memories of the vietnam war and so beyond our repression and table we hope that you will take the opportunity if not tonight come back because we'll have it set up here in the center of our lobby and we certainly love for you to hear their stories they were kind enough to share and june and they and have done a fabulous job of editing them and asking just the right questions to get wonderful stories those that are going to be playing also another part of the logistics tonight speaking of jim and i an short little memories or not necessarily memories of the war but impressions of tonight so they're going to be coming around with a microphone that would certainly welcome and also speaking of the vietnam war we mentioned it's a night program will reflect on episodes one in six of the canned burns documentary series between now and november we're going to cover all the episodes and will have underway say the different times that they'll be playing a series in our reading room so if you haven't had a chance to watch the series or there were certain episodes that you missed please check our web site and come and join us for more of the documentary and what that will all lead up to  that on your refrigerator tickets are going to go on sale in june for her father's day and if you would want to purchase the book we have them on sale at our death tonight and we'll have them on sales all through the summer but we'll have a pretty event price so we certainly hope that he'd like to read the book before tim o'brien comes is also the non veteran this is one of those classics of american literature that really looks back a very important part of history and tim shares his impressions through fiction but definitely based on a lot of his experiences and in the last little takeaway you have on your page from us is this program coming up in may it's called back from world war one there was a centennial commission that honored his remains he was from the keys already and we have the story of his life and that journey is bring me back to our country so lots of things to happen in tot waiting patiently we have we are so honored to have created this wonderful partnership i know started a long time ago with margaret and we just keep finding more things that you know sites or we work so hard to put that together along with siri weaver to get the word out about this is so wonderful working with this library they were so good actors necking with the community really putting on for national program right away when it started airing that our veterans started talking about it there was a lot of they were reacting very powerfully to each episode they were reacting with rage and sometimes the wilbur meant a lot of times recognition it was just fascinating to hear their responses to what they were seeing and hearing and we saw that right away this might be a good thing to kind of break off from our usual van and go into a deeper dive which is why hundred eighty three that kind of three schools of thought had coalesced about the vietnam war the years after the fall of saigon and historian and critic groups and different nationalism and that the war in victory was possible it probably would not have been worth it with the costs it would have taken to win it was a mistake that could have been avoided by the orthodox interpretation grant it was in the it was a flop with good intentions to restrict the expensive forces of communism throughout the world it was just an unaccommodating we picked the wrong spot to fight that fight just didn't work the way the overconfident and cold war miscalculations that's it in a nutshell the opposing the orthodox one of you with the radical point of view that said the war wasn't just a mistake it wasn't just impractical it was fundamentally moral that in vietnam the united states served as a theory it was the only dad tried to smother with disproportionate violence the legitimate aspirations of the vietnamese people for independent self government though we were on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of morality a book that kind of ninety six seven riverside church in new york city where he lays out the whole history of vietnam and it is a perfect expression of the radical interpretation of the war finally the third school rapidly whose last few years it was some time to talk about that a little bit but i i don't as for example there are conservative authors like who's really coming out with was saying we could have won if we had used less fire if we were focused more on land reform social justice in vietnam sixty six and then he became a company commander another company commander for the two hundred sixty seven signal company while in country that much time travelling digging trenches putting up full for the critical role of fostering communication among our far flung forces in south vietnam and then finally we have the sole marine  september october october nine hundred sixty eight and after a long recovery became one of the founding one of the founders i think you have to say of that center carving out a portion of the  is when you have something to do you don't do what political you know i didn't know by the political ramifications i didn't know about the history of the you know how we got to where we people three times a day every day because every day or pursued it launched up to do so did this series at all kind of change or shape your view of the war in yes i think i can summarize my feelings about the war in a nutshell i don't really have much problem do is go i don't believe th married but i didn't have that context but now that i have heard his presentation and watched his presentation i think he did a pretty balanced job and as far as i'm concerned the people that come out the worst in that thing or the very top political and military leadership courses so thank you george sanger  but the there's a lot of information there that i was aware of two years i spent in the army or communications or information about what was going on the world was very minimal in country we got a newspaper or maybe once a week if we were lucky and then maybe two weeks or when we got in we had some information that was sent to us by our families but that was it just perspective you're really focusing on the square ground with the ship planks that you're on doing your job so many people depend on you doing your job you really have time or inclination to think more broadly about the war and all you got that you really don't party were committed to winning this war or had any idea how to but i felt every one of us was doing exactly what the americans in world war two had done i didn't make any distinction and i just felt it was my turn our turn and we were going to do it for maybe only episode of the ten that did not serve me and infuriate me in one way or another was the first episode because it was essentially a cogent background of how we got into the war and the priest our role in it from year to year beginning with  late forty's and for me the most interesting single remark i made comes at the beginning of episode one when we hear somebody say for years nobody talked  i never said a word about it it was so disgusted and that's exactly how i felt all of us were responding that we came back to the state on just one of the millions but i put it aside completely for forty seven years i had hardly a friend who knew i'd even been back they didn't know i was in the army and three years ago someone invited me to a veterans breakfast for breakfast the price united methodist church which happen to be quite near my house and i went and i've been focused on this for the past three years and i'm in ni military veterans organizations now and these are three flights on this year everybody else speaks on the subject of his experience and how he perceived that one of the things that occurred to me while watching the series is that at and i had forgotten about this too is that we were over there could not differentiate the south vietnamese the north vietnamese occasionally somebody would give us a snarky smile or something we'd have reason to be suspicious that was not normally the case but trying to differentiate between our allies and our enemies was something like trying to differentiate between pennsylvania and ohio but it will feel like we've done the right something that disturbs me is the series went on was that it progressed it seemed to be ken burns was being less narrative and more in the mind to balance what he was showing us and by the time we got into the protesters i was serious to me they were our greatest enemy they did nothing for any of us and i telling you here and now if i could resurrect the fowls the fifty eight thousand two died in that war and replace them with protesters i would do it in a heartbeat makes it tolerable is that being in all of these military veterans groups i am i am surrounded by brothers who see the field exactly as i do and  was it waiting at the airport for him when the war work too bad it wasn't the korean war but it was the non veteran out in full force making sure that this latest generation of veterans coming home did not get treated the way they did and i know that you are you will be forever grateful to the vietnam veteran serving you in that way and i might also add i don't want to talk but i do want to say olympics the anti war movement got a lot of attention but these guys and most of the generation forty percent served in the military or two percent of the men that generation serve in the military this is their job serve their country you know one of the interesting things about the theory and this is happening in scholarship we're broadly is we are getting a new perspective on the enemy side there's been different from the viet cong in the south often of those to one another in a lot of divisions money tell a lot of a lot of disagreement and the enemy has a lot of their time in the ken burns here and i found it very leaders for the v c is where we make contact with them in the area that i was in you had to look at any male who is older than the age of twelve and under the age of fifty and figure he was a soldier somewhere if the south vietnamese v c leaves you with no idea what you know but he wasn't home he was an inability you would go through the diligence you did not see males between the ages of twelve and they were talking about independence but independence benthic they were going to be independent communist country and so this is one of those situations that isn't easily s were completely propaganda and they were committed to fighting and independence and they didn't realize more or they told the great majority of them that they were what this really was going to me is we were going to take over this country and make it a communist country so i put in the seeds of all of those statements is the things that we should have done as a as a country and as our political and military leadership i think we could have easily said we want to give you independence ok remember one of the one of the comments they said there was going to be  and what's right and we can continue to support a dictatorship in the south who was just out as much as i think the same as many other countries that we supported in that able specially in some they paid a hell of a price for that work well many ways they are better off now and will be in the future because some perspectives expressed in the series that that both reduce feelings i have added to the confusion one of the things i think that under play was the nature of most of the soft the enemies people i don't think anybody in this country lives with the abject poverty that people over there routinely  living in corrugated shacks and working very hard long hours some of them even doing up our our laundry cleaning our areas i' w s and what an awful struggle they had even if they survive to be the single most compelling part of any of the ten episodes was involved  you did your daily job you came out it was back to the world and when i started keeping an eye all i do is what i did you can't eat that way i had to go back to the end which i did and learned a lot about it and listen to various forever infallible to get her curriculum and it's been very successful it's because of guys like you that were willing to get over your anger and perhaps you're just disappointment in america you know we love this been out of power or at least given very sad and leadership of the country was taken over by a very radical i mean if somebody should should be vietnam didn't talk about their service at all until the last within the last three four five years and veterans breakfast club has been a big part of that and i think a lot of people opened up as a result of that so thank you guys because you've done a really great job on arranging their services that's the other thing you love like thanksgiving because as a result of the veterans breakfast club i was one of the sixteen that went on a trip back to vietnam this past the beginning of this month one area and the pentagon admits that over ten percent never explode so they're still armaments that are still exploding that well when that when those gifts played with that he killed his two friends  that he had with that gentleman up here probably changed my life as well would you mind talking about that in is a place called friendship village which was west of headway and it was just recently established by u s soldiers to help three handicapped children and orphans and over the years to go you and your brothers who have taken up the arms to do or