrich themselves than they ever did on figuring out how to create a legitimate government or fighting the VC. That's the whole reason we had to ramp up our military operations.

The more I read about Vietnam the more I have to agree with SFC Clell Hazard, the character played by James Caan in the movie "Gardens of Stone": That from the US perspective in Vietnam, there was "nothing to win and no way to win it."

[JohnTRourke]

Here's another good question on an interesting topic.

How and why did Westmoreland stay in charge for so long????

[Duman]

McNamara tried to talk Kennedy and LBJ out of Vietnam, until finally LBJ essentially fired him.