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.
The filming was very good but regarding facts, there was a lot of leftist crap in it if you knew where to look/hear.
Never were 200,000 So. Vietnamese political prisoners. A North Vietnamese/VC propaganda operation aided by radical Buddhist clergyman Tri Thich Chan or something like that. He was a communist sympathizer.
More than 8,000 SVN were executed at Hue and in the surrounding riverbanks, villages. 1 Marines found many of their bodies in the outlying villages ( a friend of mine was there). Other friends found the barbed wire bound bones of executed SVN in the sand dunes along the rivers.
No real mention of the 5-6 NVA (PAVN) divisions stationed in Cambodia or moving through it (Stationed in the Parrott’s Beak, Fish Hook and Cardemond Mountains were the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th. Either the 1st or 9th took the Cambodian government’s hand operated ammunition at Pich Nil Pass when I was in the country in November, 1970.
Nothing much about the rise of the Khmer Rouge under the tutelage of the Red Chinese, after having been beaten in 1968 by Sihanouk and Gen. Lon Nol (whom I interviewed, along with JCS Gen. Sosthene Fernandez, Royal Cambodian Army).
Nothing about NVA divisions stationed in Laos supporting their puppet forces the Pathet Lao. I got some information on that from a NVA defecting officer in 1970, who had been leading Pathet Lao and NVA troops in Laos since 1959.
Nothing about newer discoveries that PAVN main force units had infiltrated SVN as early as 1963, along with the creation of major supply depots along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and in-country, as well as in Cambodia. Some of this was revealed at the 2014 of 2015 VN conference held at the National Archives in Wash. DC. Leftist historians on stage got their asses wiped by Rufus Phillips (in several episodes) and other historians in the moderate/middle group on Vietnam.
YOU DID NOT HEAR A SINGLE WORD ABOUT ANY SO. VIETNAMESE SOLDIERS BEING RELEASED AFTER THE SIGNING OF THE PARIS AGREEMENT IN 1973. Only a reported 800-900 were released instead of the thousands, if not tens of thousands seized between 1965 and 1973. Almost all were killed in the mountains of I Corps and II Corps. You saw and heard that a SVN Regiment of about 1,000 men surrendered during the Easter Offensive. Never heard that any of them came home.
For more on the human toll of communist terrorism in SVN, see the study I created and co-edited for the Senate Internal Security Subcom., Sen Judiciary Committee, “The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam”, 1972. And that contained only a partial listing of the numbers of SVN killed or kidnapped by the VC/NVA, with almost none of them ever being heard from again.
Re the “Bloodbath” that Peter Coyote said never happened after the war, BULLSHIT. Out of a reported 400,000 SVN POWS (possibly more), held by Hanoi, major studies by Desbarat-Jackson and Ginetta Sagan for the Aurora Foundation came up with a figure of about 82,000 dead in reeducation and slave labor camps (based on eyewitnesses who either escaped or were released after up to 17 years imprisonment.
I know one of the film researchers and one of the author/researchers (a noted military writer, but he was an Intelligence officer, not a combat soldier per se). I still trust them to do a professional research job, but a lot of what you saw was old stock film and images. The No. Vietnamese films were either old or newly acquired, and were worth looking at.
Very little was said about the virtual destruction of the VCI (Viet Cong Infrastructure) in the Delta other than the item on the Phoenix Operation which was condensed into something that was much more complex than you were led to believe.
Nothing much about the “miracle rice” agricultural explosion by the farmers in the Mekong Delta, who I visited as well as the AID Agricultural Experimental Station at Dai Tam where you could literally see “amber waves of grain” for miles of the Miracle rices IR-8, 12, and 16, plus the use of So. Korean fertilizers to support them, and the aluminum Japanese boat motors that were adapted to lift water up from one level to another for rice irrigation.
Nothing on how the Hoa Hao pacified and controlled at least 2 provinces all by themselves. I was there and met the leader of the HH.
Only a tidbit about Operation Market Time and Overload which severely damaged the VC’s waterborne supply system from Hanoi up through the rivers and canals. Read our book about “Unfit for Command” and how Kerry lied about his actions as a Swiftboard commander in the delta. He did fight bravely but also killed innocent civilians, as well as lie about his 3 Purple Hearts. His boat’s successor commander, John O’Neill, is a longtime friend of mine and another one of our Vietnam Veterans for Factual History (.org) group was a Special Forces Mike Strike Force officer supporting some of Kerry’s operations in the Delta.
Nothing about the Russians having over 10,000 soldiers fighting for No. Vietnam from manning the missile systems to flying NVA jets (Wash. Post article in the 1980s. The same for the 320,000 Red China combat and labor forces in NVN from Mugia Pass southward and another 10,000 in No. Laos - testimony of Papa Buell, 1970 before congress.
Nothing much about how many teachers and medical personnel of SVN were tortured, killed, or “disappeared” never to be seen again. It was massive.
Nothing about the fraudulent “Peoples Peace Treaty” between leftist US student organizations and Hanoi.
The part on Hanoi and VC’s horrible treatment of American POWS and some foreigners was done reasonably well but there is much more to that story. A new book on the subject will be coming out next year. I should shock you.
The one reference to “pure” heroin in Saigon etc didn’t tell you who made it “pure” (a complex series of chemical reduction processes in professional labs). Most of it was from Hanoi, Red China, and parts of Laos under communist control. Some of the information on that is still classified Secret or above. Some did come from the anti-communist Laotians and was smuggled into SVN by some unscrupulous Americans but it was nothing compared to the 90-95% pure H I was told about in late 1970.
The war was extremely complex and some people only saw a small part of it, albeit the worst parts. Burns film did some good research and presented informative materials but some was “lacking” in depth for some key items, and totally lacking in others. A few items were total communist propaganda re the bombing of Hanoi. You had to read their press to know what really happened and it was not as bad as portrayed.
Thanks for your service and comments. Everyone can contribute something to this conversation, but the history of the Vietnam War is far from over in terms of research and new facts. Until the No. Vietnamese open all their archives, we will not know about 40% of what they did to conquer So. Vietnam, Laos, and help to conquer Cambodia with its resultant genocide.
see. www.VVFH.org for information you didn’t get from Burns, Prados, Porter, Chomsky, Karnow, Kahin, and Turse.
If the one segment that I had alot of prior knowledge about lacked such detail, I suspect many of the other segments did too.
I wouldn't have minded if he had added more episodes to give more depth.