Ken Burns' new documentary: The Vietnam War

The TITANIC of wars. Incredible technology, good intentions, hubris, heroism, sacrifice...and we're still a-sailin'

 

Yes. The point the war was won yet Cronkite announced a stalemate...and it was lost.

 

Yes, I've read and heard that the Tet offensive was actually a bit of a bust for the communists. But, the way the U.S. military had been giving such glowing reassuring reports on things people were apparently shocked that all these attacks, however many casualties for the North and ineffective ultimately, could be staged at all! It's impossible to know if the media/Cronkite reporting on the Tet stuff differently would have made much difference, there really was already a ton of opposition in the U.S. by then. Maybe with different leadership it could have been possible to actually take and hold at least key areas after Tet (but that would play into the U.S. etc. as 'occupiers/i.vaders'), plus there's no evidence the people at the top had learned, and it was all aimed at having better negotiating pressure through numbers on paper from Johnson's perspective.

They fed all the numbers into a computer in 1968 and asked the computer when the war would be won, came back after a weekend of it calculating and found the answer: 1965!

 

The horrible truth of the war is/was propaganda is powerful as any weapon on the battlefield. Former Sec of State Robert Gates book "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War” is an important read, IMO. He expresses a lot about the failures in the Beltway and notes Americans become weary of war. We are not, and never have been, a warrior nation. We're a peaceful nation set on principles worth dying for. Unfortunately, our leaders have not always been talented enough to manage this...

 

I know it's a bit off topic, but could you elaborate on your friends story of doing the laundry and getting exposed? Did they do the wash wash in a river or something? Or did they go outside to hang laundry when the aerosols were being sprayed nearby? Thanks in advance for any extra info you might be able to recall...

 

And throngs will toss flowers and palm fronds in joyous thankfulness. We all know the script -- real for WWII, problematic afterwards.

 

Nattering nabobs of negativity?

 

Thanks! I don't see the term flapdoodle often enough in written discourse. Sure love it!

 

"Effete intellectual snobs"

 

My old man is gonna be 71 and served 1966-67 as a Radar Op only to take shrapnel in his buttox after learning that his best friend, who I'm named after, was killed in action. There's no way in hell to get him to watch this but if I tell him they've just unearthed scratchy silent black n white footage that may or may not contain Hitler, he'd be all "Let me see that!"

 

spoke with a very good old friend yesterday who was there.

he said it is very well done, very accurate........but it brought it back to a very dark place (his words). hard for him to watch.

the more i watch, the more i wish i had been more outspoken against it than i was......truly a national tragedy of epic proportion.

 

Pentagon propaganda blaming the media for their failures. Tet was a military setback for the North, not their military end by any means.

 

U.S. history is replete with numerous examples of military aggression. Note the following quote from Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006), p. 3:
". . . by 1930, Washington had sent gunboats into Latin American ports over six thousand times, . . ." Grandin is neither an investigative journalist nor a "think tanker" of any stripe, but a professor of history at New York University. I deliberately truncated the quote to keep it down . . . the continuing narrative must be read to be appreciated.

I'll stop there, hoping not to get this thread closed down. Kool-aid comes in many different flavors -- caveat emptor.

 

I don't know much more than that, but I can ask his widow. My impression was one of the guys that he knew of who died from Agent Orange exposure did the laundry at the base camp in the military laundry. He never was in the field. Simply being exposed to the soldiers clothing was enough to do him in.

 

People are still dying from agent orange exposure. This is a very none scientific explanation: agent orange has a very long "shelf" life when people come in contact with it. If it is in the water and we are exposed to it, it will most likely cause severe problems. If it is on the plants and the wind blows, it is on you. Some people are affected sooner and more severely than others.

When you are in the tropics during rainy season and the foliage is still brown... Incidentally, Viet Nam vets (Viet Nam and Thailand) claims are still being denied by the VA especially those folks stationed in Thailand where agent orange was used to defoliate the perimeter of the air bases.

 

A meaningless war, Kennedy said it best

“I don't think that unless a greater effort is made by the Government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Viet-Nam, against the Communists.”

We would not have had the “Vietnam War” that we know today if Kennedy had lived out his terms.

 

We had a neighbor who was a proud Vietnam veteran. He had various symbols on the back of his car that let you know he was a member of various vet organizations. He was the opposite of the guys who wanted to forget it ever happened and wanted no reminders and I've never known anyone like that. I thought about trying to talk to him about it to see if he could help me understand why he felt that way. I didn't know how to even begin a conversation about such a thing. "Good morning. It's good to see you out with your dog and, oh yeah, about that war you fought in..." He may have been eager to discuss his perspective but I felt like it would be crossing a line. I wish I could hear his thoughts on this series but he died a few years ago. The doctors at the VA hospital told him that the type of cancer he had was likely due to his Agent Orange exposure.

 

I would expect they will cover the very widespread use of drugs, particularly marijuana, among the troops. I remember a very well done CBS news report in which they showed, among other things, soldiers using their rifles as pipes, and I'm hoping they use some of that segment.

 

Johnson said many similar things as well, and yet... so maybe Kennedy too would have found himself getting more involved, he had most of the same advisers as Johnson.

 

My grandfather who had lost an eye as a kid couldn't fight in WWII like his brothers did, but did work at a shipyards where he was exposed to asbestos, later he developed emphysema. I guess you could say WWII shortened his life. I remember some kind of film of soldiers drinking 'agent orange' as some kind of initiation to Vietnam... whoops.

 

More than 40 years later and vets are still suffering. It is truly an incredible thing.

In 1974 a Viet Nam vet moved into our neighborhood down the street from us. He picked me up hitch-hiking back home one day (remember when you could do that and not worry too much about being murdered?). Anyway, he took me as far as his place and said drop by any time for a beer and some tunes if you like. Just come on in, the door's always unlocked. Help yourself to a beer and a smoke. He'd really turned into a peaceful hippie it seemed (or maybe he was before his service?).

One afternoon I walked past his place and saw he was home and heard the music from his stereo. I just wasn't the kind of person to just walk into someone's place, even if I'd gotten the OK, so I knocked. No answer. I opened the door, called his name. No answer. I walked in, looked down the hall, and saw him in his bedroom napping on his bed. I didn't want him to wake up and be surprised I was there so I went up to him to tell him I was there. No sooner had I tapped his shoulder -- a split second -- and his massive hand was locked around my windpipe squeezing the life out of me, his eyes wild with a combination of fear and fury. I had never seen anything like it before. Real killing, violent intent. I croaked out his name and said, "it's me." His pupils narrowed as began to wake up and realise I wasn't some enemy out to kill him. He said, "never, ever touch me when I'm asleep." Then he went on to tell me he had been infantry and the army gave everyone amphetamines to stay awake on night patrols in the forest (jungle I guess) and that sometimes they didn't really sleep for days at a time and when they tried, it was leaned up against a tree, paranoid, eyes half open, constantly waiting for the threat to appear. I guess that hadn't left him yet when I knew him. I wonder if it ever did? I was thankful I'd been to young to be drafted into what a lot of vets called "the Wall Street War." Here's a factoid I picked up somewhere: 25 percent of non-commissioned officer fatalities during Viet Nam was the result of friendly fire. I think that's a record.

That's why the key is not to get into a war in the first place if at all possible, and then only in defence IMO.

 

And although my eyes were open, they might just as well have been closed...............

 

It was a very stomach-churning episode. Watching this--particularly tonight's episode and the previous one--has been very powerful to me in a somewhat surreal way, as '67-'68 is when my father was there, and just before I was born. I never spent much time with him after age 3, and he has said very little about his experiences there (though I don't believe he was ever in actual combat). It is as if my life has always been haunted by this period, but I had little direct access to it. I am very grateful this documentary was made. I think it challenges us to ask ourselves how we would have behaved if we were adults back then, and then to figure out how to apply that conviction to the present, which has so many obvious and not-so-obvious parallels. The documentary does a good job of making that task (of figuring out what one should have done, and should do) suitably challenging. There were and are no easy answers.

 

Yes, perhaps not. And we also had another chance to take it in another direction with RFK.

 

That was particularly disturbing episode. The Tet offensive was a disaster on both sides.