posted on March 20, 2004 08:51:54 AM newConfronting Ghosts of Vietnam
Duty, as depicted by veteran television journalist and documentary maker Michael Maclear, can be blind. It can be the folly of superpowers. It can lead soldiers to wantonly kill civilians for little reason, to commit acts they'd never normally think of committing.
And, as Maclear shows in his new documentary Vietnam: Ghosts of War, which airs tonight on History Television, duty can also be the need to confront the past.
In the film, Maclear returns to a Vietnam far different than the devastated country he reported on from time to time for the CBC and NBC in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The broadcast of the film is pegged to the 50th anniversary of France's ultimate defeat in the valley at Dien Bien Phu in northwest Vietnam. Much of the film continues to look back at that battle and the way the French grossly underestimated their enemy, a mistake that was symbolic of the whole American war. Interspersed with the French defeat are glimpses of his old telecasts from Vietnam and his view today that the United States is making many of the same mistakes in Iraq -- that it has proceeded without much understanding of the Iraqi people and what America is facing there.
"These are the kind of parallels that I would make. They aren't exact. But what is going on militarily? What are we doing to the other side? What are they doing to us? We hear about the fatalities. we don't hear about the thousands more maimed, wounded, flown back secretly in the night. We don't really have an idea who we are up against. The numbers of people. What their motivations are.
For instance, he comes across a startling fact. One former North Vietnamese army leader reveals to him in an interview the numbers of Vietnamese who used the mountainous Ho Chi Minh trail, a primary supply line against the Americans. From this, Maclear judges that the United States would have needed four times as many troops than the 500,000 to 600,000 that it had at its peak to contain the guerrilla war.
With segments of his old footage from the bombed-out city of Nam Dinh, Maclear also shows the destruction faced by Vietnamese civilians, which the American public was rarely, if ever, shown. He proceeds to draw some parallels between that and Iraq today.
"The 'shock and awe campaign,' the bombing of Baghdad, was to me obscene. And I can't understand the relative lack of outcry from both the media and the public, as if we have become inured to the idea of mass bombing," he argued.
Continually, his argument throughout the documentary is that in underestimating the Vietnamese and by not fully grasping the forces opposing the United States in Iraq today, we simply don't know what we are fighting. And perhaps we never will.
posted on March 20, 2004 04:49:32 PM new
Have to watch that if I can get it on my channels or wait for the tape. Something to think about.
Those that fail to learn from the past will be doomed to repeat the problem in the future.
Re-elect Arthur Den Dragon
Ed. because I can.
[ edited by trai on Mar 20, 2004 05:19 PM ]
posted on March 20, 2004 06:29:08 PM new
Unfortunately I don't get History Television so I'm hoping the CBC will pick it up. Otherwise hopefully they will offer the documentary for sale in their storefront.
You would think that the US would have learned from past mistakes but I guess not.
