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The Vietnam War-PBS
Topic Started: Sep 17 2017, 03:05 PM (637 Views)
Davis
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Fulla-Carp
Ken Burns, 10 part series, starts in hour or 8pm EST


Don't miss out.
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Copper
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Shortstop

http://s10.zetaboards.com/The_New_Coffee_Room/topic/9034036/1/#new
The Confederate soldier was peculiar in that he was ever ready to fight, but never ready to submit to the routine duty and discipline of the camp or the march. The soldiers were determined to be soldiers after their own notions, and do their duty, for the love of it, as they thought best. Carlton McCarthy
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Davis
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Fulla-Carp
First episode is totally worth the investment. An excellent recounting of the 20 years leading up to Kennedy's role in the expansion of our efforts.

I think it will be 18 hours total but I expect completely worth it. So much context for even the last 20 years of foreign policy.
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Jolly
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Geaux Tigers!
Enjoyed it. Thought Burns did a pretty good job at showing just how complicated and historical the reasons for the war were.
The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
Lots and lots of historical background I was not aware of. Excellent work, which we come to expect of Burns.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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Renauda
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HOLY CARP!!!
I watched the first episode twice last evening back to back. Very well done. Looking forward to the whole series.

following the second airing there was a retrospect of the DIck Cavett show with clips from contentious interviews that aired dealing with the war. Very interesting.
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Rainman
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I thought it was very good as well. Was expecting more folk music, but that may be coming.

Roosevelt was portrayed in one segment as being so supportive of self government of the people. Yet, he handed eastern europe to Stalin at Yalta.

Another segment mentioned how Ho Chi Minh wrote several letters to Truman (I think), yet it was pointed out that Truman never received the letters. I wonder why he did not. I wonder how many REALLY important letters or information are kept from any president, and who decides (puppet master).

Overall, so many times where good intentions start a movement, as a generalization, and then things spiral down into carnage, history seems to repeat itself.

Also wondered whenever these leaders in their early years moved across the globe for whatever reason, who paid, and who provided the logistics from travel expenses to filling out paperwork, applications, housing, visas, etc.


Simple questions from my simple mind. Always looking for the puppet masters.

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Aqua Letifer
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ZOOOOOM!
Rainman
Sep 18 2017, 10:06 AM
Simple questions from my simple mind. Always looking for the puppet masters.

Posted Image
I cite irreconcilable differences.
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jon-nyc
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Cheers
I'm looking forward to this as well, however I'll wait until it's on demand or on DVD. I can't commit to sitting in front of a screen at an appointed hour. I'll be too busy surfing the internet
In my defense, I was left unsupervised.
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Jolly
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Geaux Tigers!
jon-nyc
Sep 18 2017, 10:12 AM
I'm looking forward to this as well, however I'll wait until it's on demand or on DVD. I can't commit to sitting in front of a screen at an appointed hour. I'll be too busy surfing the internet
Who's yer buddy?

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/watch/episode-1/
The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
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George K
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Finally
Jolly
Sep 18 2017, 10:34 AM
jon-nyc
Sep 18 2017, 10:12 AM
I'm looking forward to this as well, however I'll wait until it's on demand or on DVD. I can't commit to sitting in front of a screen at an appointed hour. I'll be too busy surfing the internet
Who's yer buddy?

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/watch/episode-1/
They, no doubt, put up the "explicit language version" specifically for Mr. Purity Score.
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Catseye3
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Rainman
Sep 18 2017, 10:06 AM
I thought it was very good as well. Was expecting more folk music, but that may be coming.

Roosevelt was portrayed in one segment as being so supportive of self government of the people. Yet, he handed eastern europe to Stalin at Yalta.

Another segment mentioned how Ho Chi Minh wrote several letters to Truman (I think), yet it was pointed out that Truman never received the letters. I wonder why he did not. I wonder how many REALLY important letters or information are kept from any president, and who decides (puppet master).

Overall, so many times where good intentions start a movement, as a generalization, and then things spiral down into carnage, history seems to repeat itself.

Also wondered whenever these leaders in their early years moved across the globe for whatever reason, who paid, and who provided the logistics from travel expenses to filling out paperwork, applications, housing, visas, etc.


Simple questions from my simple mind. Always looking for the puppet masters.


That is the best thing about you, Rainman: you're always asking questions, always giving voice to your curiosity. The questioning mind is the learning mind.

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." -- Shunryu Suzuki, author of the classic Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
"I shall now begin to speak of purple, which exceeds all the colors that have so far been mentioned both in costliness and in the superiority of its delightful effect." -- Vitruvius, De architectura, 1st century BC.
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Luke's Dad
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Crap. You guys are going to make me watch educational TV, aren't you?
The problem with having an open mind is that people keep trying to put things in it.
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Rainman
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Thanks, Cats!

Ax always asks questions, too.

But my questions are better than his.

:silly:
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Jolly
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Geaux Tigers!
Luke's Dad
Sep 18 2017, 12:31 PM
Crap. You guys are going to make me watch educational TV, aren't you?
:yes:
The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
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George K
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Finally
George Will: It's a masterpiece

Quote:
 
Many Americans’ moral vanity is expressed nowadays in their rage to disparage. They are incapable of measured judgments about past politics — about flawed historical figures who were forced by cascading circumstances to make difficult decisions on the basis of imperfect information. So, the nation now needs an example of how to calmly assess episodes fraught with passion and sorrow. An example arrives Sunday night.

For 10 nights on PBS, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s “The Vietnam War,” 10 years in the making and 18 hours in length, tells the story of a war “begun in good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings,” and “prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions” during five presidencies. The combat films are extraordinary; the recollections and reflections of combatants and others on both sides are even more so, featuring photos of them then and interviews with many of them now.

A 1951 photo shows a congressman named John Kennedy dining in Saigon. There is an interview with Le Quan Cong, who became a guerrilla fighter in 1951, at age 12. Viewers will meet Le Minh Khue, who was 16 when she joined the anti-American Youth Shock Brigade for National Salvation: “I love Hemingway. I learned from ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ Like the resourcefulness of the man who destroys the bridge — I saw how he coped with war, and I learned from that character.” As did another combatant who loves that novel, John McCain.

Eleven years after his Saigon dinner, President Kennedy said, “We have not sent combat troops in the generally understood sense of the word.” Obliqueness and evasions greased the slide into a ground war of attrition. Kennedy, his successor (who said, “Foreigners are not like the folks I’m used to”) and their advisers were determined not to make the Munich mistake of confronting an enemy tardily. Tapes of Lyndon Johnson’s telephone conversations with advisers are haunting and horrifying. To national security adviser McGeorge Bundy: “What the hell am I ordering [those kids] out there for?”

In 1966 alone, 18 large-scale U.S. offensives left more than 3 million South Vietnamese — approximately one-fifth of the country’s population — homeless. Just on the Laos portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, more tons of bombs — 3 million tons — were dropped than fell on Germany and Japan during World War II. By body counts, America was winning. As an Army adviser says in Episode 4, “If you can’t count what’s important, you make what you can count important.”

Vincent Okamoto earned in Vietnam the Army’s second-highest honor, the Distinguished Service Cross. He recalls the platoon he led:

“Nineteen-, 20-year-old high school dropouts. . . . They looked upon military service as like the weather: You had to go in, and you’d do it. But to see these kids, who had the least to gain, there wasn’t anything to look forward to. . . . And yet, their infinite patience, their loyalty to each other, their courage under fire. . . . You would ask yourself, ‘How does America produce young men like this?’ ”

Or like Okamoto. He was born during World War II in Arizona, in a Japanese American internment camp. Karl Marlantes, a Rhodes Scholar from Yale University who voluntarily left Oxford for Marine service in Vietnam, recalls a fellow lieutenant radioing to battalion headquarters more than 10 miles away the fact that he had spotted a convoy of trucks. The battalion commander replied that this was impossible because intelligence operatives reported no trucks near there. In a Texas drawl, the lieutenant replied: “Be advised. I am where I am, and you are where you are. Where I am, I see goddamned trucks.”

Weary of hearing the prudence that was so painfully learned in Indochina derided as the “Vietnam syndrome,” Marlantes says (in his Wall Street Journal review of Mark Bowden’s book “Hue 1968”): “If by Vietnam syndrome we mean the belief that the U.S. should never again engage in (a) military interventions in foreign civil wars without clear objectives and a clear exit strategy, (b) ‘nation building’ in countries about whose history and culture we are ignorant, and (c) sacrificing our children when our lives, way of life, or ‘government of, by, and for the people’ are not directly threatened, then we should never get over Vietnam syndrome. It’s not an illness; it’s a vaccination.” The Burns/Novick masterpiece is, in Marlantes’s words about Bowden’s book, “a powerful booster shot.”
A guide to GKSR: Click

"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... "
- Mik, 6/14/08


Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles.
- Klaus, 4/29/18
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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
Just finished episode 2. Our ignorance of the people we were "saving" was staggering.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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Davis
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Fulla-Carp
Unfortunately I may going to have to binge watch and play catch up later this week.
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Rainman
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Fulla-Carp
Anyone see tonight's episode #3?
I had it on while working, so was only half paying attention.

The reason I ask, is that it seemed to be revealing a really screwed up U.S. government, and how awful our troops were in actions taken not only against the North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, but against even dead soldiers, where they retrieved 4 of their own, but left about a dozen South Vietnamese solders laying behind. That's at least one part where I looked up and watched.

Was there a bias in tonight's episode? Or was there any other side of good not presented, that could have been? Example: in Iraq, we bombed the hell out of them, but soldiers also spent considerable time building schools, hospitals, etc.

What an awful mess that was, on so many levels. And I'm worried that history could repeat itself again, soon, somewhere.

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Klaus
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HOLY CARP!!!
Jolly
Sep 18 2017, 10:34 AM
jon-nyc
Sep 18 2017, 10:12 AM
I'm looking forward to this as well, however I'll wait until it's on demand or on DVD. I can't commit to sitting in front of a screen at an appointed hour. I'll be too busy surfing the internet
Who's yer buddy?

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/watch/episode-1/
Posted Image
:veryangry: :veryangry:
Trifonov Fleisher Klaus Sokolov Zimmerman
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KlavierBauer
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HOLY CARP!!!
Klaus - the Opera browser has a nice built-in VPN that allows proxying through the U.S. (and a handful of other countries).
Netflix is smart enough to catch it, but my guess is that PBS isn’t. :)
"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper
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Klaus
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HOLY CARP!!!
built-in VPN? But who would provide a server for such a service for free?
Trifonov Fleisher Klaus Sokolov Zimmerman
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jon-nyc
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Cheers
I used Tunnel Bear for the World Cup in 2014. I think the introductory month was $5
In my defense, I was left unsupervised.
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George K
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Finally
Klaus
Sep 19 2017, 11:07 PM
:veryangry: :veryangry:
Wouldn't a VPN get around that? Never mind.
Edited by George K, Sep 20 2017, 03:20 AM.
A guide to GKSR: Click

"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... "
- Mik, 6/14/08


Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles.
- Klaus, 4/29/18
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Jolly
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Geaux Tigers!
Rainman
Sep 19 2017, 09:31 PM
Anyone see tonight's episode #3?
I had it on while working, so was only half paying attention.

The reason I ask, is that it seemed to be revealing a really screwed up U.S. government, and how awful our troops were in actions taken not only against the North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, but against even dead soldiers, where they retrieved 4 of their own, but left about a dozen South Vietnamese solders laying behind. That's at least one part where I looked up and watched.

Was there a bias in tonight's episode? Or was there any other side of good not presented, that could have been? Example: in Iraq, we bombed the hell out of them, but soldiers also spent considerable time building schools, hospitals, etc.

What an awful mess that was, on so many levels. And I'm worried that history could repeat itself again, soon, somewhere.

It's Ken Burns, so you know there will be some bias.

I think that the American government was very conflicted at that time. We really didn't want to be there, but we really didn't want South Vietnam to fall to the Communists.

I think war is war. Really nasty things happen in any war.

Did we fail in Vietnam? I don't know. I do know the progression of communism pretty much ground to a standstill by the time we left.
The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
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