Richard BasehartVietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War

The Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam, 1945-1975 is a 26-part documentary about the war in Vietnam, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It was conceived by Michael Maclear, a Canadian broadcast journalist and film maker, who had spent some time in North Vietnam during the war. Maclear’s wife, Mariko Koide, a Japanese news researcher, had contacts which helped Maclear gain access to archival film from North Vietnamese military and civilian organizations (unfortunately, this film, in black and white, is of poor quality). This series also employs film from Canadian, French, Australian, and Japanese news organizations, from the U.S. National Archives, and the Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson, and Ford Presidential Libraries. The script was written by Peter Arnett (who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for his reporting on Vietnam), and narrated by actor Richard Basehart. Interviews with a wide range of U.S. and Vietnamese officials (especially Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu), and American military officers and soldiers provide important perspectives on the war. There is less input from the other side, mainly from Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett, and Ha Van Lau.The series opens with “America in Vietnam,” a 51-minute overview of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975. Most of the 25 subsequent 25-minute programs are devoted to a general history of the war (with some overlapping between programs), beginning with a brief account of Vietnamese anti-colonialist activities before WWII, and a description of how the Viet Minh and the OSS fought together against the Japanese during World War II. During that war, the U.S. opposed restoration of French rule in Viet Nam; but after the war, and especially after the Communist victory in China and the outbreak of the Korean War, the U.S. began assisting the French in Vietnam. The Ten Thousand Day War devotes an entire program to the battle of Dien Bien Phu, then discusses the Geneva Conference, the Diem regime, and the assassination of Diem, Viet Cong guerrilla warfare against South Viet Nam, the Tonkin Gulf incident, growing U.S. involvement through advisers, bombing, and ground troops, the siege of Khe Sanh, the TET offensive, Nixon’s Vietnamization policy, peace negotiations, the final military campaign, and U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam. Along the way, we learn about Viet Cong tunnel systems, American air and naval firepower, body counts, the limitations of the Army of South Viet Nam, and the impact of the U.S. presence on Vietnamese officials and people,In addition to this general history of the conflict, The Ten Thousand Day War includes special programs focused on each of the following specific aspects of the war: (1) North Vietnamese society, (2) the Ho Chi Minh Trail, (3) the weapons of the U.S., the North Vietnamese, and the Viet Cong, (4) each side’s efforts to gain the support of the villages, (5) the air war, (5) the anti-war movement in America, (6) the lives of American troops in the field, and (7) the experiences of American prisoners of war.Many Americans who lived through it are likely to be highly critical about things that were done or not done during the war. They may be dissatisfied with this Canadian-produced series, which, to a great extent, avoids taking sides, between South and North Vietnam, between military and civilian officials, or between hawks and doves. Reviewers have expressed vastly different views, one characterized this series as “government propaganda,” another commented that it “demonstrates Washington’s systematic blundering and inefficiency,” and another, who identified himself as a Vietnam veteran, described it as “the finest and most complete history of the Vietnam War I have ever seen.”In the final program, “Vietnam Recalled,” a wide cross section of diplomats, military officers, politicians, and soldiers provide a wide range of assessments of America’s Vietnam policies. Among them are Ellsworth Bunker, Clark Clifford, William Colby, William Fulbright, Robert Komer, Melvin Laird, Henry Cabot Lodge, Eugene McCarthy, Dean Rusk, Arthur Schlesinger, Maxwell Taylor, and William Westmoreland. There is no equivalent commentary from the other side. In any case, throughout the war, there seems to have been little divergence of policy views among North Vietnamese leaders. With regard to Vietnamese memories of the war, it is perhaps sufficient to note that roughly 5 per cent of Vietnam’s people died during the conflict.The Ten Thousand Day War cannot be considered a definitive history of the conflict. The Vietnamese were involved in fighting for even more than ten thousand days. Guerrilla action against the French actually began before 1940, and was followed by operations against the Japanese during World War II. After 1975, Vietnam was engaged in combat against Cambodia and China. The series neglects much of the diplomacy behind the war, the backgrounds of South Vietnamese leaders, and the course of South Vietnamese political developments. Moreover, like many documentary films, it is largely guided by the availability of motion picture images. Thus, combat operations—of which there is much film footage—tend to receive more attention than diplomatic and military policy decisions (e.g., McNamara’s change of heart, government misperceptions and misrepresentations, peace negotiations, etc.), which took place away from the cameras.Maclear also wrote a companion volume,  Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam: 1945-1975  (1981), which provides much additional information._________________________________________________Following the release of Ken Burns’s Vietnam, it may be useful to compare it with the Ten Thousand Day War (TTDW). The Burns documentary (18 hours) is longer than TTDW (12 hours). Whereas TTDW consists of one overview episode and 25 more or less chronologically arranged (and somewhat overlapping) topical episodes, Burns tells the story in a single chronological narrative, with digressions to tell personal stories. He puts human faces on combatants and civilians from all sides—U.S. and South Vietnamese military personnel and civilians, and members of the Viet Minh, the Viet Cong, and the NVA.Burns provides the pre-history of the conflict—French colonial policies, Ho Chi Minh’s early activities, his cooperation with American forces during World War II. The French effort to restore its control of Vietnam, and Chinese aid to Vietnamese Communists. He covers certain battles not mentioned in TTDW, e.g. Ap Bac, Binh Gia, the Ia Drang Valley, and the Iron Triangle. Burns’s documentary reveals the attitudes of U.S. leaders (some of whom thought the war strategically insignificant and unwinnable, and yet continued to escalate it). Some U.S. Presidents were more worried about the war’s effect on their political careers than about its military or strategic significance. Burns documents leaders’ thinking with recordings of presidential conversations that were unavailable to producers of TTDW. He also shows major differences among North Vietnamese leaders during the war—e.g., Vo Nguyen Giap’s opposition to the Tet offensive (Giap also opposed the 1964 escalation of the war, fearing it would lead to a major conflict with the U.S.). Le Duan, North Vietnam’s preeminent hawk, had expectations of imminent victory that led him into serious miscalculations.TTDW does not discuss events after 1975, but Burns covers such postwar developments as the boat people, Vietnam’s re-education camps and the reform of its economy from Stalinist policies to a more capitalistic system. Burns also treats Vietnam’s war with Cambodia, although he treads very lightly over both the U.S. diplomatic support for the Khmer Rouge, whose blood bath destroyed the lives of as many as 2,000,000 Cambodian people, and over the Vietnamese role in ending this genocide. Burns wraps up his documentary with an account of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, American soldiers’ visits to Vietnam, and the gradual reconciliation of Vietnam and the U.S.But Burns’s film has not entirely superseded TTDW. Various issues and events are explored much more fully in TTDW, which devotes entire episodes to such specific subjects as the battles of Dien Bien Phu, Khe Sanh, and Tet, and to the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, weapons (including how the Viet Cong manufactured improvised explosive devices using material from unexploded U.S. bombs), life in wartime North Vietnam, and the physical and mental trauma of U.S. veterans.Some of the same persons appear in both documentaries (e.g., Max Cleland, Tim O’Brien, Bui Diem, Frank Snepp). But, whereas Burns presents the stories and comments of relatively anonymous soldiers and civilians from both sides. TTDW includes comments from contemporary officials—American ambassadors, Cabinet level officials (notably Clark Clifford’s description of his transformation from hawk to dove), John Ehrlichman, Alexander Haig, Edward Lansdale, William Westmoreland, William Colby, William Fulbright. Nguyen Kao Ky, and Nguyen Van Thieu. For the most part, TTDW lets viewers listen to the disparate views of these men and form their own opinions.On the other hand, Burns has a definite viewpoint: ”The Vietnam War was a tragedy, immeasurable and irredeemable.” In keeping with this outlook, much of the commentary in the Burns documentary comes from Americans who participated in the war and eventually opposed it. These persons either express respect for the other side (Major Charles Beckwith regarding the NVA: “They’re the finest soldiers I’ve ever seen.”), or criticism of American policy (future Air Force Secretary Merrill McPeak: “We were fighting on the wrong side.”). There are few comments from those who consistently opposed the war; nor are there many comments from those who supported the war. Although he appears in the film, Lewis Sorley, an army officer who participated in the war and has a more positive view of it, was not happy with Burns’s documentary.There is a companion volume to the Burns documentary.

If I were still teaching high school, this work would be the one I would insist on using for my students to understand the complexity of the "Vietnam War" (actually, the Second Indochina War) for the United States -- and especially for those of us who came of age during the Vietnam War. I graduated from high school in Newark, New Jersey, Class of 1964. Our high school graduating class was fated to be the main class to "serve", live or die for the "Vietnam War." My luck gave me a college scholarship and the time to study the war (and become an anti-war activist and organizer), while most of my Boy Scout and high school buddies (including my best friend, who died during his Marine Cops service) had to go into "the service."I took those of us who organized in opposition to the war (as I began to do in 1966) years to learn the information now summarized powerfully in "Vietnam -- the Ten Thousand Day War." We worked forward towards the truth, inch by inch, against the propaganda that soaked most working class towns (and "boys") in the USA during the 1950s and early 1960s. One of the reasons why it was possible for America's political leadership to force a half million of us into the war was the Draft. And so a triumph of our movement against the war was that we ended the draft and stopped the government from getting an unlimited supply of cannon fodder for the presidents' next misplaced adventures into other peoples and countries.Sadly the lessons taught here in "Vietnam -- the Ten Thousand Day War" were not learned during the years of brainwashing by the cultural icons of the American ruling class. And so, as a result, by the time things got to their worst in both Iraq and Afghanistan, we had to listen to the same old silly nonsense about "pacification" and "counter insurgency" that we remembered being rebuked by the late 1960s in Vietnam (and the rest of "Indochina"), One additional irony today, in 2015, is that the Obama administration (a different kind of "Chicken Hawk" from the administration of George W. Bush, but no less odious -- and I knew Barack Obama personally before he became an international super star and the "winner" of one of the most dubious Nobel Peace Prizes) now has to decide whether to prosecute on of the biggest hucksters of their generation -- General David Petraeus.It's fitting, and that celebrity general should be held accountable for his crimes, but there is a bigger irony. Petraeus pushed the bankrupt policy and notions of "counter insurgency" that had been discredited by the time of the American escalation in Vietnam -- as a result of the failure of the French versions of the same nonsense between 1947 and Dien Bien Phu in 1954. By the time I was organizing soldiers and veterans against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and later, some of our most prized possessions were books by Barnard Fall (Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place) that shared for us (and, it turned out, some of the better minds in the American parts of Vietnam) the fact -- FACT, it has to be shouted -- that "counter insurgency" is bulls***.I was particularly moved by many of the men who appear in "Vietnam -- the Ten Thousand Day War," but treasure most perhaps two: Frank Snepp and Bernard Fall. Snepp's moving narrative of the final betrayals of the USA towards those "South Vietnamese" who had been on our side for so long is a priceless addition to our understanding of the disgraces we force on the people who subject to our imperialist experiments. One of the books in my library is the book Snepp wrote about his work for the CIA and these betrayals -- a book for which he was prosecuted and silenced by the government of the United States. A government that was later to turn the con man Petraeus into a tin pot celebrity.Bernard Fall, as everyone who took the war seriously knows, provided us with all the journalistic reporting we needed to know that the American adventure in Vietnam would end badly. But while some of the wisest minds who studied the war read and reread Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place, the lessons have again been lost, buried under the nonsense of propaganda that began with cowards like Sylvester Stallone and which continue to this day to sophists like Barack Obama.Another powerful part of the story is the emergence of the anti-war veterans' movement. The narrative of those vets, with whom i worked for years (though I was not a vet, being the first CO out of the Elizabeth New Jersey draft board) is important not only because it shows the sinews of a movement, but also because it doesn't show what later became the hagiography of VVAW -- the John Kerry version of our movements. While Kerry provided some help to the vets movement, it was the "rank and file" who built and sustained it, all the way through, while Kerry got himself into too many headlines as he plotted his course into his future. And of course the vets who speak most powerfully to the story are the injured vets who thread their way through Vietnam the Ten Thousand Day War. The accounting from the Bronx VA hospital gave me flashbacks because we were among those who helped publicize those atrocities. It was a warning to all of the soldiers America sends off to come back in a body bag marked "parts missing" (as was the end of my best high school friend) or come back alive but in parts. Once their "service" is over, at some point in the future some comfortable Ronald Reagans will begin to cut back on the promised programs, medical and otherwise, that the vets need for the rest of their lives. It's happened after every way this country has fought, and is happening again today as the VA scandals during the Obama administration show.Each episode of "Vietnam -- the Ten Thousand Day War" is a carefully crafted book worthy of our study. Sadly, I'm not teaching high school any longer, but I will be sharing this work with my own sons, and with anyone who asked me, as some still do, "What did you do during the war, Daddy." Well, I worked for six years against it. And this DVD will help you understand why.

The World at War is heralded as one of the greatest documentary series ever. Vietnam, The 10,000 Day War is obviously not its equal - it doesn't have the same scope, length and depth - but it is probably the best documentary about the Vietnam war made.As with TWAW, the series comes alive with interviews of the people who were involved in the war, from grunts up to Westmoreland. The list of interviewees is impressive and covers both sides of the conflict, with prominent personnnel including Director of the CIA William Colby, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, General William Westmoreland, North Vietnamese diplomat Ha Van Lau, President Nguyen Cao Ky, Henry Cabot Lodge, Senator William Fulbright, Clark Clifford, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Members of the anti-war campaign including David Dellinger and Daniel Ellsberg.The talking heads are also surprisingly honest and upfront about the problems they faced and the mistakes that were made (other than perhaps Westmoreland, who is clearly in denial when he complains that the war could have been won had he only been supplied with the level of troops he wanted). The series is generally balanced on the whole - this is not a pro-USA whitewash. Instead, the errors the US made, the money that was wasted on futile but destructive bombings, and the hardships faced by the Vietnamese are documented in detail.I first watched this series when it was on in the early hours of Sunday morning on LWT and I enthusiastically recorded all the episodes I could. I still have those episodes, replete with ad breaks, and still enjoy watching them as the series is so compelling. The last 80s was a real golden period for those interested in the Vietnam war. Films including Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket were on TV along with this documentary and Orbis produced the excellent weekly publication NAM (The Vietnam Experience 1965-1975).Richard Basehart does a really great job narrating the series. His sonorous voice is the perfect accompaniment to the images.With wars so sanitised and media access so controlled now - in direct response to Vietnam - it is fascinating to watch a series that portrays war and its effects for what they really are.

Despite being apprehensive by ordering this Region 1 NTSC DVD set without knowing if it actually play on UK recorders, it plays perfectly well.The subject matter of the Vietnam War is something we Brits are often ignorant about, having not been part of the event. An excellent purchase.

Have this on VHS and was looking to transfer it to DVD. Don`t need to bother now. Fantastic item. Very interested in Vietnam war and this DVD is superb. If you are into the Vietnam war, then this is a must have. Great price and quick delivery.

Excellent

Very good .