Davich: Vietnam documentary reveals we're all prisoners of this war

That is a very strange perspective IMHO PO1 Tony Holland. The title of the article by Jerry Davich does not match the story he describes.

Memories of playing with people who never returned after they deployed do bring back strong memories with feelings of sadness at times.

"When I was a young boy growing up in Gary, one of the older kids in Glen Ryan subdivision left our neighborhood to serve in the Vietnam War.
It was the late 1960s and I don't recall if he was drafted or if he enlisted. I didn't know his personal story. And I don't know if he got killed in that war.

All I know is that I never saw him again. One day he was playing whiffle ball in the street with us, and the next day he wasn't.
I kept playing in the streets with my friends. I was told he was deployed to Southeast Asia – which seemed a million miles away – to defend our God-blessed country and battle the red scourge of communism in the world. Or so I thought at the time.

Later, in my teenage years, I learned differently about that complicated, controversial war.
These days, I thought I understood the war's many complexities. And then I watched "The Vietnam War," the 10-part, 18-hour PBS documentary by filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. It premiered last fall but I'm just getting around to watching it.
The documentary depicts the history of the war through hundreds of photos, archival video footage, and candid interviews with dozens of military veterans and witnesses. Not only from the United States, but from both sides of Vietnam, too.


In this 1967 photo, AP correspondent Peter Arnett walks in front of a U.S. tank in Vietnam. (Associated Press)
"This is not the story of the Vietnam War, but of the men and women who went to Southeast Asia to serve their country," states the documentary's online introduction.

It's a gripping film.
Not only from the graphic footage itself, but the feelings evoked from all those historic images. The barbarism. The human suffering. The endless amount of bombs, bullets and weapons. Mankind's brutal inhumanity within the framework of a military conflict.
As one U.S. soldier said in the film, war is merely a "finishing school" for our species' inherently violent nature.
The film also revealed all the lies and corruption from world leaders during that war. And from our own leaders, including gung-ho military generals and reelection-driven U.S. presidents.
"We were the last generation of kids who thought our government wouldn't lie to them," recalled one American GI.
Our leaders not only lied to the American public, they tried covering up their lies with more lies while ordering wave after wave of fresh-faced soldiers into a meat grinder of a war.
"The Vietnam War drove a stake right into the heart of America," said U.S. Army veteran Phil Gioia in an interview in the film. "It polarized the country as it had probably never been polarized since before the Civil War, and we've never recovered."
That war, beyond any other war in our nation's history I believe, brought out the worst in us.
"It's damned easy to get in war," President Lyndon B. Johnson said to his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, in a May 27, 1964, phone conversation. "It's just the biggest damn mess I ever saw."
Tape recordings of their conversation, among many other private chats, were released by the LBJ Presidential Library in 1997.
"What the hell is Vietnam worth to me?" Johnson asked on the recording. "What the hell is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country?"
Yet he continued to send troops into that country for political reasons.
"They'd impeach a president that would run out, wouldn't they?" Johnson asked.
Johnson, a Texan, pronounced America as "'Murica," a popular slang term these days to define extreme nationalism. Every time he said it, I flashed forward to today's political climate of extreme "patriotism" under President Donald Trump.
Someday, the American public may be privy to private conversations taking place now between our current president and his cabinet or security advisers. I can only imagine what's being said about U.S. military strategies, or which historic decisions are being made without our knowledge, or which regrets will later emerge publicly.
I also wondered if our continuing presence in Afghanistan, which started in October 2001 as a response to the Sept. 11 Al Qaeda attacks on the United States, is a current day Vietnam.
Our military leaders today are using a similar reasoning for continuing to send U.S. troops into that country, just as our former leaders did in the 1960s with Vietnam. In short, if we don't battle terrorism in Afghanistan, or other Middle Eastern countries, it will spread to American soil, we are warned.
The bogeyman of terrorism has replaced communism for many Americans. Fear has always fueled public support for war. It always will. Problem is, we remain too uneducated and uninformed about international politics and foreign policy.
Also, is today's North Korea another North Vietnam or Russia from the Cold War era? If so, political diplomacy seems less effective than brute force. Is this what we have learned from history and from war?
Only the luxury of time gives us the perspective needed to better understand such complex issues. This is what Burns' well-researched documentary has taught me.
Nearly 100 "ordinary people," as the film described them, shared their stories. This includes Army grunts, prisoners of war, a fighter pilot, a Gold Star mother, college students, reporters, protesters, military analysts and spies.
Together, they pieced together the puzzle of the Vietnam War, though many pieces will remain lost forever or were blown to bits.
"In war… there is only destruction," said Bao Ninh, a foot soldier in the North Vietnamese Army who was interviewed in the film.
In the introduction to the related book, "The Vietnam War: An Intimate History," Burns and Novick wrote, "There is no single truth in war, as this difficult story reminded us at every turn. Each of us can only see the world as we are; we are all prisoners of our own experience."
This is exactly how I felt while watching the documentary. Like most of us, I've been a prisoner of this war since that older kid went away and never came back."
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An interesting article. I can see the comparing then to now.

Let us hope we will never sacrifice 58,000 lives to government lies again.