Jonathan Mirsky

BBC4’s The Vietnam War was unique, informative and shattering

The Vietnam War
BBC4

The BBC should be praised for showing all ten episodes of this unique, informative and shattering American series on the Vietnamese war, despite screening eight fewer hours than in the original. Before each episode the BBC warned that ‘some viewers may find some scenes upsetting’. Which ones? A frog jumping in a pool of blood from the head of a dead Vietcong (NLF) fighter? The Saigon police chief shooting a prisoner in the head? The American colonel offering a case of whiskey to the first man to bring him the severed head of an enemy soldier? Which he gets. The eager US soldier on his first day in Vietnam noticing strings of what he thought were leaves, which he realised were the ears of dead enemies? (In Vietnam I saw marines wearing necklaces made of ears.) The My Lai massacre of 407 women, men, and children in a village with no enemy opposition? Or, most telling, the American corporal describing how he had entered a black hole looking for enemy soldiers. He smelled someone’s breath, they grappled in he dark, and he broke his adversary’s thorax. ‘The other casualty was the civilized part of me.’

Working for ten years, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick used often violent film footage, interviews with veteran fighters from both sides, all of them now old, in which some of the north Vietnamese and NLF veterans refer to the horrors of killing. Much here will remind viewers of Iraq, where Washington looked away as Saddam Hussein was murdered by his own side, just as Saigon’s President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu, who had been installed by Washington, were executed by their own army – for which President Kennedy later apologised. Also familiar will be presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon lying to the public about how well the war was going when they knew victory was an illusion.

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