Charles and I watched the fifth episode of the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick-Geoffrey C. Ward documentary The Viet Nam War (incidentally Charles challenged my insistence on spelling “Viet Nam” as two words, unhyphenated, saying that the Viet Namese consulate in the U.S. uses the “Vietnam” spelling that was commonplace in the American media when the Viet Nam war was actually happening), which was called “This Is What We Do” — after the reminiscence of a soldier who fought in the war who when he complained, early on in his tour, about the inhumane things he was expected to do, was told by his commanding officer, “This is war. This is what we do.” The period covered in this episode was from July to December 1967, during which North Viet Namese Communist Party general secretary Le Duan (who according to this series was the real power running North Viet Nam; by that time, Ward’s script argues, Ho Chi Minh was just a figurehead) decided the North Viet Namese army and their allies, the National Liberation Front (so-called “Viet Cong”) in the south would launch a major offensive starting on the date of the Viet Namese lunar new year, Tet, on January 31, 1968. (Tet was a defeat for the North Viet Namese in military terms but a triumph for them politically: though they weren’t able to bring down the South Viet Namese government or conquer any major cities, they virtually destroyed the support base for the war among the American people, boosted the anti-war insurgent candidacies of Eugene McCarthy — who makes what amounts to a cameo appearance at the end of this show — and Robert Kennedy and brought down Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency. But then, as I’ve pointed out before, that’s how all successful guerrilla armies win: they wear down the will of the occupying country’s people to fight.)
There were some
fascinating stories, including one from Jim Musgraves (at least I think I’m recalling his name right), a quite
personable (and attractive, even 50 years later) man from Missouri who like a
lot of other boys from America’s heartland bought into the idea that the Viet
Nam war was a) a noble struggle against Communism any right-thinking American
male of military age would want to be part of, and b) his generation’s
opportunity to serve the country the way World War II had been for his parents’
generation. He was so severely wounded in one firefight his chest was literally ripped open, and though he was evacuated
by helicopter he was visited by about four or five doctors who gave up on him,
saying there was nothing they could do for him — one even asked what religion
he was so he could call the appropriate chaplain to give him last rites — until
finally he lucked out with a doctor who said, “Why isn’t this man being
treated?” Musgraves also said that after his first week in Viet Nam “I never killed
another human being” — not because he stopped fatally shooting the people who
were shooting at him, or trying to, or might have been there to do so, or even looked vaguely like people who might have been
trying to do so, but because he started thinking of them as “dinks,” “slopes”
and “gooks” (all terms of abuse that had come from previous U.S. war or racism
against Asians — Ward’s narration includes a brief etymology for each) and he
could therefore kill them with a clear conscience — just as people on the other
side (one of the best aspects of this program is the fact that they extensively
interviewed people who fought on the Northern side — even though between them
and the South Viet Namese who were also interviewed, and Burns’ and Novick’s
decision to give the translations via subtitles instead of voice-overs, leads
to an awful lot of Viet Namese on the soundtrack) called Americans “puppets,”
“imperialists” and “monsters.”
The story of the part of the war covered in
“This Is What We Do” (a title with an oddly fatalistic air) is one of a steady
escalation on both sides, and President Johnson’s response to Robert McNamara’s
series of secret memos explaining that the current strategy was not working and
the war could not be won, which was to arrange for him to be appointed
president of the World Bank and for long-time Democratic fixer Clark Clifford
to replace McNamara as Secretary of Defense. It also covered the disputed 1967
election in South Viet Nam, in which the U.S. prevailed on the principal rivals
in the government, Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky, not to run against each
other but instead to form a ticket with Thieu as President and Ky as
Vice-President — and despite extensive election rigging and fraud the Thieu-Ky
ticket only got 35 percent of the vote, though without provision for a runoff
they were declared elected. (Shortly after the election, one of the rival
candidates, General “Big” Minh — who’d also been a player in the period between
November 1963 and June 1965 in which there were no fewer than eight South Viet
Namese governments — “Musical Governments,” Mad magazine called it — asked for
permission to leave the country, and instead was arrested. Some democracy.) The
elections were held largely to placate opposition both in South Viet Nam and
the U.S.; American critics of the war were wondering why we were being told we
were fighting for “democracy” when the local government we were allied with was
being run by military officers who’d taken power in coups, and Viet Namese
Buddhists (which was about nine-tenths of the country) were once again mounting
resistance actions and claiming that they were the victims of discrimination by
the Roman Catholic minority who were actually running the South Viet Namese
government and had been since the formation of the rump state of South Viet Nam
and the installation of its first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, in 1955.
There is
no doubt in my mind that the war in Viet Nam was a misguided misadventure that
didn’t even make sense as an act of imperialism — Viet Nam had no resources to
speak of (about all that could be said for it in terms of its value in
international trade was it was a great place to grow rice), nor was it
strategically located in terms of confronting China (as Korea was), and any
value it could have had to the international capitalist ruling class was hardly
worth the toll in human lives, financial resources and overall national energy
the American elite put into it. It will be interesting to see how this series
develops — even though, in one of the dorkiest decisions any American
broadcasting network has ever made, they’re putting the series on pause for the
next few days and won’t resume it until this Sunday night (with “Things Fall
Apart,” the episode that will cover the Tet offensive); either way, the
conflicts that drove U.S. politics and society apart over Viet Nam — and the
other two big things that happened to America, politically and socially, in the
1960’s, the African-American civil rights struggle and the emergence of the
counterculture (which in the 1960’s meant the hippies and today mostly means
Queers) — still
divide the country, and Donald Trump’s election as President was in large
measure a triumph of the racist, pro-war and anti-counterculture movement that
emerged in the 1960’s on the American Right to support the war in Viet Nam and
drive — politically and, sometimes, physically — the war’s likely opponents out
of any influence in what went on in American governance and society.
