ESCALATION U.S. Army helicopters provide cover fire for South Vietnamese ground troops attacking the Vietcong, March 1965

By DAVID KAMP

W ill there ever be a “right” time for Americans to talk about Vietnam? The nation’s involvement there began as an ill-considered but contextually understandable effort by Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to come to the aid of an ally, France, as it battled the restive, independence-hungry population of a land it had colonized, and to prevent the spread of Communism, which was then considered the most pernicious threat to the American way of life. But by the time John F. Kennedy was president, the French were well out of the picture, having been routed at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, and Vietnam was America’s headache. Cut to 1975 and the ignominious sight of evacuees being lifted by chopper from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon: a lasting image of American humiliation.

In the years since, the Vietnam War has periodically been the subject of waves of cinematic reckoning—in the late 70s, with such films as Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now, and again in the late 80s, with such films as Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War, and Born on the Fourth of July.

A reckoning of a different sort came in 2004, when John Kerry’s presidential campaign was targeted in a series of TV ads by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group ostensibly organized to call into question Kerry’s wartime rec ord as a decorated navy officer but in truth motivated by lingering anger over Kerry’s postservice years as an outspoken anti-war activist.

Each of these reckonings prompted agonized debate and begat a kind of reckoning fatigue, a feeling of O.K., O.K., we get it: the Vietnam War messed people up and divided our nation and is a stain on our history—let’s drop the subject. But by 2006, when the filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick were finishing up their World War II documentary series, The War, they felt that the timing was right for them to take a crack at Vietnam. For one thing, they had found themselves racing against the clock with their World War II subjects, talking to veterans in their 80s and 90s, and realized that it would behoove them to reach out to Vietnam vets sooner rather than later. For another, they believed that enough time may have elapsed for tempers to have cooled and for perspective to have been gained. Burns and Novick also surmised, correctly, that their Vietnam proj ect would carry them well into the following decade, by which time the crucial years of the war would be a half-century in the past.

Now, at long last, comes The Vietnam War, more than 10 years in the making. The series premieres on PBS on September 17, its 10 episodes totaling a whopping 18 hours. Burns first rose to national prominence in 1990, with his documentary The Civil War, an exhaustive examination of what remains—at press time, at least—our nation’s darkest hour. But The Vietnam War, in scope and sensitivity, is the most ambitious and fraught proj ect Burns has ever taken on. “Nothing compares to this film in terms of that daily sense of obligation, of responsibility, coupled with the possibility for art and expression,” he told me when I sat down with him and Novick recently in the Midtown Manhattan offices of WNET, New York City’s flagship public-TV station.

Novick added, “There’s no agreement among scholars, or Americans or Vietnamese, about what happened: the facts, let alone whose fault, let alone what we’re supposed to make of it.”

Burns was conscious from the outset, he said, of what he wanted to avoid: the “old tropes and invented tropes” of Hollywood’s Vietnam movies, and also the “avuncular Monday-morning quarterbacking” from historians and scholars who have never set foot in Vietnam. He was equally wary of including veterans whose postwar years in public life might have rewired them to speak in practiced sound bites rather than freshly from the heart—people such as Kerry and John McCain, each of whom has been his party’s nominee for president. Early on in their process, Burns and Novick met with the two men to get their input and guidance, but in the end told them that they would not be interviewed on-camera, because they were, as Burns put it, “too radioactive.”

So when Kerry, McCain, Henry Kis sin ger, and Jane Fonda appear in The Vietnam War, they do so only in period footage. (And there is no mention whatsoever of a certain U.S. president who once jocularly described his efforts to avoid sexually transmitted diseases in his single years as “my personal Vietnam.”) The film’s 79-person roster of talking heads— the people interviewed directly by Burns and Novick’s crew—is composed of figures not generally well known to the public, all of them offering firsthand accounts of their wartime experience. This roster includes veterans of the U.S. armed forces (including P.O.W.’s), former diplomats, a Gold Star mother, an anti-war pro test or gan iz er, an army deserter who fled to Canada, and journalists who covered the war, such as Neil Sheehan, of The New York Times, and Joe Galloway, of United Press International. It also includes South Vietnamese veterans and civilians, and, most strikingly, former enemy combatants: Vietcong guerrillas and North Vietnamese Army regulars, now gray and grandfatherly (or grandmotherly), many of whom showed up for on-camera interviews in their old uniforms, gaudy yellow epaulets on their shoulders.

I watched the whole series in a marathon viewing session a few days before meeting with the filmmakers—a knock-you-sideways experience that was as enlightening as it was emotionally taxing. For all their unguarded anxiety about doing the war justice, Burns and Novick have pulled off a monumental achievement. Audiovisually, the documentary is like no other Burns-branded undertaking. Instead of folksy sepia and black-and-white, there are vivid jadegreen jungles and horrific blooms of napalm that explode into orange and then gradually turn smoky black. The Vietnam War was the first and last American conflict to be filmed by news organizations with minimal governmental interference, and the filmmakers have drawn from more than 130 sources for motion-picture footage, including the U.S. networks, private home-movie collections, and several archives administered by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The series’s depiction of the Tet offensive, in which the North Vietnamese launched coordinated attacks on the South’s urban centers, is particularly and brutally immersive, approaching a 360-degree experience in its deft stitching together of footage from various sources.

Most of the footage that Burns, Novick, and their crew had to work with was soundless. To make up for this, they layered certain battle scenes with up to 150 tracks of sound. (As Burns recalled, “We went out in the woods with AK-47s and M16s and shot up pumpkins and squash and stuff.”) They also commissioned blipping, pulsing electronic mood music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which they complemented with more organic contributions from the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. Then there’s all that popular music from the 60s and 70s: more than 120 songs by the artists who actually sound tracked the times, such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Animals, Janis Joplin, Wilson Pickett, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, the Rolling Stones, and even the ordinarily permissions-averse and budget-breaking Beatles. Of the Beatles, Novick noted, “They basically said, We think this is an important part of history, we want to be part of what you’re doing, and we will take the same deal everybody else gets. That’s kind of unprecedented.”

In terms of content, The Vietnam War, written by the historian Geoffrey C. Ward and narrated by Peter Coyote, is rich, revelatory, and scrupulously evenhanded. It succeeds in large part by not being reductive or succinct—by being, in fact, rather overstuffed, a lot to take in. (The documentary will be available for streaming via PBS’s app, which will be useful not only to cord-cutters but also to viewers keen, as I was, to revisit earlier episodes after having watched later ones.) Even so, Burns said, he and Novick “spent a lot of time subtracting—subtracting commentary, subtracting an adjective that might put a thumb on the scale” in terms of bias. By dint of its thoroughness, its fairness, and its pedigree, The Vietnam War is as good an occasion as we’ve ever had for a levelheaded national conversation about America’s most divisive foreign war. It deserves to be, and likely will be, the rare kind of television that becomes an event.

IN A RECORDED

PHONE CALL, L.B.J. LAMENTED, “THERE A IN’T NO DAYLIGHT IN VIETNAM.”

By a quirk of historical fate, the series is airing just as America is living through its most polarized period since the late 60s and early 70s, the hair-trigger years depicted in the documentary’s latter half. One of the veterans interviewed, Phil Gioia, observes, “I think the Vietnam War drove a stake right into the heart of America? Unfortunately, we’ve never moved really far away from that. And we never recovered.”

Many an episode in the documentary finds an echo in the pres ent: massive marches on Washington; document dumps of internal government memos; the pitting of the “hard hat” workingman against the collegeeducated elites; even a presidential campaign reaching out to a foreign power during an election. As was also confirmed this year in John A. Farrell’s biography Richard Nixon: The Life, candidate Nixon, running against Hubert Humphrey, tried to scuttle the peace talks that Lyndon Johnson was orchestrating in the autumn of ’68 by sending a back-channel message to the South Vietnamese leadership: a more favorable deal awaited them under a Nixon presidency. Johnson, when he got wind of Nixon’s scheme, called it “treason.”

Burns, while aware of these parallels, cautions against making too much of them. “Just as the initial impulse to do this was uninformed by some cultural Zeitgeist going on in 2006–2007,” he said, “so, too, was our production consciously, religiously, not going to set up a neon sign that says, ‘Hey, isn’t this a lot like Afghanistan? Isn’t this a lot like Iraq?’ ” As a long-view historian, he is accustomed to finding modern-day resonance in every story his films tell, simply because, he explained, “there is a universality to human experience.”

That said, The Vietnam War is instructive in showing us how we got to where we are now—reflexively cynical about our leaders, quick to take sides—because the war itself marked an inflection point. Early in the series, a thoughtful, soft-spoken veteran named John Musgrave relates how he grew up in a Missouri town where virtually all the adult men he knew, from his father to his teachers, were World War II vets, revered for their service. With the scourge of Communism threatening Southeast Asia in the 60s, he simply figured it was his turn, and he dutifully joined the Marines. “We were probably the last kids of any generation,” he says in the documentary, “that actually believed our government would never lie to us.”

Watching the first half of The Vietnam War is akin to being the narrator of Delmore Schwartz’s short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” a young man who, in a dream, watches a film of his parents’ courtship playing on a movie screen and is moved to stand up in the theater and shout, “Don’t do it! … Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal.” The war’s outcome is fixed, but one winces nevertheless every time John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or the defense secretary who served them both, Robert S. McNamara, ignores or rejects a plausible exit strategy. By 1966, when even the seasoned Cold Warrior George F. Kennan, the originator of the containment policy, which sought to limit the expansion of Soviet influence, offers a sensible cut-bait-and-get-out rationale to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on live television—“I have a fear,” he says, “that our thinking about this whole problem is still affected by some sort of illusions about invincibility on our part”—you can’t help but think, fruitlessly and irrationally, Well, that ought to settle it.

Burns and Novick make good use of archival audiovisual material to illustrate just how dishonest U.S. leaders were with the American people about the war. In a bit of proto– Bill Clintonesque linguistic evasion, Kennedy tells a gaggle of reporters, “We have not sent combat troops in the generally understood sense of the word,” even though, over the course of his truncated presidency, the number of U.S. military advisers who were providing equipment and training to the South Vietnamese rose from 685 to 16,000, and many of these advisers joined their advisees in fighting against the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. Lyndon Johnson, even as he is escalating American involvement and committing actual ground troops, confides his doubts to Senator Richard Russell, of Georgia, in a recorded phone call, lamenting, “There ain’t no daylight in Vietnam.” Kissinger, in a recorded conversation with Nixon in 1971, strategizes with the president about how to postpone the fall of Saigon, by then seen as inevitable, until after the ’72 election. “I’m being very coldblooded about it,” Kissinger says.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID BURNETT

This would all make for mordant political comedy—Johnson, so astute at legislative horse trading but tragically out of his depth in foreign policy, is particularly colorful, a volcano of Foghorn Leghorn fulmination—were it not for the human cost of these men’s actions: more than 58,000 Americans dead, more than three million Vietnamese dead (combining fighters from the North and South, plus civilians killed), and the many more who survived but were left with enduring wounds both physical and psychological. And that’s where the veterans come in. Burns and Novick introduce them slowly and situationally, here and there sharing anecdotes of enlisting or patrolling or surviving an ambush. It’s not immediately evident which speakers will appear with regularity as the episodes pro gress. But cumulatively, over time, a few emerge both as engaging storytellers and as extraordinary stories themselves, their wartime trajectories subjecting them to a range of complicated experiences that they still puzzle over.

The most compelling figure in this regard— I hesitate to call a conflicted Vietnam vet a future fan favorite, though I suspect he will captivate viewers the way that the hominy-toned historian Shelby Foote did in The Civil War— is John Musgrave. It would be spoiling things to reveal what he goes through, but he speaks with remarkable candor and eloquence about the terror he felt, the despair he fell into, and the pride he still takes in having served his country. I expressed my admiration of him to Burns, who shares it. “I have this recurring thought that, if some evil genie took away all our interviews but one, the one we would keep would be John Musgrave, and we’d make a different film and call it The Education of John Musgrave,” he said.

When I spoke to Musgrave on the phone— he is now a retiree who lives outside Lawrence, Kansas—I realized why he so connects: while all of the vets featured in The Vietnam War have sharp recall, Musgrave also has uncommonly immediate access to the emotions he felt as a young man. In 1967 he was an 18-year-old stationed in Con Thien—a muddy Marine combat base near the demilitarized zone—which took heavy shelling from the North Vietnamese Army. “I’m still scared of those guys,” he said, his voice quavering, when I asked him what he thought of Burns and Novick’s inclusion of North Vietnamese soldiers in the documentary.

“Scared of them in the abstract,” I asked, “or scared of them as they look in the film, as gray-haired men?”

“I’m scared of the ones who are the age that they were back then—the ones who are in my nightmares,” he said matter-of-factly. Both in the film and in conversation with me, he mentioned that he still fears darkness and sleeps with a night-light on. Yet, of the North Vietnamese old-timers who appear onscreen, he said, “I would consider it an honor to sit down with them and talk, rifleman to rifleman. They were hellaciously good soldiers. I just wish they hadn’t been so good.”

Musgrave acknowledged that, to some degree, The Vietnam War will stir things up again, reviving the usual debates and dissension. “We’re hypersensitive,” said Musgrave of his Vietnam-vet cohort. “I’ll probably take some heat for some of the things I said.”

Yet he and another featured veteran with whom I spoke, Roger Harris, expressed hope that the larger impact of the documentary will be positive and reparative—both in changing how Americans regard those who served in Vietnam and in imparting lessons for our own noisy, rancorous times. Harris, another Marine who happened to serve in Con Thien (though in a different unit—he and Musgrave don’t know each other), got the double shaft from his countrymen upon his return from his 13-month tour of duty. A poor black kid from the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, he joined up out of a combination of patriotism and cool pragmatism—“ If I live, I’ll be able to get a job when I get back, and if I die, my mother will get $10,000 and be able to buy a house,” he recalled thinking—but at Logan International Airport, after a 30-hour homecoming trip, he couldn’t get a cab to pick him up. “And then, when we came home, we were ostracized, called baby-killers,” he said. “We were never called heroes. And so Ken and Lynn are telling the story, and maybe some folks will be a little more sensitive in understanding what we experienced.”

The “baby-killer” slur—the way anti-war protesters lumped in all U.S. servicemen with the small number who perpetrated such atrocities as the My Lai massacre of 1968—is an ongoing source of hurt. Harris and Musgrave never experienced the “Thank you for your service” courtesy afforded current U.S. military personnel. Still, said Musgrave, he has observed a slow turning in this regard, “with those who were alive in that period realizing that they made the horrible mistake of blaming the warrior for the war.” He suspects that the documentary, in laying out the story in such multifaceted detail, will further this process. “With knowledge comes healing,” he said, “and I can’t imagine that this isn’t going to begin a conversation that will be less bitter than the ones of the past.”

The timing of The Vietnam War might prove fortunate. The film reminds us that, not so very long ago, Americans lived through an era of seemingly irreconcilable tensions and strains. It was the beginning, predating Watergate, of the erosion of our faith in the presidency, and of the spurious debate over who among us is truly a patriot and what constitutes being a “real” American. “I’m hoping,” said Musgrave, “that the current generation will recognize themselves and realize that this struggle has been going on a long time. And they should never dehumanize those that they are working against. But I think the most sacred duty of every citizen is to stand up and say no to our government when it does something that we believe is not in our nation’s best interest.”

Harris, too, is keen for The Vietnam War to find an audience among younger viewers. After the war, he went on to have a distinguished career as a teacher and administrator in Boston’s public-school system, and spearheaded a mandatory Mandarin program for kindergartners in the city’s largest elementary school, developing partnerships with Chinese schools in the process. “So I’ve been traveling back and forth to China for about six years, and I meet these beautiful little Chinese kids,” he said. “And when I return to Boston, looking at these beautiful little American kids, it concerns me that 10, 15 years from now these same kids could be fighting each other based on the politics of some policymaker. I hope that when people watch this film they realize that war is not the answer. That war should be the last thing that we do.”

BURNS WAS CONSCIOUS OF

AVOIDING “THE OLD TROPES AND INVENTED TROPES” OF HOLLYWOOD’S VIETNAM.