Replies

Burns is making “the same documentary today” on Vietnam. Premiers next month and from serious Vietnam veterans/historians/researchers, we’ve been told that it is a maudling attempt to enforce a “moral equivalency” between the US military and Hanoi’s murderous invaders.

Burns doesn’t know anything about Vietnam. Nor does his assistant Novick. They were either no born back then or too young to have watched it/read about it in real time.

I spent almost an hour yesterday talking to a real Viet Vet (Mobile Riverine Force) - Mekong Delta, from CaMau out and up the western side of the Delta, Mekong River, and a few other places I’ve never heard of. I travelled to visit a 7th ARVN 105 battery on the Ham Leuong River higher up in the Delta but the views were the same.

My associates in Vietnam Veterans For Factual History.org know more about Vietnam then Burns will ever know in this life and the next, yet they were not interviewed for this series. Given the fact that our members have written over or edited/contributed to over 75-100 books minimis (including several national award winners - Lewis Sorley and Mark Moyar), and have combat tours from ground pounders to Special Forces, SwiftBoaters, POWS, Provincial Advisors (RFs, PFs, PSDF’s, Kit Carson Scouts), handled Hoi Chans, worked the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and briefed President Thieu, you would think the Burns would jump at interviewing people whose experiences in S. VN, Cambodia, and Laos, mirrored the war throughout its existence.

In fact, our oldest member is 88 years old and when he starts to talk about his earliest experiences in Vietnam, it was about his being with So. Vietnamese leaders fighting the Viet Minh in the early 1950’s.

Burns’ work will be compared to Stanley Karnow’s large book on Vietnam (which had good and bad materials in it), but neither have understood the whole “context” of what was going on there, and apparently didn’t try hard enough, if at all, to talk to people who could explain some of a very complex historical event.