1) I was there. In Nha Trang, a relatively quiet “rear” area, to be sure, but I was there Sept ‘67 to Sept ‘68.
2) Yeah, the left a lot out. He (they) also left a lot in.
3) Speaking as a former professional film and video editor, to edit is to make choices — and every edit leaves something out, and emphasizes something else. It’s the nature of editing.
4) Coming from his liberal bias, he did pretty good. It could have been a lot more lopsided. Maybe that’s all we get.
5) I thought, on balance, he did a pretty good job. He did catch the deeply essential insanity of many decisions of the commanders. Those feckless calls are simple facts and simple history.
6) Here’s the Killer Question, however:
After all that time, after all that blood, after all that expense... ...what was ultimately gained?
7) It was America’s Obsessive-Compulsive Psychotic War.
8) I honor all who served there.
9) The Vietnamese are clever, intelligent, and very resourceful. Give them a few years, and they will become an economic and manufacturing powerhouse that will give other Asian economies a good race for their money. The essentials of Liberty and Free Market will do what the idiot commanders of the military of the times could not:
make it a free country. Give it time. Liberty is a good hunger of the individual, and it will seek to find ways.
(P.S. — I was a guest for a day on an oil exploration vessel operated by Chevron. I have always known from that day that there was a nice amount of oil there on the conshelf.)
“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.
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.
That is clearly the best review for the show that I’ve read. Thank you for bringing some reality to this thread.
A few years? It has been 42 years since we surrendered. They have spent that time savaging their own country and doing basically nothing else. Nice beaches, though. I was home about two months when we pulled out of Vietnam and let the communist savages roll in and brutalize the country.