The documentary is well worth watching just for the film footage from the American war in Vietnam in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The narration is very curious. If someone told me it was written and recorded in 1967, I would totally believe that. It's filled with all of that false positivity in the assessments of America's "progress" in its undeclared war in Vietnam that filled the airwaves during the war, particularly documentaries about the war at that time.
To believe the narration, one would think the American military prevailed in Vietnam within one or two years, rather than being slowly, inexorably ravaged for nearly two decades.
"Huts positively identified as V. C. (Viet Cong; enemy) are burned to the ground." Just one of many patently false statements in this doc series. I've been reading about and watching documentaries about the American war in Vietnam for forty years. The American grunts wreaked destruction wherever they went, burning and killing indiscriminately. Not every last grunt, but enough to carve a path of destruction that has been remembered for fifty years.
I'm unsure if the narration is intended as satire, if it's mocking the blood-thirsty positivity of the time, if it was cobbled together from historical documents and presented unironically, but this is NOT the story of America's war in Vietnam.
Of course, not a word is mentioned of the 2,500 soldiers and airmen the Americans abandoned when they fled the country in defeat in 1973. The American war in Vietnam is an utterly disgraceful chapter in the country's history.
One oddity I found in the later installments of this series is the use of more modern American war footage to the Vietnam-era narration. Very strange. The Americans dropped dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia-double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II. And still they lost. With arrogant, ignorant, myopic military and political leadership, the average American grunt never had a chance.
The narration is very curious. If someone told me it was written and recorded in 1967, I would totally believe that. It's filled with all of that false positivity in the assessments of America's "progress" in its undeclared war in Vietnam that filled the airwaves during the war, particularly documentaries about the war at that time.
To believe the narration, one would think the American military prevailed in Vietnam within one or two years, rather than being slowly, inexorably ravaged for nearly two decades.
"Huts positively identified as V. C. (Viet Cong; enemy) are burned to the ground." Just one of many patently false statements in this doc series. I've been reading about and watching documentaries about the American war in Vietnam for forty years. The American grunts wreaked destruction wherever they went, burning and killing indiscriminately. Not every last grunt, but enough to carve a path of destruction that has been remembered for fifty years.
I'm unsure if the narration is intended as satire, if it's mocking the blood-thirsty positivity of the time, if it was cobbled together from historical documents and presented unironically, but this is NOT the story of America's war in Vietnam.
Of course, not a word is mentioned of the 2,500 soldiers and airmen the Americans abandoned when they fled the country in defeat in 1973. The American war in Vietnam is an utterly disgraceful chapter in the country's history.
One oddity I found in the later installments of this series is the use of more modern American war footage to the Vietnam-era narration. Very strange. The Americans dropped dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia-double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II. And still they lost. With arrogant, ignorant, myopic military and political leadership, the average American grunt never had a chance.
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