Ken Burns Vietnam.

Watched I think all but a few mins here/there.

Impressive. I learned a good bit.

I'm just enough too young to have turned 18 after we were completely out, and in that weird late-70s birthdate-window of about 2 years where you didn't even have to register for the draft  at all. So I didn't.

Young enough also that it mostly all happened when I wasn't really hearing about it. Plus, I spent a number of those years in several somewhat isolated places (Air Force Academy, for example, about as isolated as you could get and still have running water; I grew up in the military, my dad was IN Vietnam for most of a year).

So while I sort-of remembered a lot of the names of locations, I don't really remember why.

The whole thing was a huge cock-up. That seems to stem from a few factors:

1) This horrific post-WW2 Communist boogeyman fear. That messed us up all by itself, with HUAC and related crap. Some of us got convinced that anywhere something called itself communist was by definition going to end up being the equivalent of an eastern-european Soviet satellite/barrier/puppet state, sporting nuclear missiles like Cuba did at one point (and that episode we brought on ourselves, thanks JFK). The "domino theory" was stupid, although if you are fear-driven it seemed reasonable. You how it played out--no dominos.

2) WW2 was the last "good" or "clean" war. The veterans of that war were the parents of the draftees for Vietnam. And we'd created and heard endless stories about that having been a just war--where we were clearly "the good guys". So that's what we thought war was about.

3) Racism. This still haunts us. One required stage in war is the dehumanization of the enemy. There was plenty of residue of that from Korea (which was also really nasty, but not in the same way). So when both North and South Vietnamese "look alike" -- which is "enemy" ? And when they're all "gooks" (leftover word from Korea, or older?), smelly unattractive heathens who need the guiding hand of the white man who can help extract their country's natural resources for them and educate them in the proper ways of civilization and religion…well, we're starting out wrong. And our own racism in-squad about other Americans. It's a wonder there weren't more friendly-fire episodes (recall how Willem Dafoe dies in Full Metal Jacket?).

4) We really didn't understand the region. We understood/feared communism, or so we thought. Ho Chi Minh called the North "communist", but really the struggle was a fight for freedom from foreign invaders--and that included us, it was not a fight to become communist, that was just an excuse to receive guns and ammo from China/USSR. The NVA/VC were willing to fight to the last man/woman/child to get rid of us, which was not something we had ever actually experienced--all our experiences had had an "enemy" that was going to surrender at some point (well, except Korea, which in retrospect, wasn't that different from Vietnam). But while NVA/VC accepted military weapons from China and USSR, they didn't intend to be puppets of either one; this same bucket of Stupid got repeated by us a number of places in Latin America, except that we weren't committing troops, just money, to corrupt regimes that would more or less say "Give us money to fight off these locals who want to become communist leadership", but were going to fight them off anyway, they just scammed us for the money.

5) The South Vietnamese government, military, etc., one big corrupt kleptocracy (I sure didn't know that). They weren't good enough themselves to win--they weren't even trying hard. And we couldn't fight their civil war for them. (well, we *could* have, but that wasn't going to work.) 

6) The local situation had been badly handled from the beginning. Which is 100 years earlier near the end of the european-powers colonial period, which was driven by religion, racism, and greed and its own supremacy battles that had raged for centuries.

7) Women and kids as combatants. That was awkward for us--completely out of our experience, but not unusual for freedom fighting.

So the NVA/VC are freedom fighters. "One mans terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." They want to reunify N/S, with themselves in charge of course, after the stupid partitioning that occurred after WW2 ended, that let the French back in. The Vietnamese was in the 50s to get rid of the French didn't teach us anything, and USA looked way too much like more Frenchies.

And the whole thing was a big nasty episode from beginning to end, full of The Stupid, for which we have paid a huge price.

One thing I thought was interesting: The Revolution was televised. Unlike Ken Burns Civil War, where he did find a bunch of still photos (classic Matthew Brady), Vietnam seemed to have a film photographer in every squad and cameras running all the time. So some of those otherwise iconic photos we all remember vividly: the NV spy getting shot in the street, the burning naked girl…those weren't just stills, they were filmed for minutes. I had no idea. I didn't watch the news (didn't really watch ANY tv, same as now).

It was clear that we weren't going to win if we fought the limited war we tried to fight with inadequate troops, on the VC/NVA terms. Recall that last episode? Where NVA brings a long column of mechanized infantry down the trail, and gets the snot knocked out of them by B-52 firepower? Yeah, that was where they battled on *our* terms, and we clobbered them--because all our military thinking was still about how to fight a tank-battle in europe, and suddenly they gave us the opportunity to do so. They had no experience with that, and we had decades of planning and experience. (And, weirdly, that was till the planning approach for an expected direct conflict with USSR--a tank battle in europe: tank battle, Fulda Gap.) (And thus the massive, quick win in Gulf War 1991--Iraq was dangerously stupid about what they could/not do versus what we could do, they massed a load of mechanized ground forces, completely didn't understand air power, and we pounded them flat in a matter of weeks, and then made the same error we made in 1945: we didn't go to Baghdad and knock over the Iraqi gov't. (In 45 we should have rolled into Moscow…imagine if we had knocked over the USSR communist gov't: no cold war, no...Vietnam)

So of course we lost. It was really inevitable. 

Also a stark recognition: the similarity to the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was stunning. We learned nothing. The battlefield changed from jungle to urban, or rocky mountainous areas--no one could hide, and the fight was similarly nasty, a large guerrilla war (not a clean fight against nazis that behaved like a normal army), and the enemy looks just like the not-enemy, but we are still the foreign invaders.

And Vietnam divided us like nothing other than the Civil War--we learned that we can't trust the government. Can't trust the President. We don't all have the same definition of Patriotism--that continues to be divisive.

Glad to see that Burns used all the music from the era. You can't really separate that time from its music. Pressure creates diamonds, and there were quite a few. I was surprised to NOT hear Barry Sadler's song Green Berets.

We handled the return of soldiers badly. There was so much other social trauma going on here, and Vietnam was not separable from it.

I hope that for a lot of folks who were there that this sparks the cathartic opportunities they need to finally talk about it, and that they can achieve some greater personal peace as a result. The conversations seem to have been taking place. My father was in Vietnam 72/73. He died in 96 of pancreatic cancer. I think he probably got infected by nasty stuff from there, likely Agent Orange in the water, other crud like that. He didn't have a combat job, was in Saigon, at Than Son Nhut, which was occasionally subject to VC mortar shelling in the general area. He'd get under his bed and then go back to sleep. I never asked, but it sounded like no real persona trauma.

And I expect that in 20-30 years Ken Burns will need to do Irag/Afghanistan. Sand instead of jungle, but not much different, altho we didn't overreact against the returning soldiers. Feels like the same errors all made all over again, new actors, same script.