Problematic perspective

The conclusion to a work is especially significant in that it is supposed to sum up the whole. In the Netflix docuseries "Turning Point: The Vietnam War," which is directed by Brian Knappenberger and has clearly just been released to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, as the final episode draws to a close, we hear what the American ex-serviceman C. Jack Ellis has to say about the war:

We can’t forget about the effect that it had on the Vietnamese people, the young children. We don’t know how many Vietnamese were killed. That we dropped bombs on and napalm and fired artillery shells, and burned down their villages, destroyed their whole way of life – for so many years. It’s the human toll that I think of when I think of that war, both American soldiers as well as the Vietnamese.

This is a perfect summation of the Vietnam War; however, as a summary to this series, it is extremely odd. For in this succinct remark, Ellis depicts the tragedy of the Vietnam War better than the docuseries does in the previous seven-odd hours.

Ellis, even as a veteran, obviously has his balance right in focusing on the effect the war had on the Vietnamese people. Because even though tens of thousands of Americans died in Vietnam, including friends whose names Ellis poignantly reads off the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C., and it came to dominate U.S. politics for a number of years, the impact of it upon the Vietnamese is incontestably far far greater. Le Kien Thanh, son of the North Vietnamese leader Le Duan reflects the balance of Ellis when he says, "we could not contain the pain of millions of Vietnamese mothers whose children died in Vietnam, nor could America contain the pain of 50,000 families.” A similar skew is revealed by the U.S. ambassador, who notes that whilst 1,000 U.S. servicemen are still missing, the number is 200,000-300,000 for the Vietnamese. All in all, an estimate is given that 3 million Vietnamese were killed in the war.

These statistics are given by the series itself. There are also those of the historian Lien-Hang T. Nguyen who reveals that "1 million” bombs were dropped "over North Vietnam, and over 4 million dropped over South Vietnam.”

That is an unimaginable level of destruction. But the unimaginability is precisely what the problem is with this series. For as any proficient documentary maker should know, statistics, while they are not neutral in that they can give a sense of something, are, all the same, abstract and amorphous to us and do not grab our attention and our empathy in the way that individual stories do. And the stories told in this series are primarily American. It is of course understandable that an American-made series is going to focus on the effect of the war on its own people. Yet, the degree to and way in which this documentary series does this is indefensible. For the Vietnamese were affected more by the war in every conceivable way, from their much higher casualty numbers to it being fought in their country. Moreover, whatever trauma the American soldiers went through must have been greater for the Vietnamese. For the Americans, soldiers did not also need to worry about their families, whilst those of the Vietnamese were constantly in the firing line, and they also served tours from which they returned home, whereas for the Vietnamese the war was home and nonending.

For the Vietnamese, the series describes the war as a civil war, which is the truth; the states of North and South Vietnam simply being unnatural creations of a division internationally forced on the country in 1954. In a civil war, the situation of both sides should be fairly investigated, however, in this series, of the limited focus given to the Vietnamese, the much greater part is given to the people of the South, those for whom the Americans involved themselves in Vietnam. Thus, the major issue with this documentary is that the Communist North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front of the South (referred to in derogatory terms as "Viet Cong”) are almost as inscrutable to an outside audience as they would have been at the time of the war itself.

For example, while the statistics of the bombing suggest its devastating impact, it is hardly actually depicted at all. In episode five, there is a tiny clip of raised buildings in North Vietnam taken by a foreign TV crew at the time. On the other hand, Chung Tu Buu of the South Vietnamese Air Force states, "the Viet Cong bombed my family. I was angry and I vowed to fight those people who harmed my family.” Tu Buu’s feelings are fully understandable, but with Americans by far outbombing anyone else, there must have been multitudes who felt similarly to him in North Vietnam and the rebel areas of the South, but from whom we do not hear.

We learn about, but insufficiently from, the Communist Vietnamese. So we see what they do, but not why. These include breaking agreements such as the Tet cease-fire of 1968 or the Paris peace of 1973, their harsh treatment of their prisoners, either South Vietnamese or American, and the fear they inspire in their enemies. However, without being shown as rounded human beings caught up in a war as with the Americans and South Vietnamese, they instead necessarily appear almost as an anonymous aggressive force and this does not do justice to their struggle.

Moreover, this failure to engage with one side of the conflict enables contextualization only for the other, risking the creation of an unjust bias in the audience. For instance, two specific atrocities from 1968 are covered in the series. One is the infamous massacre at the village of Mai Ly by American troops and the other concerns the North Vietnamese and Hue. It is true that the series does not airbrush the brutal killings and rapes carried out by U.S. troops under the command of Lt. Calley in the village of Mai Ly. Rather, it clearly reveals what happened that day through still scarred Vietnamese survivors. Yet, Calley is presented in the series as an obnoxious figure, then set against a kind of anti-Calley in the figure of the officer Thompson, who risks an inter-American engagement to prevent the massacre from expanding. So among the Americans, there are "villains,” but there are also "heroes.”

Then during the Tet Offensive, South Vietnamese are kidnapped by the Communists in Hue. When the latter are finally forced back out of the city, their hostages, which include civilians and school children, are killed and buried in mass graves. This is declared to be "one of the most brutal examples of the Vietnamese Civil War taking place.” However, here we do not know what went on in the unit that did the killings leaving the unstated assumption that here there were no "heroes” and only "villains.”

There is also a section that deals with the killing of landlords in North Vietnam. Only those who feared being caught up in it are interviewed. Yet, greater fairness would have been achieved if the grievances of the peasants had also been looked at. Although under a kind of "Downton Abbey effect,” we may have come to see landowners as benign, in fact, in feudal societies, it is inconceivable that they were not abusive, at least sometimes, and this would explain any revolutionary hostility toward them. Without such contextualisation, one is unconsciously left with the impression that North Vietnam is simply a brutal regime. This is an unpardonable error, as through it, the series fails to explain why the Communist Vietnamese were able to appeal to the mass of the Vietnamese people and were willing to continue to fight even against the huge military strength of a superpower.

Castigation of US

As for that superpower, according to the historian Peter L.W. Osmos, "the story of the United States in Vietnam was a story of ignorance, hubris and arrogance.” His remark intimates what is good about this series, in that it does not pull its punches in its castigation of the U.S. administrations that brought disaster to Vietnam. Thus, it shows how the war takes over the administration of the feckless LBJ and it reveals the machinations of Richard Nixon, who is willing to let his own servicemen die in large numbers just to advance his political career. As Ellis himself puts it, "to sacrifice so many men for an election is disgusting. It doesn’t get any worse as far as I’m concerned.” The series should also be especially commended for completely destroying the thesis advanced in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film "JFK" that somehow John F. Kennedy was dovish on Vietnam. Here he is instead shown as escalating U.S. involvement and even seems to merit Malcolm X’s controversial "coming home to roost” speech in that Kennedy had effectively greenlighted the assassination of the president of South Vietnam, No Dinh Diem, just months before he himself was fatally shot in Dallas.

The series shows that the American government was long aware that the war could not be won and yet it continued to attempt to dupe the U.S. public and futilely sacrifice the lives of its own young people. The series is also commendable for revealing that the vast majority of soldiers sent to fight there had barely reached adulthood and for correctly showing that the tragedy, from the American side, of the Vietnam War is that they were fighting a war that they did not understand. One Vietnamese witness notes of the Americans that "they didn’t understand the country, the attitude, even the disposition of enemy forces.” The result, as Ed Rabel in a CBS News clip from the time states, is that "the GIs are plagued by low morale, drug abuse and drunkenness.” The series follows the veterans home where they are subject to continuing trauma through PTSD, the condition itself named during this conflict. They suffer from being uncontrollably violent and having nightmares, there are suicides and some wind up in prison, on drugs or homeless. They also suffer from disillusionment. Scott Camil, the highly sympathetic ex-Marine with whom the series opens, comes to see the whole thing as a "lie,” concurring with the secret view of the U.S. government. The series also shows the hypocrisy of disproportionately drafting African Americans to fight in Vietnam, whilst their Civil Rights had not been secured back home.

Another positive element to the series is that it does leave the Vietnam War in the 20th century. Rather, it makes a link between the disastrous U.S. intervention in Vietnam and those from our century. Keith Kay, a former CBS News photojournalist, declares that: "we never learn from history. You know history repeats itself. When you see Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s the same scenes that I shot in Vietnam, this time being shot by another photographer.” This point is well illustrated with Kay’s own photos from Vietnam on one side of the screen with the other half taken up with similar footage taken from those later conflicts.

Finally, it subtly raises an important point about political administration. It is of course true that today the lack of real expertise in the current U.S. government is very worrying, yet this series refreshingly shows that it is not necessarily preferable to have intellectuals in charge. Both Robert McNamara and Dr. Henry Kissinger had brilliant minds, yet they both played an immoral and oversized role in keeping the U.S. in the Vietnam War.

Confused messaging

However, even among its willingness to investigate the ghosts in the American closet, the series also produces some intentional or unintentional mixed messaging. It is of course to be expected that directly out of the heat and dust of a live battlefield, confusion will emerge. With 50 years having passed since the end of the war, though, it is to be expected that the docuseries makers would have sifted out the truth to present to the viewer. The series instead sows confusion about certain important questions.

For instance, when U.S. troops finally pull out of South Vietnam in 1973, to the South Vietnamese, this appeared as a betrayal. Their perspective is understandable and it is right the series shows this. It also shows that despite leaving, the U.S. had promised continued practical and material support to the South Vietnamese, but this too proved not to be forthcoming. That this constitutes a moral betrayal is indisputable, but the series oddly seems to indicate it is more than that. For the way the series focuses on the performance of the South Vietnamese forces from 1973 to 1975 seems to suggest that had the Americans kept their promise, the South could have won the war. This is confusing, for if the whole reason for U.S. involvement initially and subsequently was that the South could not stand on its own, and with the heavy U.S. presence in Vietnam ensuring only stalemate, it is odd as to why the audience toward the end of the series is led to believe that somehow South Vietnam could have emerged triumphant after the Americans left, had it then been provisioned properly.

There is also confusion concerning the Mai Ly Massacre touched on above. For two authorative-looking American historians are used to contextualise it, one claiming that only 10% of the soldiers present fired on these civilians whilst 90% did not, due to their being "no reason to shoot.” The other claims that "Calley was far far from representative of the larger American experience.” Thus, the conclusion to be drawn is that My Lai was indeed a war crime, but also an exceptional occurrence. But then the series shows what other U.S. servicemen thought at the time. Frederic Whitehurst claims of Mai Ly that "actually, we were surprised than anybody cared ‘cause it was normal,” and Camil declares that "I thought that Lt. Calley was a scapegoat. I thought basically he was doing what he was supposed to be doing.” Both of these ex-servicemen here tacitly or explicitly admit to shooting on sight in villages, rendering Calley’s only exceptionality as being that he had the villagers rounded up first.

Now, if Calley was not unexceptional, then the series should not have given voice to the historians. By giving it along with that of the ex-serviceman, there is confusion, and this is insupportable, as determining whether or not war crimes were exceptional or the norm on the part of U.S. troops in Vietnam would by now be easy to determine, and the truth should be clearly given to the audience.

To surmise, in this docuseries, there is much interesting coverage of the Vietnam War, albeit mainly from the American perspective, but its blind spot as regards the North Vietnamese, and the National Liberation Front in particular, and its sometime confusing messaging render it fairly disappointing.

Review: 2¼ from 5