For the US and its allies, postwar foreign policy conforms to a pattern. In the planning and execution stages, this new war is strategically essential and a moral imperative, and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor; decades on, when it’s too late, it’s admitted that the same war was a folly or perhaps even a crime. Usually, though, the war was bad because of what it did to the US, not what it did to the other nations involved.
The six-part documentary series Vietnam: The War That Changed America sticks to that brief. There are a handful of Vietnamese interviewees, and the extent of the carnage wrought upon the country’s people is touched upon, but the subject matter is the effect the war had on the psyches of US soldiers – and on the mindset of the US itself. This does not, however, make the enterprise worthless. Accept those narrow parameters and the stories it tells are powerful, often stunningly, movingly so. Maybe it’s indictment enough.
Shepherded by Ethan Hawke’s annoyingly hammy, gravelly voiceover and soundtracked by a selection of obvious pop hits that moves from Thunderclap Newman and the Stones in the early years to the Who, the Doors and Lynyrd Skynyrd when the mood becomes (even) darker, the series tells variations on the same tale. Americans arrive in Vietnam, keen to do their duty or at least happily ignorant of what awaits them. Very quickly they surmise that what is there is pure horror, much of which they are expected to perpetrate themselves.
What strikes you initially is that Vietnam was the first major conflict to be extensively filmed in colour, and that subsequent wars have not been documented so vividly or at such close quarters. The footage here, especially in the lush green of the Vietnamese jungle, confronts us directly with what one veteran refers to in an anguished whisper as “images that are burned into your soul”.
More startling, though, is the verbal testimony of those veterans, particularly what some of them are willing to admit. CW Bowman, a “tunnel rat” who specialised in the nerve-shredding task of exploring the enemy’s underground bunkers without knowing if they’d been abandoned, recalls the moment when an above-ground manoeuvre ended with him locating a Vietnamese soldier who had been shooting at Bowman’s platoon. A comrade of Bowman’s, Gary Heeter, had recently had a leg blown off in a firefight; deranged by this trauma, Bowman hacked the target to death with a machete. “I felt all this power and hatred,” he says. “I was mad at God.”
Another soldier, Scott Camil, describes the view of the Vietnamese that the American troops were required to hold: “I never thought of them as human.” When he returned home, Camil stayed with the Marine Corps and was deployed against anti-war protesters, thinking nothing of meting out violence there too: “I thought they were just communist sympathisers and cowards … I hated them.”
Camil then had a profound change of heart and campaigned against the war, publicly admitting to his own misdeeds. The series is sensitive to the fact that the soldiers were largely conscripts who did terrible things to survive, and it extends this desire to offer redemption to those who served willingly, because they felt compelled to do so by the culture they grew up in. The starkest example is Nurse Corps volunteer Joan Furey, whose blue-collar Brooklyn community took pride in serving one’s country: Furey, observing anti-war demonstrators with contempt, signed up to go to Vietnam and treat the wounded, but was so shocked by all the “needless, useless death” she saw that she was soon speaking out against the war, and breaking protocol by finding excuses to invalid lightly injured men back home.
Camil, meanwhile, eventually reconciled with Jim Fife, who fought alongside him in Vietnam but then didn’t have the same regretful epiphany as Camil, because he continued to believe he had been doing his duty as an American. This meant these best friends were estranged for years, but Camil retained his love for the person he knew, over and above the political views he held. The programme films Camil and Fife meeting and embracing in the present day, a device it deploys repeatedly to great effect: Bowman’s fishing trip with Heeter, the two men being the only ones who know what the other has gone through, is similarly fraught with unimaginable emotion.
How much Vietnam changed America is debatable – this series arrives at a time when Americans demonstrating against crimes committed by the US or its proxies are maligned as severely as ever. It provides, however, a valuable perspective on some of the damage that was done.
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Vietnam: The War That Changed America is on Apple TV+.