NewsCut Flashback: Vietnam

It was on this date in 1975 that President Gerald Ford announced that the Vietnam War era was over, a declaration that doesn’t even register a blip on the historical calendar because the war actually ended more than a week earlier when Ford told a graduating class at Tulane University that for America, the war was over.

“While America will surely never revert to its old brand of isolationism,” Newsweek’s assessment of the war said in its account then, “the shaken nation has already shrunk from some global responsibilities out of fear of ‘another Vietnam.’ Such is the legacy of Vietnam: a bitter remembrance of things past that is sure to haunt the future.”

(Originally published September 29, 2017)

Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s epic documentary, The Vietnam War, concluded on PBS last evening with a whimper, not a bang.

In publicity interviews before the series, Burns seemed to suggest that the nation remains conflicted over whether the war, which took the lives of 58,000 Americans, was worth it. The first episode last week seemed to promise to deliver an answer to that question.

It didn’t.

The question, actually, was never posed during the 18-hour film, opting instead for the assessment of one of the documentary’s handful of interviewees that the stated reason for the war was a worthy one. That was a disappointing, but not unexpected, cop-out from a film that had already delivered its gut punch: a deeper picture of the treachery of Richard Nixon and the thousands of American kids who died because of it.

Nixon, running for president in ’68, torpedoed peace talks between North and South Vietnam and the Viet Cong after President Lyndon Johnson tried to bomb North Vietnam to the bargaining table.

Nixon used an intermediary to convince a corrupt South Vietnam president to pull out of the talks before they could even start because it was just a few days from the election and Nixon, incredibly, had been marketed as a peace candidate. Peace before the election was not in his interest.

Nixon called President Johnson to insist that he had nothing to do with the diplomatic subterfuge (Burns/Novick had the recording of their conversation), but Johnson knew the truth; he had bugged the phones of South Vietnam’s government, but he couldn’t say anything because it would’ve revealed the U.S. had wiretapped its partner.

Later, once elected, Nixon started a secret bombing campaign in neutral Cambodia and Laos, but didn’t tell the American people or Congress. When the media — portrayed now as “the enemy of the people” — found out, Nixon ordered illegal wiretaps on journalists and generals.

The final episodeThe Weight of Memory — was far more tender than the rest of the series and didn’t really require an answer to Burns’ original question. History had already spoken, even if — as Fair and Accuracy in Media writes today — Burns couldn’t even bring himself to conclude the obvious: America lost the war.



The document, long on historical facts, was short on obvious context and relevance to America in 2017.

The parallels were unmistakable, however, including the ability of Americans to create reality of whatever they were and are told to believe, the facts be damned, creating an up-is-down country where a subsequent presidential candidate who served in Vietnam was framed as the coward, while his opponent who stayed home was the patriotic hero.

To that extent, another interviewee’s assessment of the Vietnam War last night was far more important and accurate.

“We never recovered,” Sam Wilson (Army) said.

Burns and Novick pulled their punches in their conclusion that meaning can be found in the stories of people who fought in Vietnam. “Stories of courage and comradeship and perseverance of understanding and forgiveness and, ultimately, reconciliation,” narrator Peter Coyote said.

“It makes me cry,” southern Minnesota native and author Tim O’Brien told the Washington Post this week. “I can’t stop crying. I can’t stop thinking of what a waste it all was.”

The film, partly funded by David Koch, gave O’Brien the last word, reading from his book, “The Things They Carried.”

They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. They often they carried each other — the wounded and weak.

They carried infections. They carried basketballs, Vietnamese – English dictionaries. Insignia of rank. Bronze stars. Plastic cards imprinted with code of conduct.

They carried diseases, among them malaria, dysentary. They carried lice and ringworm and leaches, paddy algea, and various rots and mold.

They carried the land itself. Vietnam. The place. The soil, a powderly orange-red dust, that covered their boots, and fatigues, and faces. They carried the sky, the whole atmosphere. They carried it. The humidity. A lot of feelings. The stink of fungus and decay. All of it.

They carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire. At night they were mortared. They crawled into tunnels, and led point, advanced under fire.

But it was not battle; it was just the endless march. Village to village. They march for the sake of the march.

They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bones. Simple grunts soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies. They crossed the rivers, and up again and down again. Just humping. One step and then the next. And then another. They made their legs move. They endured.

Cue the credits, a fade to black over the Beatles’ “Let it Be.”

Let’s not.

Related: ‘The American War’: You’ve watched all 18 hours of ‘The Vietnam War.’ Here’s what Ken Burns wants you to remember. (Washington Post)

  • kevins

    Bless all those who served, and those who died, and bless their people at home. The legacy, if anyone is listening is summed up by the data; there are more suicides than combat deaths, and flying home did not mean you left the war behind. For the sake of my grandchildren, do not do that again.

    • Brian Simon

      “there are more suicides than combat deaths, and flying home did not mean you left the war behind”

      Given that the same truth applies to the GWOT, it seems the lesson has not yet been learned.

      • kevins

        Assuming that GWOT means global war on terror, I agree. Remember, GW Bush (no nation building) started THREE wars almost simultaneously..ugh! Colin Powell I think tried to modulate that, but Cheney won. Sad. And BTW, trump is FAR more dangerous than GW.

  • J Allen

    The Vietnam War was not worth fighting, because after the Korean War it was decided that the U.S. would not again fight a war with China if it could avoid it, so invading North Vietnam was out of the question. All the U.S. could do was try not to lose. Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition was grasped at by LBJ as a rationale to send U.S. forces to South Vietnam, but it was a flawed strategy given that North Vietnam in fact could keep fighting the war for years – and did just that. But the prospect of losing a war to Communist North Vietnam at the height of the Cold War was one that Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, or Nixon could not abide. So it took Kissinger’s “peace with honor” deal to save face, only to have the war end in 1975 with the fall of Saigon. It was all a waste, and a terrible tragedy for Viet Nam and the real victims, the Vietnamese people.