Ken Burns’ ‘Intimate’ Vietnam War History: a Big Book, but…

Reviews by Marc Leepson

The Vietnam War: An Intimate History (Knopf, 640 pp., $60), the companion volume to the much-hyped, eighteen-hour, ten-part Ken Burns PBS documentary that blasted off September 17, is a big, heavy doorstop of a book. Big, in this case, though, doesn’t mean great.

The best thing I can say about this large-format, heavily illustrated, sidebar-strewn coffee table tome, written by Burns and Geoffrey Ward, is that it is an above-average history of the war with lots of excellent pictures. The history covers virtually every aspect of the wars in Vietnam from 1945-75. It focuses mainly on the military, diplomatic, and political. However, there is virtually no new history here, and the book contains no footnotes.

Then there’s the “intimate” part of the book, the personal stories of people who influenced and took part in the war. Many of these first-person stories from American and Vietnamese veterans, journalists who covered the war, and activists who opposed it are compelling. However, a healthy majority of them are from widely available, previously published (albeit valuable and well-received) memoirs and other books written by these men and women. That august list includes Philip Caputo, Tim O’Brien, Karl Marlantes, W.D. Ehrhart, Neil Sheehan, Frank Snepp, Duong Lee Mai Elliott, Bao Ninh, and Joe Galloway.

The book tells the long, complex history of the war from all sides (American, South and North Vietnamese) and also includes an account of the American antiwar movement. That’s a good thing. But one big part of one aspect of the Vietnam War is seriously and conspicuously underrepresented in a book that purports to tell the “intimate” history of the conflict: the hundreds of thousands of men and women who served in the Vietnam War (and around the world during the war) in support units.

Naturally and correctly, the military history concentrates on what happened on the ground and in the air. But the only mention of those who served in support roles is a scant page and a half that features quotes from a former infantry lieutenant grousing about “base camp commandoes” who were “hungry for souvenirs” and “slept in beds with sheets.”

Even worse, Burns (or Ward) tells readers that “men in combat support and service support units… never heard a shot fired in anger, never saw a bomb dropped or a village burned.” That statement is simply not true. Just ask the families of support personnel who were killed and the men and women of the rear echelon who were wounded in sniper, rocket, mortar, and sapper attacks in base camps, while on guard duty or in helicopters or traveling the roads of South Vietnam. No, they did not fight the enemy in the bush, but they did put their lives at risk in the war zone. And not all of them slept under sheets in beds.

Anyone who served as a cook, clerk, truck driver, MP, vehicle mechanic, radio operator, engineer, quartermaster, or in any of the many other jobs outside of the infantry should approach this book knowing their intimate war experiences did not make the final cut.
Also missing: Any mention of the only congressionally chartered veterans service organization that from its founding in 1978 has worked on behalf of Vietnam War veterans and their families. In the introduction, Burns and co-producer Lynn Novick write that they were “ably assisted” in their work by an “invaluable board of advisers, historical consultants, and veterans of the war.” That “invaluable” group included not a soul representing VVA, an egregious oversight.

A tiny section that deals with veterans’ homecoming appears in the big book’s final pages. It features personal stories, but does not spell out the facts of this significant part of the Vietnam War: the shameful treatment the nation gave to returning troops and the subsequent Vietnam veterans movement.

One other thing: In that final section the authors misidentify the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Memo to Ken Burns: The Wall is not “a Vietnam memorial.” It’s a memorial that honors the service of all the men and women who served in the Vietnam War, especially those who did not come home alive.

CONCISENESS

A good counterpoint to the bloated Ken Burns book is the ultra-concise The Vietnam War, 1945-1975 (Giles/New-York Historical Society, 96 pp., $17.95), the companion book for a mammoth New-York Historical Society exhibition on the Vietnam War that opens October 4 at the society’s museum on Central Park West. This slim volume contains a short but meaty chronological history of the American war in Vietnam illustrated with a stunning collection of mostly black-and-white photographs, posters, and other images. The book manages briefly but accurately to cover virtually every important political, geopolitical, military, and societal aspect of the war from 1945 to the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong victory in 1975.

The book includes the voices of American veterans, along with a summary of the war’s impact on their lives and on American culture, society, and politics (something that the Burns book barely touches). The book’s authors—the exhibition’s curator, the historian Marci Reaven, and her colleagues David Parsons and Lily Wong—have produced an admirably objective, albeit very brief, look at what they rightly call “a signal event in the history of the twentieth century.”

REASSESSING

Gregory Gaddis is leading a very small movement to rehabilitate the image of disgraced Vietnam War commanding Gen. William Westmoreland. Virtually every military historian who has looked into the matter has concluded that Westmoreland never understood the nature of the Vietnam War and stubbornly clung to his search-and-destroy, war-of-attrition, body-count-centric strategy that failed miserably. Gaddis, a retired Army colonel who teaches at Chapman University, began his campaign with his 2014 book, Westmoreland’s War. He continues it in Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (Oxford University, 288 pp., $28.95).

This time Gaddis also seeks to shatter the idea that Westmoreland’s successor, Gen. Creighton Abrams, implemented a much more successful strategy (the so-called “better war”), only to have Congress, the antiwar movement, and the media snatch defeat out of the hands of victory. While Daddis shows off a great deal of research, his conclusion that Westmoreland took a more nuanced approach than he is generally given credit for is not convincing.

To his credit, however, Daddis makes a strong case that Abrams made no significant changes in strategy after he took over in 1968 and that the war effort was doomed for reasons that had little to do with politicians, the news media, or antiwar demonstrators. His most compelling argument is that few U.S. historians have factored in the most important determinant of the war’s outcome: the role of the Vietnamese. His sound advice is to look at the Vietnam War “as many Vietnamese see it, the American War.” In other words, as just one part of a more-than-fifty-year fight by the Vietnamese for self-determination.

THE WALL

The complicated and controversial story of how the Vietnam Veterans Memorial came to be built and dedicated in 1982 has been exhaustively covered in the news media and in two worthy books: Bob Doubek’s Creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Jan Scruggs’ and Joel Swerdlow’s To Heal a Nation. The journalist and author James Reston, Jr., leans heavily on these books, along with lots of secondary sources, in his take on the story in A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial (Arcade, 272 pp., $24.95).

Reston includes new interviews with a handful of people involved in the struggle to get The Wall built. Oddly and incorrectly, though, Reston refers to The Wall in the book (and in the subtitle) as the “Vietnam Memorial” or the “Vietnam War Memorial.” Oddly, because he points out between the book’s covers that The Wall never was intended to be a war memorial. Incorrectly, because The Wall always has been a tribute to those who served in the war, living and dead—not to the war itself.