if you lived through it, you'll find lots of stuff left out Many years of war and dimwitted politicians. Finally documented on-screen--long after the perpetrators are all dead, and many of their victims too.
Before the war got going, people assumed that America was one point of view--mostly defined by the magazines, newspapers and movies: --factories, CocaCola, John Wayne, unquestioned racism and superior military might.
That was never true--America did not fragment during the war--the war just brought those fissures and fragments to the surface. The Baby Boom, the Generation Gap was part of it. But much more, regional, educational, economic, rural, urban, back, white, suburban, urban. These divisions and tensions were bound to come out during a decade of an unwinnable war. But it was quite an upheaval.
ALL the American politicians in this Ken Burns documentary come across as basically ignorant, egotistical and paranoid fools. The footage and recordings of Johnson especially, and the "best and brightest" of his JFK-LBJ cabinet.
Vietnam was basically a RELIGIOUS war--it was based on beliefs and assumptions--military strategy that would not work, the goal of 'fighting communism" as imposed onto the nation of Vietnam. And the easy expendability of American lives, young and black and white.
The protesters believed that they were fighting to stop the 'crimes against humanity' that they'd seen in all the World War II documentaries about the Nazis--these same crimes now being committed by the US.
The government countered these criticisms by saying that these anti-war youths were lazy, and cowardly and privileged, and "nervous nellies"--to use an LBJ phrase. And "campus bums" to quote Richard Nixon.
We can say today that more returning Vietnam Vets have died from suicide after the war than died in combat during the war. But today, the suicide rate of returning US soldiers is much much higher than that.
Here in this election year of 2024 we may be seeing all these divisions returning and another right-wing lying administration taking over all our lives.