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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.