CSIS REMARKS

28 September 2017 – by Lewis Sorley

Now we have seen the Burns Vietnam epic, or at least some of us have. What are we to think of it?

+ The story line is not very complicated:

War is hell.

Americans who opposed the war: good.

Americans who fought in it: inept, pitiable.

North Vietnamese: admirable.

South Vietnamese: hardly worth mentioning.

War is hell.

Let’s all make nice.

Probably didn’t need 18 hours to tell that story. But there was always one more explosion to feature, one more bloody body to examine, one more anti-war riot to recall.

Had there been somewhat greater economy in telling the Burns  version of the story, there might have been room to recall that:

 It was aggression by the North Vietnamese communists that led to all this bloodshed and agony.

 The communist way of war deliberately featured bombs in schoolyards and pagodas, murder of schoolteachers and village officials, kidnapping and

impressment of civilians, indiscriminate rocketing of cities.

 Under communist rule today Vietnam is one of the world’s most repressive and corrupt societies.

 The “boat people” and other émigrés now living in America and elsewhere in the free world have with great courage and industry made new lives for themselves and their families.

 This list could be extended almost indefinitely.

+ What of the filmmaker’s outlook?

Burns and his associates have appeared at a large number of preview events. At one such session at the Newseum here in Washington (billed by them as an “influencer event”) one could not help but be impressed by their self-regard and self-satisfaction. They apparently now view themselves as the premier historians of the Vietnam War. And they are candid in stating their most basic conclusions.

“You can find no overtly redeeming qualities of the Vietnam War,” Burns opined. I hope I may be forgiven for stating my own conviction that he is in that profoundly wrong, as he was in referring disparagingly to what he called Americans’ “puffed-up sense of exceptionalism.” Clearly Burns does not much like America, an outlook that permeates his work.

+ What of the research? We are told the Burns team spent ten years on this project, and that in the course of it they interviewed more than 80 people. I know writers, working alone, who have interviewed several hundred people for a single book. The Burns team averaged 8 interviews a year, an interview every month and a half, over the decade. Not impressive, at least to me, certainly not comprehensive.

Crucial omissions are a damaging flaw in the Burns opus. The great heroes of the war, in the view of almost all who fought there (on our side), were the Dustoff pilots and the nurses. We don’t see much of them. Instead we see repeatedly poor Mogie Crocker, who we know right away isdestined to get whacked. We see over and over again the clueless General Westmoreland, but learn nothing of his refusal to provide modern weaponry to the South Vietnamese or disdain for pacification. We see precious little of his able successor, General Abrams. We see (and hear) almost nothing of William Colby. And so on. These are serious failings in a film that bills itself as “a landmark documentary event.

”Burns and company are said to have made a decision not to interview former government officials for the film. That’s like going to an opera and listening only to the chorus, and them one at a time, with the diva and the tenor silenced and ignored. How does that contribute to an understanding of the war writ large?

Burns repeats in all the materials he distributes the mantra “There Is No Single Truth in War.” But there is such a thing as objective truth, elusive though it may be. What we have here is preferred “truth” as seen through the Burns prism.

Finally, the idea that this deeply flawed version of the war and those who fought it might somehow facilitate “recon-ciliation,” as claimed by Burns, can only be viewed as fatuous. There is no middle ground, and the Burns film demonstrates, if nothing else, how deep and unbridgeable the divide remains.