Culture | Digging up the past

A powerful new documentary series on the Vietnam war

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick unearth painful memories just as American politics have become explosive again

Their children will remember, too

THE great novels of the Vietnam war, both in English and in Vietnamese, tend towards surrealism. In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”, an army medic manages to have his 17-year-old sweetheart flown in from Ohio for a visit, only to watch her transform into a bloodthirsty commando sporting a necklace of human tongues. In Bao Ninh’s “The Sorrow of War”, ghosts haunt the Jungle of Screaming Souls, and severed limbs rain from the sky during a B-52 raid. The two writers, who fought on opposite sides, are among the dozens of interviewees featured in “The Vietnam War”, a ten-part, 18-hour history by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Like Mr Burns’s earlier work, the new series is encyclopaedic and solemn, but this time there is also an element of psychedelic frenzy. This is partly because, as with the novels, the material demands it. But it is partly because the war, a decade-long nightmare that killed 58,000 Americans and over 2m Vietnamese, remains too contested for a purely elegiac treatment. Its politics still split both American and Vietnamese society today.

One way America has tried to process the war is by casting it as an unnecessary tragedy. Like many other historians, Mr Burns and Ms Novick trace the points at which things might have taken a different turn, such as the brief alliance between Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh guerrillas and the OSS (precursor to the CIA) at the end of the second world war, and America’s unwise decision to back France as it tried to hold on to its colony. Later, as Presidents Kennedy and Johnson are forced to deploy troops in South Vietnam to protect their client state from a communist takeover, the filmmakers reveal both men’s secret doubts. In a taped memo, Kennedy blames himself for approving the military coup that killed South Vietnam’s autocratic president, Ngo Dinh Diem. Johnson tells a senator, “There ain’t no daylight in Vietnam,” even as he sends in the first Marines. Such presidential qualms create a sense of the road not taken; had Kennedy lived or Johnson been more confident, they imply, America might have heeded its better impulses.

Yet the uncomfortable truth is that whereas the war was in one sense an aberration from America’s character, it was also an expression of it. Kennedy’s intellectual arrogance and Johnson’s cowboy bravado were two versions of the same typical American overconfidence. Throughout the series, the Americans’ misguided reliance on quantitative technical approaches to complex problems comes up over and over again, from the “body count” measure used by the hapless General William Westmoreland to the computer-processed pacification statistics of Robert McNamara, the defence secretary. The American belief that massive bombing would dissuade the North Vietnamese from trying to unify their country betrayed a crippling inability to understand that others’ worldviews might be different from theirs. Or as James Willbanks, an army strategist, describes this approach: “When McNamara wants to know what Ho Chi Minh is thinking, he interviews himself.”

The series will be equally wrenching for Vietnamese viewers. The conflict was a civil war, numerous Vietnamese interviewees insist—“down to the family level”, says Duong Van Mai Elliott, a Vietnamese-American academic from the South whose sister went north to join the communists. This might seem blindingly obvious, except that the government in Hanoi has always resolutely denied it. For Vietnam’s communist rulers, the former South Vietnamese government was a “puppet regime” controlled by America, and the war was not between two groups of Vietnamese but between the Vietnamese people and foreign invaders. To admit otherwise would be to acknowledge that there could be more than one source of political legitimacy in Vietnam.

Americans, too, long ridiculed South Vietnam and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) as corrupt and shambolic. But Mr Burns and Ms Novick, like many historians today, recognise that some ARVN units were disciplined and patriotic, and that the country, for all its flaws, was relatively free and had a strong civil society. Today’s Vietnamese government, by failing to pursue a full rehabilitation of the former officials and soldiers of South Vietnam and to allow a free debate about rights and wrongs on both sides, continues to hamper the country’s reconciliation.

Part of the force of “The Vietnam War” comes from its startling primary material. The film-makers interviewed George Wickes, then in his late 80s, who was with the OSS mission that met Ho in 1945. They persuade two ageing North Vietnamese Army veterans to acknowledge the North’s massacre of thousands of civilians in Hue after the Tet offensive in 1968, which the communist government has always denied. They play recordings from the Oval Office in which Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger openly admit that their programme to “Vietnamise” the war (ie, remove American troops and hand all responsibility to the ARVN) is doomed, and is intended merely to distance America from the South’s inevitable collapse.

But the power of the series also derives from its disturbing contemporary echoes. To listen to Nixon’s White House tapes is to feel nostalgia for a time when political lying was coherent and directed towards rational policy objectives. One cannot watch footage of construction workers beating anti-war demonstrators in New York City in 1970 without thinking of Charlottesville; footage of the killing of four students by the National Guard at Kent State inevitably recalls today’s roiling campuses and police-brutality scandals. (At the time, a poll showed most Americans thought the dead students had it coming.)

Mr Burns notes that he and Ms Novick finished the films over a year before Donald Trump’s election; the resonances, he says, stem from history’s habit not of repeating, but rhyming. The series ends with the construction of Maya Lin’s Vietnam war memorial in 1982, the gradual easing of tensions between supporters and opponents of the war, and the normalisation of relations between America and Vietnam in the 1990s. But today America’s mercurial foreign policy is weakening that new friendship with Vietnam, and the hatred between the country’s right and left has risen to levels not seen for 40 years. A decade ago, it felt as though the Vietnam war had been put to rest. Today, the rhymes of history are uncomfortably loud.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Buried ordnance"

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