Ken Burns, shill of the international left
Passed along for another perspective.
BE SKEPTICAL OF KEN BURNS’ DOCUMENTARY: THE VIETNAM WAR
By Terry Garlock
Some months ago I and a dozen other local veterans attended
a screening at the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta - preview of a new
documentary on The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The screening was
a one hour summation of this 10-part documentary, 18 hours long.
The series began showing on PBS Sunday Sep 17, and with
Burns’ renowned talent mixing photos, video clips and compelling mood music in
documentary form, the series promises to be compelling to watch. That doesn’t
mean it tells the truth.
For many years I have been presenting to high school classes
a 90 minute session titled The Myths and Truths of the Vietnam War. One of my
opening comments is, "The truth about Vietnam is bad enough without
twisting it all out of shape with myths, half-truths and outright lies from the
anti-war left." The overall message to students is advising them to learn
to think for themselves, be informed by reading one newspaper that leans left,
one that leans right, and be skeptical of TV news.
Part of my presentation is showing them four iconic photos
from Vietnam, aired publicly around the world countless times to portray
America’s evil involvement in Vietnam. I tell the students "the rest of
the story" excluded by the news media about each photo, then ask, "Wouldn’t
you want the whole story before you decide for yourself what to think?"
One of those photos is the summary execution of a Viet Cong
soldier in Saigon, capital city of South Vietnam, during the battles of the Tet
Offensive in 1968. Our dishonorable enemy negotiated a cease-fire for that
holiday then on that holiday attacked in about 100 places all over the country.
Here’s what I tell students about the execution in the photo.
Enemy execution by South Vietnam’s Chief of National Police,
1968 . . . "Before you decide what to think, here’s what the news media
never told us. This enemy soldier had just been caught after he murdered a
Saigon police officer, the officer’s wife, and the officer’s six children. The
man pulling the trigger was Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam’s Chief of National
Police. His actions were supported by South Vietnamese law, and by the Geneva
Convention since he was an un-uniformed illegal combatant. Now, you might still
be disgusted by the summary execution, but wouldn’t you want all the facts
before you decide what to think?"
The other one-sided stories about iconic photos I use are a
nine year old girl named Kim Phuc, running down a road after her clothes were
burned off by a napalm bomb, a lady kneeling by the body of a student at Kent
State University, and a helicopter on top of a building with too many evacuees
trying to climb aboard. Each one had only the half of the story told by news
media during the war, the half that supported the anti-war narrative.
Our group of vets left the Ken Burns documentary screening .
. . disappointed. As one example, all four of the photos I use were shown, with
only the anti-war narrative. Will the whole truth be told in the full 18 hours?
I have my doubts but we’ll see.
On the drive home with Mike King, Bob Grove and Terry Ernst,
Ernst asked the other three of us who had been in Vietnam, "How does it
make you feel seeing those photos and videos?" I answered, "I just
wish for once they would get it right."
Will the full documentary show John Kerry’s covert meeting
in Paris with the leadership of the Viet Cong while he was still an officer in
the US Naval Reserve and a leader in the anti-war movement? Will it show how
Watergate crippled the Republicans and swept Democrats into Congress in 1974,
and their rapid defunding of South Vietnamese promised support after Americans
had been gone from Vietnam two years? Will it show Congress violating America’s
pledge to defend South Vietnam if the North Vietnamese ever broke their pledge
to never attack the south? Will it portray America’s shame in letting our ally
fall, the tens of thousands executed for working with Americans, the hundreds
of thousands who perished fleeing in overpacked, rickety boats, the million or
so sent to brutal re-education camps? Will it show the North Vietnamese victors
bringing an influx from the north to take over South Vietnam’s businesses, the
best jobs, farms, all the good housing, or committing the culturally ruthless
sin of bulldozing grave monuments of the South Vietnamese?
Will Burns show how the North Vietnamese took the city of
Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive, bringing lists of names of political
leaders, business owners, doctors, nurses, teachers and other "enemies of
the people," and how they went from street to street, dragging people out
of their homes, and that in the aftermath of the Battle of Hue, only when
thousands of people were missing and the search began did they find the mass
graves where they had been tied together and buried alive?
Will Burns show how America, after finally withdrawing from
Vietnam and shamefully standing by while our ally was brutalized, did nothing
while next door in Cambodia the Communists murdered two million of their own
people as they tried to mimic Mao’s "worker paradise" in China?
Will Burns show how American troops conducted themselves
with honor, skill and courage, never lost a major battle, and helped the South
Vietnamese people in many ways like building roads and schools, digging wells,
teaching improved farming methods and bringing medical care where it had never
been seen before? Will he show that American war crimes, exaggerated by the
left, were even more rare in Vietnam than in WWII? Will he show how a naïve
young Jane Fonda betrayed her country with multiple radio broadcasts from North
Vietnam, pleading with American troops to refuse their orders to fight, and
calling American pilots and our President war criminals?
Color me doubtful about these and many other questions.
Being in a war doesn’t make anyone an expert on the
geopolitical issues, it’s a bit like seeing history through a straw with your
limited view. But my perspective has come from many years of reflection and
absorbing a multitude of facts and opinions, because I was interested. My
belief is that America’s involvement in Vietnam was a noble cause trying to
stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia, while it had spread its
miserable oppression in Eastern Europe and was gaining traction in Central
America, Africa and other places around the world This noble cause was, indeed,
screwed up to a fare-thee-well by the Pentagon and White House, which
multiplied American casualties.
The tone of the screening was altogether different, that our
part in the war was a sad mistake. It seemed like Burns and Novick took photos,
video clips, artifacts and interviews from involved Americans, South
Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, civilians from south and north,
reporters and others, threw it all in a blender to puree into a new form of
moral equivalence. Good for spreading a thin layer of blame and innocence, not
so good for finding the truth.
John M. Del Vecchio, author of The 13th Valley, a book
considered by many Vietnam vets to be the literary touchstone of how they
served and suffered in the jungles of Vietnam, has this to say about Burns’
documentary: " Pretending to honor those who served while subtly and
falsely subverting the reasons and justifications for that service is a con
man’s game . . . From a cinematic perspective it will be exceptional. Burns
knows how to make great scenes. But through the lens of history it appears to
reinforce a highly skewed narrative and to be an attempt to ossify false
cultural memory. The lies and fallacies will be by omission, not by overt
falsehoods."
I expect to see American virtue minimized, American missteps
emphasized, to fit the left-leaning narrative about the Vietnam War that, to
this day, prevents our country from learning the real lessons from that war.
When we came home from Vietnam, we thought the country had
lost its mind. Wearing the uniform was for fools too dimwitted to escape
service. Burning draft cards, protesting the war in ways that insulted our own
troops was cool, as was fleeing to Canada.
America’s current turmoil reminds me of those days, since so
many of American traditional values are being turned upside down. Even saying
words defending free speech on a university campus feels completely absurd, but
here we are.
So Ken Burns’ new documentary on the Vietnam War promises to
solidify him as the documentary king, breathes new life into the anti-war
message, and fits perfectly into the current practice of revising history to
make us feel good.
Perhaps you will prove me wrong. Watch carefully, but I
would advise a heavy dose of skepticism.
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Terry Garlock lives in Peachtree City, GA. He was a Cobra
helicopter gunship pilot in the Vietnam War.
