It was fought in the north,
and in the south,
in the air
and on the ground.
It was fought in the White House
and in the halls of Congress,
in America's streets and colleges
and living rooms.
Now catch a special sneak peek
at the television event of the year
as PBS previews
"The Vietnam War."
Corporate funding for the production
of "The Vietnam War"
was provided by Bank of America
with funding from the following...
And by members of
the Better Angels Society...
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
and by viewers like you.
Thank you.
When we approached the target,
coming down from altitude,
it was obvious that they could pick us up on their radar.
I remember my knees shaking,
and I was saying, "Holy smokes.
I'm going into war.
This is war."
I was a bit scared.
Once we went in and they started firing at us...
The fear went away.
Everything became smooth, deathly quiet in the cockpit.
It was sort of like a symphony
in the sense that my plane was just like
a ballet in the sky,
and I was just performing what I was doing...
And then I got hit.
Mayday, mayday. Going down.
There was no way we could avoid telling this story.
We'd famously said, after "Civil War,"
no more wars, and then got sucked in
inexorably to the film "The War"
on the second world war.
By the time we were finishing that,
we knew that we were in some ways obligated
to jump into Vietnam.
Ken turned to me and said, "Ok.
I think we could really try to do Vietnam now,"
and I said, "I'm in.
I've been in since day one. I've always wanted
to do this story, so that's no problem."
... The torch has been passed
to a new generation of Americans
born in this century,
tempered by war,
disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud...
I still believed very much in this concept
of an heroic America,
America being a really special country,
the best country in the world,
the best democracy,
all the things that we believe about it,
which... and I didn't really see anything wrong with that.
I was sure that we were right to be in Vietnam,
you know, because it started under Kennedy,
and to me, JFK was God.
There's been a lot done about this subject...
books, documentaries, feature films, novels.
I mean, it's not like no one's ever tried,
but it remains this kind of unfinished business
in American history.
In order to move on as a country at all,
we have to really understand what happened,
and we've never done that with Vietnam.
So it's time now.
The decades have passed.
We have always felt that in any kind
of historical presentation,
you've got to have 25 or 30 years' perspective,
the kind of triangulation that can take place
from that passage of time.
I just stayed awake last night,
thinking about this thing.
The more I think of it, I don't know what in the hell...
it looks like to me we're getting into another Korea.
It just worries the hell out of me.
I don't see what we can ever hope to get
out of there with once we're committed.
I don't think it's worth fighting for,
and I don't think we can get out.
It's damned easy to get in a war,
but it's gonna be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself.
In many ways, the Vietnam war was our second civil war,
ripping the country apart
in ways that hadn't taken place
since the Civil War,
and it's important now to go back
and try to understand it.
We have tried to take a look at this from every side.
So within the American experience,
there's people who fought in the war,
there's people who fought against the war.
There was a tremendous conflict within the United States
about the war,
and then within Vietnam, there's the winning side,
there's the losing side.
They were our enemy and our ally.
There's just so many different perspectives,
we tried to bring them all together.
Just hope we can stay alive day to day.
Everybody just wants to go back home and go to school.
That's about it.
Have you lost any friends?
Quite a few. We lost one the other day,
good buddy of mine.
Whole thing stinks, really.
This film is not an answer,
but a set of questions about what happened.
I am getting a little bit antsy because,
first of all, we're losing light.
Second of all, we are now outside of artillery range.
We got to get out of there.
We have to move out of here
because they coming.
And we don't have time.
I went to the... Major Nho, his name was...
and I said, "Major, we have got to get out of here now,"
and Nho said, "Don't you forget.
I am a major, and you are a lieutenant,"
turned on his heel, and walked away.
10 minutes later, all hell broke loose.
There he is.
We have extraordinary people looking for stills
and archival footage and music
and all the elements that make up our series.
They are all really committed to finding material
that is not only accurate and relevant,
but they all have creative, artistic minds and eyes,
and we're really good as a team.
We've pulled in hundreds
of hours of footage for this project.
The shooting of 4 students at Kent State is
one of the most important scenes in our film.
We came across some scraps of footage
that we had never seen before,
and we didn't know where it had come from.
We got in touch with some of the people
who had been at the Kent State protests
and just started asking them, "who do you know
who may have been shooting this footage?"
And sure enough, one of those people
put us in touch with Ray Kline,
who happened to be the brother of David Kline,
who was a student at Kent State,
and these protests were a big deal.
They'd been going on for 4 days, so he had been shooting them.
Sure enough, his brother had a box of old film reels.
There were, you know, maybe 10 reels
of 16-millimeter film that hadn't been seen
in more than 4 decades.
I think everyone here recognized
how important it would be for our viewers
to be able to see this incredible moment
as it unfolded.
There are literally 25,000 photographs
that were pulled into our system.
It's an enormous archivist's job to keep track.
One of our interviewees, his name was Philip Brady,
said, "I will tell you my story if you can find
this photo that ran in Paris Match."
They found that the source was AP,
and they called AP, and AP said,
"Yeah, it ran, but we don't have it anymore,
we can't find it.
We're so sorry,"
and I thought, "Well, can we actually go
back into your archive, have us look at the folders
because we feel like maybe if we could just look?"
And lo and behold, there was a folder called "Advisors,"
and Phil Brady was a marine advisor.
We looked through, and we found, actually,
3 photographs of Phil Brady,
two of which had never been seen before,
had never been published,
and they're... they're in the film.
What we have is kind of two parallel tracks
in which research and the collection of material is ongoing,
and we have writing in the other track,
which is ongoing.
I can't believe I've been lucky enough
with Geoff Ward for all these years.
I can't imagine doing a film like this without him.
I don't think it would actually be possible.
We don't want to stop.
We just want to make it better.
Good morning, Mr. President.
Hi, Jack.
Uh, we need guidance this morning, sir, on...
Guidance? Uh, is that all you want?
- Yes, sir. - No quotation?
- That's right. - No attribution,
- no connection? - Yes, sir.
Give it absolutely none.
- Absolutely none. - Your press is lying
like drunken sailors every day.
Two of the most important characters
in our film we didn't interview.
They're the two most important presidents
to the story of Vietnam...
Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Nixon,
and fortunately for us, we have tapes.
Dr. Kissinger.
Yeah. Mr. President?
Yeah, Henry.
This was the best speech you've delivered
since you've been in office.
Yeah. I'll tell you one thing.
This was... this little speech was
a work of art, Henry.
I... I know a little something about speechwriting,
and if it doesn't... if it doesn't work, I don't care.
I mean, right now, if it doesn't work.
Then let me say, though, I'm gonna find out soon,
and then I'm gonna turn right so goddamn hard
it'll make your head spin.
We'll bomb those bastards right out of the...
off the earth.
I really mean it.
It helps to kind of give us an access
on the presidency.
Now we have a chance to put them together
and really understand what had happened,
and it is a fascinating portrait,
so while this film is for the most part bottom-up,
it's hugely important portraits of Truman and Eisenhower,
but particularly Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon.
Rolling.
Today, we are extremely lucky
to be recording music with Yo-Yo Ma
and the Silk Road ensemble.
It's just such a privilege to work with these musicians.
Working with Silk Road is
such an incredible joy for me
because these are people who are like brothers and sisters,
and I think what musicians specialize in doing
is to actually locate emotions
and even the juxtaposition of different types of emotions in one thing,
so by doing, like, a "Wounded Soldier," for example,
in 6 different ways, there are so many ways you can show that.
As many as 230,000 teenagers,
many of them volunteers,
worked to keep the roads open
and the traffic moving.
More than half of them were women.
Le Minh Khue, who had left her home in the north
with a novel by Ernest Hemingway in her backpack,
observed her 17th birthday on the trail.
_
Thousands died on the trail
from starvation and accidents,
fevers and snakebite and sheer exhaustion,
as well as from the relentless bombing.
We brought all our editors with us,
and you can see them taking a take in their own mind
and pulling out a piece of music that was sort of in there
and putting this back in and having it mean something.
Ultimately, the music is gonna come
from a variety of places.
Some of them are very well-known tunes,
like there's a lullaby that is very much
really all known in Vietnam,
and other pieces are tunes that we try and show in different ways.
Some of the greatest musicians on the planet
are in that room, and so when you hear a violin or a viola
or you're hearing some Asian instruments,
you're hearing them played by practitioners at the highest level.
- Whoo! - Whoo!
I went to the movies, and I saw a film,
"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,"
and I found myself sitting there,
mostly listening to the music and thinking,
"That is exactly what we want for our film on Vietnam."
It's this constant state of tension.
I stayed to watch the credits,
and I saw the music was done by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
I got a call from my manager,
who said, "Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
have reached out about a new, massive project
they're working on about the Vietnam War
and were wondering if you would like
to be involved in composing,"
and I just cut him off and said, "For sure,
we want to be involved in that."
Their music is like an extraordinary combination
of a kind of cold, metallic, electronic sound
mitigated by this incredibly beautiful, melodic sensibility.
Somewhere around 80% of our casualties came
from landmines of all sorts.
In Vietnam for me, just to get up in the morning
and look out at the land
and think, "In a few minutes, I'll be walking out there,
and will my corpse be there or there?"
It's always nerve-racking handing off a lot of music,
but I was amazed at how sophisticated it was,
how it goes from music that we might have created
to music of the era
or stuff that Yo-Yo Ma did.
It was mind-blowing.
♪ One time ago, a crazy dream came to me ♪
♪ I dreamt I was walking in World War III ♪
It was the biggest crowd any of us
had ever been in in our lives,
and when the front of the march got down to the united nations,
the back of the march had not yet left Central Park.
That's how many people we were.
The music of this era, the Vietnam War era, is iconic.
We knew we would be including some very important
and recognizable music.
This is the best music in American history, you could argue.
We have Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin
and Neil Young and Bob Dylan,
and I think it was important to the artists
and to the record companies
that if we're in 1968 in our film,
we're not gonna play a piece of music
that came out in 1972.
♪ I like to dream ♪
♪ yes, yes, right between the sound machine ♪
♪ on a cloud of sound I drift in the night ♪
♪ any place it goes is right ♪
If you could just bring them down even more to give...
This is one of the most exhilarating
and difficult and bittersweet parts
of the whole process.
This is mixing.
Saigon's troops would gradually take over
responsibility for engaging the enemy.
This is the first film I've worked on
that I actually was a part of in a way
'cause it's my generation.
It makes my whole approach to it
a little bit more intense,
a little different than usual.
I'm putting reverb on.
- Ok. Good. Yeah. - Good.
I think the series has
a very different sound than the other work we've done,
and I attribute that mostly to the genius
of our editors and sound editors.
Each editor has their own personality,
each editor has their own interests in music
and in stories that they like to tell,
and so each one has brought their own particular genius
to their episodes.
There are 4 editors and 10 shows.
The producers just give it some thought.
"Who would be good for the show?"
I think sound is important in every story.
It's the other half.
Without that full sound effect feeling,
it's just one step shy of being real.
We're coming up to Kent State here in episode 8,
and people seem to be reacting very strongly
to the Kent State scene.
I held it in pretty much really well
up until Kent State,
and I just lost it,
and I actually had to leave the studio
and walk around for 10 minutes
just to collect myself.
That just symbolized for me
what this war was doing to our culture.
These were kids on both sides,
young National Guard boys who had very little training
and probably scared, uh, and not well-led
and... and young men and women on the other side
protesting the war, out there for, you know,
idealistic reasons.
And look at what happens when we let things get
as bad as they got.
Stay tuned.
When we return, we'll follow the filmmakers on location
and see how they captured the war through the experiences
of those who lived through it
when PBS previews "The Vietnam War" continues.
We did take a camera crew to Vietnam twice.
We had to move our whole crew there.
We had to figure out locations and gear and workflow.
We all wanted to represent
the Vietnamese perspective,
but we weren't sure we'd be able to.
If we didn't find a way to do it,
our whole film was gonna not be what we wanted it to be.
There were a couple of occasions
where a few people said to us,
"You know, we never tell the truth about the war.
The war was so terrible."
We really had to try to explain
that we wanted to hear the real human story
of what it was like,
and once we could communicate that
to our Vietnamese veterans and civilians,
people would stop and take a breath and think,
and then they would tell us what happened.
There are North Vietnamese soldiers
and Viet Cong guerrillas
and south Vietnamese civilians.
Every day was a big surprise.
Every day was a kind of shake-your-head thing.
You go in always realizing
that the first thing you have to do is shed
what you thought you knew.
_
We hear from an American participating in a firefight
and talk to the people who were doing the firing
on the other side at the same moment,
and that gives you a heightened sense
of what it's really like.
All of a sudden, you could see the... the tracers coming out
of the plantation hit the helicopter and crash.
We were ordered to go down and retrieve the remains
the following morning.
We wanted to get to know the people,
we wanted to get to know the place,
we wanted to spend time there,
we wanted to make people feel comfortable with us,
and then to try to bring their story to life on film
is a huge challenge and a great responsibility.
We had a wonderful Vietnamese producer Ho Dang Hoa,
and he was the one really who helped us identify veterans
and find people to talk to.
_
For us to do interviews
the way we like to do them, in a foreign language,
it was a challenge to come up with a way
that we could feel like we were having
a natural conversation.
Mark Roy, our extraordinary soundman,
came up with a system where we basically had
two interpreters everywhere we went.
Our Vietnamese producer would hear our question
and then reinterpret that question
for our Vietnamese interviewee.
And then Ben Wilkinson, our extraordinary
consulting producer, would be off in a closet
or... or a bathroom or down a dingy hallway.
He was listening on an earpiece,
whispering into a microphone, and we could hear him,
so we're basically having like they have at the U.N.,
simultaneous translation of the interview
so we could be responding in real time
to what the people were saying.
By the time the second question was asked,
they realized we were just having a conversation,
and even though we couldn't actually understand each other,
we really understood each other.
What struck me was how beautiful
Vietnam was to look at.
There were just these endless acres
of these jade-green rice paddies
and these lovely villages inside these groves
of bamboo and palm trees
and way off in the distance these bluish jungle mountains,
and it looked like Shangri-La,
and I remember seeing this line of Vietnamese women...
or schoolgirls, I think they were.
They actually looked like angels come to earth
or something like that,
so it was really quite striking,
but a little unsettling because...
so how could a place like this so beautiful
and so enchanting be at war?
We are now climbed up a little hill in Lai Chau,
shooting some incredible rice paddies.
We don't quite know what's gonna happen.
We have to be open-minded.
We're driving down the road,
"Oh, my God. The sun is setting. There's a rice paddy,"
jump out, cross the road, "Get the camera.
Quick, quick, quick!"
You know, that happens all the time.
Our cinematographer buddy squires
just completely outdid himself
to get the footage that we thought we might use.
One idea that we had was to go to the Politburo,
where the government of Hanoi met
to decide the strategy for the war
and see if they would let us film the room
and stage it as if they were having a meeting.
At the ninth party plenum that began in Hanoi
on November 22, 1963,
the day President Kennedy was killed in Dallas,
the Politburo had argued over how best to proceed in the war.
North Vietnam's two communist patrons,
the Soviet Union and China,
were giving them conflicting advice.
_
We went to the Politburo with a camera crew,
and we started asking them to move furniture around.
We brought pictures with us that we had gotten
from their archives and our archives
that showed what it looked like during the war,
the leaders sitting around the table with the maps
and the coffee cups and their leather portfolios
and ashtrays,
and we were sort of asking the curator there
"We want it to look like this,"
and she said, "Wait. Where'd you get that picture?
We don't have that picture,"
and then they sort of saw how serious we were,
and they started pulling things out of the cabinet.
"Oh, we have the real notebooks they used.
Oh, this is Le Duan's eyeglasses.
You know, no one gets to touch that,"
and so they actually got really interested
and involved in our process.
It was really exciting to see so many aspects
of what we do all come together on that one day.
This Vietnamese officer came to me,
and he spoke English,
and it was the first real English speaker
that I had seen,
and he had a little reel-to-reel tape recorder,
battery-powered tape recorder,
and he asked me to make a message to my family
to let them know that I was safe,
and I could do that if I would make a statement
against the war.
And I told him with great bravado
that I would rather die than make a statement
against my country,
and he said to me, uh,
"You will find dying is very easy.
Living will be the difficult thing.
Living is the difficult thing."
Hal Kushner was held in a series of jungle camps.
As we were editing and realizing
he was becoming a major character
and there was nothing to show for his story.
These camps don't still exist. There are no pictures of them.
He moved all the time.
We decided that we would try to find
some visual way to represent where he was in the jungle.
There are a few still photographs
of what we imagine, I think, are the huts
that these men were kept in,
and we said to Hoa, our producer in Vietnam,
"Could you find some people to build some huts?"
So Hoa said, "Sure. I can do that."
_
And we turned the corner,
and there at the top of this mountain
is the hand-built bamboo hut,
and it is like where Hal Kushner would have been.
There were moments on this film
where we would be somewhere,
and we would turn to each other and say,
"Imagine what this was like for Hal Kushner."
It's an extraordinary thing to be in a place
and think about historic events that happened in those places
and also the people who had to endure it.
I think the thing that I'm most proudest of,
and I'm sure Lynn and Sarah are,
is that we've been able to do something
that operates on many different levels.
Now many people in Vietnam are too young
to remember the war,
but they still have family members
who know someone.
I mean, it's that close,
and you just sort of try to understand
if you possibly can what this experience meant for them.
It's inspiring to see how resilient people can be
because you walk around Vietnam,
there is no sign that a war happened there.
It's not as though there's this dark cloud hanging
over every part of Vietnam.
It's not like that at all.
You have to look hard to find evidence of the war.
Soldiers adapt.
You go over there with one mindset, you know,
and then you adapt, you adapt
to the atrocities of war,
you adapt to...
Killing, dying, you know.
After a while, it doesn't bother you.
Let's just say it doesn't bother you as much.
When I first arrived in Vietnam,
there were some... there were some interesting things
that happened and I questioned
some of the marines.
I was made to realize that this is war,
and this is what we do,
and that stuck in my head.
"This is war. This is what we do,"
and after a while, you embrace that.
This is war. This is what we do.
Ok. Everybody here?
Good morning, everybody.
The biggest thing I want to say is
this is not a finished film.
We are 2 1/2 years from broadcast.
As we said yesterday, this is the earliest
we've ever brought folks in to do...
One of the great joys of a project like this
is that we get to work with some
of the leading experts on the subject
of the Vietnam War, and we pulled together
a wide range of historians
who have many different perspectives about the war.
I think dropping it in makes great sense, actually,
so I may disagree with Ed a little bit...
Listening to those advisors helped us
immeasurably, and as we go around to get their comments
and we take diligent notes,
but you can almost read in their faces
where they're at, what their concerns are.
Combat is like crack cocaine.
It's an enormous high,
but it has enormous costs.
Any sane person would never do crack.
Combat is like that.
You're scared, you're terrified, you're miserable,
but then the fighting starts.
There's a group of us outsiders
who are taking a look at the very, very rough first cut
of the documentary,
and a lot of the group are historians,
who can say, "Well, maybe you didn't quite get
this right," or whatever..
They work with us.
They come to screenings, they give us notes.
We make changes.
They come to more screenings, they give us more notes.
We make more changes.
We listen to them talk to each other and argue.
For me, the focus is maybe too much on the Americans
and the North Vietnamese, uh, army.
I think that's a really important point,
and it gets to what I was trying to argue earlier...
One of our favorite things is to listen to them
disagree about things, and then we realize,
"Ok. There's no right answer here."
There's disagreement.
Vietnam is a particularly unsettled subject
about which historians and people who lived through it
disagree quite vehemently at times.
We hated going there.
When we'd get the word "You're headed for Pinkville,"
one guy would say to another, "Somebody's gonna die,
or somebody's gonna lose a leg."
We were terrified of the place.
It was littered with landmines.
The villagers were... the expressions on their faces,
including the children of, say, 6 or 5 years old,
had a mixture of hostility and terror.
I thought I knew the history of Vietnam
as well as anyone in the country,
and I've found out otherwise in the last 3 days.
"You want to know what it's like?
Boom! There it is. I'll give it to you right now.
You want to feel it?"
Partly, it's the new material
that I'm not familiar with
that some of the historians in the room
are bringing to our analysis.
We interviewed nearly 100 people for this project.
The witnesses who appear onscreen
are telling you their stories.
This ought to be a bottom-up story
so that if you weren't in the war...
and that means combat...
or you weren't waiting for a loved one
to come back from that war,
you're not really in our film.
You've got to have been sort of in the thick of it.
I was there, and so even though... it's odd.
I mean, my view of the Vietnam War
is sort of from a grunt's-eye view,
which is pretty localized,
but on the other hand, I can add things
that a historian can't.
I mean, it's like, "Well, the hole in the tank
couldn't have been made by a grenade.
It had to be an RPG,"
and so technical things like that,
which... documentary filmmakers, I'm sure, are plagued
by military nuts out there that are gonna nail them
for getting something wrong,
so I'm hoping I can help avoid a few of those things.
Watching it so far has been a bit like
going into a dream
that is a familiar dream, one I've had before.
It's a revisiting of my history
as a veteran of Vietnam.
It's a revisiting of an era,
and the era is the era of my youth.
We just felt we had to put our arms
around as much of this war as we could,
to take it back to the very beginning
and bring it up right to today
and say, "Here we are.
What are we gonna do with this information?
How can we go forward as a people?"
And I think, as divided as we are,
we are yearning just below that surface
to be reconnected again.
♪ Oh, I marched to the battle of New Orleans ♪
Two weeks after the marines landed at Da Nang,
members of the University of Michigan Faculty organized
a night-long discussion between professors
and some 3,000 students
about the escalation of the war.
I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, in March of 1965 had
one of the first teach-ins about the war
and it began in the anthropology department,
and my father was in the anthropology department,
and so our family was being pulled
in a lot of directions, just as my country was.
I was born in 1962.
As I was growing up, it was sort of in the background.
This big, important, and not good thing was happening,
and I could sense that all the adults
were concerned, talking about it,
but I really didn't understand what was going on.
And as I got older,
I began to sort of ask myself
what is this thing that was happening,
sort of overshadowing my whole childhood basically?
So we had a very different idea of patriotism,
so we began an era in which two groups
of Americans, both thinking
that they were acting patriotically,
went to war with each other.
Over 200,000 communist sympathizers
in that park this morning
tried to burn this flag, but they didn't succeed.
I think this film will help a lot.
It does show a very balanced view.
It shows the peace protestors had a very legitimate role
in that whole historical drama,
and that very brave 18-year-olds
went over to Vietnam and performed admirably
and that they have an important part in it.
You know, nothing is as simple as you'd like to think it is
when you're 19,
and this is a very mature documentary
that's looking at a lot of shades of gray,
and it's just the way the world is.
My mother and father were convinced that when
Ho Chi Minh and his government arrived in Hanoi,
my father would be the first one to be killed,
and all of us would be persecuted...
And I remember the day we left.
I looked around, and I thought,
"I'll never come back here again."
It was extremely traumatic.
It was... Like the ground
was suddenly cut from under you.
_
We've spent a decade trying to put our arms
around a hugely complicated and controversial event
in American history.
We didn't have an agenda,
we didn't have an ax to grind.
We had a story that we wanted to tell.
We think we're making this film at the perfect time
because the people who lived through it are very much alive,
very much aware of what they went through,
and at an age where they want to talk about it.
We hope that we might be some agency of healing
for the soldiers who lived through it
to take whatever slight burden
off the already immense burden they still carry.
I think we have tried to make a film
that everyone will be interested in watching,
whether you're 18 or 80,
whether you're a man or a woman,
whether your politics are left or right.
I think we want the film to inspire
a new conversation about the war,
but also, the film is asking a lot of questions,
and we don't pretend to answer them.
We just want to throw those questions out
for our country to think about again.
I've been to the wall, um, more than once.
When I look back at the war
and, you know, think of the horrible things,
you know, we said to, you know, vets
who were returning, you know,
calling them baby killers and worse,
I've, you know... I... I feel very sad about that.
Um, I can only say that, you know, we were kids, too,
you know, just like they were.
Wars are so extraordinarily revealing,
obviously, of the worst of humanity,
but as it turns out, also the best of humanity.
As you dig deeper, as you go in and reach
into the lives of the people we spoke to,
you... you can understand new dimensions of courage
and new dimensions of heroism,
and it may not take place always,
in the case of this war, on the battlefield.
This is, without a doubt, the most ambitious project
that we have ever undertaken,
and I would probably suggest that this may be one
of the biggest undertakings of our network,
but the most important thing with regard to PBS
is that this is the only place it could have been done.
This was the only network on earth
that would have provided the bandwidth
to permit us to go in and study it as we have
over the last decade and come to terms
with a very complicated portrait.
I fear that there's a kind of national amnesia
about Vietnam, that we've erased the horror
of the kinds of mistakes that were made.
I think this film, at this point in history,
might be a terrific antidote to that.
To see these kids who had the least to gain,
there wasn't anything to look forward to;
they weren't gonna be rewarded for their service in Vietnam,
and yet their infinite patience,
their loyalty to each other,
their courage under fire
was just phenomenal,
and you would ask yourself,
"How does America produce young men like this?"
- Synced and corrected by chamallow - - www.addic7ed.com -