I just tried to watch the first episode of The Vietnam War, a new multi-episode documentary by American filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novik. I didn’t expect this documentary be good, but I am actually surprised now at how bad it really is.
The core of the problem of (at least the first episode of) this documentary is that it is entirely America-centric. It is based on a fantasy that the American government can determine the fate of world affairs, and that individual Americans can influence US government policy.
The “lesson” that the documentary seeks to teach is then that there are times when world affairs do not follow the standards of American ideals, and that this is because the US government does not listen to the good ideas of individual Americans.
Let’s call this the “Americans are so stupid” self-loathing narrative.
This narrative is omnipresent in the first episode of The Vietnam War. There are the obvious “Americans are so stupid” examples of President Wilson not meeting with Hồ Chí Minh at Versailles in 1918 and President Truman not responding to Hồ Chí Minh’s letters in 1945/46.
However, the documentary introduces less well-known “Americans are so stupid” stories as well, such as the story of OSS (Office of Strategic Services) officer Peter Dewey.
Dewey was station in Saigon in 1945 when the British were there disarming the Japanese after the end of World War II. According to The Vietnam War, Dewey could tell that the Vietnamese really wanted independence, and he encouraged the British commander to not suppress that desire.
Tragically, however, this clear-sighted American was killed on 26 September 1945 when he was driving to the airport by Vietnamese nationalists, the very people whom he supposedly supported.
Again, what is the lesson here? It is that there are Americans who have good ideas who are not listened to, and that this directly affects world affairs. If only Peter Dewey had been taken seriously in 1945. . . everything that happened after that point could have been avoided. . .
That, as I said, is a fantasy. But there is something much more sinister about the depiction in The Vietnam War of Peter Dewey as a kind of American martyr, because after Dewey met his tragic death, there were multiple Vietnamese who were killed by Americans, but that is not even mentioned.
As he was driving in a jeep to the airport, Dewey was accompanied by a certain Captain Herbert J. Bluechel. Bluechel was not hit by the gunfire that killed Dewey, and in the aftermath of Dewey’s death, Bluechel fought back against the Vietnamese who had killed Dewey, Vietnamese, again, who were fighting for the independence that Dewey supposedly supported.
To quote from an affidavit that Bluechel made (and which can be found in a mouse-click from The Vietnam Virtual Archive at Texas Tech University), Bluechel stated that,
“I grabbed the carbine and attempted to shoot at several annamese who were approaching me and firing rifles. Their route of approach was along route ‘D’ as marked on the sketch. The carbine jammed and I was forced to abandon it and depend on my pistol. I was fortunate in inflicting three hits on the annamese approaching along route ‘D’, causing the remaining to take cover.”
“I noticed 10 or 15 annamites making their way south on the road in the direction of the OSS headquarters, and realized they were attempting to cut me off from my only line of retreat. I fired several shots at them causing them to take cover.”
As Bluechel then made his way along a hedge towards OSS headquarters. He then states that “I reached the end of the hedge without being hit, and can certify that I did hit five of the pursing annamese.”
If those five were in addition to the three that he “hit” earlier, then that means that Bluechel had shot eight Vietnamese by this point.
There were five people at OSS headquarters when Bluechel arrived, and he states that he had them “placed at strategic places in and around the house and ordered them to fire at any armed annamese they saw firing at or approaching the house.”
He goes on to state that “For the next 20 or 30 minutes firing was brisk, and we inflicted many hits on the annamese who had deployed themselves on the golf course which extends to the front of the headquarters. I would estimate the attacking force to number approximately 50.”
The fighting continued until eventually the Vietnamese “raised a Red Cross flag and approached the golf course to our front to evacuate their dead and wounded.”
Peter Dewey is referred to on Wikipedia as “the first American fatality in French Indochina, killed during the 1945 Vietnamese uprising.” While that may be true, why aren’t the multiple Vietnamese who were killed by Americans that same day recognized?
Is that neglect to acknowledge the American killing of Vietnamese who desired independence in any way significant?
In the America-centric world of people like Ken Burns and Lynn Novik, it is clearly not significant at all. That is one reason, among many others, why their documentary, The Vietnam War, is a total disappointment.
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Haven’t seen the documentary but based on my impression from the trailer, the only things noteworthy are the general production quality and cinematography. However, everything else left much to be desired. Can’t understand how many Vietnamese are still in awe by this kind of knowledge production. Is there still an association between the West and the Objective or the Rational as viewed by the non-West and vice versa?
That might be true, but compared to what other options there are for entertaining historical documentary, this is as good as it gets for Vietnamese. It is, of course, an American production for an American audience, so it’s hard to demand otherwise, especially when Americans still feel the need to justify their continuing involvement abroad. Meanwhile, given the rift within the Vietnamese community, it’s hard to have a propaganda-free production, while I think it’s a long shot to expect the youth to take up the task.
The narration in this episode was really bad, but an historian who had some involvement with this project said that it is centered around interviews. The first episode was about the colonial period and the immediate postcolonial years. There aren’t many people around anymore who were adults at that time, so the interviews in this first episode were not all that insightful, with at least one exception: Duong Van Mai Elliot, the author of a family memoir (Sacred Willow). The interview with Duong Van Mai Elliot does bring in some complexity as she talks about how some members of her family joined the Viet Minh, while others didn’t; that the family was proud of the defeat of the French forces at Dien Bien Phu, but the fact that communists were killing rivals did not make people happy; and the narrator at this point used the term “civil war” to talk about how Vietnam was becoming divided at that time
It was surprising to hear the narrator say that, and that’s new for an American documentary on the Vietnam War. There was a big series produced in 1983 called Vietnam: A Television History. I need to go back and check to see what it said about that period, but I’m pretty sure it emphasized unity.
My point though is that it does indeed look like the interviews are what will be worth paying attention to.
It is quite interesting how the first episode of the 1983 series and its corresponding book briefly mentioned Vietnam’s pre-colonial history or at least the nationalist historiography of it. It mentioned how Vietnamese fighting among themselves is nothing new vis-a-vis Trinh-Nguyen in the 16th century or the Tay Son uprising but the Vietnamese people still regard themselves as one. Thus, the Vietnam War is a contemporary continuation of it but with international ideological dimensions. So yes, it did emphasise unity. The 1983 series made an effort in going slightly further back than the Ken Burns one, which has 1858 as its starting point.
The weirdest aspect of the first episode was intermixing American veterans interviews (who’d served in Vietnam in the 60’s) while the narrative went over the period from 1918-1950’s. They had nothing to do with that part of the story, the time jump was confusing, and given that most of the next 9 episodes will presumably deal with the experience of American’s in Vietnam in the 60’s and 70’s, it’s not like the series is likely to lack the opportunity to include those clips in a relevant context later.
I need to go back and watch it again, but I think that was trying to show that what Americans experienced had been experienced by others (the French) before.
In any case, someone on an email last commented that the first episode seems like an afterthought. It’s as though they completed the documentary and then realized, “Oh, wait! We need an introduction! We forgot the introduction!!!”
I was waiting to see if the conclusion somehow reinforced the introduction, but it didn’t seem like it did. The conclusion mainly tries to say that the one thing we can appreciate is the experiences of the individual people who lived during that time. I don’t remember that being the gist of the introduction, but again, I need to go watch it again.
Dommen writes about Dewey and Bluechel in “The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam”. On page 128, he claims 10 Vietnamese were killed. His footnote (no. 61) cites the same affadavit and another document: “Affidavit of Captain Herbert J. Bluechel, October 13, 1945, printed in U.S. Congress, Causes, Origins, pp. 286–291. This is a factual account of the events, without any attribution of responsibility. The number of Vietnamese killed comes from material in RG 226, NARA” (p. 1025).
Anyway, as you say, no excuse for Burns and Novik not to have known about these Vietnamese deaths. If they knowingly suppressed the information for the sake of “their” narrative, that’s worse.
Thanks, Paul!! Yea, there were a few times last night where I wanted to have someone who knows what has been written about this period by my side because certain points came up that made me wonder where they got that information from.
As for “knowingly suppressing” information, I think it’s more that they are just so intent on imparting a certain message that information that doesn’t fit that message just doesn’t even register in their minds. This is exactly what the “orthodox narrative” that we find in the 1983 pbs series, and Stanley Karnow’s book, suffered from as well. And that shows the degree to which Burns and co. are trapped in a worldview and can’t possibly “rethink” or “rewrite” this topic.
Liam, have you seen the review by Thomas Bass in last month’s Mekong Review? “America’s Amnesia”” https://mekongreview.com/americas-amnesia/
He makes some interesting related points, as well as also discussing the interviews, Duong Van Mai Elliott, etc. His comments regarding the question of civil war vs. unity somewhat confuse me…he seems to take umbrage with Burn’ civil war characterization and prefers the “unity” idea, so seems to prefer Karnow and others.
Yea, I can’t say that many (or any) serious historians today would agree with his characterization of things in South Vietnam. He’s repeating the old anti-war view that South Vietnam was a total American creation, the US were colonizers, and that therefore Duong Van Mai Ellliot does not know what she’s talking about. To quote, he states that “The war divided families like hers, but anti-colonialist fighters arrayed against colonialist sympathisers do not constitute a civil war..”
So the people in the South were “colonialist sympathizers”? Hmmm. . . that’s certainly a reductionist statement. Where then, one wonders, did anti-communism fit into the picture?