science of southern illinois university he retired in two thousand and eight and has moved to seattle it's our luck that he is here most of his writings examine the political institutions pro w worked as an archivist at the university of massachusetts boston with the w g b h vietnam a television history media archive and other vietnam related emphasis on asian american studies link completed her ph d in ethics studies at the university of california san diego and her recent work as examined the intergenerational history and personal memory of the vietnam war research interests include critical immigration and refugee studies and race war and empire and last but not least on the far ri women who has recently completed her ph d in history of the university of washington with a specialization in the history of money and now her work focuses on the social history  of the vietnam war particularly in the city of or a in central europe known as she's also interested in urban still is war and diaspora studies and storytelling so this is often times a strong opinions we would like that we would like to engage of course in question and answer but with all due respect and not with too long  i did not see the series in the same time frame that most of you probably did because i was overseas when it was shown so when i came back to the states i had to stream a tin and watch a couple or three a day and i saw i saw all squished up in a bunch but i also had the advantage or maybe disadvantage of reading quite a lot of reviews and commentaries that came out while the thing was being broadcast here and so i suppose in some way i'm reacting in part to the reviews in the commentaries as well this to the series so bear in mind i may not have quite the same take on things that as my fellow panelists for that particular reason that said my broad conclusion is that the documentary which is meant a lot of criticism for from academics i think much of that criticism is unjustified in the following limited sense that it lives up to its billing and its billing is very clear what it is what it's about what its aims are and so forth on the p b s website ken burns and  n know the extent part eighteen hour documentary series the vietnam war all caps tells the epic story of one of the most consequential to visit and controversial events in american history not  anybody else's american history as it has never before been told on film while visceral and immersive code words for affective not analytical not not  not explanatory really a little bit manipulative but it was the word visceral and immersive the series explores the human dimensions of the war the human dimensions of the war and indeed we do see a lot of people getting blown to bits or running out of burning villages and things of that sort through revenue torrie testimony some of it is in fact i found it absolutely fascinating every once in a while there was a little bit of testimony to sort of really set me back on my heels not as much as i'd like to see nearly eighty witnesses from all sides americans who fought in the war others who opposed it as well as combatants and civilians from north and south vietnam so let's be clear this is not a history it is not a documentary history it's the application of the burns effect to historical facts  all of which by the word chile all of them by the way have long been familiar to academic historians of the war but haven't achieved the degree of circulation throughout the general population much less in the media   so i view it as a kind of a springboard for the kind of conversation that we're about to hear now in my own view of what the thing that by about the second or third episode i realized i was watching all about a lot of battles a lot of fighting and a lot of testimony from people who had been in battles and about the experience of combat and so forth and that kind of surprised me and i realized as the reels went by that this heavy focus on the actual fighting in the veterans experiences was leaving little space for much else some things are certainly squeezed in there but it results in a number of distortions one involving the actual fighting itself because the actual fighting that we are shown is pretty limited to the war the big talons and this forward in other words the conventional warfare size of the war in spite of the fact that sixty percent of saigon forces who were killed were south vietnamese regional and popular forces not the urban not the main force sixty percent of them the real war wasn't the war of the big battalions in casualty terms it was a little war dirty nasty out of hidden villages and so forth fought by people who work apart times some of them you could call call  guerrillas others were still call regional forces wopper the locality out to a certain distance they could be mobilized into main force battles from time to time but their range of operation was relatively confined their weaponry was not particularly heavy and it's those guys other people spanned on the scene a little later because if you could see it sort of got to my snout a little bit what the war that they that they show you the images that they  possible first there's virtually nothing in the series about how the revolutionary side mobilized the forces to pretty much win the fifty eight to the the the the party membership in the south was somewhere south of five thousand and it was from that nucleus that this machine was created in popular support was was found and these  these irregular forces were were armed and trained and had to saigon government forces on their heels by nine hundred sixty five requiring intervention how the hell did they do that why isn't that a part of the story or is a marvelous comes to long not long on being a very important lush rice growing province just to the south of saigon in those days you could actually crosses from paddy fields to get along on now the southern suburbs the far ring of the suburbs as saigon interesting second there's very little in the documentary about the allies the so cold free world assistance forces up at total i think twenty six different countries provided some kind of assistance monetary material or so forth at one time or the other food at one time or the other two to our war effort but only only four of them sent troops and those were australia new zealand the philippines and south korea despite our pleading for other nations to join us in one great allied effort fight communism and for what two of them had to be bribed you know that it's an important story it just isn't there it is says a whole lot about the degree to which we're prepared to go along because essentially we did a third separate but link to wars and revolutions and laos and cambodia that wasn't the vietnam war certainly in the war plans of the allowed of don't argue the communist party in hanoi certainly it's in the war plans of the military from the beginning it was assumed this war had to be fought right over to the make up on the boundary between laos and thailand and all sides treated that way which was to hell with international law under the the geneva agreement set that was all pushed aside  strategy on the revolutionary stark side on saigon side if you've never heard of rev down of or rough buffs you don't know your vietnam war history it's very important there was a constant effort by the revolution react side and the saigon government to develop what were simply mirror image armed forces of social structures at village level and saigon learned from the communists about how to do that with the assistance of defectors from the revolutionary side and all of a psych on government efforts to create a similar kind of political military structure at village level to build a kind of power with the peasants of the communists it succeeded so brilliant and people came to know why the how could the communists do it when i guys couldn't there are answers of that question but in the the burns is a critically important question to understanding the war the dynamic of it why so many irregular bodies were killed and not only main force  don't like to go and maybe shouldn't it's very controversial but they give us no help as to how we might address the post war controversies that are best understood as historical  with the need to consider them because they're very powerful forces voices and forces have put them forward and one of these is the kissinger thesis of the vietnam war with the wheel won or lost it is really not so important is that it held communism at bay so the noncommunist countries of southeast asia could stabilize and develop and stand on their own feet and they needed a couple decades to do that so you know we got something good out of it i think that's nonsense another one is that the it's sort of a spin off of the stab in the back the thesis sorley who is quoted i think just in the towards the end of the of the film is the primary proponent but it's the notion that we had the war one sometime during one thousand nine hundred two it was there the communists were were on the on the water basically and we just had to stick with a little longer and congress pulled the rug out from under the feet of our own armed forces and and the aid program to the saigon government and of course after that they couldn't withstand the onslaught from the north their responses to these and i didn't see any material and i don't expect them to answer those or you can deal with them but i didn't see anything in what they presented to help me think about it and i'm sorry those are the controversies that have the most political punch in our national conversation today i have more to say but  much about the particular war period is that i was living in the us well in fact i was living in britain of course during a time when britain was too engaged in not not so much overtly but i have you know met met actually american veterans also having worked with vietnam war collections and being a kind of a scholar of vietnam will be it in another period so i'm interested in i mean this would be a long term project but it would be series was a long time in the making a meticulously prepared with what they called vietnam university they brought in all the experts about vietnam in order to train the directors all the producers and what they  should be looking at so that too was a very hyped series and i'm interested in that because i think sort of like like bill i'm i'm interested in how  these series are kind of reflections of public opinion of the time and how public opinion in fact correlates to the kind of evidence that we have before us and how we deal with that deal with that evidence so of course you know the evidence that we have before us is very different now than it was in one nine hundred eighty three so it seems to me that the vietnam war was not just the television war as it was often proclaimed its public image was both made through its exposure that is to say through its production every night as a television event but also through its secrecy and its lies so we begin to see revelations as early as the seventy's obviously with the publishing of the pentagon papers in seventy one and i think there's this interesting tension between these these kind of the revelations the series of revelations and and and the kind of the lies and the of the viet nam of television history was one of a kind of truth seeking with a focus on understanding through a sequence of critical decisions that led to the u s involvement and you know they did this through this kind of meticulous research and through interviewing almost all of the high profile people that they could find at the time and that was pretty much ever anybody who had anything to say or do with the war and i have a list of people  truths but it also appeared i think very much of this motto that there is no single truth in war i mean that was the thing that you saw repeatedly in the trailers but certainly they were looking they were searching for some kind of understanding national history making or even miss making perhaps i mean i think this is where you know some of us can get into some interesting discussions on the actual content of what's going on here but i think that there is this sort of searching for a common humanity something that's going to make people come out of this feeling better about themselves and i have to agree with bill i think it does this magnificent that you know it it it chooses people who are in dering their narratives you know heroic and we go through this kind of tragedy and heroic responses and then families are united and we can feel good about it in some way so oh i should say one of the first things that struck me about the series in this regard is the very beginning where of co film is run in reverse which i have to say i found very annoying and it seems to me that this is almost saying that this too is a sort of reflection of our technological society that we now can control these events in some kind of technological ways that we can kind of run these things backwards to a point of a razor in some sense so i just found that exploring really annoying another kind of you know gimmick of the of the modern age so this is you know i see it as  this attempt to create this sort of national narrative and i don't know maybe lincoln speak to this but it seems that it doesn't really address the narrative of who america is now because of course it doesn't address you know the one point three million vietnamese americans who are in fact part of the vietnamese part of the american story now so to turn to my other point here which is to look at this from the point of documentation as we probably are aware you know thirty years is the kind of mandatory release period for us agency document so most of the vietnam war material was released by two thousand and five unless of course it was you know secret  left have now in fact been proved out there and i think that the burns documentary does that that kind of makes these mainstream these things that only you know some of us are kind of understood for a long time so these things are now kind of proven to be true you know we know it now know about the gulf of tonkin incident with the release of the you know the logs from the maddox and the turner joy the kind of reverse in the autobiographies of people like matt meagher and we know my running out of time ok so the other thing i wanted to talk about is this idea of the making of the south and i think other people have commented on this to me the failure of the series to really get to the heart of the divisions that are the basis of the war itself and i was very disappointed watching the series because i think as as other people have noted the first one is probably the weakest which claims to deal with the colonial period which of course is my particular laugh and to deal with you know the hundred years of history in an hour seems a little absurd but not only that but that hour in fact is repeatedly interrupted by this kind of return to the present as if you know the viewers can't possibly have to deal with this ugly history stuff let's give them you know this kind of this ongoing narrative of the  sixty s and the narratives from the from the vets enduring as they are you know i would have liked to see much more of that real history so i think what is lost there is really an understanding of genesis of the south as a kind of separate either as a real separate entity or as an imagined separate entity and you know i see this in part in the one nine hundred thirty s that's my period you know the south has a very different colony as a result of that it has very different laws and it enjoys certain freedoms because it's a colony it enjoys certain freedoms that come as a result of being under french law so you know the newspapers are free or in the south and in many ways as a more vibrant kind of press activity that goes on in the south and as a result of that i think you know there are a certain there's more vibrant exchange there not only among the communists but the noncommunist and i think they see this opportunity to try and consolidate power in the south and in fact you know there's an attempt in forty six at the conference to create a separate cochin china state within cochin china that would be a bulwark against the sort of the communist north so i think all of that is kind of lost and it seems to me that it's critically important in understanding how this how this kind of notion of the south comes into being and and then again in the period one nine hundred fifty three fifty four when this character ed lansdale first goes to be and now ed lansdale i believe is mentioned once in the series without any introduction and of course he was absolutely critical forwarding this kind of symbolic notion of the south and building up noting the regime and creating this kind of you know through it a psychological operations which of course he'd been involved in in the philippines to and against  the rebellion so he comes back and he's sort of part of this effort to to build up this notion of the south and putting cobbling together this kind of old coalition in cochin china of the francophone catholic and  its marxist elites and i think that's very important and i just want to sort of lastly say how i think this this fits into our categorize  of the war this series i think rather casually described it as a civil war and i think that's something that we need to debate because you know one in one sense in my mind it is a civil war in the sense that he has two parts  so even if you accept the both the democratic republic and the republic the states themselves both are claiming kind of terror territorial sovereignty over th area of viet nam i think the mindsets of those different people the mindsets in those areas somewhat different in their approach is the difference so is that a civil war even though it's also a proxy war i mean i think that in my mind hi i'm so nervous to be on this panel because i'm not a historian so i have no no correction to any of the political theories about the war any of the history of the war obviously was not alive during the war but some of my comments so i do research on basically the aftermath of the war you know how does the war live on how does that moment  continue and what happens with the trauma so just to build a little bit off of what judy was saying i think that there are ways that i'm really interested in the perception of the film right the circulation the reception so i'm going to be really interested to hear from the audience why are you here  say evening it's very windy outside what do you hope to get from this so why are you here but so i think that the documentary series as something that's on public television with your viewership of close to forty million viewers when it was actually happening in this era of tweets you can sit for an hour and thirty minutes and do it for eighteen hours and i applaud you because when it came out i was like oh here's a here's the thing i have to do is so long i think that it does work of orienting people toward something right so they're trying to orient the american public towards a certain kind of narrative about the war where they disavow any sort of responsibility they say we're not trying to tell you what to think or feel but the end in the end they are always trying to tell you what to think or what to feel right so they're trying to create a universalize a cohesive narrative about the war and they say that they do so in this nonpartizan way by interviewing people as well as american  veterans well it is very much a war history right all of the events are centered around military operations the interview interviewees are primarily veterans right and so how does that really frame in a limited way our understanding of does war not permeate civilian life right so i mean you have the gold star mother being interviewed you have some other folks but i think it does a disservice to the the significance of international warfare to only talk  about war as something that happens in the battlefield in certain kinds of operations they talk a little bit about p t s d and how people bring that home but there's more than that there's much more than that so i found particularly problematic interview that burns you know it did on fresh air where i think it was no big saying you know related to this this question of whether or not it's a civil war she said something about you know the vietnamese were exceptional too they had kind of their own manifest destiny which is a misappropriation and misunderstanding that manifest destiny is is driven by white supremacy and white supremacy really drove the united states to enter into t fact of being unwilling to acknowledge that a third world country a brown people want independence from the french so i think this question of whether or not it's a civil war vietnam war how would it challenge people's understanding of where that war was located who are the hmong people why were they there why were they involved in this war but it opens up different kinds of questions so for me it was about they keep talking about reconciliation they keep framing it in terms of healing and burns himself never says that he's trying to heal from the war it's that the one veteran who is who they feature a lot in the film is talking about how it's about healing and reconciliation and then my question is for whom right and i think that is very much it's clear obviously a beautiful film it's anything that you can get millions of dollars to do you can hire professionals to do very well right it's  beautiful but i think that it's an attempt to reconcile with american veterans and whether or not the veterans here and agree with that that was what it seemed like so i'd be i'd be interested to hear your response to whether or not you feel that way  but i think that you know this to also speak to what judy said it really doesn't imagine the united states to exist the way that it does right so if one point three million refugees came afterwards and we're multiple generation generations away from that now you know who is watching this documentary series and we're hoping to get out of it i imagine that the intentions are very diverse  o for example well i've taken a vietnamese language class and for me there's wanting to get in touch with my cultural heritage wanting to do research and then there was a military historian who wanted to learn to me so he could figure out what the u s had done wrong so that because they could have won that war right so for him it was about how to fight that war again for the future and so we have different intentions coming into watching the documentary series and different things that we're hoping to get out of it and i think it's a little bit you know there's there's a lot of oversight and not thinking about the large refugee community that that are american citizens and that exist in the united states and does watching the series tell the second generation anything about why their parents don't want to talk about that i think it does a little bit but there's a little bit of kind of violence war pornography in it right so these excruciating to watch scenes where people who look like my grandmother you know are being tortured and killed and the fact that they went out and got a k forty seven shot at pumpkin so they could lay the soundtrack over these images thinking about the fabrication of this affix the bills talking about that they're trying to generate right there's that part of it but the other large part of the story and this takes us back to the anti colonial movement is the experience of racism why the united states was involved abroad had to do with white supremacy and racism why refugees were treated the way they were treated when  back why people why the first generation didn't want to talk about it and then had to come to the united states and be visible reminders of the u s defeat and they struggled with what word to use read the u s failure and i would say it was the u s his failure to to maintain his empire which is not a conversation that is really brought up in the film at all but this is this conversation of you know how to deal with the aftermath of the war in terms of the trauma of physical violence of emotional and psychological violence and then to have to live in the united states post civil rights in the this very conservative environment after deal with the day to day racism of trying to live in the united states as refugees of war dealing with races on a day day basis i think is a huge underlying current of all of it that is not discussed at all and so i'm not trying  to argue that they should have included all of these things right it's as a director or producer you make decisions about the story that you're going to tell everything else gets cut because it doesn't make sense because you have to make time but it just left me with this question of what kinds of feelings how are they trying to orient us towards this history and with whom were the filmmakers trying to reconcile from the film a lot of their thoughts a frame in in the official official state of you know the narrative of liberation you know against invasion and foreign aggression  of the historical parrott we don't really hear or we don't see much about the the other side or i mean the like that's much more happening in vietnam on t we don't really for the fim i mean it's i mean it would be nice to frame it so that people can encourage people to think about you know such did a good job on into printing different in different stories in different locations in vietnam in the you know we talk about vietnam war and as young mentioned earlier in vietnam we often say that we have fifty four minority groups we don't see any of them the central region in vietnam and basically these location up your only way we talk about the battlefields happened oth doing because of the war and during war time on so people from different backgrounds educational backgrounds and religious backgrounds people with different political views and all that so that the filmmaker made to conduct so many interviews because we have to really see that the the interviews very central from the beginning from the beginning of the series and it's actually the greatest strength of this documentary in my view in my in my opinion it's actually because you know because of the disappearing generation of the and so there's some questions about the interviewing process and they said that they they spend for each interview these they spend five to six hours you know to get to know them and to really to ask all of the questions before they get to the point that the the they feel that they feel the whole thing but like really to get to the the moment when they can quote that and cut them into the two to put into the film and i mean as someone who did lots of interviews with the war generation as well i have to say that this really is really impressive because you you you know we watching the film you remember that's a lot of really emotional moments that for example the  six hours they get into that process it's really that they have to leave that moment and again i mean imagining that all of these so to us you know they really expand the trauma or  feeling the emotion or all of the the head of it or the feel and all of that you know that the expo in stealing wartime forty years fifty years ago so that was really i i mean to me it's really  limited number of enemies people had a chance to see that documentary but with this vietnam war series a lot of people in vietnam now are still are talking about the war again and especially with the new perspectives and the new views that they learn from the series but of course a lot of people or i mean are you going to be seen vietnam so vietnamese in the u s the vietnamese americans in the u s are now  people i would say a lot of people welcome and really broaden and deepen our knowledge on the on the war and you know people who were directly affected by the  war they disarmed thing really important and maybe open up a lot of discussions among vietnamese the first generation in the second generation both landlord land