Last week, I finished the daunting task of watching The Vietnam War, the 10-episode, 18-hour documentary first shown PBS in May 2017, and now streaming on Netflix. It was a stunning achievement, epic in scope and depressing in affect, educational without being didactic and dry. If only the lessons it taught were examined and understood by those who needed the instruction the most.
Like most kids raised in the '70s, I grew up with "Vietnam" as an abstract, a concept that offered up a quick delineation between adults -- who seemed to understand the multiple meanings implicitly, with a nod or a sigh or a conversation in hushed tones -- and mere children. It was stitched into the fabric of the United States like a single black strand of coarse thread in an otherwise pristine American flag. But as a kid, I gave not a whit of attention to it, as Star Wars and Marvel Comics and Lego and Top 40 FM radio consumed most of my waking hours.
Oddly enough, it was Top 40 FM radio in the middle of the '80s that gave me my first stab at a greater understanding of what happened in Vietnam, in the form of one of the oddest and most chilling one-hit wonders to ever crash the top of the charts: "19" by Paul Hardcastle.
"19" used archival audio samples, set to an electro beat straight outta the Tommy Boy Records catalog, to make some strikingly salient points and impressions about the Vietnam War, all at 120 beats per minute. It introduced the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to the mainstream of America, and it drove home the fact that children -- well, young boys in their late teens, to be precise -- were being sent by their government to fight, even though they might not have understood why. The video was even more powerful, thanks to the copious archival footage available, and it was the height of cognitive dissonance to watch MTV in 1985, when "19" would sometimes air right after pop pap like "Just A Gigolo" by David Lee Roth. "19" -- and the various audio and video remixes that followed the original -- is still as unsettling today as it was over three decades ago, and for me, it was the beginning of a deeper understanding.
In my college years in the '90s, like many people, I was exposed to alternate histories of the United States that challenged the historical record of my K-12 youth. I learned that with American exceptionalism comes the bloody doppelgangers of genocide and slavery, that the wars fought and paid for with young American lives didn't always meet the morality litmus test as we hoped. But regardless of what I read or what I watched -- surfing the wave of Vietnam movies such as Born On The Fourth Of July and Platoon and Full Metal Jacket -- I still consumed the media from the insular worldview of a white male from the Midwest. I understood the basic premise of Vietnam as a civil war that became a Cold War proxy for the global superpowers, but there was still a distance and disconnect.
The Vietnam War on PBS shatters that gap for good by spending a lot of time with the voices and the lives of the actual Vietnamese -- men and women, North and South -- to show just how horrific the 20th Century was to the average Vietnamese citizen, first under the colonial cuff of the French, then yoked to the Americans and the Chinese and, to a lesser extent, the Russians. The Vietnamese featured in the documentary spoke of fear and pride and family and identity and trauma, and while the language wasn't English, the sentiment mirrored the American experience more than most Americans would like to admit. How does a country and a people ever recover from such a schism? It's been over 150 years since the American Civil War, and the ripples still trigger thoughts and feelings that bridge time and place. How can we expect Vietnam to be different? And what about those Americans with Vietnamese heritage, having to strain under the weight of multiple identities?
And in an ocean of tragedies, of lessons unheeded and atrocities evaporated under the grim heat of unwavering racism, we somehow see the same mistakes being made over and over, from the incursions in Afghanistan and the devastation in Iraq in the '00s to the current scapegoating of immigrants and "illegals." We fail to grasp that for each act of dehumanization and aggression, we create a poisoned generation that hurts all sides. While I view The Vietnam War as essential programming for all generations of Americans, I feel that its best purpose is as a crystal ball to the thoughts and feelings and actions of those for whom history will sadly repeat at some point. And not even Ken Burns can help us at that point.
Like most kids raised in the '70s, I grew up with "Vietnam" as an abstract, a concept that offered up a quick delineation between adults -- who seemed to understand the multiple meanings implicitly, with a nod or a sigh or a conversation in hushed tones -- and mere children. It was stitched into the fabric of the United States like a single black strand of coarse thread in an otherwise pristine American flag. But as a kid, I gave not a whit of attention to it, as Star Wars and Marvel Comics and Lego and Top 40 FM radio consumed most of my waking hours.
Oddly enough, it was Top 40 FM radio in the middle of the '80s that gave me my first stab at a greater understanding of what happened in Vietnam, in the form of one of the oddest and most chilling one-hit wonders to ever crash the top of the charts: "19" by Paul Hardcastle.
"19" used archival audio samples, set to an electro beat straight outta the Tommy Boy Records catalog, to make some strikingly salient points and impressions about the Vietnam War, all at 120 beats per minute. It introduced the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to the mainstream of America, and it drove home the fact that children -- well, young boys in their late teens, to be precise -- were being sent by their government to fight, even though they might not have understood why. The video was even more powerful, thanks to the copious archival footage available, and it was the height of cognitive dissonance to watch MTV in 1985, when "19" would sometimes air right after pop pap like "Just A Gigolo" by David Lee Roth. "19" -- and the various audio and video remixes that followed the original -- is still as unsettling today as it was over three decades ago, and for me, it was the beginning of a deeper understanding.
In my college years in the '90s, like many people, I was exposed to alternate histories of the United States that challenged the historical record of my K-12 youth. I learned that with American exceptionalism comes the bloody doppelgangers of genocide and slavery, that the wars fought and paid for with young American lives didn't always meet the morality litmus test as we hoped. But regardless of what I read or what I watched -- surfing the wave of Vietnam movies such as Born On The Fourth Of July and Platoon and Full Metal Jacket -- I still consumed the media from the insular worldview of a white male from the Midwest. I understood the basic premise of Vietnam as a civil war that became a Cold War proxy for the global superpowers, but there was still a distance and disconnect.
The Vietnam War on PBS shatters that gap for good by spending a lot of time with the voices and the lives of the actual Vietnamese -- men and women, North and South -- to show just how horrific the 20th Century was to the average Vietnamese citizen, first under the colonial cuff of the French, then yoked to the Americans and the Chinese and, to a lesser extent, the Russians. The Vietnamese featured in the documentary spoke of fear and pride and family and identity and trauma, and while the language wasn't English, the sentiment mirrored the American experience more than most Americans would like to admit. How does a country and a people ever recover from such a schism? It's been over 150 years since the American Civil War, and the ripples still trigger thoughts and feelings that bridge time and place. How can we expect Vietnam to be different? And what about those Americans with Vietnamese heritage, having to strain under the weight of multiple identities?
And in an ocean of tragedies, of lessons unheeded and atrocities evaporated under the grim heat of unwavering racism, we somehow see the same mistakes being made over and over, from the incursions in Afghanistan and the devastation in Iraq in the '00s to the current scapegoating of immigrants and "illegals." We fail to grasp that for each act of dehumanization and aggression, we create a poisoned generation that hurts all sides. While I view The Vietnam War as essential programming for all generations of Americans, I feel that its best purpose is as a crystal ball to the thoughts and feelings and actions of those for whom history will sadly repeat at some point. And not even Ken Burns can help us at that point.
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