'The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick' Episode Review: 'The History of the World (April 1969-May 1970)'

Episode Eight: The History of the World (April 1969-May 1970)

Written by: Geoffrey C. Ward

Directed by: Ken Burns & Lynn Novick


With morale plunging in Vietnam, President Nixon begins withdrawing American troops. As news breaks of an unthinkable massacre committed by American soldiers, the public debates the rectitude of the war. An incursion into Cambodia reignites antiwar protests with tragic consequences. - from The Vietnam War's Episode List

On September 26, 2017,  PBS premiered "The History of the World (April 1969-May 1970),” Episode Eight of The Vietnam War, a 10-part documentary series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (The War, Prohibition). Produced by Burns, Novick, and Sarah Botstein, this 18-hour exploration of one of the most divisive events in modern American history was 10 years in the making. It features interviews of participants from all sides, including civilians and veterans from North and South Vietnam. (Hence the series’ tagline: “There is no single truth in war.”)

(C) 2017 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and Florentine Films

"The History of the World" begins with a "present day" interview with Joan Furey, a former Army nurse who volunteered for duty in Vietnam after one of her high school classmates was killed during the Tet Offensive of 1968. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., young Joan had wanted to be a nurse "ever since she and her older sister watched a movie on television called So Proudly We Hail! which was about the nurses on Bataan and Corregidor during World War II." As Furey tells the interviewer, "It was probably the first time in my life that I realized women could do brave and courageous things." 

At first, Second Lieutenant Furey, now assigned to the 71st Evacuation Hospital at Pleiku in South Vietnam's Central Highlands, believed that the U.S. presence in Vietnam was there to do good. But in the spring of 1969, Furey's youthful idealism erodes as she and her fellow caregivers deal with a never-ending flow of U.S. and allied casualties.

One day, they brought in a young soldier who had a head injury. He had a large field dressing on the back of his head. They said, "He's expectant." I kind of freaked out and decided, "No, they're wrong." I was going to take care of this patient. I told the corpsman to get me blood. And he's saying, "Well, Lieutenant, this patient is expectant. You're not supposed to be using blood."  I said, "Get me the blood." He went and got it, and I hung the blood on the patient and I decided to change the dressing. I took off the dressing. The whole back of his head was gone and all the blood I had been giving him  came out. A friend of mine came over and said to me, "You just have to walk away. Come on, you can't just give him any more blood. We have all these other patients." And he just walked me out of there. We went out and had a cigarette. A few minutes later we walked right back in and got back to work. You had to learn to be detached, to push down those overwhelming emotions to get the job done. - Joan Furey, "The History of the World (April 1969-May 1970)" 

Three months into President Richard Nixon's new Administration, the war in Vietnam grinds on. The Republican chief executive had won the 1968 election by promising to restore law and order at home and end the increasingly unpopular war "with honor." Playing to his largely conservative base of supporters, Nixon refuses to publicly acknowledge the antiwar movement and conceals from the press that he knows that America can't win the war by force of arms. The only way to end America's involvement in South Vietnam is to, in essence, capitulate without publicly admitting we have capitulated.  

But like his Democratic predecessor Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon believes that America can't simply cut and run without losing prestige in the eyes of her allies - and her enemies. And just like LBJ, Nixon abhors the thought of becoming the first President to lose a war in U.S. history. Torn between the need to restore a modicum of law and order to a divided nation and trying to extricate U.S. forces from a war that he knows can't be won, Richard Nixon plays a strange political shell game that pits conservatives against liberals against each other - thus creating the polarized America that we live in today. 

"The History of the World" is, like the period of the war it covers, complex and encompasses many points of view. 

In Southeast Asia, over 500,000 American men and women in uniform are being asked to fight for a nebulous cause. Officially, as one veteran remembers, when new GIs ask what America's mission in Vietnam is all about, the reply is, "To stop the advance of international communism." But if the questioner shows any skepticism about that, then the next reply is "Well, it is to show to the world at large that the U.S. sticks to its commitments no matter what."

No nineteen-, twenty-year-old kid wants to die to maintain the credibility of Richard Nixon. And so, within a relatively short time, the guys were saying, "Look, we shouldn't be here, but we are. So my only function in life is to try and keep you alive, buddy; and to keep my precious ass from being killed; and then to go home, and forget about this." - Vincent Okamoto, "The History of the World."

The episode, with a running time of one hour and 48 minutes, delves into many diverse topics, including: 

• The contrast between the Johnson Administration's policy of "quiet diplomacy" regarding U.S. prisoners of war held by Hanoi and its Viet Cong surrogates and the Nixon team's more public efforts that linked withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam with the release of the POWs
• Nixon's canny strategies to take the edge off the growing antiwar movement, which included cancellation of two draft call-ups in late 1969 and the adoption of "Vietnamization - the policy of gradually bringing home U.S. troops and giving responsibility for the war to the South Vietnamese armed forces
• Ho Chi Minh's death and the North Vietnamese leadership's refusal to give in under constant U.S. bombing of the North
• The war from the North and South Vietnamese perspective
• The growing radicalization of the antiwar movement and the emergence of domestic terrorist groups such as the Weathermen
• The growing disillusion felt by U.S. veterans upon their return home from Vietnam
• The impact on the home front created by such debacles as the revelation of the My Lai massacre, the pointless battle for Hill 937 (also known as "Hamburger Hill"), and Nixon's "incursion" into Cambodia in April 1970
• The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam (October 15, 1970), the largest nationwide protest in American history
• Campus unrest and violence in the spring of 1970, which culminates with the Kent State Shooting on May 4, 1970 

(C)1970 Valley News-Dispatch. Photo Credit: John Filo 

I was a young boy (six in April of 1969, seven in May 1970) and living in Colombia with my mom and older half-sister in the period depicted in "The History of the World (April 1969-May 1970)." And even though I was somewhat precocious and read the news accounts about Vietnam in local newspapers or watched grainy-looking black-and-white footage on Colombian TV, the war was a disturbing blot that stained my childhood. I didn't understand the conflict, and the images from both Southeast Asia and the protest-stricken U.S. were scary and unsettling.

I knew that I'd been born in Miami and was a U.S. citizen, and even though I was being raised in Colombia (a traditional U.S. ally), I was proud of being the only person in my family with an American passport. But considering that Latin American leftists - emboldened by the chaos in the U.S. and Western Europe caused by the world-wide youth revolts of the late Sixties - were inciting protests and aiding Marxist guerrillas in Colombia (and elsewhere), I had to keep that to myself.

As a result, I heard a lot of anti-American comments among my older cousins, many of whom were the same age as the soldiers fighting in Vietnam and the college kids who wanted to end the war and change the world - for the better, they thought. Most of them, especially those that spoke English and had traveled abroad, agreed with the anti-war movement and even mimicked some of their behavior. At least some of my male cousins grew beards and let their hair grow a bit long - not as long as the stereotypical hippies, mind, but longer than our conservative and very staid grandparents could tolerate.

And because the war in Vietnam lasted till the mid-1970s, it was still the dominant topic on the evening news when Mom and I returned to Miami in the late spring of 1972.  By then, Nixon's Vietnamization policy was well underway and U.S. forces were greatly reduced. Nevertheless, I arrived Stateside just in time for the tail end of North Vietnam's failed Spring Offensive and its consequences, as well as the beginning of the Watergate scandal. 

The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick has been a somewhat cathartic experience. I have known many of the main talking points related to the war for several decades now; I long ago gave up any notions I once held that we could have won on the battlefield if "those liberal politicians" had not "tied our hands behind our backs."

Also, I used to get angry at the protesters and the intellectuals who made up the antiwar movement, especially the cruder, crueler ones who called returning vets "baby killers" and "war criminals." But though I still think those individuals should not have said such hateful and hurtful things, I'm now more understanding about why they acted that way. 

I have always been in awe of America's veterans, and even though "The History of the World" reminds us that Americans lose the veneer of civilization on the battlefield and are capable of committing atrocities such as the My Lai massacre (which occurred in 1968 but became public a year later), I still feel profound respect for the men and women who serve our country. The stories of Joan Furey, Merrill McPeak, Roger Smith, Tim O'Brien, Vincent Okamoto, Thomas Varelly, John Musgrave, Bill Erhardt, Wayne Smith, and Hal Kushner are moving and powerful profiles in courage.  

I've watched my fair share of movies (Platoon, Apocalypse Now) and documentaries (Vietnam: A Television History, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War) about this conflict, and they are all worth seeing. But Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and co-producer Sarah Botstein have brought the Vietnam conflict back into America's living rooms with an intimacy and sense of tragic loss unlike no other film project about the nation's "lost crusade" in Southeast Asia.

In The Vietnam War, Ward, Burns and Novack labored for 10 years to tell a multifaceted story with multiple points of view (American, North and South Vietnamese, civilian and military) in a moving and informative fashion.

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Their endeavor is made possible by the skills of principal cinematographer Buddy Squires; editors Tricia Reidy, Paul Barnes, Erik Ewers, and Craig Mellish; composers Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and David Cieri (The Roosevelts: An Intimate History). Together with narrator Peter Coyote, the Florentine Films team make "The History of the World (April 1969-May 1970)"  a fascinating - and heart-breaking - window into one of America's most tragic periods.