A TV Monument to the "TV War"

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

PBS's chronicle of the sorrow and the pity of Viet Nam

For years it seemed like the war that dared not speak its name. There were few parades or movies to celebrate the 2.5 million Americans who served in Viet Nam or the 58,000 who died there, few political postmortems, even to apportion the blame for defeat. There was only a prolonged consensus for forgetting.

Of late, however, American scholars and the American public seem more ready for a reckoning. The reappraisal with perhaps the greatest potential for emotional impact is a 13-hour documentary series, Viet Nam: A Television History, to air starting next week on the Public Broadcasting Service. (One episode will also be shown this Friday by ABC News, which donated $50,000 to the project in 1978.) The ambitious series was produced by PBS's Boston affiliate, WGBH, in conjunction with Britain's Central Independent Television and France's Antenne 2. Assembled by a multinational team that focused on America but gained access to Communist Viet Nam, the 13-part report is fair and generally balanced. It speaks more in sorrow than in anger, without accusations or the smug wisdom of hindsight and with sensitivity to the tragedy of what started as a noble cause.

Viet Nam was a televised war, a "livingroom war," in the phrase of Critic Michael Arlen. The camera still conveys, more immediately than almost anything in print, the imagery and texture of war: whirring helicopters, cascades of bombs from the bellies of B-52s, the devastation wrought by battle. As used in the series, the camera is also a neutral observer: it provides a forum to participants ranging from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong and from Americans who considered the war honorable to those who believed it immoral. Conclusions about right and wrong are left to the viewer.

There are not many revelations in this television history, nor were there likely to be: the footage was drawn chiefly from public records and from the recollections of figures whose views are well known. The intent is to tell why the U.S. went to Viet Nam, how it lost a sense of purpose in being there, and how and why it left. The scope of the six-year, $4.6 million project is impressive: the production team obtained 94 hours of film--200,000 feet--from archives in eleven countries and conducted 5,000 transcript pages' worth of interviews. The principal reporter, Stanley Karnow, 58, first went to Viet Nam in 1950, when it was still part of French Indochina, and later became a foreign correspondent for TIME, the Washington Post and NBC. Executive Producer Richard Ellison, 59, formerly headed overseas production for TIME-LIFE Films.

What makes Viet Nam: A Television History effective is less its grand scale than its telling detail. The opening hour, which concentrates on France's century of colonial control, offers chilling hints of why the Vietnamese nationalists were so implacable: in the first years of the 20th century, postcards of severed Vietnamese heads were mailed by French soldiers to their sweethearts; some 2 million Vietnamese died of starvation during and after World War II. The narrative recalls that North Vietnamese Leader Ho Chi Minh collaborated at the end of that war with U.S. intelligence agents and modeled Viet Nam's 1945 declaration of independence on America's. These facts could lead to a romantic string of what-ifs; indeed, some former U.S. diplomats contend on-camera that Ho might have become a U.S. ally. But the documentary is careful to depict Ho's lifelong commitment to Communism and his close ties with the Soviet Union and China.

The second episode, about how the French were driven out in 1954, is enhanced by extraordinary footage obtained from the Communist government in Hanoi of the battle for Dien Bien Phu. The third hour, about American support for, and eventual abandonment of, Ngo Dinh Diem, includes horrific scenes of a Buddhist monk setting himself ablaze as a protest against Diem's government, followed by a clip of Diem's sister-in-law Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu sneering at the monk for using "imported gasoline." President John Kennedy is shown saying in September 1963, " "It is their war. The [South Vietnamese] government has gotten out of touch with the people."

The fourth and fifth hours depict President Lyndon Johnson as a tragic figure, torn between desire for peace and belief that the U.S. owed its South Vietnamese ally a debt of loyalty. The sixth hour describes the North Vietnamese, both as they viewed themselves and as they were seen by American prisoners of war, whom they abused and tortured. Subsequent shows chronicle the attempt to "Vietnamize" the conflict by withdrawing U.S. troops, the simultaneous expansion of the war to Cambodia and Laos, North Viet Nam's public relations triumph despite the military failure of its 1968 Tet offensive, the protracted peace negotiations, and the antiwar movement in the U.S.

There are poignant glimpses of American soldiers. One recalls that the rule was "Shoot first, ask questions later," and sobs, "The thing I have nightmares about is the woman in the rice fields whom I shot one day because she was running--for no other reason, because she was running from the Americans who were going to kill her. And I killed her. And at the time I didn't even think twice about it." The "home front" hour is also full of painful recollection: it couples the public anguish over the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy with the private grief of veterans who gave back their war decorations as a gesture of protest and of families who gathered at fallen soldiers' gravesites. The final hours (the 13th is still being edited and will close the series Dec. 20) are to portray the collapse of the South Viet Nam regime in 1975, two years after the U.S. Army left, and the war's continuing repercussions in Southeast Asia and in the U.S.

Despite the length, the first twelve hours are rarely repetitive, never languorous. The narration, by Boston Actor Will Lyman, is unintrusive and kept to a minimum. The only conspicuous adornment is a jungle-beat musical theme written by Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann of the rock group the Grateful Dead.

There are shortcomings. The series gives glancing attention to the destructive American impact in South Viet Nam: corruption, prostitution, an overheated and dependent economy. The first twelve shows offer almost no impression of life in North Viet Nam or of what the Communists planned to impose on the South. As usual, the U.S. suffers for being an open society: there is almost no film or discussion of Soviet military activity, and the footage supplied by Hanoi often seems sanitized; while most of the Americans who are interviewed are thoughtful, there is no flicker of self-criticism among the people interviewed in today's Viet Nam.

For Americans who do not recall the war, especially its all but accidental beginnings, the 13 hours can serve as a comprehensive and comprehensible history lesson. For those who remember all too well, the series offers an opportunity for reconsideration, perhaps reconciliation. If given the chance, the chronicle might captivate even those who feel they have no will or wish to relive the sorrow and the pity of that time. --By William A. Henry III. Reported by James Wilde/New York

With reporting by James Wilde/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.