The Ken
Burns Vietnam War Documentary Glosses Over
Devastating Civilian Toll
By Nick Turse
September
30, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- “I think that
when Americans talk about the Vietnam War … we tend
to talk only about ourselves. But if we really want
to understand it … or try to answer the fundamental
question, ‘What happened?’ You’ve got to
triangulate,”
says filmmaker Ken
Burns of his celebrated PBS documentary series “The
Vietnam War.” “You’ve got to know what’s going on.
And we have many battles in which you’ve got South
Vietnamese soldiers and American advisors or … their
counterparts and Vietcong or North Vietnamese. You
have to get in there and understand what they’re
thinking.”
Burns
and his
co-director Lynn
Novick spent
10 years on “The
Vietnam War,” assisted by their producer Sarah
Botstein, writer Geoffrey Ward, 24 advisors, and
others. They assembled 25,000 photographs, feature
close to 80 interviews of Americans and Vietnamese,
and spent $30 million on the project. The resulting
18-hour series is a marvel of
storytelling,
something in which Burns and Novick take obvious
pride. “The Vietnam War” provides lots of great
vintage film footage, stunning photos, a solid Age
of Aquarius soundtrack, and plenty of striking
soundbites. Maybe this is what Burns means by
triangulation. The series seems expertly
crafted to appeal to the widest possible American
audience. But as far as telling us “what happened,”
I don’t see much evidence of that.
Like
Burns and Novick, I also spent a decade working on a
Vietnam War epic, though carried out on a far more
modest budget, a book titled “Kill
Anything That Moves.”
Like Burns and Novick, I spoke with military men and
women, Americans and Vietnamese. Like Burns and
Novick, I thought I could learn “what happened” from
them. It took me years to realize that I was dead
wrong. That might be why I find “The Vietnam War”
and its seemingly endless parade of soldier and
guerrilla talking heads so painful to watch.
War is not
combat, though combat is a part of war. Combatants
are not the main participants in modern war. Modern
war affects civilians far more and far longer than
combatants. Most American soldiers and Marines spent
12 or 13 months, respectively, serving in Vietnam.
Vietnamese from what was once South Vietnam, in
provinces like Quang Nam, Quang Ngai, Binh Dinh, as
well as those of the Mekong Delta – rural population
centers that were also hotbeds of the revolution —
lived the war week after week, month after month,
year after year, from one decade into the next.
Burns and Novick seem to have mostly missed these
people, missed their stories, and, consequently,
missed the dark heart of the conflict.
To deprive
their Vietnamese enemies of food, recruits,
intelligence, and other support, American command
policy turned large swathes of those provinces into
“free fire zones,” subject to intense bombing and
artillery shelling, that was expressly designed to
“generate” refugees, driving people from their homes
in the name of “pacification.” Houses were set
ablaze, whole villages were bulldozed, and people
were forced into squalid refugee camps and filthy
urban slums short of water, food, and shelter.
A U.S. Marine
carries a blindfolded woman suspected of Vietcong
activities over his shoulder. She and other
prisoners were rounded up during the joint
Vietnamese-U.S. Operation Mallard, near Da Nang,
Vietnam. Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
I spoke
with hundreds of Vietnamese from these rural areas.
In hamlet after hamlet, they told me about being
rousted from their homes and then being forced to
drift back to the ruins, for deeply-held cultural
and religious reasons, and often simply to survive.
They explained what it was like to live, for years
on end, under the threat of bombs and artillery
shells and helicopter gunships. They talked about
homes burned again and again and again, before they
gave up rebuilding and began living a
semi-subterranean existence in rough-hewn bomb
shelters gouged into the earth. They told me about
scrambling inside these bunkers when artillery fire
began. And then they told me about the waiting game.
Just how
long did you stay in your bunker? Long enough to
avoid the shelling, of course, but not so long that
you were still inside it when the Americans and
their grenades arrived. If you left the shelter’s
confines too soon, machine-gun fire from a
helicopter might cut you in half. Or you might get
caught in crossfire between withdrawing guerrillas
and onrushing U.S. troops. But if you waited too
long, the Americans might begin rolling grenades
into your bomb shelter because, to them, it was a
possible enemy fighting position.
They told
me about waiting, crouched in the dark, trying to
guess the possible reactions of the heavily-armed,
often angry and scared, young Americans who had
arrived on their doorsteps. Every second mattered
immensely. It wasn’t just your life on the line;
your whole family might be wiped out. And these
calculations went on for years, shaping every
decision to leave the confines of that shelter, day
or night, to relieve oneself or fetch water or try
to gather vegetables for a hungry family. Everyday
existence became an endless series of life-or-death
risk assessments.
I had to
hear versions of this story over and over before I
began to get a sense of the trauma and suffering.
Then I started to appreciate the numbers of people
affected. According to Pentagon figures, in January
1969 alone, air strikes were carried out on or near
hamlets where 3.3 million Vietnamese lived. That’s
one month of a war that lasted more than a decade. I
began to think of all those civilians crouched in
fear as the bombs fell. I began to tally the terror
and its toll. I began to understand “what happened.”
I started
to think about other numbers, too. More than 58,000
U.S. military personnel and 254,000 of their South
Vietnamese allies lost their lives in the war. Their
opponents, North Vietnamese soldiers and South
Vietnamese guerrillas, suffered even more grievous
losses.
But
civilian casualties absolutely dwarf those numbers.
Though no one will ever know the true figure, a 2008
study by researchers from Harvard Medical School and
the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at
the University of Washington and a Vietnamese
government estimate, suggest there were around two
million civilian deaths, the vast majority in South
Vietnam. A conservative killed-to-injured ratio
yields a figure of 5.3 million civilians wounded.
Add to these numbers 11 million civilians driven
from their lands and made homeless at one time or
another, and as many as 4.8 million sprayed with
toxic defoliants like Agent Orange. “The Vietnam
War” only weakly gestures at this civilian toll and
what it means.
Episode five of “The Vietnam War,” titled “This Is
What We Do,” begins with Marine Corps veteran Roger
Harris musing about the nature of armed conflict.
“You adapt to the atrocities of war. You adapt to
killing, dying,” he
says. “After a
while, it doesn’t bother you. I should say, it
doesn’t bother you as much.”
It’s a
striking soundbite and is obviously offered to
viewers as a window onto the true face of war. It
made me think, however, about someone who
experienced the war far longer and more intimately
than Harris did. Her name was Ho Thi A and in a
soft, measured voice she told me about a day in 1970
when U.S. Marines came to her hamlet of Le Bac 2.
She recounted for me how, as a young girl, she’d
taken cover in a bunker with her grandmother and an
elderly neighbor, scrambling out just as a group of
Marines arrived — and how one of the Americans had
leveled his rifle and shot the two old women dead.
(One of the Marines in the hamlet that day told me
he saw an older woman “gut-shot” and dying and a
couple of small clusters of dead civilians,
including women and children, as he walked through.)
Ho Thi A
told her story calmly and collectedly. It was only
when I moved on to more general questions that she
suddenly broke down, sobbing convulsively. She wept
for ten minutes. Then it was fifteen. Then twenty.
Then more. Despite all her efforts to restrain
herself, the flood of tears kept pouring out.
Like
Harris, she had adapted and moved on with her life,
but the atrocities, the killing, the dying, did
bother her — quite a bit. That didn’t surprise me.
War arrived on her doorstep, took her grandmother,
and scarred her for life. She had no predefined tour
of duty. She lived the war every day of her youth
and still lived steps from that killing ground.
Add
together all the suffering of all of South Vietnam’s
Ho Thi A’s, all the women and children and elderly
men who huddled in those bunkers, those whose
hamlets were burned, those made homeless, those who
died under the bombs and shelling, and those who
buried the unfortunates that did perish, and it’s a
staggering, almost unfathomable toll – and, by sheer
numbers alone, the very essence of the war.
It’s there
for anyone interested in finding it. Just look for
the men with napalm-scarred or white
phosphorus-melted faces. Look for the grandmothers
missing arms and feet, the old women with shrapnel
scars and absent eyes. There’s no shortage of them,
even if there are fewer every day.
If
you really want to get a sense of “what happened” in
Vietnam, by all means watch “The Vietnam War.” But
as you do, as you sit there admiring the “rarely
seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage,”
while grooving to “iconic musical recordings from
[the] greatest artists of the era,” and also
pondering the
“haunting original music from Trent Reznor and
Atticus Ross,” just imagine that you’re actually
crouched in your basement, that your home above is
ablaze, that lethal helicopters are hovering
overhead, and that heavily-armed teenagers —
foreigners who don’t speak your language — are out
there in your yard, screaming commands you don’t
understand, rolling grenades into your neighbor’s
cellar, and if you run out through the flames, into
the chaos, one of them might just shoot you.
Nick Turse is the author of “Kill
Anything That Moves: The Real American War in
Vietnam,” one of
the books suggested as “accompaniments to the film”
on the PBS
website for “The
Vietnam War.” He is a frequent contributor to The
Intercept.
Top photo:
U.S. Marine stands with Vietnamese children as they
watch their house burn after a patrol set it ablaze
after finding AK-47 ammunition, Jan. 13, 1971, 25
miles south of Da Nang.
This
article was first published by
The Intercept
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