Oh Cinema: Films for the Trump Years, Part 16: Ken Burns' The Vietnam War

The US War in Afghanistan began less than a month after the September 11^th terror attacks, with initial military operations commencing on October 7^th, 2001. Though many can and do quibble over how to separate and define the war's various "phases," the conflict has continuted unabated since then, and last year it surpassed Vietnam as the longest continual military conflict in American history. Casualty estimates, obviously, vary widely according to the source, and it will likely be decades after fighting ceases before solid numbers can really be established, but the most up-to-date figures range between 170,000 and 190,000 killed thus far, including over 3,500 NATO forces (US included), 60,000 apiece from the Taliban and the Afghan government, and as many as 40,000 civilians, with countless more wounded or turned into refugees.

Almost 16 years later, on September 17^th, PBS aired the first episode of The Vietnam War, the latest series by Ken Burns, arguably the most monumental documentarian of American history to ever live (the whole series is currently available on Netflix). With a total runtime topping 17 hours, split into 10 episodes, the show delves deep into the weeds of modern Vietnamese history and the thousand steps that, bit by bit, drew the US further into a tragic path enabled by a poisonous mix of ignorance and active obfuscation of the truth by those in power, a concerted propaganda effort that involved administrations from across the political spectrum.

Earlier this month, on December 9^th, 2019, the Washington Post released a massive, 6-part series titled "The Afghanistan Papers." Based on a huge trove of newly-released documents, interviews, and testimonies from a huge swath of the policymakers and military figures who drove US policy in Afghanistan, up to and included Donald Rumsfeld himself, it lays bare the degree to which every facet of America's conduct of the war, up to the present day, has been built on a web of lies, ignorance, and institutional malaise on par with Vietnam. It's long been fashionable to refer to Iraq as "my generation's Vietnam," but, while that comparison remains bitterly fitting, the Afghanistan Papers make it painfully clear that Afghanistan has an equally strong claim to that uniquely American moniker.

How lucky are we; we've so thoroughly failed as a society to learn a damn thing from our history that we are now saddled with the fallout of not just one, but two Vietnams. And, almost two decades on, neither of them are even over yet.

Even before it ended, the Vietnam War stood as a frighteningly prescient example of what happened when the blind lead the blind, where the powerful on high are so far removed from the effects of their decisions that they are incapable of altering course, even when the magnitude of their failures becomes impossible to ignore. While the war effort continued to deteriorate, the governing institutions in Washington responded by simply locking down into systematic, pervasive patterns of deflection and denial. Those at the very top, especially Secretary of State Robert McNamara, couldn't hide the reality from themselves, but that didn't stop them from pulling every lever within reach to hide it from everyone else. Until, of course, the release of The Pentagon Papers, when the whole facade finally came crumbling down like a house of cards before a great wind.

In a just, or at least moderately sane, society, the Afghanistan Papers would be every bit as much an earth-shattering scandal as the Pentagon Papers were. The Pentagon Papers were a seminal moment in American civic society, a breaking point that, for the first time in the modern era, pushed an especially large number of Americans (particularly White Americans) into a place of permanent distruct for the government and any related institutions of power, a fundamental attitude that continues to have ripple effects in our politics today.

Sadly, they will not. They have already passed from the top of the Washington Posts' website and generated only limited coverage in other outlets. To a certain extent, with an active impeachment process going on and another climate conference having taken place around the same time, that is to be expected. But in other respects, it further reflects the tragic nature of the media environment we live in today, where the drumbeat of terrible news about terrible people doing awful things- which, obviously, includes Trump, but is in absolutely no way limited to him or even to the United States- is so overwhelming, so all-encompassing, that none of us have the time or strength to properly consider a single thing like this, no matter how severe and major a problem it may be.

But the importance of such things is not entirely dependent on our attention spans, and with the increasingly global problems and conflicts that the current crisis are bound to spark, it is more essential than ever that as many of us as possible make the effort now to learn the lessons of the past that we didn't earlier. This includes the continuing military and humanitarian disasters in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, all of which mirror the many things that went wrong in Vietnam in too many ways to ignore.

The Vietnam War was Murphy's Law in action, a cascading series of mistakes and misunderstanding and bad decisions, consistently made worse by bad faith efforts to keep as many people as possible in the dark about just how little the United States knew what it was doing in Vietnam and why. Burns' latest documentary carries many of his now legendary stylistic choices, like editing together video clips and moving photographs to draw the viewer into their stories and prevent them from feeling static or detached from us in the now. This, combined with the length of time he takes to ensure every facet of the story possible is worked in, including wide-ranging interviews with both American and Vietnamese people from every possible side of the conflict, gives this series crucial depth. To be fair, watching it requires commitment; the whole thing is long, often hard to watch, and has so many threads at once that it is very hard for the mind to wrap itself around it. Which makes it, effectively, a miniature taste of what the war itself was; a long, messy, vast thing that so many individuals ended up lost inside of forever.

There are so many ways we can be better. There are so many ways we can do better. But we can't start with them until we find a way to end the wars we are still fighting now, so as to finally put at least a part of our history as a nation to rest. It is hard, bitter work, and I can't say I am optimistic we can pull it off. Yet, in the end, we really don't have a choice.

-Noah Franc

Previously on Films for the TrumpYears:

Part 1- Selma

Part 2- Good Night, and Good Luck

Part 3- 13^th

Part 4- Get Out

Part 5- Chasing Ice/Chasing Coral

Part 6- The Big Short

Part 7- Human Flow

Part 8- Winter's Bone/Moonlight

Part 9- Black Panther

Part 10- Arrested Development