Terry and I have been watching the series (usually a day or so late) with deep interest. I was a junior in high school in the spring of 1968, exposed only to mainstream headlines and TIME magazine. (I remember reading an article about a Vietnamese farmer
who was overjoyed to find, finally, after much bombing, earthworms surviving in his field. I was moved to tears reading this at age 17.) When Terry and I met in the fall of 1969 at college, he organized the moratorium against the war on campus. I began to
be exposed to the war below the headlines--but not enough to feel that I understood much, and as J. Wiegel wrote, there was a lot of life going on around us.
Taking in this series is in many ways like swallowing difficult large pills--but I find myself so grateful to have these stories to fill in some of the spaces in our national and global story about this war. And about all wars. The other night on one of
the episodes a North Vietnamese veteran said, "War awakens a savagery in people." And U.S. veteran, Matt Harrison, said quietly after describing some horror he witnessed, "The veneer of civilization is very thin." And I think of a line from one of my favorite
novels, STONER, from a professor commenting on the start of WWI: "A war doesn't merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars,
pretty soon all that's left is the brute, a creature that we--you and I and others like us--have brought up from the slime."
Another line from the film struck me came when a North Vietnamese veteran talked about noticing how American soldiers reacted when one of their fellow soldiers was killed. He said something like, "They gathered together around him and comforted each other
in respect for the fallen solder. Just as we do. And I realized that we share a common bond with humanity. And that gave me something to think about."
http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/home/
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www.pbs.org
The Vietnam War is a ten-part, 18-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that will air on PBS in September 2017.
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Here's to our common bond--Diann McCabe