War is coming.
The Vietnam War, the 10-part, 18-hour documentary series from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, has just gotten its deployment orders from PBS.
It will run Sept. 17-21 and Sept. 24-28, one episode a night. PBS will then repeat it, one episode a week, from Oct. 3 to Nov. 28.
Burns and Novick have become PBS institutions for their long-form documentaries, which have tackled foundations of American life from the Civil War to the Dust Bowl, jazz and baseball.
Like past productions, this one has been in the planning and execution stages for a decade, give or take. It includes interviews with more than 100 witnesses, commentators and historians, plus copious footage from the most-photographed war in American history.
The Vietnam War also is likely to elicit a different kind of reaction than, say, the Civil War series, which was the most watched documentary in PBS history.
Many of the people who fought in the Vietnam War, or fought about it, are still alive, and many of the issues it raised remain raw.
It’s a war that had relatively widespread support when the U.S. made a full on-the-ground military commitment in 1964.
We were going to stop communism. That was an idea Americans could get behind.
By the time we left, a decade later, that same war was an embarrassment, something we wanted to leave behind.
Which we did, in 1975, after herding a last handful of desperate South Vietnamese onto helicopters as the victorious Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army poured into Saigon.
By that time Vietnam was already widely seen as a mistake, a terrible mistake that cost more than 58,000 American lives alongside hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.
But the “war we lost” image is as simplistic as the “stop communism” image had been, and the Burns-Novick team will be revisiting what happened during all those years of war, as well as the forces that led us into the war, the forces that finally helped usher us out of the war and the lessons we learned or didn’t learn in the aftermath.
We’ve made a number of efforts over the past 40-plus years to shove the Vietnam War into the past. President George H.W. Bush at one point formally declared it was behind us.
It wasn’t, and it isn’t, and it won’t be, at least until it becomes like the Civil War with no one left who was there at the time.
Just the ways we’ve responded to the war’s legacy, even when the response isn’t explicit, is telling.
After World War II, our most definitive and emphatic military victory since the Revolution, we elected a whole string of Presidents who had served in that war. Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (who served stateside after being turned down for overseas deployment), George H.W. Bush.
As time passed, three Vietnam veterans ran for president: Al Gore, John McCain and John Kerry. All three lost, and in the 2016 Republican primary Donald Trump openly sneered at McCain’s time as a prisoner of war, saying, “I like people who weren’t captured.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone saying that about a soldier who had been a prisoner during World War II.
Conversely, we’ve elected three presidents who were eligible for military service during the Vietnam era and never served there: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Trump.
Clearly Americans prefer wars that we won. So, presumably, do the people of most countries.
But now, ready or not, Burns, Novick and PBS have teed up the most exhaustive study to date on the nuts and bolts of a war we lost: what we said, what we didn’t say, what went right and what went wrong.
This much, it seems clear, is true: Any greater understanding, however nuanced or belated, is in itself a victory.