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Burns/Novick: The Vietnam War

theprestige said:
Haha oh wow. You really have no idea what you're talking about, do you? Or worse: You do know, but choose to lie anyway.
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The photo shows the final evacuation before the fall of Saigon to the Communists.

IMO, calling it a won war for the USA is really some bizarre reasoning.
 
FYI you can watch past episodes and even some upcoming episodes on the PBS website or app. I used Apple TV to watch #1 again and it offers me several episodes that are yet to be shown. If you pay to subscribe to PBS you can watch the entire series right now.
 
William Parcher said:
The photo shows the final evacuation before the fall of Saigon to the Communists.
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Saigon fell to the Communists after the US withdrew from South Vietnam for political reasons back home. There was no military defeat for the US in Vietnam. What that photo shows is the evacuation of the US embassy in a foreign country that was overrun by Communists because the US had refused to fight for their ally, not because the US had been defeated there.
 
theprestige said:
Saigon fell to the Communists after the US withdrew from South Vietnam for political reasons back home. There was no military defeat for the US in Vietnam. What that photo shows is the evacuation of the US embassy in a foreign country that was overrun by Communists because the US had refused to fight for their ally, not because the US had been defeated there.
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Have you watched any of the series? I highly doubt any amount of "resolve" would have resulted in anything remotely looking like victory. The story of this war is a tragic story of epic proportions. It began slowly and may have been for good reasons and was of limited scope but it became a run away freight train that nobody could control or even understand at the time. It wasn't even about ideology by the time it ended. By the time the war ended, more people were fighting out of hatred, bitterness, and stubbornness than ideology or eventual goals and I think that is true on both sides. It turned into a terrible mess.
 
theprestige said:
Saigon fell to the Communists after the US withdrew from South Vietnam for political reasons back home. There was no military defeat for the US in Vietnam. What that photo shows is the evacuation of the US embassy in a foreign country that was overrun by Communists because the US had refused to fight for their ally, not because the US had been defeated there.
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You are not describing a win by the US.
 
William Parcher said:
You are not describing a win by the US.
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The Tet Offensive resulted in a resounding victory for the US and South Vietnam, and a commensurate defeat for North Vietnam. To the extent that the Vietnam War was a military contest for the US, the US was the victor.

But I concede that the US abdicated the conflict for political reasons, resulting in the ultimate defeat of their ally, South Vietnam. If you want to call that a "loss", go ahead. It wasn't a military loss, though.
 
theprestige said:
The Tet Offensive resulted in a resounding victory for the US and South Vietnam, and a commensurate defeat for North Vietnam. To the extent that the Vietnam War was a military contest for the US, the US was the victor.

But I concede that the US abdicated the conflict for political reasons, resulting in the ultimate defeat of their ally, South Vietnam. If you want to call that a "loss", go ahead. It wasn't a military loss, though.
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Not losing is not the same as winning. Winning battles does not always win a war. Ask the British.

The North controlled more territory when the US left than when they got there.
 
Waking up with Sam Harris recent podcast interviews Burns on this documentary if anyone is interested. Took them 10 years to produce apparently. They do talk about how all the politicians involved wanted out, but just couldn't (wouldn't ) do anything about it, and was partly politically motivated (elections looming)


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I have watched on and off. I like the audio of private conversations of JFK and LBJ where they talk about how they know things suck. And they have addressed the manner in which LBJ really did lie about a lot going on. I am too young to be too familiar with that. The interviews with the North Vietnamese are interesting that they humanitize both sides, but have not done a lot more than that (although last night they had a woman who's role was to fill in the bomb craters on the Ho Chi Minh trail - that was fascinating)

As others have noted, the one thing that really stands out is just how awful the South Vietnamese government was. Jesus, these were our allies? The enemy of our enemy is our friend and all that, but not really. We had to choose an enemy to support, and it couldn't be the communists. Because if not for that, man, there was no way we should have propped up any of that crap.

And to me, the US military is not coming off well, particularly the leaders. Last night, there was a guy on complaining that the image of American soldiers as being out of control, and how that wasn't fair to their efforts. While certainly #notallAmericansoldiers, but then when he goes on to describe how, yeah, there were times when they were ordered to set fire to thatch roofs, but they did it with an uneasy feeling. So don't judge them unfairly because they were just following orders to burn down the village? Sorry, no, that's not going to fly.

It is also clear how the soldiers were hung out to dry in a lot of cases, being put in situations for which they weren't at all prepared due to things like lack of intelligence. That I have a lot more sympathy for.
 
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pgwenthold said:
As others have noted, the one thing that really stands out is just how awful the South Vietnamese government was. Jesus, these were our allies? The enemy of our enemy is our friend and all that, but not really. We had to choose an enemy to support, and it couldn't be the communists. Because if not for that, man, there was no way we should have propped up any of that crap.
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That was normal during the Cold War. The U.S. talked about freedom and democracy, but made it clear it was much more about competing economic systems. No government of a market economy nation could be wrong in the eyes of the U.S., so long as the alternative was a more socialist system, even if that socialist society has a very benign government. Capitalism was freedom, socialism was tyranny. Actual freedom, human rights, or effective governance was fairly meaningless to USA and USSR Cold War policies.

This may be a bit of a hijack - but we still do that sort of thing. We continue to supply Egypt and Pakistan with quite a bit of military support. ISIS overran half of Iraq because the government we supported infuriated a big part of the population, such that they saw ISIS as a better alternative. The government of Afghanistan is probably as bad as the South Vietnamese government was; many people in Afghanistan seem to see the Taliban (supported by our Pakistani "ally") as a viable alternative. Russia still does it too, supporting Assad in Syria, Maduro in Venezuala, and various other bad players.

We never learn.
 
crescent said:
That was normal during the Cold War. The U.S. talked about freedom and democracy, but made it clear it was much more about competing economic systems. No government of a market economy nation could be wrong in the eyes of the U.S., so long as the alternative was a more socialist system, even if that socialist society has a very benign government. Capitalism was freedom, socialism was tyranny. Actual freedom, human rights, or effective governance was fairly meaningless to USA and USSR Cold War policies.

This may be a bit of a hijack - but we still do that sort of thing. We continue to supply Egypt and Pakistan with quite a bit of military support. ISIS overran half of Iraq because the government we supported infuriated a big part of the population, such that they saw ISIS as a better alternative. The government of Afghanistan is probably as bad as the South Vietnamese government was; many people in Afghanistan seem to see the Taliban (supported by our Pakistani "ally") as a viable alternative. Russia still does it too, supporting Assad in Syria, Maduro in Venezuala, and various other bad players.

We never learn.
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(and now back to the show)

One segment last night talked about the study the US did to try to understand why the Viet Cong were supporting North Vietnam and the Communists. Their conclusion: we are in trouble.

Because they discovered that the VC were not the brainless monsters they were painted to be (the description on of the women gave literally translates as head of an ox and the face of a horse), and that they were thoughtful and dedicated to their cause, which they considered to be on the side of right. They weren't just "American haters," they had their well-thought-out reasons.

South Vietnam and the US didn't have that.
 
pgwenthold said:
Because they discovered that the VC were not the brainless monsters they were painted to be (the description on of the women gave literally translates as head of an ox and the face of a horse), and that they were thoughtful and dedicated to their cause, which they considered to be on the side of right. They weren't just "American haters," they had their well-thought-out reasons.
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If you should ever read "The Ugly American", it comes to much the same conclusion regarding the Viet Mihn and the French defeat at Den Bien Phu (although that might have been in the forward or afterward of the edition I read some twenty years ago, rather than in the story itself). They realized that you can only go so far with forcing people to work hard - people work harder when they want to. And the effort and discipline needed to prepare the way the Viet Mihn did for that battle made it apparent that they were motivated to work very, very hard.

They had enough discipline to dig the gun emplacements in direct view of the French base while maintaining enough silence and camouflage to prevent the French from hearing or seeing it. Dismantling the artillery and carrying it great distance through the jungle (heavy pieces on slings carried by as many as a dozen men), mostly at night, on paths camouflaged to avoid being seen from the air, using few lights to remain unseen. Moving in enough ammunition, reassembling the guns in the camouflaged hideouts.

You can't force people to work that hard under such discipline, unless they want to work that hard and accept that discipline.
 
I will be watching the series during the marathon session on the weekend.

There is an episode of Malcom Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History that talks about the change in interpretation of the Vietnam situation, and more specifically the North Vietnamese status and will to fight. They interviewed people who interrogated captured NV prisoners on behalf of the Rand Corporation to assess the situation for the US government. It makes the point that multiple people can see the same evidence and come to very different conclusions.

CT
 
BStrong said:
I'm in.

I'm a little leery, but it might have more to do with the local station airing priorities than the material.

KQED aired a segment a few weeks back as a tease, and it focused on the guys that ran to Canada, and yes, I admit to my bias in this. I have a friend that went to jail rather than submit to the draft. That I have no issue with.

I do have an issue with somebody that ran.

The joke was Canada sent us her best, and she got stuck with our worst.
I always think of this man, even before the 9/11 attacks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rescorla
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I will accept that as a joke, because it certainly is not true from my experience. Through that time period I was roughly the same age as the Americans who were eligible for the draft. I knew a number of US draft dodgers at the time and IMO they were generally good people. Some went back to the US when they were able to and some elected to stay in Canada and those seem to have become productive citizens. They most definitely were not the worst of Americans. I would count among the worst those who went to Viet Nam willingly and enjoyed the killing opportunities they found there.

I agreed with and respected the position of those that left your country rather that fight in a war that they did not agree with. I would have done the same thing in those circumstances. I also had a number of American acquaintances who elected to stay in the US and take their chances with the draft. I respected their positions equally although I felt sorry for them that their country had put them in that position.

As to the TV series, I have only seen one episode. I was impressed that they showed good balance regarding the US political position and the US troops, and also showed the North Vietnamese in a way that I have never seen before in US media.
 
I would imagine that Burns will put a focus on the My Lai Massacre. I would also imagine families watching this series together with some knowing little or nothing about this incident. It could test the audience in ways that no other scene does.
 
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