Frontier Partisans

The Adventurers, Rangers and Scouts Who Fought the Battles of Empire

Driving A Stake Through The Heart Of America — The Legacy Of The Vietnam War

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The Vietnam War is fading into history. The battles and firefights of that savage conflict — both in Southeast Asia and on the home front — occurred 40, 50 years ago. The young men who fought the war and the young men who fought against it are all getting to be old men now.

And yet it is still with us. Many of the fault lines that have created the fractured and fragmented country we live in today were first revealed in that troubled yet vibrant era.

The war was, in many respects, part of a long tradition of Frontier Partisan warfare. Not for nothing did the troops in Vietnam call the area controlled by the enemy Viet Cong “Indian Country.” The generation that fought the war was raised on legends and myths of frontier history, mostly gleaned from Western movies. The tactics of long-range reconnaissance patrols (LRRPs) more closely resembled the experience generations of Frontier Partisan rangers than they did the Big War combat experience of World War II and Korea.

Much of the fighting in Vietnam would have felt familiar to generations of Frontier Partisans.

The war is a knot of contradictions — idealism and cynicism — played out in a Cold War context that we are revisiting 50 years on. Like all significant historical events, Vietnam deserves a complicated story, not a morality play. Looks like Ken Burns’ documentary (special preview on May 28 on PBS) will give us that complicated story:

THE VIETNAM WAR is a ten-part, 18-hour documentary film series
directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that will air on PBS in
September 2017.

In an immersive 360-degree narrative, Burns and Novick tell the epic
story of the Vietnam War as it has never before been told on film. THE
VIETNAM WAR features testimony from nearly 100 witnesses, including
many Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as
well as Vietnamese combatants and civilians from both the winning and
losing sides.

Six years in the making, the series brings the war and the chaotic
epoch it encompassed viscerally to life. Written by Geoffrey C. Ward,
produced by Sarah Botstein, Novick and Burns, it includes rarely seen,
digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe,
photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of
the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home
movies, revelatory audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson
and Nixon administrations and more than 100 iconic musical recordings
by many of the greatest artists of the era.

In a time when so many people speak with such certitude about complex issues, based on superficial knowledge often gleaned from sources that are biased to the point of serving as propaganda or disinformation, it is refreshing to hear Burns note, “This film is not an answer; it is a set of questions about what happened.” That’s the right approach. The only approach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

  1. Matthew says

    The Vietnam era is proof that America has been as divided before and it is now. Both the modern era and the Vietnam era weren’t as divided as the Civil War era, though.

    The thing about Vietnam war in fiction is that as controversial as it was it’s used as backstory for a lot of fictional characters. Which gets odd when that would make the characters too old to have adventures. Mack Bolan, The Punisher, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, Leonard Pine are really should be retired by now.

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  3. Thom Eley says

    I will have to see this too. Having made two relatively recent trips to Vietnam, including visits to all the USMC bases in I Corps, including Khe Sanh and Lang Vei (Special Forces camp on the Laotian Border–great book called Night of the Silver Stars), the Mekong River, Saigon (nobody calls it Ho Chi Minh City), Danang, Chu Lai, Phu Bai, Hoi An,Hanoi (saw the Hanoi Hilton, where McCain crashed, and the remains of “Uncle Ho” as the Vietnamese call him. We walked the Battle for Hue from the Esso Gas Station, where they pulled a road map off the wall–it was the only map of Hue they had, through the town and to the Palace. We walked exactly the route the Marines did–pretty powerful. We stopped at a road-side store on Hai Van Pass, which was a site where a convoy I was leading got ambushed at a road block and a 2nd Lt. (who had been in-country less than a week and I was giving him a ride to Phu Bai) was shot between the eyes by a snipe because he didn’t have the sense to get down fast enough. Capt. Ed (85years old)was a fantastic guy–funny, knowledgeable and definitely a Marine–he died in Vietnam from a stroke on a subsequent visit. He had made over 100 trips to Vietnam taking Veterans back and helping them cope. I cried when he died. I trust all you have read Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joe Galloway’s co-authored book: We Were Soldiers Once… And Young and the sequel in 2008: We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam. The books are fantastic and the movie We Were Soldiers Once. Col. Moore made a quote that shook me as it was a quote that I used when we were inserted by helicopter. I was on the first chopper in, and I told my troops, “my boots will be the first on the ground and the last in the chopper.” I later found out that it was a common motivational comment by Platoon and Company Commanders.

    I found the visit to be a good thing and the country and the people are wonderful. There were times when 60 year old men, stood at a place and cried like a baby. I cried for the men that I lost under my command–the guilt never goes away. It is an entirely different country from in the 60’s and 70’s. We have to remember that something like 75% of the population was born after the War. Our last tour guide was a retired Marine Capt. (Old Corps–Korea and Vietnam) and his Vietnamese assistant was the son of a Viet Cong–that was a shock, but you get over it. Great place, people and food, and it can’t be confused with that place that “we gave up our boyhoods to drill and to train, and play our own part in the Patriot Game.” My favorite tee-shirt and metal sign on my deck says, “This is the only Wood Stock that I remember in 1969” (crossed M-14 rifles).

    My favorite Vietnam quote is: “Not everyone who lost their life in Vietnam, died there. Not everyone who came home from Vietnam ever left there.” I am in the later category, but Capt. Ed helped. However, that damned war is still killing people. I have lost and losing many friends from Agent Orange. Not all them were exposed in Vietnam, but in Korea and the United States!

    “We were children of the 1950s and John Kennedy’s young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship” in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with out white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truly the future he had envisioned for us.”
    ― Joseph L. Galloway–Joe Galloway was the only civilian to receive the Bronze Star with a combat V.

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  4. lane batot says

    Purty much ANYTHING Ken Burns does is worthwhile(I think)–but duh-YAMM–usually too expensive to purchase! Which, not having Cable, and PBS STOLEN from me with the advent of DTV reception(or LACK thereof), I’ve missed out on a lot of the newer Ken Burns stuff. But maybe. I grew up watching the Vietnam war on the news and propaganda regarding it(both sides) in numerous films and TV series of the day. I DREADED getting old enough to git drafted–nothing against the patriotic and unfortunate soldiers that served there, but I was already plotting my future exodus to Canada as a young kid! Luckily, such notions never got put to the test, as the war ended before I got old enough. My older brother BARELY missed out, and he no doubt would have “done his duty” and gone. But Vietnam was an influence in EVERYTHING in those days, just as the Middle East is now……..

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  5. lane batot says

    …..and, incidently watching one of the few regular TV shows I watch on Peasant TV–a favorite–“The Amazing Race”–they JUST were in Vietnam, and boy howdy, what a different vibe, being presented as a Tourista destination these days! BEAUTIFUL country, though. We have many communities of the refugee Montagnon people that sided with the U. S.(and were afterward so brutally persecuted for it) here in North Carolina now–fine, fine citizens and additions to our country, if I may say so!…..And an Animal Geek factoid regarding the Vietnam war I found fascinating(if in a macabre way….),native TIGERS in Vietnam learned to APPROACH the sounds of gunfire, as there was often easy meat to be had as a result. I always wondered if that scene in “Apocolypse Now” was based on that knowlege……

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  6. Rick Schwertfeger says

    I still haven’t gotten over it – and I didn’t even go. Army National Guard and then a medical discharge. But a friend said just the other day that 1970 was when we lost our illusions. I graduated from college on strike against that war and the murders at Jackson St. and Kent St. University was shut down; but they did hold commencement.
    I suppose there is a benefit to losing one’s illusions. But that was an awfully costly delivery vehicle.
    That war is still so clear in my mind and soul. I’ve got three or four months to decide whether to go through it again or not.
    And, to be absolutely clear, I in no way equate my experiences to those who went. A different order completely.

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    • JimC says

      The emotions are remarkably fresh for my friends who went through those times — those who went, those who protested it. As you say, clear in mind and soul. A lot remains unresolved for them.

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  7. J.F. Bell says

    Forward Air Controllers have been a favored field of study since I was old enough to want to fly. Of course there were FACs before Viet Nam and FACs since, but that’s where I tend to believe the practice really hit its stride.

    Take one man. Put him in an off-the-shelf civil aircraft without much in the way of martial pedigree. Set him just high enough off the ground that everybody can see him (and common small arms are still very much in range). Allow his aircraft no defensive/offensive armament. Make him accountable for providing separation for the much heavier, faster strike aircraft above him and for not accidentally wiping out the infantry below. On top of putting him in charge of getting said fast-movers to hit targets which they themselves cannot see (many of which are actively attempting to kill said FAC) put additional rotary-wing assets in his AO – which he may or may not control.

    If – IF – he comes back with the left-side glass of his ship covered in grease pencil markings, you know it’s been a busy day. If the cowling, windscreen, and leading surfaces aren’t plastered with bugs you know he was working too high. If there grass stains on the belly of the aircraft he was probably about where he should have been.

    If he comes back at all. If he doesn’t the first indication of his absence means it’s already too late. Working low and alone means nobody likely saw where he went in. Given the lack of parachutes and ejection seats (pre-Bronco) and the problems inherent to landing in triple-canopy jungle or ditching, figure the odds are pretty ugly – worse, once you consider how the little men in black pajamas and khaki aren’t really fans. Silence on the radio and an empty space on the flightline are about all the memorial he’s liable to get. Whatever he gets, it won’t include press. Men who fly small aircraft don’t draw much ink in the big picture.

    Not to take away from the experience of the grunt or the chopper pilot (which occasionally seems to be a species of winged grunt) or the guys who took precision ordnance Up North but I never did and still haven’t figured out how you could fit those kind of brass accouterments in a twin Cessna.

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