The Challenge to Maintain one's Humanity during and after the Vietnam War

“The Vietnam War was a tragedy, immeasurable and irredeemable. But meaning can be found in the individual stories of those who lived through it, stories of courage and comradeship and perseverance, of understanding and forgiveness and, ultimately, reconciliation.”
 —Peter Coyote, the narrator in The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick  

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

“In terms of content, The Vietnam War, written by the historian Geoffrey C. Ward and narrated by Peter Coyote, is rich, revelatory, and scrupulously evenhanded. It succeeds in large part by not being reductive or succinct—by being, in fact, rather overstuffed, a lot to take in…. By dint of its thoroughness, its fairness, and its pedigree, The Vietnam War is as good an occasion as we’ve ever had for a levelheaded national conversation about America’s most divisive foreign war. It deserves to be, and likely will be, the rare kind of television that becomes an event.”

— David Kamp, “Why The Vietnam War Is Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s Most Ambitious Project Yet” Vanity Fair September, 2017.

  

John Musgrave

"There is a family of these witnesses; we never hear the voice of an interviewer. One of the most beguiling is John Musgrave, a Marine so badly wounded in Vietnam that several doctors rated him ‘expected’. He became a drop-out and an alcoholic, a would-be suicide and a protester who is still battling the melodrama of the war and the effects of his wounds. He is now a poet and a spokesman for veterans. We feel his romantic recklessness, as he tries to reconcile what happened to him with what he wished had happened. Another witness, Tim O’Brien (author of Going after Cacciato and The Things They Carried), has been a success in life, but is so anguished still that he has difficulty looking at the camera. Musgrave, on the other hand, stares into the lens as if it were his mirror. He deserves a novel or a movie, and because so many of the witnesses are just as conflicted as he is The Vietnam War acquires the density of a sprawling work of fiction....

This is the point: The Vietnam War isn’t just about the war but the consequences it had for Americans. There is a great deal from the home front here, and while the jukebox of great rock and roll on the soundtrack makes the ordeal seem exciting sometimes, it leaves little doubt that the cultural revolutions of the 1960s – Merrill McPeak’s ‘rivulets’ – were a liberation for a minority and one that left a schism in America still emphatically evident in the 2016 election."
— David Thomson, "Merely an Empire," London Review of Books, September 21, 2017 

Another insightful review can be found in The New York Review of Books  

Perhaps the best drama on Vietnam and the incident that it is based upon that is referenced in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War is the 1989 film, Casualties of War.

"Casualties of War is a film based, we are told, on an actual event. A five-man patrol of American soldiers in Vietnam kidnapped a young woman from her village, forced her to march with them, and then raped her and killed her. One of the five refused to participate in the rape and murder, and it was his testimony that eventually brought the others to a military court martial and prison sentences. The movie is not so much about the event as about the atmosphere leading up to it - the dehumanizing reality of combat, the way it justifies brute force and penalizes those who would try to live by a higher standard....

More than most films, it depends on the strength of its performances for its effect - and especially on Penn's performance. If he is not able to convince us of his power, his rage and his contempt for the life of the girl, the movie would not work. He does, in a performance of overwhelming, brutal power. Fox, as his target, plays a character most of us could probably identify with, the person to whom rape or murder is unthinkable, but who has never had to test his values in the crucible of violence. The movie's message, I think, is that in combat human values are lost and animal instincts are reinforced. We knew that already. But the movie makes it inescapable, especially when we reflect that the story is true, and the victim was real."

— Roger Ebert, August 10, 1989 

This memorial is now thought to be the most successful and beloved public work of our time. It is so simple, so elegant, that it makes its statement without even trying. The long arms of marble enclose us. We see the names of the dead. We are left with our thoughts.

The most arresting scenes in the documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision are about the miracle that this memorial was even erected at all—about its opponents, who would have replaced it with something ordinary and mundane.

Today, when the memorial is universally beloved, such men as Pat Buchanan and Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) are not quick to remind you that they fought against it, in ways that do not reflect well on their judgment or taste.... Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, written and directed by Freida Lee Mock, tells the story of how Lin designed the memorial, and how it came to be built. It follows her over the next 14 years, as she matures from an insecure student to a confident professional, and designs other public works, including the Civil Rights Monument in Montgomery, Ala. " 

—Selections from a review by Roger Ebert

"Kathleen Belew’s gripping study of white power, Bring the War Home, as written before the city of Charlottesville became a hashtag, and is largely concerned with activities from the 1970s and ’80s. But it is. Her activists — for indeed, these were activists building a grass-roots movement — consolidated power in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It is that starting point that hints at the book’s explosive thesis: that the white power movement that reached a culmination with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing emerged as a radical reaction to the war.

Sit with that for a moment, because it is a breathtaking argument, one

 that treats foreign policy as the impetus for a movement that most people view through the lens of domestic racism. But Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, perceives something more in the white power movement than metastasized racism. She sees the malignant consequence of the war, which, she argues, “comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.”

— From a review by Nicole Hemmer

"Too many people still think of these attacks as single events, rather than interconnected actions carried out by domestic terrorists. We spend too much ink dividing them into anti-immigrant, racist, anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic attacks. True, they are these things. But they are also connected with one another through a broader white power ideology.

Likewise, too many people think that such shootings are the goal of fringe activism. They aren’t. They are planned to incite a much larger slaughter by 'awakening' other people to join the movement.

The El Paso manifesto, if it is verified, ties the attacker into the mainstream of the white power movement, which came together after the Vietnam War and united Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead and other activists."

—Kathleen Belew, “The Right Way to Understand White Nationalist Terrorism," The New York Times August 4, 2019.