RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week, Vietnam veterans sent a letter to PBS, Ken Burns, and Bank of America setting the record straight about the Vietnam War.PBS’s new documentary TV series, “The Vietnam War,” produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and funded by Bank of America, left out key aspects of the war, including the communist connections of North Vietnamese dictator Ho Chi Minh and the brutal repression after the war, veterans alleged.

“The whole cause of all this agony and bloodshed was the aggressive North Vietnamese invasion of the South. If it hadn’t been for that, none of this ever would have happened,” Lewis Sorley, a Vietnam War veteran, historian, and director at Vietnam Veterans for Factual History (VVFH), told PJ Media in an interview Wednesday. “Burns never seems to find that worth mentioning or condemning and I wonder why.”

Sorley alleged that Burns and his fellow filmmakers “had clearly decided that they wanted to tell the standard left-wing narrative of an unwinnable, unjust war.” The PBS documentary also obscured the evil of communism throughout the war and afterward. The veteran suggested that presenting the American and South Vietnamese forces as heroic would be “anathema” to the filmmakers.

In the letter VVFH sent to PBS, Burns, and Bank of America, Vietnam veterans emphasized four key omissions and distortions with broad-reaching consequences. The documentary presented a view of the war “very negatively slanted against both the nation of South Vietnam and American involvement there” that “exacerbates” the current cultural polarization in America today.

1. “Blustering, blundering jingoism.”

First, the documentary portrayed “U.S. support for South Vietnam as blustering, blundering jingoism,” with “Burns’ choice of music, graphics, and interviewees” demonstrating “a bias in favor of the militant leftist anti-war cliches of the 1960s.”

Although Sorley took part in a three-hour interview for the documentary, he only appeared “four times” in the actual program, for only “about half a minute each.” He remembered the interviewer giving off “very dismissive” body language. “The person interviewing me was offended by my understanding of the nature of the war and how it was conducted.”

In a 1980 survey, 91 percent of Vietnam veterans said “I am glad I served my country.” A full 66 percent said they would serve again, even knowing the outcome of the war. According to VVFH, the Burns documentary “demonstrates a prejudice against” these veterans and “the more than 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers killed by the Soviet-equipped and trained North Vietnamese Army and its Viet Cong subordinates.”

2. Minimizing Ho Chi Minh’s communism.

Perhaps more subversive, the PBS series “minimizes Ho Chi Minh’s life-long dedication to ruthless Leninism, his years of Soviet training and professional work as a covert communist subversive, and the mass atrocities of his supporters in North and South Vietnam.”

In the 1920s and 1930s, Ho worked for the Comintern in Moscow and advised Chinese Communist forces, returning to Vietnam in 1941. According to VVFH, the PBS documentary brushed aside this history, presenting Ho as a Vietnamese freedom fighter.

“Ho Chi Minh, as far as they’re concerned, was a nationalist,” Sorley told PJ Media. “His lifelong devotion to international Communism is largely glossed over.” The historian noted that North Vietnam enjoyed support from Communists in China and the Soviet Union, so portraying Ho as a nationalist is extremely deceptive.

3. Ignoring South Vietnam’s valor.

The VVFH letter also attacked Burns’ documentary for ignoring “the actions of leftist U.S. politicians in cutting off funding for vital military supplies for the South Vietnamese Army” and restraining U.S. air power.

Sorley presented the war’s outcome as the result of the U.S. holding back support while the Soviets continued backing Ho. In his telling, the South Vietnamese fought heroically, and could have won with the right help.

In his interview, Sorley told PJ Media that the South Vietnamese proved very effective in the war, pushing back the Easter Offensive in the spring of 1972, when most of the American troops had already gone home. While many credit U.S. air power for securing the South Vietnamese victory, General Creighton Abrams said the resolve of the South Vietnamese won the day.

“I didn’t see anything in Burns’ portrayal” about that offensive, or about the valor of the South Vietnamese, Sorley said. CONTINUE AT SITE