Vietnam in HD

Lyrics excerpt - "All we are saying is - Give peace a chance."

This is a picture about war - And, believe me, it isn't a pretty one.

This was a war that the Americans had no business being in.

This was a war where two-faced, US President, Lyndon Johnson promised his gullible citizens that American involvement would only last for a few months.

This was a war that endured (under direct US occupation) for 10 years (1964-1974) and took the lives of 60,000 American military men (with 300,000 wounded) - Not to mention the dead Vietnamese.

This was a war where blacks (and other racial minorities), along with under-privileged whites, were the ones sent to the front lines to fight.

This was a war that was condoned by 2, hypocrite, US presidents (Johnson & Nixon) in order to save political face.

Through interviews, narration, and archival footage - This is a mighty powerful re-telling of the reality of that war, which, as you'll see, is like nothing that Hollywood has ever shown you.

What strikes me most about this series is how it is possible, even necessary, for Americans to take this most colossal of domestic and international blunders and attempt to ennoble it with fancy language about "buddies" and "honor" and "sacrifice" and other words that are, shall we say, incompatible with the utter annihilation of generations here and there.

To say this series is bad would be incorrect. What it is, is somehow disgusting jingoism. The fake-dramatic music, the lap dissolves, the Times Roman font, the narration of simplistic statements made to sound deep by the hammy-sounding readers - it is deeply repellent, even more so than the earlier "WWII in HD" was repellent. One should learn from his mistakes and correct them. That's something Americans don't seem to understand. War-mongering is only compatible with victory.

Reviewer's update: The series ends with a predictable paean to militarism from the veterans featured in the series, which is grossly offensive, comparing those who returned from the modern catastrophes in Iraq and Afghanistan (the latter ongoing) to themselves. They have, I suppose, the right to this opinion in compensation for their respective ordeals. But at least this conclusion is a consistent ending to a series that attempts to ennoble a moral, political, and societal catastrophe. This is simply not possible. Those who are predisposed to accept that America is a militaristic state with the God given right to throw its destructive weight around regardless of consequences, will find the series compelling. Those who prefer the position of Washington, Jefferson, Grant, Eisenhower, etc. will be filled with a combination of remorse and revulsion.

It's a six-part History Channel show about the Vietnam War. The tagline is "It's not the war we know. It's the war they fought." It uses home videos, brutal battlefront footage, and real veterans' recollections. The home videos give a sense of the times. The war footage is bloody and vicious. The gore is front and center. There isn't anything new to the overall understanding of the war. It's interesting to walk a few steps in the shoes of these men. I would like an experienced narrator to do the general story. The real veterans talking does grow on me. When that reporter says "That boy haunts me today", there is a chill that radiates out of the screen. This is a brutal recollection and a compelling watch.

I was surprised to see there was only one review of this , i was expecting a couple of hundred at least. Clearly the other poster was not impressed by this series and i agree with a lot of what he said but i also think that these pages in history shouldn't be forgotten and if that means some cheesy music and a bit of hammy voice acting then so be it, although i think Michael C Hall was the ideal person to narrate this.

Putting the production aside there is a wealth of archive footage that gives you a glimpse of what it was like over there, I've never been in a war but I feel I should at least watch these documentaries and try to understand what they go through. I'm not even American and I feel I owe them that which is why i was surprised to see such a small number of reviews.

I make a point of watching and reading as much as I can on any conflict that people have fought and died in, to recognize and remember what they did is the least we can do. Listn to the real guys talking ,look at their faces in the archive footage and read between the lines...ignore the music, that is how you watch a war documentary.

I liked this a lot. It seemed that the series strove to maintain a neutral point of view in regard to the causes and/or futility of the war while maintaining focus on the individuals they profiled, and in my opinion they largely succeeded. Unlike a previous reviewer, I did not find it to be overly narcissistic, pro-war, or even all that pro-American, though the focus was definitely on the American experience. Some time was also devoted to other factors, such as life for the families back home, protests and movements, and U.S. administration positions on the war at various points, though the main focus remained with the progress of the war and the battlefields themselves.

Leaving the controversies aside, I thought that what the series tried to do -- portray the experiences of various individuals at certain key places and events in the war -- they did quite well. I also liked the graphics and illustrations and, as opposed to other documentaries I have seen, I thought that these were distributed well and did not get in the way of the real story. The CGI stuff was good and not overdone, in my opinion.

The thing about Vietnam is that once you start discussing the controversies and what we now know to be untruths, it is a discussion without end, full of passion and short on facts, not because of the people discussing it but because the whole thing was based upon a twenty year series of lies and deceptions on the part of the governments involved. Wherever there are lies there will always be arguments, and the subject of the Vietnam war is proof positive of this on a massive scale. This series did not attempt to take any of that on, and wisely so. Though at times I found this irritating -- for instance, the neutral announcement of the events in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 as legal cause for Johnson's escalation, when we now know that at least one of the incidents never happened -- I could recognize it as necessary in telling the story. If they had taken on any one of the many controversies or governmental lies, it would have been a quicksand from which the series would not have recovered. I'm glad they didn't!

It is good to remember that many of those fighting were not volunteers but draftees: it was a federal charge and prison time to dodge the draft. In that light, I do not think that talk of honor and duty is narcissistic or out of place: many did not choose the war, but were sent by force. These went in service to their *country* -- if not the war itself -- and acquitted themselves on a personal level largely with great honor, regardless of the legitimacy of the war or their belief in it. Many times in the series you hear the soldiers referring to the war as a lost cause, and yet they gave their lives for it, if only because that was what they personally felt was the honorable thing to do. I believe that this *personal* honor, courage and heroism on an *individual* level is what this series was trying to bring out, and I think it succeeded very well.

I enjoyed this series in spite of its neutral point of view, and I think it was very nicely done given the incredibly controversial nature of the war and its premises. While I would NOT recommend this series as a primer on Vietnam, nor even a good outline or overview -- you'd be better off going to Wikipedia for that -- it did very well with what it tried to do, and it's well worth a watch if wartime documentaries are something you like. Enjoy!