Tatiana Sanchez at the Mercury
News offer a piece on the complaints of Vietnam veterans who watched PBS’ The
Vietnam War.
A gripping documentary on the
Vietnam War — described by many viewers as a masterful depiction of a prolonged
conflict that divided the nation — has left many American and Vietnamese
veterans feeling deeply disappointed, even betrayed.
“The Vietnam War” — a
10-part, 18-hour PBS documentary by American filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn
Novick that concluded Thursday night — depicts the history of the war through
photographs, archival footage and interviews with more than 80 veterans and witnesses
from all sides. The film has been hailed as a hard-hitting, raw account of the
war and the players involved.
But veterans of the South
Vietnamese military say they were largely left out of the narrative, their
voices drowned out by the film’s focus on North Vietnam and its communist
leader, Ho Chi Minh. And many American veterans say that the series had several
glaring omissions and focused too much on leftist anti-war protesters and
soldiers who came to oppose the war.
On Thursday evening, hours
before the film’s final installment aired, a group of American and South
Vietnamese veterans came together at a San Jose home to share memories of the
war and talk about the documentary.
Sutton Vo, a former major in
South Vietnam’s army engineering corps, watched the series but has told friends
and family not to do so. The film is “pure propaganda,” he said.
“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 Vo, 80. “Any documentary should be fair and
should tell the truth to the people.”
After the war, Vo was sent to
a communist “re-education” camp, where he was imprisoned for 13 years. At one
point, he said, he was confined for three months to a pitch-black cell
virtually 24 hours a day — his feet shackled and his hands bound with rubber
string — after an escape attempt.
… Like Vo, Cang Dong spent
time in a re-education camp; he was freed in 1987. Dong, 70, president of the
local chapter of Associates of Vietnam Veterans of America, has just started
watching the series, but said he’s unhappy with what he sees as the filmmakers’
glorification of Ho.
“Everything is a big lie,” he
said. “To our people, Ho Chi Minh was a big liar and immoral.”
Veteran Jim Barker, 70, of
San Jose, also said he was surprised by the extent of coverage given to North
Vietnamese soldiers in the film.
“What bothered me is the
element of arrogance that seemed to come out in seeing themselves so superior.
I had trouble with that,” said Barker, who was an adviser with a South
Vietnamese intelligence unit in the Central Highlands and survived the siege of
Kontum in 1972. “That focus detracted attention from the people of South
Vietnam and the idealism that was there.”
… Jack Wells, a retired
lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Marine Corps who served in Vietnam in 1968 and
1969, called the documentary “a masterpiece of video and footage” in which he
learned a number of things, but said he identified several omissions that
bothered him.
He pointed to the film’s
depiction of Kim Phuc, “the Napalm girl” who became a famous symbol of the war
after a 1972 photograph showed her running naked on a road with other children,
her back severely burned by a South Vietnamese napalm attack. The film said
Phuc left Vietnam and eventually moved to Canada but didn’t mention that she
had requested political asylum from the Vietnamese communists, who had used her
as a propaganda symbol, Wells said.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
