We will be better treated when the draft dodgers die off. They have to justify their cowardice and they do it by degrading their betters. Just look at “We Were Soldiers” which was directed by someone too young to have been a draft dodger.
But coming from PBS and Ken Burns that shouldn't surprise a single soul.
Ken Burns should have named that documentary “The History of the Anti War Movement (and How They Betrayed Our Troops)” or the “History of How LBJ Screwed Up and Nixon Almost Snatched Victory from the Jaws of Defeat, but the Democrats Successfully Stopped Him With Watergate”
Haven’t watched any of it.
All I need to know about Vietnam I apparently learned from John F’n Kerry.
LBJ war good. Nixon war bad.
Burns and Cronkite can suck it.
Ed
I also thought Burns tried to make both parties equally responsible for the war. Truth is that demos were 10x more responsible for getting us involved over there.
Dems were then able to sucker in all the anti-war leftists to their corner. It’s almost like when they became the party for the blacks soon after they were the kkk party.
I had a feeling that this was a crappy documentary by the way the leftists were singing its praises.
By 1973 there were virtually no more “Vietcong” and North Vietnam held no meaningful amounts of territory in the south.
As Ollie North mentions in his excellent piece, all the South needed was continued promised assistance, which the commie rats democrats (I repeat myself) cut off in 1974.
I am sure one logical proposition regarding Vietnam:
If no Watergate, then no South Vietnam collapse.
> Ken Burns portrays the young soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of the Vietnam War as pot-smoking, drug-addicted, hippie marauders.<
Sorry Burns, we had no pot-heads, drug addicts, hippies or anyone else who truly didn’t want to be there in my unit. Any that occasionally sifted in simply didn’t last long, so we never had to worry about them.
Vietnam Era Vet.
Aside from the politics of the Vietnam War, I already know Hollywood’s take on the war - BS. I am sick and tired of hearing we were the bad guys, THEY were the good guys, we were stupid, THEY were smart and we lost, THEY won. That’s NOT what I saw and lived. NONE of the Hollywood crap, except for The Killing Fields - which is the only VietNam era movie I was able to sit through - or We Were Soldiers - which I could not watch in its entirety - was an accurate portrayal of the war. I was in the RVN with the 9th Inf. Div, 3/5 Cav in 67-68 to include TET on Jan 31, 1968. Our unit was engaged with the enemy for 17 hours that day, I’m told, as I never kept track of the time. I’m hoping one day Col Oliver North will do more programs on the VietNam War and tell the true story. There is a saying, “To the victors go the spoils, as well as the telling of the history”. The victors of the VietNam War were NOT the enemy of the battlefield but our enemies at home.
Aside from the one sided portrayal of the American forces by Burns explained so well by Ollie North and others in the comments, there were two glaring omissions that further taint this “documentary”.
Burns never mentions the Cambodian holocaust where over 2 million helpless Cambodian noncombatants were MURDERED, (not “killed”) by their communist “liberators” after “Peace was given a chance” in 1975. There were no armies clashing on the battlefield in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge murdered an estimated 40 percent of the Cambodian people. There was peace over the land, A “peace” which became the peace of a mass grave.
Burns film had the soundtrack of many 60s songs. One he missed was John Lennon’s “All We are Saying is Give Peace a chance”. That would have made good background music for a slideshow of photos showing the piles of skulls from the Killing Fields. Combine that with showing how the so-called “antiwar” left turned a blind eye to the mass murder by the Communists in Cambodia, Viet Nam, and Laos after the war ended in peacetime after the same self-righteous left had excoriated US troops for their alleged human rights violations in wartime.
The salient fact form that war is that as many or more people were MURDERED in the 4 years of peace after the war ended than were KILLED in the 10 years of war that preceded it.
Although Burns briefly mentioned the Boat People who fled Viet Nam after the fall of Saigon where hundreds of thousands died in the south China Sea, he glaringly omitted the post-war mass murders in Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos and glossed over the “re-education” camps in South Viet Nam.
His other glaring omission was leaving out the mocking abuse and even physical attacks by the anti-war left on returning Viet Nam Veterans, It got so bad that the DOD had to ask Congress to make it illegal to call up the parents of a soldier killed in Viet Nam and gloat and mock them on the phone. Not showing the leftist demonstrators cheerleading for Hanoi, burning our flags and waving the flags of the enemy troops killing our men in that war is another omission.
I don’t have time to detail more. But there are plenty of similar omissions in this one-sided “documentary”
Viet Nam Mai Mai!
RVN, 68,69,and 70
Bump.....