I, perhaps oddly, do not know how my relatives feel about the war or the Ken Burns documentary. Most flat out refuse to talk about those years. Perhaps that's not so odd, given the times and situations they faced both abroad and on coming home.
The folks I worked with, on the other hand, were pretty uniformly proud of the job they and their men did. They did not all agree with the politics surrounding the war, both in recent years as well as at the time, but being professionals, they did as they were ordered. Several of them, now professors of U.S. History, thought the Ken Burns' documentary was very well done, and reflected reality in a way that Hollywood never did or desired to. A couple of those professors include the Burns' documentary as part of their courses' curriculum.
I don't know if any of that helps with your curiosity.
Individually, I'm sure there's plenty to be proud of. But as a group, they did a lot of terrible and evil things extremely well.
Since starting that documentary, when I've been thinking about large protests, I'm struck by how often the protestors are right. I know going forward it's going to change how I see big protests.
Very few folks decided to return their passports and emigrate. People liked to blame the Army but everything that happened was in the name of the American people and by their leave.
"I didn't know" and "I thought it was a bakery" are poor excuses.
If Burns' documentary is correct, the government and military lied about pretty much all aspects of the war. If that wasn't the case, I would agree that the American people are to blame.
> Very few folks decided to return their passports and emigrate.
Thank goodness for that. The people that fought the most against the war may very well be the best Americans.
In the first Gulf War when we (the US) were bombing Iraq to take out the supposed weapons of mass destruction, I supported the action. I remember arguing with my sister that even though it might be wrong for the US to invade another country, removing Hussein's offensive capabilities was too important. The ends will justify the means! Boy, was I wrong. Again though, it was lying by the government, failures of the press, and failures of officials I trusted (esp. Colin Powell) that was the basis of my support.
You could say the same for many of the"anti-war" movement. Individually there was a lot of concern and desire to do the right thing, but the context of the Vietnam war was it was also a civil war, and many people in Vietnam wanted to fight back against communists who had been doing some pretty awful things. So collectively, there was some undermining of resistance to them, and which also resulted in millions? of refugees and hundreds of thousands in life loss after the war.
Because then you have to really start thinking on your own plus you don't get the benefits of the army anymore. Comfort zone.
In some ways the documentary made me feel better about today's America; they survived, so can we. The parallels between the Nixon administration (and, frankly, the pro-war coverup parts of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) and today's administration are just amazing. On the other hand, it makes me sad to realize how much of today's mindsets are unchanged knee-jerk leftovers from that era. My dad is a Vet, and was actually on a carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin during the incident; fortunately his active duty service was complete shortly thereafter. He later came to realize the war made no sense, but I'm sure that many of the things the anti-war folks said would still hurt to this day. He's also had friends he served with who he's lost friendships with because they can't accept that someone could go from being in the military to being skeptical of these kinds of foreign interventions, and that the government isn't always right.
One thing I found really interesting was how well-received Americans are in Vietnam. Maybe it helps that communism ultimately fell apart so it seemed like we were 'right' all along, and looking out for their best interests-- but of course it wasn't their interests we cared about, and communism would have fallen apart on its own, likely without millions of deaths, if we hadn't gotten involved.
Communism caused more deaths where we weren't involved than where we were.
This is confounded; the areas where we had no influence had much larger populations. But it is indisputable that if we hadn't gotten involved at all, communism would still have caused many millions of deaths.
I wonder how soldiers or police from that era feel about the documentary. The soldiers clearly were ordered into a terrible war. The police can't be proud of their role either.