'The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick' Episode Review: 'Things Fall Apart (January 1968-July 1968)'

Episode Six: Things Fall Apart (January 1968-July 1968)

Written by: Geoffrey C. Ward

Directed by: Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

At the onset of the Tet holiday, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launch surprise attacks on cities and military bases throughout the South, suffering terrible losses but casting grave doubt on the Johnson administration's promise that there is "light at the end of the tunnel." The President decides not to run again and the country is staggered by assassinations and unrest. - from The Vietnam War's Episode List

On September 24 2017, millions of television viewers watched "Things Fall Apart (January 1968-July 1968)" on their local Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations, streamed it on the PBS.org website, or had already binge-watched it on high-definition Blu-ray (the box set was released on September 19).

Per PBS:  Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides - Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam.

Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. THE VIETNAM WAR features more than 100 iconic musical recordings from (the) greatest artists of the era and haunting original music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross as well as the Silk Road Ensemble featuring Yo Yo Ma.

Blu-ray packaging with series cover art. (C) 2017 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and Florentine Films

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity, - William Butler Yeats,"The Second Coming"

"Things Fall Apart (January 1968-July1968)" is the sixth episode of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's 10-part documentary The Vietnam War. It begins, as many of Florentine Films' documentaries have in the past, with an anecdotal prologue about a specific topic or person - in this case, the large scale use of helicopters by the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies during the war.

Vietnam was the first real helicopter war. Chopper pilots flew over 36 million individual sorties before it was all over. They dropped propaganda leaflets over the enemy and poured lethal fire into their positions; carried troops and supplies and artillery pieces into battle - and lifted the wounded off the battlefield so swiftly that most reached a field hospital within fifteen minutes. It was a perilous business; U.S. Army aviators suffered the highest casualty ratio of any contingent of U.S. combat forces in Vietnam.

The prologue introduces us to Ron Ferrizi, a helicopter crew chief who served in the First Air Cavalry Division in the Central Highlands. It was "perilous business" indeed. As Ferrizi recalls, "My job was to get shot at, to draw enemy fire, to see where the enemy was. I got shot at a lot."

To illustrate the insanity that the war brought out in the young men who fought in it, Ferrizi describes an encounter he had with a female reporter after one of the many harrowing missions he flew in South Vietnam. When she asked him "What was it like out there?" Ferrizi felt like drawing his weapon and shooting the reporter. "You want to see what it feels like?" Ferrizi remembers thinking. "BAM! That's what it feels like!" 

The first half of 1968 began with blood, violence, and turmoil. South Vietnam was convulsed by a surprise offensive by North Vietnamese Army regulars and their Viet Cong allies against every major city and military installation in the country that began on the Lunar New Year, or, in Vietnamese, Tet. Planned by Communist Party Secretary Le Duan and other hardliners and prepared in late 1967 by NVA forces and VC cadres, the Tet Offensive had two goals:

• Ignite a country-wide popular rising in the cities to remove the South Vietnamese "puppet government" from power in Saigon and reunify the country under Communist rule
• Demonstrate to President Lyndon B. Johnson and - most importantly - the American public that the war could not be won on the battlefield

As "Things Fall Apart (January 1968-July 1968)" explains, the Tet Offensive that began on January 31 caught Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of America's Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) by surprise. His initial thought was that the "General Offensive, General Uprising" was a feint by Hanoi to divert attention from the siege of a Marine outpost at Khe Sanh. Mindful of a similar situation faced by the French in 1954, Westmoreland thought the North Vietnamese were trying to pull off "another Dien Bien Phu." So, as it turns out, did LBJ.

Both men were wrong. According to Le Duan's scheme, Khe Sanh was the sideshow; Tet was the main event. Tens of thousands of NVA soldiers and VC cadres stormed all over the South and captured several key locations, including the ancient capital city of Hue on the coast and - for several hours, anyway - penetrated the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon.

American and South Vietnamese firepower and "boots on the ground" prevailed, and after several long weeks of hard combat in the cities - especially Hue - the offensive was repulsed at heavy cost. The Viet Cong, particularly, lost a lot of men and women during Tet and never quite recovered from it. The NVA, too, lost a lot of troops and equipment, but North Vietnam could absorb the casualties and replace them.

But if the Communists lost on the battlefield, America lost on the political front. The ferocity of the Tet Offensive was a nasty shock to a nation whose highest civilian and military leaders had assured that the enemy was on the brink of defeat and that victory was close at hand. "There is light at the end of the tunnel," Johnson and Westmoreland often said. Tet suggested otherwise.

The impact of the Tet Offensive on the 1968 Presidential election was significant. LBJ was a consummate politician who knew how to push his domestic agenda - the Great Society - and get legislation passed, usually with bipartisan support. He was constitutionally eligible to run for a second term because he had entered the Presidency as a result of JFK's assassination in 1963, and at first glance it looked as though he would win the Democratic Party's nomination in '68.

Vietnam changed all that.

Emboldened by the President's decreasing popularity in public opinion polls, several Democratic Party figures threw their hats in the ring. including Eugene McCarthy, a Senator from Minnesota, and - even more grievous from LBJ's point of view - former Attorney General and presently the junior Senator from New York, Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of the slain President and Johnson's main political nemesis.

At first, Bobby Kennedy expressed his reluctance to run against the sitting President, but when McCarthy's poll results in some of the early primaries showed that Johnson was politically vulnerable, he announced his candidacy on March 16, 1968.


This was the final straw for LBJ. On March 31, at the tail end of a nationally televised address in which he talked about the war in Vietnam, the growing dissent and disillusion at home, and his proposals to achieve peace in Southeast Asia, the President said:


With American sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office -- the Presidency of your country.


Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President. But let men everywhere know, however, that a strong and a confident and a vigilant America stands ready tonight to seek an honorable peace; and stands ready tonight to defend an honored cause, whatever the price, whatever the burden, whatever the sacrifice that duty may require.


Johnson offered the start of peace negotiations in Paris and ordered a halt of bombing on North Vietnam, but the war would drag on long after his exit from the 1968 Presidential campaign. And his decision to not run for a second term did not heal the ugly divisions in American society.

In a year that was marked by revolution and protests in the U.S. and other parts of the world, including France, Britain, and Spain, worse was to come. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights leader and an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam, was assassinated in April. Two months later, after winning the California Presidential primary, Bobby Kennedy was shot and fatally injured in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

There is, of course, a lot more to "Things Fall Apart (January 1968-July 1968)." It is replete with anecdotes from American and Vietnamese military participants (from both North and South) who fought on the battlefield, as well as reminiscences from men and women on both sides of the social divide in the States.

As Carol Crocker, the sister of Denton "Mogie" Crocker, Jr., said of the situation on the home front that "murderous spring":

People were stunned, and people were scared. The people we'd looked up to were being taken away from us. It certainly put those of us who were heading off on our own on a path that felt uncertain.



I was five years old and living in South America in 1968, so my memories of this period are vague, hazy, and not trustworthy. We saw news reports about the war, the protests, and the American Presidential election on Colombian TV, but I don't remember their editorial "slant."  Colombian newspapers also covered international events quite well, and I remember reading - but not really comprehending - them.


Since then, I have read several books about the Vietnam War, including Michael Maclear's Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History, and - more recently - Mark Bowden's Hue 1968. As the U.S.-born son of Colombian immigrants, I feel obligated to learn more about one of the darkest chapters of American history; I strongly believe that education is essential if one is to understand the good aspects of American political and military policies, as well as the bad ones.

I've also watched several worthwhile documentaries about the war, including PBS' Vietnam: A Television History and Last Days in Vietnam (which was directed by Robert Kennedy's youngest child, Rory). The former is a big-picture examination of the war that focuses on strategy and politics, while the latter is an account of the final days of America's odyssey in South Vietnam after U.S. combat forces were withdrawn in 1973.

Both of those projects are excellent and I strongly recommend that you watch them if you haven't already.

Nevertheless, it looks as though Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, along with series writer Geoffrey C. Ward, have created the best narrative account of the conflict in Southeast Asia.

As they have done in the previous five episodes of The Vietnam War, Burns, Novick, and Ward work hard to tell a complex story with multiple points of view (American, North and South Vietnamese, civilian and military) in a compelling and informative way.

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 "Things Fall Apart (January 1968-July 1968)" a fascinating - and heart-breaking - portal into one of America's most tragic periods.