vietnam 35 years later

[blu]

more awesome boston.com pictures

Vietnam, 35 years later - The Big Picture - Boston.com

 

[blu]

thats some intense shit

 

[waltky]

The Many Sides of ‘The Vietnam War’ With Director Lynn Novick...

Explore the Many Sides of ‘The Vietnam War’ With Director Lynn Novick
September 26, 2017 - Novick co-directed with Ken Burns and we had a wide-ranging conversation about the film and the war's aftermath in America.

The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick explores “many sides” of the conflict in a way that explodes the “hippies vs. patriots” caricature of the era that’s been such a bad influence on American political discourse. Every American seems to have at least a few regrets about how things went down back then and that’s before we learn about the head-spinning complexity of the Vietnamese positions on their civil war. Lynn Novick directed the series in partnership with Ken Burns. His may be the name that everyone recognizes, but Lynn has working been with Burns since The Civil War and she previously co-directed seven episodes of their World War II film The War and 2011’s underrated Prohibition. In the midst of the publicity blitz before the series debut, Novick took the time for a wide-ranging discussion about the film and the influence of the Vietnam War on American society. There are very mild spoilers below if you haven’t started watching the series.

Portraits of Lynn Novick, producer for upcoming documentary “Vietnam” along with Ken Burns of Florentine Films, to be shown on PBS. Photos taken on March 15, 2017.​

You were born in the ‘60s. What was your experience of the Vietnam war?

My memories of my childhood are sort of spotty and fragmentary. It’s more images and moments than anything continuous or properly organized. But I don’t remember a time growing up when the Vietnam War wasn’t happening. It just felt like it was always there and it was always going on and it was something that the adults around me seemed very concerned about and focused on, watching it on TV, reading about it in the paper, talking to other adults and people older than me. I just had this sense of something sort of looming and frightening and disturbing, and something that the adults were concerned about and I was not really understanding what was going on. I don’t have any family members or family friends even who served in the military during that time. I knew a lot of people whose families were focused on how to avoid military service.

By the time I really became aware of the war and began to understand that question, it was in the early 70’s, by which time it really had become quite unpopular. There were more people trying to get out of it than eager to get into it. I certainly remember that and I remember protests and a sense of questioning the government, a sort of “They don’t know what they’re doing and we’re not getting told the truth.” I remember that in the background, kind of the bass notes, all the time. By the mid-’70s, there were quite a few people in my family who weren’t going to college and they were called up to serve. And then we didn’t talk about it anymore. It was this absolutely closed subject from about ’72, ’73, onward.

Marines marching in Danang. March 15, 1965.​

I was just in Vietnam, showing some clips of the film there. And a Vietnamese man who watched some of the clips said, “I’m not going to sleep tonight after seeing the scenes of the film that we just saw.” He was from a South Vietnamese family and he said he remembered scenes of fleeing, trying to get away, the communists were coming south. And now he would have nightmares, having seen the film. Then he said, “I have tried to basically put the Vietnam War into a drawer and close the drawer and not think about it and just try to not remember it because it’s too painful. Vietnamese have this saying, we sort of — we celebrate the good things and just put the bad things in the closet and shut the door. But seeing the film made me realize you can’t do that.” For different reasons, I think Americans have done the same thing with the Vietnam War, unsuccessfully, I would say.

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[longknife]

Vietnam 2017

 

[waltky]

Interview with Ken Burns...

Going Deep on ‘The Vietnam War’ With Ken Burns
September 28, 2017 - I had a chance to talk with Ken Burns early this summer about The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. We ended up having a wide-ranging and relatively intense conversation about why they made the film and how they decided what to include and what to leave out.

If you’ve made it through more than a couple of episodes of the series so far, you realize that there’s nothing easy about watching it and the experience of spending a decade making The Vietnam War had to be an almost unimaginable challenge. There’s a determination in this film to give a voice to the men and women who participated in this war, no matter their loyalties or political persuasions. Check that: everyone who participated has a willingness to engage points-of-view that may not align with their own and it’s that hunt for perspective that makes this series so important. The Vietnam War showed me things I never knew or understood, changed my mind and frustrated me at the same time. Burns talks about his philosophy in this interview. “The only way you have a conversation is not to make the other [person] wrong.”

If you haven’t watched much of the show, we get into specifics about some of the interview subjects. Several of them have life-changing experiences during the course of the war. Burns and Novick don’t reveal those changes until the moment in the timeline when they actually happen, so some of our conversation may qualify as spoilers if you worry about that kind of thing. As I promised Ken, I don’t ruin the final moment of the film. Even though I was born in the Sixties, the Vietnam War seems like most significant event in my lifetime. It affected people in my generation, especially, how we approached everything: from school to military service to finding our careers. A lot of Vietnam era people would consider my group too young to be a part of all that, but the war was this shadow over everything in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It was overwhelming for me to see things that I vaguely remembered or didn’t really know firsthand at the time because I was 6, 7, 8 years old.

Well, I was born in 1953. It was very much a part of my life. But my co-director, Lynn Novick, was born in ’62 and she describes Vietnam as just being exactly that. As soon as she became aware of the world around her, beyond her family, she knew there was this bad thing going on. Well, the shadow, you said. I come from a family with generations of people who served in the military but there was absolutely no question of whether I should consider it or be allowed to join. I didn’t serve because that’s not what we did coming out of high school in the 80’s.

What was your personal experience? You’re in the demographic. The draft was an issue in your life. What was it like for you?

It was scary and I lived in a college town, the son of a college professor. A lot of it was very much about the opposition to the war. And yet I was torn inside myself. I think a lot of people talk about Vietnam as being this thing we buried and didn’t want to deal with. As you know in the opening, Karl Marlantes says it’s like having an alcoholic father. “Shhh, we don’t talk about that.” And we haven’t talked about that. When we do, it causes divisions between us. But it’s also revealing, it seems to me, of divisions within us.

I saw the deaths, the body counts at the end of the week on the nightly news and I was so relieved that we were killing more of them than us. And so I was psychologically torn. But none of that was relevant in making the film. It was just stuff you had to shed because everything everyone knows about Vietnam is off in some way. You’ve got to realize that there’s been all this new scholarship on the war. We’ve opened up, we’ve triangulated with the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong and the South Vietnamese civilians and military alike and got to know what actually happened from the top down, from all of the decisions that Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations were making. To me, it was our responsibility to try to find out as much as we can exactly what the facts were and then try to process 80 people’s memories of it.

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[waltky]

I thought it did a pretty fair job of portraying the Vietnamese vets in a sympathetic light...

Veterans Angry, Disappointed following PBS' Vietnam War Documentary
2 Oct 2017 | A gripping documentary on the Vietnam War -- described by many viewers as a masterful depiction of a prolonged conflict that divided the nation -- has left many American and Vietnamese veterans feeling deeply disappointed, even betrayed.

"The Vietnam War" -- a 10-part, 18-hour PBS documentary by American filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that concluded Thursday night -- depicts the history of the war through photographs, archival footage and interviews with more than 80 veterans and witnesses from all sides. The film has been hailed as a hard-hitting, raw account of the war and the players involved. But veterans of the South Vietnamese military say they were largely left out of the narrative, their voices drowned out by the film's focus on North Vietnam and its communist leader, Ho Chi Minh. And many American veterans say that the series had several glaring omissions and focused too much on leftist anti-war protesters and soldiers who came to oppose the war. On Thursday evening, hours before the film's final installment aired, a group of American and South Vietnamese veterans came together at a San Jose home to share memories of the war and talk about the documentary.

Sutton Vo, a former major in South Vietnam's army engineering corps, watched the series but has told friends and family not to do so. The film is "pure propaganda," he said. "The Vietnam War included the Americans, South Vietnam and North Vietnam. But in the 18 hours, the role of South Vietnam was very small," said Vo, 80. "Any documentary should be fair and should tell the truth to the people." After the war, Vo was sent to a communist "re-education" camp, where he was imprisoned for 13 years. At one point, he said, he was confined for three months to a pitch-black cell virtually 24 hours a day -- his feet shackled and his hands bound with rubber string -- after an escape attempt.

American Vietnam War veterans and South Vietnamese Vietnam War veterans meet up to discuss the PBS documentary on the Vietnam War by American filmmaker Ken Burns​

Despite South Vietnam's fall to the communists in 1975, he said, South Vietnamese soldiers did what they could with what little they had. "We fought for our country with our best," Vo said. "We didn't need the Americans to do our job for us. We didn't need the American GIs to come and fight for us. We needed money, supplies and international support." Like Vo, Cang Dong spent time in a re-education camp; he was freed in 1987. Dong, 70, president of the local chapter of Associates of Vietnam Veterans of America, has just started watching the series, but said he's unhappy with what he sees as the filmmakers' glorification of Ho. "Everything is a big lie," he said. "To our people, Ho Chi Minh was a big liar and immoral."

Veteran Jim Barker, 70, of San Jose, also said he was surprised by the extent of coverage given to North Vietnamese soldiers in the film. "What bothered me is the element of arrogance that seemed to come out in seeing themselves so superior. I had trouble with that," said Barker, who was an adviser with a South Vietnamese intelligence unit in the Central Highlands and survived the siege of Kontum in 1972. "That focus detracted attention from the people of South Vietnam and the idealism that was there." In a recent interview with New America Media, Novick acknowledged that historically the stories of South Vietnamese were simplified in the U.S. news media, which she said portrayed the South as "inept and corrupt." "But the film has gone a long way to tell their stories, the heroism and the stories of personal sacrifice made by those on the losing side," she said.

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[Old Rocks]

I think in another decade, Vietnam will be like South Korea, a real player in economic power in Asia, and, in fact, the whole world.