I did it. I Figured out how to watch this without paying $20 per episode ($200 total) to own. I was able use my library’s free streaming service. Granted, it is slightly limiting. You are given 10 credits each month and each movie or episode is 1 – 4 credits. This took me spanning over two months to have enough credits to watch the whole mini-series. But that is OK because I started late in July and so August came quicker than I realized.

I have been a Ken Burns fan for a long time. When I was in middle school, I recorded each episode of his Civil War series. That was so long ago, I don’t really remember that much about it other than I felt pretty satisfied on the subject when it was over. But, it was already a subject I had studied pretty extensively, so most of it was not too revolutionary.

Ken Burns: The Vietnam War was a powerhouse documentary. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, that war was in the American psyche. Heck, when I was born the US had not even completely and formally evacuated Vietnam. When I was a youngster, most Vietnam Veterans were less than ten years from their service. We are now twice as far away from 9/11 then we were from Vietnam when I was a kid. You betcha it was a sore subject in this country.

I used to believe that the US could have won the war, we just did not fight it in a way that would have. I no longer believe that. It was based on nothing but a sheer belief that Team America had to be the best. Now that I am older and wiser, I can see my naivete was just sheer ignorance. At almost 17 hours, this review probably deserves more than one blog post. I am going to try and get it in one long one.

I have questioned a lot of things about my country in recent years. I am as anti-communist as they come. I believe in personal accountability and yielding the merits of my own work both good and bad. The reason I am against permanent, social safety nets is that I believe that they de-incentivize personal accountability. That being said, I can understand the American desire to contain Communism in the 1940s.

President Truman sent military advisors to Vietnam in 1948. They were to bolster the colonial ruling French and beef up the South Vietnamese efforts aiding the French who were fighting Chinese backed, North Vietnamese Communists. The North Vietnamese wanted two things: to get rid of French rule and to unite the country. A ceasefire in 1953 drew the Vietnamese De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) directly resulting in France’s withdrawal from Vietnam.

In a subversive way, France drew the United States significantly deeper into the conflict by playing on the US weakness for stemming expanding communism. But, they were smarter than us and when France abandoned Vietnam, the left the United States with the bag of supporting South Vietnam as it was now called. Puppet elections and widespread corruption left a completely dependent country on foreign support both militarily and financially.

Clearly, hindsight is 20/20 and the Domino Theory of Communism advancing did not happen. The question that I keep asking myself is ‘why is it that America thinks it is our business to get involved in other nation’s affairs’? Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and finally Nixon all knew that we were not going to win this war and yet the first three kept escalating the war. I strongly believe that Nixon would not have ended it if it were not for his utter fear of total revolution. He had no choice. But it still took seven years for that to happen.

For those of us who did not live it, we may think that of all of these events in sort of one big, grab bag called Vietnam. As an example, there was always protests and civil unrest. It was the Tet Offensive of 1968 that really changed the country’s mind. Due to the US getting completely surprised and most of the South Vietnamese soldiers on Lunar New Year break the illusion was shattered. How could the US be winning the war and yet they needed to double the troop size from a quarter to half a million men? Clearly we were being lied to about what was happening and the country got mad.

Out of that grab bag also came Watergate. While my impression was always Nixon was a slimy POS, This film gave me a whole new perspective. When it was apparent that Nixon was going to win the 1968 election, Nixon started negotiating with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong going outside of the official government channels basically signaling that there was going to be a change in US policy focusing on peace with dignity. We know this because Johnson had bugged Nixon’s phone lines. Knowing that was illegal, Johnson never divulged this information nor that it was happening at all.

I tell that anecdote because it was my impression that it was only Nixon who was a crook. But, what it really told me was that corruption was already in place for both sides. Just like they were fighting a war that was already known to be unwinnable, they were playing the public as fools with almost everything they were doing.

What all of this has ultimately crystallized to me from all of this was that this is the true legacy of the GI generation. From a remarkable victory in World War II to a stalemate in Korea to an utter defeat in Vietnam. Granted, I know that this is way more complicated and mixed, but it was the GIs that fought in World War II, advised in Korea and lead in Vietnam.

The best I could say about all of this is ‘travesty’. Americans lost around 58,000 soldiers the North Vietnamese lost 2.5 million people. That is just killed, then there is wounded and invalid and there is nothing to say of the psychological effects. It is true the country was united in government and boundaries but they were as divided as ever. Vietnam struggled to thrive economically under communist policies.

End Your Programing Routine: For what? What was this all for? This war was an homage to arrogance and resulted in futility. I have been to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and stood back and watched in solemnness as the tears flowed while names are traced of friends and loved ones that were killed. It was powerful and humbling to realize that now over almost thirty plus years some people were still struggling to move on. What can you say, possibly it is worth $200 to watch.