The Vietnam Wars

I found the 9th and 10th episodes to  be the most egregiously wrong and sometimes disgusting.

For example:

The war criminal who participated in Operation Phoenix, a massive, illegal action within an illegal war, that killed somewhere far more than the 20 thousand Vietnamese, supported his actions–and is now a judge.

William Colby led Phoenix, remained respectable, and became head of the CIA. Later, he revealed the “Family Jewels.” http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=1659

Among the Jewels, but left out of Burns’ Vietnam, was Cointelpro, an intelligence operation that included murder, drugging unsuspecting people, black propaganda, targeting radicals and leftist in the US. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/washington/26cia-timeline.html

The hysteric MD who was held as a POW was, indeed, a war criminal, as were the bomber pilots.

The notion that people living in the South, under the US’ created and controlled puppet government were “freer” than those in the North is preposterous (as is the endlessly repeated lie that the North and South were real, separate and distinct countries–the north communists).

Obviously, for example, conscripts in the puppet Southern army did not want to be there, and fled when they could. NLF and VC troops were overwhelmingly committed to the ideology the NLF leadership put forward–peasant nationalism with a small dose of “equality” that was, to a considerable degree, practiced in the Ho/Giap led military.

It’s simply wrong to overplay a divide between Ho Chi Minh, Giap, and Le Duan.

The only fundamental truth presented in episode nine: We were fighting on the wrong side.

Episode ten was, notably, worse.

There is no mention of the reparations promised to Vietnam, but never paid.

There is no Long Binh prison uprising. Prisons to hold GI’s who disobeyed (illegal within a illegal war) orders were jailed all of the south, but the biggest jail was Long Binh where forced labor and torture in sweat boxes was common. The prison was overcrowded: nearly 750 men in a jail built for 400. The prison was known, famously, as LBJ.

In August, 1968 (after Tet, the murder of Dr King, Kennedy, urban uprisings all over the US) the Long Binh prisoners, not surprisingly mostly black, rebelled. The uprising lasted more than a week. The jail was destroyed. More than 100 court martials were levied. After the uprising, which received nearly no mention in the US press, conditions improved at Long Binh.

On a parallel note, there is no mention of the thousands of “bad conduct” discharges the US services handed out, effectively destroying the lives of, mostly, draftees–most of them suffering from PTSD. It was not until 2014 that the US government began to re-think that policy and offer some of those living a re-examination.

What George Schmidt has rightly called a “general strike” of US troops, is grossly underplayed, setting aside the profoundly political, and passionate, underpinnings of the actions. See the film, “Sir No Sir,” online at

The Vietnamese did, as per Burns, invade Cambodia in the late seventies. They did so to stop the Khmer Rouge, authors of the “Killing Fields,” that is, the murder of about 2 million Cambodians, from continuing their deadly policies.

That the Khmer Rouge came into existence because of the US bombing of Cambodia, and the fact that the US paid for and supported the Khmer Rouge as they later conducted a guerrilla war against Vietnam for more than 20 years, is wiped out.

The idea that today Vietnam’s country side is for the most part alright was contradicted moments later by the narrator offering a side note indicating the country is littered with unexploded ordinance and land destroyed by Agent Orange–set aside the tens of thousands of wounded and disabled Vietnamese.

The focus on US’ MIA’s, which leaves the matter up in the air–is without any basis. The US long ago admitted there are none, and further, that Vietnam had made every effort to locate bodies of US soldiers.

Highlighting US senators John Kerry (cold warrior, hot warrior, political war criminal), John McCain (bomber pilot–see above) and especially Bob Kerry who wrote that as a leader of Navy Seals, he found killing Vietnamese civilians like drowning cats. https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/06/bob-kerreys-return-to-vietnam-like-drowning-cats/

Absent in Burns is the indisputable fact that tens of thousands of young Americans became radicals during the war in Vietnam, reading Marx, Lenin, Lukacs, Mao, Sun Tzu, Giap, and many others. Some developed a fairly sophisticated analysis of capitalism, imperialism, racism, and later, sexism. Perhaps one in fifty never gave up. But the ideas remain and proliferate, despite Burns’ (and American education) efforts to obliterate them.

Then, we had to have the return of a parallel to the “spat upon veteran” myth. A woman says, “I am sorry for calling you baby killers.”

While there may have been a few people who abused vets, there is NO evidence they were spat upon. Importantly, the people who abused them were government officials, especially at the Veterans’ Administration, but throughout the government, into the economic class (as with Trump, today–and the Savings and Loans bailouts, the 2008 bailouts–the absence of decent jobs when they returned, and much more.

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Witless patriotism, particularly in regard to the Vietnam Wall fetish, is written all over every aspect of Burns’ work, on both sides.

The conclusion, a rendering of the billionaire Beatles’ John Lennon’s song, “Let it Be,” is exactly what should not happen in a nation writhing in color coded inequality and promising endless war, led by political, economic, and military classes who are simply not fit to lead anything.

Reconciliation with what is now a fascist state? Hell No.

Read Marx. Make class war versus the empire. The Vietnamese proved we could, all, win.