The documentary on Apple TV+ Vietnam: The War that Changed America presupposes a titular thesis. In a certain sense, how could a war not bring change? There are 58,281 names etched in black granite in Washington, DC that remind Americans of our calamitous involvement fighting communist aggression in Southeast Asia. Any conflict of such magnitude will have indelible effects on the countries involved. But neither the title nor the documentary itself, which is apparently timed for the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, suggest a more specific argument for how Vietnam is the war that changed America. Vietnam is obsessed with the picayune at the expense of the wider context of the war, and yet it does still offer insights on such perennial themes as friendship, loyalty, and duty amid the moral complexities that war inevitably creates.
The six-part documentary is produced by London-based 72 Films. Each episode is about 40 minutes long and ably narrated by actor Ethan Hawke. The episodes precede chronologically from 1965 to 1975 and combine contemporary interviews with footage from the time. The primary conceit of the documentary Vietnam is that it is telling the real story of the Vietnam War through the footage shot in a war extensively documented with photographs and videos. While the emotiveness of the interviews is affecting, it is sometimes unclear what impression the creators want to make. For example, Vietnam has a penchant for blasting rock n’ roll music over footage of an exploding Vietnamese countryside. Vietnam’s focus on footage and memories leaves readers regularly grasping for needed context.
The First and Second Indochina Wars (1946–1975)
The Vietnam War’s origins extend beyond 1965, tracing back to France’s colonization that began in 1858. By 1883, Vietnam was three colonies of French-Indochina: Tonkin in the north with Hanoi (Hà Nội), centrally located Annam with the imperial city of Hue (Huế), and Cochinchina with Saigon (Sài Gòn; now officially Ho Chi Minh City (Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh)) in the south. This division is ironically more historically accurate than the later 17th Parallel split that created North and South Vietnam at the 1954 Geneva Conference.
From 1883 to 1954, Vietnamese independence movements struggled against colonization, briefly interrupted only by Japanese control (1940–45). Post-World War II, the United States balanced anti-colonial sentiments (e.g., the breezily obtained Filipino Independence in 1946) with stronger anti-communist priorities. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations ultimately supported France’s colonial retention, viewing it as a bulwark against communism in Asia, especially after neighboring China became communist in 1949. The First Indochina War (1946–54) saw France become ever more desperate for American assistance, but despite receiving substantial material support, France suffered a decisive defeat to the Nationalist-cum-Communist Viet Minh (Việt Minh) at a mountain top 275 miles west of Hanoi on the Laotian border in an ethnic Tai (Thái) stronghold: Dien Bien Phu (Điện Biên Phủ).
Eisenhower, still smarting from having to negotiate with communists to fulfill his campaign promise to end the Korean War by allowing the Korean Peninsula to remain divided along the 38th parallel, did not support the French doing the same with Vietnam along the 17th parallel. So, as soon as the French withdrew in 1955, the Americans increased their material support for the Republic of Vietnam, i.e., South Vietnam. Eisenhower articulated the influential “Domino Theory,” warning that if one country fell to communism, neighboring nations would follow like toppling dominoes. Through Eisenhower’s presidency, Kennedy’s brief term, and both Johnson’s and Nixon’s administrations, preventing communist North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) from overtaking the South remained central to America’s anti-communist stance, with each administration fearful of the regional consequences should Vietnam fall. This commitment ultimately drew approximately 2.7 million Americans to serve in Vietnam during the Second Indochina War from February 1955 to May 1975, resulting in over 58,000 deaths, more than 153,000 wounded, and expenses reaching approximately 1.55 trillion in today’s dollars.
Vietnam, as War and as Documentary
The documentary Vietnam opens in 1965, where the first episode, entitled “Boots on the Ground,” swiftly moves from the Battle of the Ia Drang (of We Were Soldiers Once … And Young fame) in November of that year to the end of 1967. Nothing is said of the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 or the subsequent Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, even though they are what gave Johnson the pretext to launch a full-scale war in Vietnam. The next two episodes, “Uprising” and “Not My War,” on the Tet Offensive and its aftermath give the Viet Cong’s attacks across South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive a sympathetic shading, as is clear even from the title of the second episode. The final three episodes of the documentary cover the remaining years of the US involvement from 1969–75: “Mutiny,” “Homecoming,” and “The Endgame.”
When the US government and highest levels of the military failed their own people in how they prosecuted the war in Vietnam, it was left to courageous men like Broyles to protect those that were under his command.
Each episode is a collection of vignettes based on interviews with those present during the events retold. Among those interviewed are former Viet Cong soldiers, a South Vietnamese pilot who was working for the Northern cause, and several Vietnamese civilians who immigrated to the United States. Though many Vietnamese perspectives are included, noticeably absent are any South Vietnamese who remained faithful to their country. Additionally, the plight of the “boat people” is passed over basically in silence, which is confounding given that many Vietnamese immigrants present in the US originally came as part of that migration and were integrated under the Orderly Departure Program.
On the American side, the series features officers (including a female nurse) and enlisted men across the military branches. They relate their experiences of the war, and how they have lived for 50 years with the emotional and sometimes physical wounds. Some journalists and flight attendants were also interviewed, especially about their experiences during the Battle of Hue during the Tet Offensive and the Fall of Saigon.
The series is pervaded by a certain editorial carelessness. The footage interspersed with the interviews sometimes depicts things the interviewees describe, but often, it does not. For example, footage is shown of Army soldiers of the First Cavalry Division when the segment discusses the Marines. This is particularly unfortunate given the conceit of the documentary that makes a unique contribution by showing so much actual footage from the war. The series is also careless at times about objective facts, and even when these are given, they are sometimes misleading, as when the series repeatedly refers to combat deaths as “casualties,” when casualties refer to both killed and wounded in action.
The documentary’s social messaging is also underdeveloped and confused. Vietnam makes a purposeful argument for racial discord among white and black servicemen in Vietnam throughout the series, while at the same time contradicting this portrait with a black officer who had an all-white platoon in the first episode and in a later episode where video, narration, and interviewee all give conflicting accounts of this. Like the account for racial discord, there is also a narrative surrounding drug use and mutiny of the enlisted towards the officers (more on this later). While I’m certainly not discounting that this happened in Vietnam, it comes across in the documentary that this was not only prevalent, but the norm.
With only anecdotes and no statistics, we cannot determine the actual extent of racial discord, drug use, and mutiny during the Vietnam War. Yet, these problems did exist, and they stemmed in part from successive American Presidents’ refusal to mobilize the Reserves while simultaneously allowing college enrollment deferments. Vietnam correctly highlighted the incongruity faced by black Americans fighting abroad while still struggling for full rights at home in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Thus, a significant portion of Vietnam seems to be angling towards a social message that is never quite articulated directly since it is too often distracted by efforts to emotionally manipulate the viewer.
Two Vignettes
There are two vignettes from the fourth and fifth episodes that are exemplars of the best of the documentary. In both, there is a pair of Marines who served in combat together. In the former, we have an officer and an enlisted man, and in the latter, two enlisted men.
“Mutiny” opens with a man, Bill Broyles, recounting how, as a college student on fellowship at Oxford, he watched footage of the Battle of Hue during the Tet Offensive, and he confronts the moral issue: “I didn’t believe in someone else taking my place to go there. And that’s when I thought, ‘Well, I’ll go to Vietnam.’” He states that when he arrived in Vietnam to serve as a Platoon Leader, he had about eight months of Marine Corps officer training. As Broyles looks through the files of those in his platoon, he notices that they are all 18 to 19-year-olds who were previously unemployed high school dropouts. Broyles calls this a “catalog of the people who had been left out in America,” and this characterization is one that Vietnam struggles to make on its own: despite Nixon’s efforts with the draft lottery, there was an inequitable sharing of the burden of fighting the war, with those of lower socio-economic status carrying disproportionate weight.
Jeff Hiers recounts how, when the 25-year-old Broyles arrived with his unit in 1969, he did not salute his new lieutenant because “he didn’t know enough about Vietnam to be in charge.” Individually, they tell the story of the first firefight that Broyles was in and how, due to his terror, Broyles had to depend on his radioman, Hiers, to keep the platoon safe. It becomes clear that for Hiers and his fellow enlisted men in the platoon that they “would die for each other, but they weren’t gonna die for a war that wasn’t worth their sacrifice.” So, one night, Broyles must make the choice between putting his platoon in harm’s way versus committing a court-martial offense: “All those things about fighting for freedom, for democracy, all those things … that was gone. And that was my moment, right there, when I realized what I was there for. I was there to be responsible for these kids.” Broyles makes the choice that allows him to say, over fifty years later, “I fulfilled my mission. I kept them alive. I did.”
Hiers recounts that on his penultimate day in Vietnam, he turned to Broyles and “I gave him the smartest salute that I could possibly muster.” The documentary then shows them meeting one another for the first time since that day. The reunion that Hiers describes as “the opposite of going to a funeral” is poignant and it illustrates that despite all their trauma about serving in the moral ambiguities of combat in Vietnam, they are still bound to one another through their shared experiences and have pride in what they did together while in the Marine Corps.
What this striking vignette illustrates is that when the US government and the highest levels of the military failed their own people in how they prosecuted the war in Vietnam, it was left to courageous men like Broyles to protect those that were under his command; those men “who had been left out of America.” While American institutions failed Americans in so many ways during the Vietnam War, particularly those most socially and economically disadvantaged, Americans like Broyles did not.
In “Homecoming,” we meet Scott Camil and Jim Fife. By 1970, Camil was still in the Marines but had rotated back home after his second tour in Vietnam. Through the process of being deployed as crowd control for anti-war protests, leaving the Marine Corps, and going to college, Camil had an epiphany by listening to Jane Fonda speak, which led him to become active in the anti-war movement. In January 1971, Camil publicly claimed that he had committed war crimes. For his part, Fife left Vietnam and the Marine Corps to get married and to go to college, but while he was in college, he rejoined the military to become a helicopter pilot. Thus, their post-Vietnam War trajectories were antipodal. Camil tried to talk Fife out of serving again by telling him he would be killing innocent people. Fife responded with a diametrically opposed view of his call to serve in the US Military again, “I’m going to do what I have always done. I’m gonna keep other people alive.” This gets at the heart of the disagreement among Americans regarding our involvement in the Vietnam War: were we killing the innocent or helping the oppressed?
Due to this disagreement, they had a falling out even though they were best friends when they served together. But a few years later, Fife took a military helicopter to fly it to Camil’s house, where they then spent three days reconnecting, and coming to some sort of understanding of one another’s fundamentally different views. This episode does give us reason to continue to hope in the promise that is America. The message is particularly welcome at a time in our history where being friends with someone on the opposite side of the political spectrum, buying a particular car, or liking a social media post can get you cancelled. The episode closes with Fife and Camil meeting one another in the present day, and over this footage, Camil states, “I learned, as human beings, our friendship is stronger than our politics.” As Americans, we should remember, our patriotic bonds are stronger than our politics, and the documentary Vietnam reminds us of the shared values of Americans.
