| Subject: INSIDE THE VIỆTNAM WAR |
Author:
Tango
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Date Posted: 23:37:59 03/05/09 Thu
In reply to:
Tango
's message, " Phim tài liệu BI KHÚC DA VÀNG -(Sad Song of Yellow Skin)" on 20:28:29 02/22/09 Sun
Tango đang t́m cách chôm phim tài liệu này về cho pà con koi. Hy vong một ngày nào đó phim sẽ được chiếu trên trang nhà
Almost 33 years after the last Army chopper lifted off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, that still happens a lot with the war that killed 1.5 million people, including 58,000 Americans.
By the early 1970s, when the U.S. was pulling out of South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese were clearly going to triumph, historians were already reaching a consensus that we never belonged there in the first place, that it was an unwinnable exercise in arrogance and a tragic Cold War miscalculation.
In the years since, there has been a modest counterview from often more conservative historians who argue the war was a noble idea that we not only could have won, but were already winning when our national leaders lost their resolve.
Under both these scenarios, soldiers died - is there a colder phrase? - for nothing. The only difference is whether the anger is directed at those who put them there in the first place, or those who stopped supporting them before their mission was accomplished.
While this special, "Inside the Vietnam War," avoids overt political, historical or moral conclusions, it seems more sympathetic to the latter view.
It details, for instance, the argument by the military command that the Tet offensive in early 1968 had been so costly to the North that a quick, massive counterstrike could break their resistance for good.
When President Lyndon Johnson not only declined to provide additional troops, but also stopped bombing the North and sought a peace conference, "Inside" reports that U.S. ground forces were dismayed, feeling their Commander in Chief had "cut and run."
Much of "Inside" is told like that, through the words of troops and support personnel who were in country and for whom debates on geopolitical theory were less urgent than staying alive.
It recites with pride how U.S. troops won every battle and relegates to one incidental comment the best explanation for why in the end we lost the war anyhow: because we were always going to leave and the enemy wasn't. The enemy lived there.
"Inside" doesn't dwell, however, on bigger pictures. It picks up the war when the first American troops arrived, not mentioning the division of North and South, Ho Chi Minh's long history fighting for a united Vietnam, including, the war with the French. It also doesn't mention the Cold War or the domino theory, and a brief reference to antiwar demonstrations at home is anchored by a soldier's observation that he was risking his life for the freedom that made such protests possible.
"Inside the Vietnam War" ends being part chronological walk-through and part oral history. Both are crowded fields and this isn't the broadest or deepest examination of either. But no production that takes war out of the abstract can ever be a bad thing.
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