Watch some of it with the sound turned down and concentrate on the images. Some images are poetic, even heroic. Which people are portrayed this way? This is all done with forethought.
#3. Your remarks have been noticed by a SF veteran of Kham Duc and hopefully his article will appear soon in public.
Burns and Novick both had their own prejudicial objectives in making this film, some good, some neutral and some bad.
It is “what” they left out in terms of “accurate history”, “context”, and the whole war of aggression by both Red China and No. Vietnam in Laos, and the NVA in Cambodia.
I interviewed PAVN senior officer defectors in Saigon in 1970 and one had been stationed in Laos as early as 1959. The poor city boys and farm-boys of No. Vietnam were drafted right off the streets, from the schools, and the fields and sent to SVN to fight the Americans. That really surprised the 18 year olds captured in Cambodia by Cambodian forces.
The story of communist atrocities in SVN was addressed in a decent manner though the extent of VC/NVA atrocities against the people outside of the Hue massacre and Dak Song massacre of the Hills people by flamethrowers and satchel charges was barely mentioned. That was a major mistake because as Rep. John Schmidtz used to call it in the Congressional Record, i.e. “the pulping of a people”, it was political genocide and fratricide on a scale most Americans never learned about.
I helped to document this in the Senate study “The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam”, 1972, Senate Internal Security Subcom., Sen. Judiciary Committee, the only such congressional study in depth of communist atrocities as a policy from 1925 thru early 1972 when the study was published.
Burns and Novick generally ignored the issue of what happened to the scores of thousands of SVN citizens who were kidnapped by the VC and then the NVA, and never heard from again, not even at the POW release of the 1973 fake Peace Agreement. Only about 800-900 ARVN soldiers and a few civilians were released from communist captivity though the number of captured/kidnapped was well into the tens of thousands. They will killed, period.
Also, the veterans who was featured in the film included a handful of leftist radicals from Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Vietnam (VVAW), an organization used by John Kerry and vice versa, and eventually taken over by the Maoist communists of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) who still control what is left of that organization.
Burns didn’t tell you about what they did as part of VVAW, including a couple who met and planned “protests” against the war, with the North Vietnamese and puppet front, the LNLF/VC, overseas. (Stockholm, Moscow, Japan, Paris, etc).
There was literally no mention of the U.S. “Civic Action Program” which helped to build hospitals, schools, wells, roads, bridges, and delivered badly needed medical help to isolated villages and hamlets. This involved thousands of soldiers, sailors, Marines and pilots, including the late actor and WW2 veteran Glen Ford (Navy Reservist, 6 months duty in VN).
Nor was there literally any mention in depth of the “Miracle rice” program’s tremendously positive economic effects on the quality of life for millions in the Mekong Delta, which I personally saw at Dai Tam Agricultural Station. Burns/Novick only briefly mentioned this life-changing and economy-changing program that brought real money into the hands of the farmers who could have two to three rice harvests a year instead of one, maybe two if they get lucky.
This program gave them money to pay off their debts for seeds, land rental or buying, equipment, fertilizer, etc, and then to have money left over for building better houses, buying motorcycles or trucks, sending their children to school with supplies, and even opening up little food stands/stores in their houses (I got the best flavored soda in the world in one such store, which was right next to a communist party graveyard kept neat by the woman and her husband, for as she said, “The Vietnamese respect and take care of the dead, no matter whether they are communists or not).
In fact, the communists destroyed traditional SVN military cemeteries, bulldozing them out of existence and history, an action that showed the So. Vietnamese that the No. Vietnamese were communists first, not nationalists (a fact they learned in blood during the surprise attacks during Tet, a holiday sacred to Vietnamese, but not the communists).
I met an old Viet Minh general in the Delta (which I have mentioned before here at FR) who showed us a picture of him in his white Viet Minh uniform with Ho Chi Minh. When I asked him why he was now fighting the Communists he said, in summing up the war, “I fought the French for freedom, and now I’m fighting the communists to keep my freedom”.
Burns and Novick never really got this as the paradigm of the war, freedom versus communist slavery.