Why Vietnam? ‘Descent’ Gives the Answer

You’d have thought by now we’d have read, seen, heard and pondered enough about Vietnam. Decades after the war ended, is there really anything left to say?

My initial reaction: not much. The shelves of my Hanoi apartment are already lined with all manner of books on Vietnam, from the scholarly works of Bernard Fall and Stanley Karnow to those by ex-servicemen who felt--usually wrongly--that they had some wartime story of literary merit worth telling.

So I admit to having had a degree of skepticism when I sat down to watch “The Vietnam War: A Descent Into Hell,” a three-hour documentary that will be shown tonight on the Discovery Channel. More helicopters buzzing over rice paddies? More generals defending our role in Vietnam? More footage of the final evacuation of Americans from the U.S. Embassy roof in Saigon in April 1975?

Not by any means. This splendid documentary focuses on an era of history most of us know too little about and sets out to answer the simple question: How and why did the United States get involved in Vietnam? The program’s story ends in 1965, by which time there were 200,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam and what had been called a “security action” had turned into a full-blown war.

One of the documentary’s strengths, in addition to its use of rare archival footage of Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam in the 1950s and recently declassified Soviet and Chinese documents, is that it puts the Vietnam War in the context of an era. The war didn’t just happen as a result of some imperialistic scheme; it was Korea Phase II, an outgrowth of the Cold War and superpower rivalries, meshing at a time when nationalistic fervor in the developing world was shaking the chains of colonialism.

Many viewers will be surprised to learn that Ho Chi Minh and the United States once enjoyed a cordial relationship. Ho, in fact, counted on Washington to back his bid for independence and sent eight messages to President Harry S Truman. Truman didn’t respond, and the United States ended up supporting the colonization of Vietnam under France. When Ho finally declared independence on Sept. 2, 1945, he borrowed many of Thomas Jefferson’s words and began, “All men are created equal. . . .”

One can only wonder, in watching history unfold from a distance, if the whole tragedy of the Vietnam War could have been avoided had we understood more about the Vietnamese and their past and had four U.S. presidents summoned more wisdom in dealing with what Robert McNamara referred to in 1962 as “a minor problem.”

“Descent Into Hell” leaves us with the impression that the answer is a resounding yes.

The Brook/Lapping Productions team--which also produced award-winning documentaries on Watergate and Yugoslavia--relies heavily on compelling stock footage and interviews that turn out to be particularly revealing with McNamara, presidential aide Jack Valenti, CIA operatives and North Vietnamese military officials Gen. Nguyen Kim Hung and Col. Bui Tin. (Unless it slipped by me, narrator Martin Sheen does not inform us that Tin has become disenchanted with the Communist government in Hanoi and now lives in Paris; I wondered if Hung had chosen a similar path.)

Unlike many newsmagazines that raise a provocative question on the cover then never really answer it in the text, “Descent Into Hell” admirably fulfills its promise to tell the viewer why we got involved in Vietnam. And the answer is communism. “The West thought it was facing a threat to its existence,” McNamara said.

It comes, then, as something of a shock to hear a former Soviet diplomat say of the years that the United States was obsessed with using Vietnam to block the spread of communism in Indochina, “We had no great interest in Vietnam at that time.”

In carrying us from the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 through to the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1965--which President Lyndon B. Johnson used to justify the start of the U.S. bombing campaign against North Vietnam--”Descent Into Hell” becomes a compelling historical drama of a nightmare we would like to forget but can’t.

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* “The Vietnam War: A Descent Into Hell” will be broadcast tonight at 8 on Discovery. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).

David Lamb is The Times’ Southeast Asia bureau chief, based in Hanoi.