Vietnam:Television History

Rating:
Summary: This is visual war history without precedent
Review: After seeing the series, one by one, and every which way, I can only come to the conclusion: unparalleled history. Only a doctrinere bigot and a mad-dog at that, would see how it tries to be balanced-- any rational being would see as America's greatest surrender and tragedy--so far--the Irag debacle is still underweigh. Of course, one is expected to read more, to not think this is the last word on the Vietnam War. How ridiculous! Previewed in 1983, no one should think there should be more evidence presented. Only in time, well-tested opinions and with all the evidence in, can a clear perspective be seen of the whole. I lived in that era, the Nixon era to be exact, when I understood what was happening. Before which, in my teens and brought up in rural Maine, I thought America could not be wrong, the government was right, Communionist were evil haters of our way of life. When I understood, I was against. But I was not all the way, my disagreement was fully conditional. It was Watergate and finally Reagan that made me see my intuition against the Vietnam War was right. It was not a good feeling. I did not want to think it was all in vein. I did not want to accept the inevitable. This documentary is the best balanced visual history of its kind on a post-WW2 (cold gone hot) war, from the first misunderstand to the last revisionist spin.

Rating:
Summary: Two episodes missing
Review: Check out the running time of the DVD package (660 minutes), and that of the VHS tapes (780 minutes). Unbelievable!

Rating:
Summary: A compilation masterpiece
Review: Do not worry about the 2 missing episodes...This series is so supurb that it could miss another 2 episodes and still get 5 stars!

I watched this in 2001 on PBS television (they only showed 11 episdodes too) and when it came on DVD I had to get it.

Yeah there are 2 commercials before each episode - tacky I know but with dvd its very easy to fast forward and get to the program....

Bottom line is that this documentary was put together in scope and timeline with the footage, interviews and narration that is second to none.....I particalarly liked the episode that focused on ziem and how the US gave the go ahead to assasinate him....

The end of the tunnel episode really captures the essence of a country being overrun and conquered by the enemy - the panic, chaos and deterioration of the chain of command was depicted with great insight and passion.

Every episode is interesting and there are no "boring" moments...all the footage and interviews tell an interesting story about the war....its almost like watching a drama series and waiting to see what happens next episode.

Don't let the negative reviews about the missing 2 episodes detract you....the 11 that are on this DVD are a masterpiece on the Vietnam WAR.

The Walter Cronkite Vietnam war is the only other vietnam documentary that can even get close to this one....

Rating:
Summary: Beware! 2 out of 13 episodes have been taken out!
Review: I am a fan of this series and when I found out that the DVD was out I immediately purchased it. Unfortunately, I was completely let down. There were way too many commercials and the 4 dvds only comprise of 11 hours as oppose to the 13 hours of the original series. The original series had 13 episode but the dvd version only has 11 episodes. They are missing episode 13 which is suppose to be titled "Legacies". This was an extremely important episode that should not have been taken out because it was the final conclusion. It's like watching a movie and missing the last showdown. There is also another episode that was taken out but I don't remember which one.

Rating:
Summary: Great reference tool!
Review: I had to rent this tape set for school as there was a college course on Vietnam, but decided to buy it instead! I am glad I did because I can pass this down to my daughter. It was an honest account of not only the war, but the history of the country as well, which I found interesting! Worth the money!

Rating:
Summary: Great reference tool!
Review: I had to rent this tape set for school as there was a college course on Vietnam, but decided to buy it instead! I am glad I did because I can pass this down to my daughter. It was an honest account of not only the war, but the history of the country as well, which I found interesting! Worth the money!

Rating:
Summary: The War in Vietnam.
Review: I rarely watch television but I have made an exception for this wonderful series of PBS shows about the war in Vietnam. This series ranks up there with Ken Burns Civil War and the BBC World at War. This covers the war in Vietnam from all angles. Not only is the French war included, but the interlude when North and South Vietnam were separated. Of course, the concentration is where it should be--the American involvement in a difficult and costly war. The one gripe I have is many of the GIs were from the Boston area (including John Kerry), and so one didn't get a snapshot of the entire country.
One moment I remembered is when the story is recounted of Marines storming into a South Vietnamese villiage. At least one and possibly more villagers were shooting at the Marines and killed some. When the Marines entered into the village, they tossed grenades into occupied houses, and shot villiagers. From the Vietnamese perspective, the villagers were just innocents going about their everyday existence, and no one mentions the armed villagers killing Marines. From the Marines perspective, somebody killed their friends and someone was gong to pay. This demonstrates the fog of war.
I was young when this war was going on, but even now it is a controversial subject to discuss with anybody. I really did disagree with some of those being interviewed, and can see why the Vietnam War is still difficult to discuss today. However if one sees the DVD, one has a better idea of the subject and why it was such a hot topic.
After seeing this DVD and reading Karnow's book, I now better understand the Vietnam War. This is truly a must see, for those wanting to better understand why the United States got itself into such a difficult war. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Big Disappointment
Review: I was a huge fan of this series when it first aired on PBS in 1983 and I taped the whole thing. So when it came out on DVD I thought I'd invest in the new format, seeing as my tapes were now 20 years old and I wanted to be able to watch it again and share it with others without fear of it disintegrating.

Boy, was I in for a letdown. First of all, this edition is loaded with commercials. That's right, commercials. That was the last thing I expected to see on an expensive DVD set. But no, every episode is prefaced with no less than 2 commercials: one for Liberty Mutual and one for the Scott lawn care company. I could have lived with a brief mention of the companies that funded the series, but not only are these full-blown commercials, they aren't even the companies that funded the making of the series! WGBH has sold commercial time to companies who had nothing to do with the making of this docmentary. If that weren't enough, we get to see the same commercials at the end of every episode, followed by a plug for PBS. I paid $60 for this???

But the most shocking thing about this set is that it's been edited down from the original series. I couldn't believe it. I haven't had a chance to compare every episode on the DVD set with my old tapes, but there is a segment near the end of episode 1 that has been deleted. In the original episode 1, a French colonel being interviewed about Dien Bien Phu talks about the end of the infamous seige and refers to the Viet Minh as "Red Termites". This has been lopped off the DVD version. I can only dismay at the thought of other expurgations. Was it purged for political correctness or to make room for the commercials? I can't say. I don't yet know if the other episodes are similarly truncated, but in my opinion none of them should have been. This series is too important to let commercial expediency diminish its journalistic integrity.

Thank goodness I still have my old tapes. Now I think I will digitize them onto DVD so I can preserve the work in the form the film maker intended.

Rating:
Summary: MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE LIES
Review: This has to be one of the most flagrantly biased and dishonest documentaries ever to air on American television. It is a non-stop marathon of philo-totalitarianism, apologetics for tyranny, whitewashing of mass murder, and outright lies, such as claiming the Khmer Rouge were American supported. (They only recieved American assistance when they were out of power and a small part of an ad hoc group of armed bands harassing the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia; during their oft-denied - by anti-war leftists like Noam Chomsky - autogenocide of millions of their own citizens, the Khmer Rouge were squarely in the communist bloc.) There is an excellent overview of some of the - failed - attempts by other filmmakers to provide balance or rebuttal to this ugly piece of work in the book PBS:BEHIND THE SCREEN, which is highly recommended to anyone who wants an objective look at how public broadcasting conducts itself. This film is more than bad, it is a morally vile apologia for the tyrannical subjugation of an entire country and the murder or exile of well over a million people, and the demonization of those - American and Vietnamese alike - who sought to prevent precisely that eventuality. This film is the moral equivalent of Holocaust denial, and ought to viewed as such by anyone who watches it.

Rating:
Summary: caution about reviewer's advice
Review: This series is not solid history. There are two essential facts you must get right to start with in order to interpret the Vietnam war. First you must understand who Ho Chi Minh was and second you must understand the nature of the Geneva Conference of 1954. Third, in order to understand why the U.S. lost one must be understand the critical importance of two decisions made during the administration of John Kennedy. First, the 1962 Geneva Accords which created the "facade of Geneva" and prevented the U.S. from selecting a winning strategy (i.e., cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail). See Norman Hannah's book, "The Key to Failure: Laos the Vietnam War." Second, you must understand the unethical decision made by the Kennedy administration in backing the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem that resulted in his assasination and a deeper immersion of the U.S. into the military government we created without even knowing the makeup of the characters in it. Read "A Death in November: American in Vietnam, 1963" by Ellen Hammer. The point is the war is hugely complex and the video series is not. It is extremely biased, Ho Chi Minh, a dedicated international communist is the hero! and the U.S. is the villain. The
It is only in video 13 that the producers discover that the communists are bad guys and it is a belated discovery! So they killed one third of the population in Cambodia, subjected Vietnam to hellish re-education/prison camps and produced millions of deaths, not to mention two million or so boat people who fled the country. This is the regime of a nationalist? But they constantly produce a dialog heavy in ideology, communist ideology. Perhaps that is a concidence, like their land reform program that killed off the landlord class or their police state. Just coincidences I am sure, after all, Uncle Ho was a nationalist wasn't he? The video series never takes the trouble to examine the Soviet Union or Communist China's role in the Vietnam war in any depth. It is as if all of history is understood by psychoanalysis of the what goes on in Washington. I use this series in the classroom to teach students how to detect bias in a badly flawed historical series and while there is some good history in it, there is far too much that is poorly done and now, outdated, given new information. Even communist histories belie some of the points made in the series. Hanoi now admits that planning for the war in the South began in 1956 and was well along in 1959, when the 15th Party Plenum ordered armed struggle in the South to begin. For example, Communist Party Politburo member Le Duan was responsible for the formation of 37 guerilla companies by October 1957. The respected Soviet diplomat, Andre Gromyko, said of Joseph Stalin in his Memoirs, "it seems to me that the nature had endowed him with the ability to hide the harsh side of his character, and very effectively so. He also seems to have had the capacity to appear at times even gentle and sensitive to others. The conversations he had with some foreign personalities, especially writers, confirm this." These words could have written about the man who called himself "Ho Chi Minh" or "He who enlightens." His frail and gentle manner belie the harsh, ruthless man beneath the veneer. In fact, having studied him for many years, I would have to say he was one of the greatest actors of the twentieth century and one of its most evil men. The key to understanding him lies in understanding what brought tears to his eyes. It was not the nation but rather Lenin's "thesis on national and colonial questions" which called for international communist liberation of oppressed peoples from colonialism. The trouble is so many fail to study this and therefore miss the import of Ho's ardor for the doctrine. Nationalism is the foe of internationalism and communism embraces only the latter. This is clear from Lenin's writings. Recommend you read Lenin! There is a video series that attempts to correct some of the errors (Television's Vietnam: The Real Story) in this one and although, it carries some biases of its own, it does help to bring out some of the worst features of this seris. It is put out by Accuracy in Media and is worth your effort to investigate if you are going to view this poorly done series. On the Tonkin Gulf incident, the Canadian series, the Ten Thousand Day War, is far superior. It seems American film makers are more enamored with Uncle Ho than his own people. Ask them if you don't believe me.