Ken Burns' Vietnam War documentary gets mixed reactions from veterans and Vietnamese Americans

PBS

A Vietnamese woman watches a column of American soldiers.

Compiled from the Los Angeles Times, Orlando Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News

WATCHING Ken Burns' 10-episode, 18-hour documentary on PBS made Tien Nguyen cry.

“This raised even more questions than it answered,” Nguyen, 51, told the Los Angeles Times.

I thought I knew a lot about the war that divided America. The lies used to justify the war and loss of so many lives - American and Vietnamese - and the inability of the Vietnamese and American politicians  to say we were wrong makes the war a sad tragic chapter in American and Vietnamese history.

U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese who fled Vietnam when the communists took power had mixed reactions to PBS' documentary on the war that some have called a masterpiece and others call a lie.

“The Vietnam War included the Americans, South Vietnam and North Vietnam. But in the 18 hours, the role of South Vietnam was very small,” said Sutton Vo, 80. who spent time in a communist re-education camp after the war.

“Any documentary should be fair and should tell the truth to the people,” said the former South Vietnamese Army major.

The film is “pure propaganda,” he told the San Jose Mercury News.

Vi Ma told the Orlando Sentinel that it’s important to keep memories of the war alive.

“We’re all right now trying to teach the younger generation about the history of Vietnam,” said Ma, 50, whose father served in the South Vietnamese army. “We need to keep reminding and teaching every single generation in the future. And we all believe we should keep reminding the world about it.”

“I grew up knowing about the war in the same way that most Americans grew up learning about the war, which was through movies or books,” said Beth Nguyen, an author and a graduate professor at the University of San Francisco. “Mostly every movie is done by a white man. And this documentary is sort of the same perspective.”

“America was divided by the war,” Nguyen told the Mercury News . “American pain and suffering is something I feel is important to discuss and think about, but it should not come at the expense of Vietnamese pain and suffering, which is what usually happens.”

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Vincent Okamoto, who became a judge in California
recalls his experience as a platoon leader in Vietnam.

Vincent Okamoto, who was born in one of the internment camps for Japanese Americans during WWII, was a lieutenant leading a platoon in Vietnam, where he earned the Army’s second-highest honor, the Distinguished Service Cross.

“Nineteen-, 20-year-old high school dropouts … they looked upon military service as like the weather: you had to go in, and you’d do it," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Patience, their loyalty to each other, their courage under fire. … You would ask yourself, ‘How does America produce young men like this?'”

Nguyen Ngoc, an 85-year-old scholar and veteran of the North Vietnamese army, watched the documentary in its entirety.

“I used to ask myself: ‘How come the United States after 40 years still can’t get over the Vietnam War?’ I considered it a weakness of the United States,” he said. “Actually now, having seen this film, I believe that the way in which the United States hasn’t ever really been able to leave the Vietnam War behind is actually a great strength. It’s is a nation that’s always asking itself about its own history, questioning its past and asking questions about what it’s done and why it did it. I really hope that we Vietnamese can make a film like this and that we can starting asking ourselves those same kinds of very difficult questions.”

It's painful to watch as I think of my friends and classmates who never came back and the lives that could have been. 

It fills me with remorse when I think the way most soldiers were received by the American public when they came back. They didn't need to be hailed as heroes, but at the very least, neither should they be cast as villains. 

Watching the documentary may be gut wrenching and make you extremely uncomfortable as it makes you question your own values, but, nevertheless, the documentary is something we all should view. Whether you were in the jungle fighting for your buddies and  trying to survive, or in the streets of our nation questioning the morality of the conflict or protesting the draft, or, It is the least we can do.

The questions about Vietnam might not have all been answered by the documentary. In fact, the questions the film raises should make us all pause whenever our country's leaders - most of whom have never served in the military - send America's young men and women into hell. War ain't no reality show.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: All the PBS stations airing the documentary have followed up online with responses from viewers, veterans of all factions in the war, anti-war activists and the filmmakers. For the San Francisco Bay Area, you can link to KQED here. The series can be watched online at http://video.kqed.org/show/vietnam-war/

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