Posted on 10/10/2017 7:48:48 AM PDT by pabianice
Time with the wives? No thanks. There was already way too much home front stuff. There only needed to be enough of that to explain something battlefield related.
It cast doubt on America’s intentions and showed the North Viets as heroes.
Sickening.
One thing that struck me - in one episode we were treated to Jane Fonda, in North Vietnam, stating that US POWs should be executed!...and the very next day Hanoi Jane was in the news having been in Megan Kelly's show. How on Earth is she not a pariah?!? How on Earth could Kelly (who for a short while was the darling of some conservatives) sit next to her, without slapping her?
Kerry is mentioned...but they left the traitorous parts out.
Hollywood has been trying to lionize Fonda the last few years. Patriotism and treason mean nothing in tinseltown. Look for some lifetime achievement awards soon.
“I was there. In Nha Trang”
A friend of mine went there last summer and sent me photos from the beach. Out of curiosity I googled up some photos from then and now. Unbelievable the explosion of high rise hotels with luxury views. If you haven’t looked at it today, I think you might be amused.
I said the “vets” on the show are probably REMFs or not veterans at all. I got sick of all of their whining. And when they talked about getting spit on and called “baby killers”, I knew they were frauds. They always throw that in as proof when all they did was hear about it. If there’s one freeper this happened to, please, let me know. I saw an article a few years back where the author said he could not find one vet to swear they were spit on.
But, what really did it for me was making McCain and Kerry heroes. Those few minutes added nothing to the story. I turned it off.
I was very disappointed because I had looked forward to seeing it.
If that’s the case, then it sounds like the pablum I watched in the 80s by Stanley Karnow. Also liberal revisionist nonsense. Ho was a good old boy and America was an imperialist dog.
So I learned that the very first editorial input was the choosing of the interview subjects. And it turns out that so many of them have made a life's work out of the bad parts of the war. Very few of the interview subjects had no prior activism/published writings about the war...ie very few 'ordinary every day soldiers' who quietly returned to private civilian life, without pursuing an agenda.
I agree. I'm about 1/2 way thru the 10 episodes and note that the painting of our troops as blood thirsty maniacs is picking up speed.
By contrast, I watched an Ollie North "War Stories" last night (from 2001) on the helicopter war. It was a refreshing break from Burns' "documentary".
It took that war 20 years to kill 58,000 Americans. Meanwhile it only takes our highways about 16 months to kill that many people and you hardly hear a peep. No one's political objectives can be achieved by politicizing highway deaths.
So, you think that the patriotic wives and mothers who believed in their soldiers do not deserve a hearing?
I have a couple of Aunts who are now in their eighties and nineties who suffered terribly during the Vietnam War and they did not protest the war. They suffered it.
First of all, Thank you for your Service.
Unlike Burns’ documentaries on The Civil War, the birth of jazz, or the Negro Leagues, there are STILL people alive who REMEMBER the Vietnam War.
Our Memories are our “Fact Check”.
Burns is deeply in error for choosing a subject that has SURVIVORS who Remember the Truth.
From what I saw they made it clear that self-interest was a major motivator for the anti-war movement, that the North's seeking unification through war was a waste. The purity of the anti-war movement and Ho's team were two "shibboleths of the Left" that weren't reinforced.
He even has Peter Coyote say that the war was “begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.” Plenty of leftists in the 60s and 70s would have disagreed with the "in good faith by decent people" part.
If you compare the series to what it could have been rather than to what you or I might have made, it may not look quite as bad as the critics say.
if you did not watch the show, you really cannot make generalizations like that.
I did not think they made anyone look particularly good. I understand if you take it personally. Unfortunately it is impossible to tell every person’s story.
I dont think they glorified the hippies or the grunts. Everyone is shown having done good and bad.
How can you say that?
They covered the killing fields outside Hue, and they certainly were up front about fighting a guerilla war. The VC nor the NVA were held up as above atrocities.
They made Nixon out to be the only who saw it for what it was: A civil war with a corrupt government and we were not going to win it.
The gave Nixon most of the credit for getting out and not adding to the mess.
That is clearly the best review for the show that I’ve read. Thank you for bringing some reality to this thread.
I thought they made Jane look like a traitor.
I thought it was interesting that even the Vets who had joined the anti war movement saying that they would never forgive her.
The show did not make the deserter (not draft dodger) look like a hero. The guy was trying to say that it was the toughest decision he had to make. They hung him with his own words.
The discussion with some of the vets who were portrayed as heroes, with a balanced view of their war experiences—and then the transition to their involvement in the anti-war process was interesting. The transformation of those men was moving. People with Silver Starts and DSCs who are slowly turned against the war are not liberal hippies.
As soon as I heard about the series I stated that it would be a hit piece on America. Was I right, or was I right?
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