Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire PBS "Vietnam" - My review

One of the things that Burns repeated was how inhumane and vicious the VK and NVA were to the civilians and captured troops (both American and ARVN).

This is something I can't recall anyone from his part of the political spectrum ever talk about. I thought several times that it must have been hard for Peter Coyote, the narrator, to read those scripts.

Rocky

I agree with you on Ken Burns. I watched the whole series, after episode 2 it leaned more and more Left Wing. As to the discussion

on the Bravery of the Pilots over there. If not for the Fac's , Sandy's and Fast Movers, I would be a Name on that Black Wall in DC.

I was a MT/PJ in the 38ARRS. Tuy Hoa and TSN. 69-70. Thank You and all the Others on the Campfire for your service.

from all indications, and senator from arizona being one example, the vietnamese on the northern side had plenty of anti-aircraft capacity, and also some mig-21's or some such. no doubt.

in the south, the air was controlled by the allies (south vietnam & us, etc?). that means we controlled the air. we all know what that means. it means the north vietnamese made their gains against incredible air power, including B-52 bombers. had the good luck to play hs football, attend college with a navigator (USAF) on a b-52. a true patriot no doubt, and a beautiful wife that rode the same hs bus that i did. ah the memories. anyways, we controlled the sky at least in the south.

that fact alone tells me, a neophyte, an awful lot. it's quite amazing the war lasted as long as it did before we got our arses run out of that civil war. the french did their best, and so did we. ho chi minh city is moving right along from all indications.

it is oh so hard to divide or separate our own individual feelings & emotions from the objective reality of war. people died, there were winners & losers. but, thankfully life went on for the vast majority no matter if the outcome was win or lose. we've been indoctrinated our whole lives to know & believe that americans don't lose. it's part of the great mythos that keeps us up and going strong.

I don't think that is necessarily the case.. His documentary about the Civil War was pretty fair and balanced. If he did it with an ultra-libral slant, it would have been full of how evil the Southerners were, etc. It wasn't.

I also don't think the Viet Nam series was slanted very much left. Originally the people supported the war because we thought it was a clear case of monolithic communism trying to strangle a free country. But later this turned out not to be the case. Basically, the country turned against those who were mismanaging the war. I was living in Boston in the Spring of 1968 when Eugene McCarthy came out of nowhere to challenge Landslide Lyndon in the New Hampshire primary. The LBJ people got the idea to PAY veterans, in uniform, to campaign for LBJ in New Hampshire. This backfired when McCarthy got so many veterans to campaign for him FOR FREE that they had to turn away the help. It wasn't liberal vs. conservative. It was just the facts.

I’ve been there done that, got the scars, retired ID, and medals, so y’all ain’t hurtin my feelings Rocky.

The film was balanced in the hard to swallow truth. I personally saw the film as less about Vietnam and more enlightening on the beginings of a new standard operating procedure for the government elite warpigs.

If you want to know just how left slanted the series was, all you have to do is got the leftwing forums where the commies are bashing Ken Burns even harder than the rightwingers on here are...

This thread is an enlightening reminder of differences in bias and perception, Civilized even six pages in.

I’ll take an opinion (even left wing) from a jarhead that was in a particular battle before I’d give credence to a right wing opinion from Air Force punch card guru back in Saigon.

Believe what you will, Hero. That's why most all of us volunteered and would do so again Now GFY

Are you referring to Lt. Col Raab, recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross, or someone else?

Were you in Vietnam?




Dave

Not only are you an idiot, so is your momma.

Thats the kinda closed minded, lack of honesty, idealistic, mentality, that some folk have. If you served, thanks very much and you have earned your opinion. If you didn’t serve, you are welcome to the grace of your opinion because soldiers. Make no mistake though, nobody died in Vietnam for the Constitution unless it was their mindset. The sign of a mentally ill non-maturing soldier is not having different perspectives of events and their relationship to the “Big Picture” as time passes. The VFW and VA facilities are full of these 2-6 year wonders stuck in their time of service, us retired soldiers tend to avoid such places.

No, I’m not dogging those guys, they served, but they are mentally stuck.

No man, everywhere since then, the blueprint is the same. Seen a lot of good folk die and the older you get the more you question it. Its the blueprint that I found the most interesting.

Most GI’s fight for each other and to get back home, not some damn cause.

Unless you stormed the beaches of Normandy, there is plenty of room for after the fact pondering.

I think that the motivation to stop communism was correct, or at least the morally correct decision. However, that war was a mistake, couldn't be won, and I'm not even sure stopping communism was the motivation for it.

Why couldn't it be won? Because the North Vietnamese would not quit unless we invaded their territory and killed, if not every single one of them, enough to terrorize them. And we would have had to have had a nice long occupation as well. Why couldn't we do any of that? Because we didn't have the will for one thing. And it would have meant war with China and possibly Russia as well. The Chinese would have no more tolerated an American occupation of North Vietnam than we would have a Chinese occupation of Mexico.

And I'll add that the South Vietnamese NEVER demonstrated enough stability to have made any of our efforts worthwhile.

So very shortly into the war, if not from the very start we knew that we would not and could not do what was necessary to win that war. Every life lost on both sides as a result of American intervention was in vain and only for politics.

Can't argue with that. I'll only add had we done in 65 what we did in 71-72, as in bomb their infrastructure, ports etc. which is what brought them to the table. We could have pulled out a lot sooner, but in the end, the same would have happened.

many of them, I'm sure.

But some of the college kids protesting had already been there......

Sycamore

Hard to argue with that statement. Or maybe we ( or anyone) never had a government we could trust, and we just had our eyes opened to it. I don't know.

Sycamore

Spot on.

Watching the episode on Tet, I had the same thought, "that would have been the time to carpet bomb every city in the North"

They had a crushing defeat in combat, destroy their ability to rebuild and re-arm.

Sycamore

I can see that for sure. I think the consensus is it takes about 15 seconds in your first combat experience for your mind to catch up and give you a different perspective. Depending on one’s deep rooted ideology, many wouldn’t want someone else to go into combat unless it were justified.

Wait, was bombing them into so called “submission” what “brought them to the table”? I musta missed that.