Vietnam: A Measure of Hope and Healing

I HAVE SEEN AND HEARD ALL 1,080 MINUTES of "The Vietnam War" at least once. Scattered among those 18 hours are minutes I've screened five or ten times, some for professional reasons, most for personal ones.

Even so, I will watch "The Vietnam War" again starting September 17 when the 10-episode documentary from co-directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick premieres nationally on PBS. Why? Partly to fill in vast factual gaps in my knowledge. Partly to pin down information I used to believe was factual but isn’t.

Mostly, though, I’ll watch “The Vietnam War” again because it is a dense and deep work of non-fiction art that is more beautiful, heart-breaking, inspiring, infuriating and honest than any other such work I have seen on a screen of any size, including the other distinguished Burns films of the last 35 years. That is a rarity for any art in any medium and worth experiencing more than once. (See scheduling details below this column.)

“The Vietnam War” is historical, of course, the result of exhausting years of research in public, private and personal archives and collections on at least three continents and more years of a rigorous writing and post-production process of editing visuals and sounds and music — rock, folk and pop songs from the era and original score elements — to ensure the film’s faithfulness to the often conflicting truths and emotions of the war.

The historical content of the film, though, as compelling as it is, is not its heart. Nor does its heart lie in the extraordinarily high level of professionalism that Burns, Novick and their colleagues at Florentine Films bring to the demanding disciplines of visual and aural storytelling.

Beyond the History

No, what makes “The Vietnam War” a creative whole far greater than the sum of its exceptional parts is the humanity of people who appear in quiet interview segments recounting their direct experiences of the war, or describing people they knew and loved who died in the war, or reflecting on their lives and events since the war and revealing through their joy, sorrow, anguish, anger, guilt and more the lasting impact of war.

We see these feelings in the faces of U.S. combat veterans and in those of the forces they opposed — soldiers in the armies of what once were the separate entities of South Vietnam and North Vietnam and members of Viet Cong guerrilla cadres that fought in the south for the north.

Humanity pours out of parents, siblings and friends in the memories they share of dead loved ones. Humanity haunts first-hand recollections of journalists who risked their lives for weeks at a time living with U.S. forces on combat missions, experiencing for themselves terrifying encounters with enemy forces as they sought to see, feel and understand what really was happening in Vietnam.

And a sense of humanity drives the moral and political objections of people interviewed in the film who opposed American military actions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and devoted themselves to ending U.S. involvement and bringing the troops home, sometimes making ugly, stupid mistakes in the process.

It’s in these human moments that “The Vietnam War” demonstrates its conviction that the truth of the Vietnam experience lies within the contradictory impulses we human beings are capable of: Sacrifice and selfishness; modesty and arrogance; honor and disgrace; hope and despair; trust and betrayal; faith and denial; brotherhood and bigotry; honesty and deception; intelligence and ignorance; love, kindness and caring alongside savagery, cruelty and brutality; and astonishing bravery and paralyzing fear -- not infrequently occurring simultaneously within one person.

Absent an Agenda

It should come as no surprise that some moments in “The Vietnam War” are upsetting to see, difficult to watch and challenging to think about.

And, as Ken Burns acknowledged in a conversation we had last week for this column, "There'll be moments when you hate it, because it's saying the thing that's opposite to what you feel or what you believe," he said. "But wait two minutes, and it'll be saying exactly what you feel and believe. And then be prepared because two minutes after that, it might be yet another thing that you didn't know whether you liked or you didn't like."

This push-pull structure wasn't exactly purposeful, but it wasn't exactly accidental, either.

"I can't say that there's a kind of absolute intentionality to that," Burns told me, "but we know that that's a by-product of not having an agenda, not having your thumb on the scale and just tolerating complexity. Conventional wisdom is about the simplification of complicated aspects, and we just did the opposite of that. We just complicated it, because it is complicated."

In this context, Burns often invokes Wynton Marsalis, the great musician, composer and educator. During production of Burns' "Jazz" documentary in the late 1990s, Marsalis told him that “'The thing and an opposite of a thing can be true at the same time.' It was revelatory to me when he said that. I think about it all the time, and it's no more obvious than it is here [in the Vietnam series], even though it's a truth that suffuses life."

Healing at The Wall

At several moments in its 18 hours, the film visits the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, 140 panels of black stone bearing the names of more than 58,000 Americans who have died as a consequence of the war. The Wall has become a hallowed place of remembrance, pain and even hope, as a succession of survivors attests — even as some confess their initial antipathy to its concept and design.

The Wall’s first appearance in the film comes early in Episode One. The screen goes black and the voice of Bob Dylan begins to sing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Images of The Wall start to appear, the music dips into the background and the voice of another man, as yet unseen, is heard speaking of life, suffering, surviving and searching for meaning. “For those of us who suffered because of Vietnam,” says the man, now shown on screen with a graphic identifying him as Max Cleland, Army, “that’s been our quest ever since.”

The voices, pictures, music and lyrics convey a deep sense of sadness and foreboding, even if you don’t know that, in 1968, then-Capt. Cleland lost both of his legs and most of one arm to an exploding grenade in Vietnam and went on to a career in public service that included running the Veterans Administration and a six-year term as a U.S. Senator from Georgia.

The uncommon brilliance of “The Vietnam War” doesn’t change the fact that it is, after all, a made-for-television documentary film. Yet, it might prove to be more than that. For people still struggling in their own way for their own reasons to accommodate the war’s many tragedies, this documentary’s dedication to complex truths and emotional honesty can exert tremendous force.

What I sensed resonating just below the surface as I watched all 10 parts from start to finish, even in its most horrifying and maddening sequences, was a potential for healing. I’m not suggesting that this or any other film possesses magical powers. But in the best of worlds, “The Vietnam War” might offer us all a measure of hope and perhaps even some peace.

A version of this column originally was published by the St. Louis Jewish Light.

“The Vietnam War” will premiere September 17, 2017, on PBS stations nationwide. The first five episodes will air nightly from Sunday, September 17, through Thursday, September 21, and the final five episodes will air nightly from Sunday, September 24, through Thursday, September 28. Each episode will premiere at 8:00 p.m. ET with a repeat broadcast immediately following the premiere (check local listings). Beginning Tuesday, October 3, the series will re-air on a weekly basis through November 28, at 9:00 p.m. ET (check local listings).

On September 17, concurrent with the broadcast premiere, the first five episodes of “The Vietnam War” will be available for streaming on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and PBS apps for iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Chromecast, and the final five episodes will be available beginning September 24. All episodes will remain accessible until October 3, when the series begins its weekly rebroadcast. During the rebroadcast period, each episode will be available to stream for two weeks. PBS station members with Passport, a benefit for donors, offering extended access to a rich library of public television programming can view the entire series (all 10 episodes) beginning September 17 (contact your local PBS station for details). The series will also be available in Spanish and Vietnamese on streaming. — PBS Press Release, April 12, 2017