If You've Watched Ken Burns' Vietnam Documentary, Do You Need Netflix's?

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Wednesday marks 50 years since the “fall of Saigon” and the end of the Vietnam War.

Turning Point: The Vietnam War , which premieres on this anniversary, is a new five-part Netflix documentary series that somewhat unevenly shows how the United States inserted itself into the internal affairs of Vietnam for decades. It opens with an interview of Scott Camil, a Brooklyn-born Floridian raised by a cop who was an active John Birch Society member; Camil joined the Marine Corps and served in Vietnam. Guided by this opening, it becomes clear to viewers from the very beginning that Netflix's story of the Vietnam War is at heart an American story.

This is certainly understandable. While scholars in recent years have enriched our understanding of the political and social dynamics that underlaid what was in many ways a Vietnamese civil war, the US military invasion that accompanied the internecine fighting between communist-led revolutionaries seeking to reunify a divided Vietnam and the anticommunist Vietnamese who opposed them turned what might have been a mostly Vietnamese conflict into one of major global significance. The physical toll that resulted seems almost impossible to fathom today: millions dead, a landscape destroyed, diasporic communities created, and countless people still poisoned by American chemical agents.

The Netflix series is not the first major attempt in recent years to tackle the war on film. Most significantly, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick made a 10-part, 18-hour documentary series for PBS called The Vietnam War that aired in 2017. This followed a 13-part, 13-hour series —Vietnam: A Television History —that premiered on PBS over 30 years earlier, in 1983, before being rebroadcast in abridged form on public television's American Experience in 1997.

At six and a half hours, Turning Point: The Vietnam War, directed by Brian Knappenberger, who is probably best known for the critically beloved 2014 documentary The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz , seems spare by comparison. whereas the Burns and Novick series tried for a comprehensive and authoritative presentation—the last word on the war, in the classic Ken Burns style—Knappenberger's approach has the feel of a “greatest hits” documentary, employing powerful and often brutally graphic visuals for a Netflix audience accustomed to documentaries that tell “hidden stories.” It is the third in Netflix's Turning Point series, all directed by Knappenberger—the first two covered 9/11 and the War on Terror and The Bomb and the Cold War —and it's certainly on solid ground in seeing the Vietnam War as a major “turning point” for the United States. Among other things, this is a war that shattered Americans' faith in their government and the belief that their country was a global force for good.

Despite its shorter length, and even with some notable omissions, quite a lot gets packed into the series' five mostly chronological episodes, with impressive archival footage, tight editing, stylistic graphics, and compelling interviews. Combined, they make for gripping viewing. Like the two earlier PBS series, the Netflix filmmakers drew on firsthand accounts from a variety of American and Vietnamese informants: military veterans, former officials, war correspondents, antiwar activists, and others. With the passage of time, many of the war's participants are no longer with us, but the series makes good use of archival materials, such as the White House tapes of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, to bring their voices into the story. The filmmakers' interviews with a number of scholars round things out as they interpret the war's major developments and help pull the broader narrative together.

Turning Point ’s opening episode, called “America Goes to War,” begins, somewhat oddly, in 1961. To be sure, there is a certain logic in this choice. That year, John F. Kennedy had just become president, and it was Kennedy who began the major escalation of US military “advisers” to Vietnam. But most Americans know very little about the war, and many viewers, conditioned by Hollywood to expect combat-heavy stories when they hear the word Vietnam , may not make it past the first episode.

Those who do will learn from the second (“Civil War”), which zooms back in time and introduces the topic of French colonialism in a way that may be confusing to some; the United States went to war in Vietnam, at least indirectly, well before Kennedy entered the White House. The 1961 escalation, we find out in the second episode, followed years of a US-backed French campaign against the communist-led Vietnamese revolutionaries. By 1954, when the French were ultimately defeated, the United States was paying for roughly 80 percent of France's war costs. Another six or so years of intimate US efforts to shape Vietnamese politics followed.

If that first episode makes it clear that the filmmakers are telling a largely American story, the title of the second suggests a possible rebalance toward the political dynamics inside Vietnam. If nothing else, the fact of the second episode's existence reflects just how many historians in recent years have moved beyond previous narratives that frequently overlooked the messy politics of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or “South Vietnam”) and the anticommunist nationalism that drove it. But there is still a problem, as Turning Point's interviewees too often present the Vietnamese civil war in geographically bounded ways. The filmmakers, of course, cannot be blamed for what some of their informants say. Yet they do little to clarify any misconceptions.

Contrary to some of this testimony, the war cannot be understood in simple north-south terms. It was, rather, one between communist-led revolutionaries and anticommunists. After Vietnam was temporarily divided at the 17th parallel under the 1954 Geneva accords, those anticommunists congregated in the south. But the communist-led revolutionaries were not exclusively located in the north. Turning Point admirably points to the pejorative nature of the term “Viet Cong” to refer to the National Liberation Front, but it is less successful in clarifying for viewers that the NLF was understood of southern Vietnamese.

In other words, there was indeed a “civil war” in Vietnam, but it was not one that pitted northerners against southerners, as, for the most part, our American Civil War did. On the contrary, it was a war between communist-led revolutionaries in both the north and south against anticommunists in the south. The “north,” moreover, did not necessarily mean northerners (just as the “south” did not necessarily mean “southerners”). As the distinguished historian Lien-Hang T. Nguyen notes in Episode 2, the “actual leader” in the north was not Ho Chi Minh but Le Duan, a southern revolutionary who became general secretary of the Communist Party.

So where does this leave the United States? According to Netflix's capsule summary for the first episode, Washington “secretly enter[ed] the fight against North Vietnam” as “Cold War tensions escalate[d].” This is misleading. The entire American ground war in the 1960s was fought in “South Vietnam,” and, in the early years, nearly all of those whom the Americans fought against were “South Vietnamese.” They were not the “South Vietnamese” that the series almost without fail associates with the RVN—a notable exception comes from Nguyen, who appropriately refers to both the RVN and the NLF's Provisional Revolutionary Government as the “South Vietnamese parties” in Episode 4 (“Why Are We Even Here?”). Instead, the “South Vietnamese” who fought against the Americans were those who joined the NLF.

I recognize that this is confusing, and all of the above may seem like minor linguistic quibbling to those less aware of the history. But it in fact matters, as how we understand the parties to a war tend to shape how we understand that war. As historians, we often use convenient descriptors such as South Vietnam/South Vietnamese and North Vietnam/North Vietnamese as shorthand. That's fine if the complex political realities behind these terms are understood or disclosed. Unfortunately, however, the Netflix series obscures on this issue more than it enlightens.

Turning Point tends to be stronger in its examination of US political and social developments. Viewers of the series will learn a good deal about the Kent State shootings, which receive especially moving attention, as well as about the disappointments of American policymakers and the legacy of distrust the American public was left with after the war. The series compellingly addresses the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the baseless claims of William Westmoreland about impending victory, and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers. It is refreshing, moreover, to see the historian Ken Hughes so clearly spell out the “decent interval,” the cynical political calculus of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger by which Washington could escape blame for the inevitable collapse of the RVN if it could create enough time between the impending US withdrawal and the southern government's almost certain demise.

Yet when you look at its treatment of modern Vietnamese history, Turning Point has many misses. There is nothing about the Japanese occupation of Vietnam during World War II, which led to US intelligence collaboration with the Viet Minh. There is nothing about Bao Dai and the State of Vietnam. And there is nothing about the 1955 southern referendum—a “travesty on democratic procedures,” according to the US ambassador in Saigon—that ousted Bao Dai, elevated Ngo Dinh Diem to president of the newly declared Republic of Vietnam, and apparently justified Diem's ​​decision to ignore the Geneva accords' call for a 1956 nationwide election.

There are, moreover, occasional problems that diminish the reliability of the series. We hear several times in Turning Point that “South Vietnam” simply wanted to “live in peace” or be “left alone.” The implication is that “North Vietnam” waged an aggressive and illegitimate war. But, while the series did not mention it, the reason the NLF insurgency began is because Diem's ​​regime, having refused to abide by the Geneva accords' call for a nationwide election, engaged in widespread repression against Viet Minh supporters and other political opponents in the south. These anti-Diem southerners were not “left alone.” They participated in “political struggle” in the 1950s, and an estimated tens of thousands of them were imprisoned, tortured, and/or executed by the same “South Vietnam” that, viewers are told, just wanted to “live in peace.” In the face of the Diemist repression, these persecuted southerners called for Hanoi to fight back, which led to the formation of the NLF and the beginning of a coordinated “armed struggle.” Such context would have been helpful.

There are shortcomings, too, in the series' treatment of the domestic opposition in the United States. In Episode 4 (“Why Are We Even Here?”), for example, we hear claims about alleged hostility by the American antiwar movement to returning American troops. One Marine Corps veteran says that “the treatment of the troops” is “one of the biggest tragedies” of the war. “A lot of the guys were telling me that people would call them names. You know, all your 'baby killers' and, you know, your 'murderers.' ” As he says this, the film shows a protest sign featuring a photo of the My Lai massacre with the words “Q. And babies” superimposed over it, followed by an onscreen image of a newspaper article with the terms “baby killers” and “murderers” highlighted.

These visuals are presumably meant to lend the claim credibility. An Army veteran follows this up by saying, “I got spit on coming back. And people had a right to protest. But I didn't think they should be protesting against me, against us.” The filmmakers then add the somewhat confusing testimony of a third veteran, though presumably with the final line in mind: “They sent us out there. They paid for the taxes. They put the guns in our hands. They, they revealed in all the life we ​​took and everything. And we came home, and they literally and figuratively spit on us.”

The allegation that antiwar activists routinely abused American military personnel has become an article of faith since the 1980s, appearing in films, television programs, newspaper and magazine articles, and books. Its existence is why those opposed to the Iraq War in the early 21st century felt they needed to say that they nevertheless “support the troops.” The problem, as scholars such as Jerry Lembcke have shown , is that there is almost no contemporary evidence of such hostility. Indeed, the newspaper report shown in Turning Point alleging the use of “baby killers” and “murderers” was published years after the war, and the poster can only qualify as evidence of the charge if one assumes that denouncing the massacre at My Lai is the same thing as calling a returning veteran a “baby killer.”

In reality, as chronicled in numerous books and as illustrated in David Zeiger's powerful 2005 film Sir! No Sir! , both veterans and active-duty personnel formed an important part of the antiwar movement. The Netflix series actually goes on to make this clear with footage of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Operation Dewey Canyon III just minutes later. This disjointed representation has the unfortunate effect of leaving viewers scratching their heads. Was the antiwar movement hostile to military personnel? Or did it welcome them? Nearly all contemporary evidence points to the latter.

Another shortcoming appears in Episode 5's (“The End of the Road”) coverage of Operation Babylift. Babylift was a US government effort in the war's final weeks to evacuate nearly 3,000 Vietnamese children and place them with adoptive families in the United States. As Frank Snepp, a senior CIA intelligence analyst in Saigon, notes in the series, the operation was undertaken to earn “South Vietnam sympathy from the American people” at a time when it was desperately needed. Most of these babies were the children of Vietnamese mothers and American fathers, many of whom probably did not know that their wartime encounters had resulted in a pregnancy. The documentary's treatment of Babylift is moving, with the story of Jennifer Kruse, a Vietnamese American woman who survived an early plane crash that killed dozens of other children, humanizing the operation. Now an adult, Kruse explains why she was evacuated in April 1975: “A lot of biracial babies were created, and Northern was coming, didn't want us here. Anything American, they would kill us.”

It would not have been surprising for people in Saigon in 1975 to believe that the communist-led revolutionaries might kill them. There was plenty of US and RVN propaganda predicting a bloodbath of Vietnamese who had collaborated with or were sympathetic to the United States. But it's disappointing that, 50 years later, the filmmakers chose to include this statement or at least allowed it to go unchecked. As we know, many children of Vietnamese women and American GIs did not get evacuated, and they were not killed by the victors. Nor did the predicted bloodbath materialize.