On Vietnam War Documentaries: What They Get Right—and Where They Go Wrong

BY Marc Leepson

Consider the many Vietnam War documentaries that have been produced over the last several decades. The overwhelming majority of TV, film, and online documentaries on the war are self-contained, single-sitting productions that deal with one aspect of the conflict.

The list of these productions includes: true stories of individuals and individual operations, battles, and units; docs that focus on war correspondents, chaplains, American war veterans, the war’s legacy, and the antiwar movement; and docs that instead look at strategy and tactics, the air war, Gold Star families, Agent Orange, PTSD, POWs, and MIAs, among others. (Editor’s Note: For reviews and info on more than 100 Vietnam War documentaries, check out our Arts of War on the web page’s documentaries section: https://vva.org/category/arts-of-war/documentaries)

Just a handful, however, are big-budget, multi-part, multi-hour affairs that include the history of Vietnam, the country, and Vietnam, the war, and its legacy. One of the first series was one of the best: the award-winning 12-episode Vietnam: A Television History produced by WGBH-Boston, which hit the PBS airwaves in 1983.

That ambitious series was inspired by former Vietnam War correspondent Stanley Karnow’s longtime reporting on the war, on and off from 1959-74, and his award-winning book, Vietnam: A History, which also came out in 1983.

Courtesy Apple TV+

Written and produced by Richard Ellison, A Television History set the standard for the genre as it gave us the war’s history, politics, strategies, and legacy through the voice of a narrator and augmented with talking-head historians, journalists, and American and Vietnamese war veterans. Naturally, all this talking was backdropped by tons of wartime TV coverage, newsreel footage, and other moving and still images from the war and the home front. (Editor’s Note: All 12 episodes are available online at https://archive.org/details/vietna-a-television-history)

The doc’s narrator, the actor Will Lyman (best known perhaps as the voice of the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World” commercials), hits the right tone with his rich, authoritative voice. VVA founder and then president, Bobby Muller appeared in the final episode. Muller talked about leading VVA’s 1981 trip to Vietnam and made a case for reconciliation with our former enemies, saying that it was time for the American people to “end the war.”

Also memorable is Ken Burns’ 2017 extravaganza, The Vietnam War, a ten-part, eighteen-hour PBS doc that he and Lynn Novick produced and directed. In The Veteran’s mostly positive review eight years ago, we highlighted the high quality of the American Vietnam War veterans who appeared in the film. Their demeanor and what they had to say reflected very well on the 2.8 million of us who took part in the war.

Courtesy PBS Distribution

This year, Apple TV+ gave us Vietnam: The War that Changed America, a six-part documentary that started streaming on January 31 to get a head start commemorating the 50th anniversary of the war’s end on April 30, 1975.

All six episodes served up a visual earthquake of the worst that war has to offer, with director Rob Coldstream and producer Caroline Marsden giving us a wide variety of wartime horrors, many of them in living (and dying) color. In my mind, though, that over-the-top display was mostly redeemed by the moving individual war stories the documentarians included. The producers’ choice to build each episode around tales told by American veterans and a few Vietnamese veterans and civilians was an inspired one, as nearly all were heartfelt, poignant, and insightful.

On the other hand, the entire exercise was marred by the narrator, the actor Ethan Hawke, who conjured up a creepy, whispery, gravelly voice of doom, often accompanied by a menacing score. Here’s our full review: https://vva.org/arts-of-war/apple-tvs-vietnam-the-war-that-changed-america-documentary/

Most recently, on April 30 this year, Netflix released Turning Point: The Vietnam War, another extensive and ambitious words-and-moving picture look at the war, this one presented in five episodes.

Directed by the award-winning documentarian Brian Knappenberger and produced by his Luminant Media, this narrator-less doc does a decent job telling the story of the war mainly through the voices of a slew of historians, journalists, authors, and Vietnamese and American war veterans.

More than any of its counterparts, Turning Point includes excerpts of secretly recorded White House in-person and phone conversations—some newly released—dealing with the war and the antiwar movement during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

Courtesy Netflix

On the plus side, Knappenberger and his team make good use of their high-caliber collection of experts and witnesses. Aside from war veterans, the group includes the Vietnamese-American novelist and essayist Viet Thanh Nguyen; veteran war correspondents Peter Arnett and Dan Rather; accomplished Vietnam War historians Fredrik Logevall, George Veith, Lien-hang T. Nguyen, Marc Selverstone, Gregory Daddis, and Michael Kazin.

And there is much illuminating input from an array of former prominent Vietnam War military and government figures, including Frank Snepp, Morton Halperin, Stuart Herrington, John Negroponte, and Richard Armitage.

That said, those with a solid knowledge of Vietnam War history will find very little new here. On the other hand, for Millennials, Gen X and Z’ers, and others for whom the war is ancient history, this documentary would be a good place to learn about America’s most controversial overseas war, including what most likely didn’t make it into their high school U.S. history classes.

And what probably did not make it into the classroom? This list is long and includes: the rampant illegal drug use and sagging morale during the last years of U.S. involvement; American GIs “fragging” their own officers and NCOs; the South Vietnamese government torturing tens of thousands of political prisoners; and the communists brutally exploiting hundreds of thousands of former South Vietnamese military and government workers after the war in what were euphemistically called “re-education camps.”

As far as the war being a turning point, the outcome did mark a big moment in U.S. history—but what war’s end doesn’t?

In the end, I believe this documentary only partially lives up to its creators’ claim that it examines the “lasting impact [the war] has had on America’s global identity and on the lives of countless people.” Mostly, it shows what happened back then and why.

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