Posted on 09/28/2017 8:09:56 PM PDT by Sleeping Freeper
Finished showing tonight. Interested in your thoughts.
Wounds take a long time to heal, some never do.
Our culture has yet to recover from the splits. Democrats got us in to it knowing it couldn’t be won.
Only part I didn’t know was the OSS helping early to get Ho Chi Minh early - keeping him alive with medical help and arming him.
Not dissimilar to what we wold do later with Bin Laden.
i was not impressed...it was kinda scatter shot...seemed to just kinda skim over important events. The 1983 “VIETNAM..A TELEVISION HISTORY” was much better...the one G.I., Bill Earhart was in both documentaries..kinda odd i thought.
A masterwork. Reasonably balanced and accurate. I was there for much of it — being a vet of that place.
As a filmmaker, he got it right.
Great work. Lots of testimony from both sides. They descriptions of the battles for hills was detailed and described acts of heroism. The first part had more details about the French occupation than the previous series.
Burns steps it up again. Some of his work is landmark like Jazz and Baseball and the use of letters in the civil war was heart rendering.
Kerry portrayed as hero and no mention he interjected himself into the space process which was traitors.
Good coverage of the politics in saigon.
I watched both VN series and they re different. I will; watch them with concurrent progress through the years some day.
space=peace
Didn’t watch. Cousin did and said it was informative.
Have nephew’s wedding Saturday. His pop died from a heart attack 6 years ago that the powers that be said was caused by Agent Orange. Sister received a letter regarding the connection without even knowing nor inquiring about it.
He was laid to rest with Taps playing. Draped flag. It was beautiful yet devastating.
His picture in uniform and at different places in Vietnam will be up at the wedding.
Seems almost overwhelming to have at a reception, but the son and my sister wanted it.
He was/is a good man. Medic embedded with marines.
I stopped watching after about six episodes. As a Vietnam veteran myself I could hardly relate to the veterans they interviewed. They all seemed to be filled with regret, which I never have been. Frankly the interviews with the VC and north Vietnamese veterans were much more revealing. I did learn some history from it, but I have no idea how much of it is accurate.
It did lean left but not as bad as I expected. I didn’t serve because of my age but I was a precocious consumer of Huntley-Brinkley and US News and World Report and remember every bit of it. Kennedy and Johnson made a mess and didn’t try to win. We should have bombed the Communists back to the stone age before they had SAM missiles. We were too squeamish. It takes nerve in a war like that.
I was born while my dad was there and first saw him when he escorted my uncles body back home who had been killed near Ben Cui on 8-22-68, it was saddening and maddening to watch. It was interesting to see the leftist media up to thier old tricks and thier smarmy behaviour. I noticed protestors with signs replacing the X in Nixon with a swastika and a flag with swastikas instead of stars. I wonder how it would have played out if there was a right wing media like there is now to counter Cronkite saying it was lost. And I took away that the Communists kept thier promises to thier allies and we did not.
Wounds take a long time to heal, some never do.
Some must never be forgotten...
Did not watch, do not trust any of them to tell our story straight. The high level stuff has pissed me off every time I see some of it, do not remember that much.
Wife is watching it and asks questions.
Told her to pay attention to the early days, Kennedy's scheming. The plotting to rid of Diem etc. are the sleaze as I recall.
Johnson and his treachery to expand are even worse, but as I did not watch, no idea how fairly they told the Gulf of Tonkin affair.
They acknowledged that we fired first at the first confrontation and that the second confrontation never existed.
You must keep in mind this was done by a liberal to entertain liberals while attempting to justify the liberal actions. I as a 28 year vet although to young to be in Nam I did serve with many vets who did serve there. None of them were anywhere close to the ones portrayed in the documentary. Was it slanted? To some degree but it was worth the watch. All in all the soldiers who served did what was ask of them. That is the main moral of the story that must not be forgot. Leftist slant or not.
I didn’t watch. I watched Viet Nam The 10,000 day war and thought it pretty good. There is always a slant that I don’t remember the way they say it so to keep from getting so upset all the time, I just watch other stuff. If they showed Kerry and McCain as hero’s it’s best I watch Overhaulin or Fast and Loud. As I get older, I’m not sure how much the ticker can take. I get to pacing and fartin and get a little vomit in my throat. It’s just nor good.
Nothing a little reading couldn’t cure.
It occurred to me Vietnam was were the USA won the battles but lost the war. The Viet Cong won the war but lost the peace. They proved that communism does not work and is not best for the people.
ANYONE INTERESTED ALL 10 episodes posted on PBS for streaming
One of the things I did not like was the way they showed the South Vietnamese police chief executing the Viet Cong person - without providing important background. Leaving that part out was deliberate malfeasance. I copied an excerpt from Wikipedia below:
General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon (in a photograph taken by Eddie Adams on 1 February 1968). It shows South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Việt Cộng captain of an insurgent team Nguyễn Văn Lém (referred to as Captain Bảy Lốp), in Saigon during the Tet Offensive.
Around 4:30 A.M., Lém led a sabotage unit along with Viet Cong tanks to attack the Armor Camp in Go Vap. After communist troops took control of the base, Lém arrested Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Tuan with his family and forced him to show them how to drive tanks. When Lieutenant Colonel Tuan refused to cooperate, Lém killed Tuan, his wife and six children and his 80-year-old mother by cutting their throats. There was only one survivor, a seriously injured 10-year-old boy. Lém was captured near a mass grave with 34 civilian bodies. Lém admitted that he was proud to carry out his unit leader's order to kill these people. Having personally witnessed the murder of one of his officers along with that man's wife and three small children in cold blood, when Lém was captured and brought to him, General Loan summarily executed him using his sidearm, a .38 Special Smith & Wesson Model 38 "Bodyguard" revolver, in front of AP photographer Eddie Adams and NBC News television cameraman Võ Sửu. The photograph and footage were broadcast worldwide, galvanizing the anti-war movement.
The execution appalled many people, but was most likely legal as Lém was acting like a "franc-tireur". According to Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949, irregular forces are entitled to prisoner of war status provided that they are commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates, have a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance, carry arms openly, and conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. If they do not meet all of these, they may be considered francs-tireurs (in the original sense of "illegal combatant") and punished as criminals in a military jurisdiction, which may include summary execution.[citation needed] Lém had murdered a POW and civilians thus violating the rules of war. He was not marked by any identifiable marker showing that he was a legal combatant.
The photo won Adams the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography, though he later regretted its effect. The image became an anti-war icon. Concerning Loan and his famous photograph, Adams wrote in Time:
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?"
Adams later apologized in person to General Nguyễn and his family for the damage it did to his reputation. When Loan died of cancer in Virginia, Adams praised him: "The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him."
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