Why I find it hard to watch Vietnam War documentaries
US documentary filmmaker Ken Burns' 10-part, 18-hour documentary on the Vietnam War (made in association with Lynn Novick) is making waves here, as well as it should.
Give Burns credit. In a world where filmmaking, one of the most prohibitively expensive of artistic media, is driven by the financial bottom line, Burns deserves enormous credit for persevering in the most challenging of genres—the long-form, multi-part documentary.
This is no small feat. Today what passes for reality TV in the US is an abomination—just consider its most famous star, our dear president. This new genre has given rise to a host of appalling TV confections like "The Real Housewives" franchise, and ribald, risqué riffs like "Temptation Island". Instead of provoking thought, the aim is to titillate—the TV equivalent of junk food.
Burns, on the other hand, has a long, distinguished record of producing documentaries that are thoughtful, sensitive ruminations on the American experience. His epic nine-part 1990 documentary on the American Civil War drew 40 million viewers, the largest viewership ever for a public television broadcast.
The USD 30 million "The Vietnam War" took over six years to make and "features testimony from nearly 80 witnesses, including many Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as Vietnamese combatants and civilians from both the winning and losing sides," according to its website.
The Vietnam War (1955-1975), for readers too young to remember, was a violent, genocidal war of the last century. Driven by a ghoulish obsession to root out world communism, the United States got involved in a war which cost it dearly in terms of lives and moral standing.
Early reviews suggest the documentary series is a sensitive, thoughtful attempt at coming to terms with a controversial, decades-long war that tore America apart.
Yet I find it extraordinarily hard to summon the patience to watch it. No matter how sensitively portrayed, the attempt is crippled by an American insularity that I find too upsetting.
Perhaps a brief word on how I learned about the Vietnam War is in order. I first heard about Vietnam in the 1960s. I wasn't grown up enough to have an in-depth understanding, but I recall being horrified by a mindless, gruesome war against a hapless Third World country by one of the most powerful nations of the world. As I grew up some images remained hauntingly etched in my mind—a little girl running in agony after indiscriminate US bombing of napalm; I vividly recall those potbellied, ugly Huey helicopters that were instruments of wholesale slaughter.
I always feel particularly outraged when Americans refer to the Vietnam War as a great traumatic experience for the nation. Well, spare a thought for the Vietnamese. Estimates of Vietnamese deaths range from a million upwards (vis-a-vis 60,000 US deaths). More bombs were dropped on that tiny country than in World War II. And then there is the killing, raping and the dropping of the massive amounts of cancer-causing Agent Orange that has caused birth defects and maimed a generation of Vietnamese.
I think the big question is this: How brutally honest can you be? Historians raised questions about Burns' "The Civil War" as well. In a recent profile of Burns, The New Yorker magazine noted: "In a collection of essays by historians about 'The Civil War,' Leon Flitwick noted how the last episode jumps ahead to the gatherings of Union and Confederate veterans, at Gettysburg, in 1913 and 1938: the effect is 'to underscore and celebrate national reunification and the birth of the modern American nation, while ignoring the brutality, violence, and racial repression on which that reconciliation rested.'"
There is a telling detail in the New Yorker profile on the making of the Vietnam documentary. Former US Air Force Chief of Staff General Merrill McPeak, who flew 269 combat missions in Vietnam, was a consultant for the series. "In a section about the massacre of South Vietnamese civilians, in My Lai, in 1968, 'murder' became 'killing.' (The final script: 'The killing of civilians has happened in every war.') McPeak pressed for 'murder.' His argument, he said, was, 'Let's open the kimono—let's tell it all, see it the way it is.'
". . . Burns defended his change, on the ground that My Lai continues to have 'a toxic, radioactive effect' on opinion. 'Killing was the better word, he said, 'even though My Lai is murder.'"
The remark underscores the sobering reality that sometimes the truth is too horrendous, and nations, like individuals, can lack the gumption, the moral courage to face up to the horrors they have visited upon others.
To be fair, this is not unique to America. The Turks vehemently deny the Armenian massacre in the First World War. How ready are Pakistanis to face up to what they did in 1971? Closer to home, is India willing to be honest about what its army has done in Kashmir and the north-eastern states? Does Bangladesh acknowledge the terrible price paid by Chakmas during our prolonged anti-insurgency depredations?
It's really difficult, sometimes, to face up to the terrible things we do as nations, but nonetheless essential. Over half a century ago, the American author and activist James Baldwin observed with searing insight: "We, as a nation, modified and suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history…Whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilised in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations."
Ashfaque Swapan is a contributing editor for Siliconeer, a monthly periodical for South Asians in the United States.
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