Vietnam lesson not learned

When I first heard of the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary, “The Vietnam War,” I did not plan to watch it. Surely, my 12 months in Vietnam and the decades I’ve spent since trying to understand the war and my own participation gave me more than enough knowledge about the war. Why submit to 18 hours of video whose creators said would offer no answers?

But I watched anyway. The film was compelling and often riveting. Burns and Novick are excellent documentarians and storytellers. They offered perspectives and information from all sides and showed the determination and heroism of Americans and Vietnamese alike.

But for all that information and screen time, the documentary never recognizes the most profound lesson of that war: the United States was a foreign invader fighting on the wrong side of Vietnamese history against an indigenous independence movement.

As in our own Revolution, the Vietnamese, despite their relative poverty and lack of sophisticated weaponry, were able to outlast the world’s greatest military power because they were defending their homes against an unwanted foreign power. The National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese were tenacious, determined, dedicated, and able to withstand the apocalyptic violence we brought to their country.

That lesson escapes Burns and Novick just as it escaped or was ignored by the five presidents who committed the U.S. to war in Vietnam. America’s never ending wars — overt and covert —since 1975 clearly demonstrate that succeeding presidents have also failed to learn this fundamental lesson.

This story was originally published October 26, 2017 at 1:19 PM with the headline "Vietnam lesson not learned."