Portside

The war in Vietnam was America’s longest war at the time, and its first defeat. The image of protesters spitting on troops enlivened notions that the military mission had been compromised, even betrayed, by weak-kneed liberalism in Congress and seditious radicalism on college campuses. The spitting stories provided provided reassuring confirmation that had it not been for those duplicitous fifth-columnists, the Vietnamese would have never beaten us.

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Portside readers continue to weigh in to The Vietnam War, PBS series by Burns and Novick, The impact of the war on the country, the role of the peace movement; and today the impact of discussion of the war and the new series on a country living in the "time of Trump".

The current PBS series on the war in Vietnam is stirring discussion throughout the country on the U.S. war in Vietnam; the longest war in Afghanistan; and now Donald Trump's threat to use nuclear weapons to annihilate the people of North Korea. Portside readers have responded to posts about the series in emails and posts on Facebook. Here are comments by Portside readers on the Burns and Novick series. Reposting by Portside is with permission of the writers.

With The Vietnam War, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have created a film that rehashes some old, tired tropes. In doing so, they distort what soldiers, veterans, and antiwar activists alike know about the war and its aftermath, especially inside the United States.

What is the appropriate response to the banality of the Op-Ed: “Vietnam’s Unhealed Wounds” by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick in the 2017 Memorial Day edition of The New York Times? Such a trite pronouncement is surely destined for the dustbin of history. But already accompanied by much media hype, Burns and Novick are set to launch their PBS documentary: THE VIETNAM WAR, a ten-part, 18-hour series in September 2017.

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