Filmmaker Ken Burns aims for healing with new documentary about Vietnam War
Filmmaker Ken Burns came to San Diego this week to preview his new documentary, an 18-hour look at the Vietnam War that’s as much about healing as it is about history.
“I think a lot of the reasons we are so divided now had their seeds in Vietnam,” Burns said in an interview before the screening Tuesday night at the Balboa Theatre. “Maybe (the film) is a way to understand how we got to where we are today.”
The event drew a capacity crowd to the theater, which seats 1,300. There were veterans of the war in the audience, including two North County residents — Stuart Herrington, a retired Army colonel, and Juan Valdez, a retired Marine — whose stories are included in the film. There were also local Vietnamese-Americans, former refugees who fled their homeland to start over in the United States.
They were there to watch eight excerpts totaling about 53 minutes taken from the new opus by Burns, who over the course of about 40 years has become one of the country’s most respected documentary makers. His films have influenced the public’s understanding of the Civil War, World War II, jazz music, baseball, the national parks and numerous other subjects, and as a result have helped shape their meaning.
“The Vietnam War” will air in 10 parts on public television starting Sept. 17.
Burns and his filming partner, Lynn Novick, said in the interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune that they’ve been working on the project for 10 years. They said their goal was to tell the story from all sides — American, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese — and to include the viewpoints of those who supported the war and those who opposed it. About 100 people are spotlighted.
“You can have more than one truth happen at the same time,” Burns said. “What we tried to do is create a safe space for all these different perspectives.”
Burns and Novick drew criticism from Latino veterans who felt left out of the filmmakers’ 2007 documentary about World War II, with some of the sharpest protests coming from activists in San Diego. The film was re-edited to include Latino voices. Burns said that experience didn’t affect their approach to the Vietnam film.
“We just went where we found the people,” he said. “Everybody is represented here.”
And from those various perspectives, the filmmakers said, they hope to spark a conversation about Vietnam and its lingering impacts.
Novick said she was moved by a war veteran who spoke after a recent screening in another city. “He said he came home from Vietnam and it was just too painful and he shut that door and would not talk about it. He just got on with his life. And he felt like our whole country did that,” she said.
“It’s like this thing never happened. This is one of the most important events in our history since World War II and we don’t know anything about it and we don’t talk about it. It’s like we have this national amnesia. What happened? No one knows. That’s what we tried to address.”
Added Burns, “We’ve got to get beyond it. We just have to outgrow Vietnam in a way and grow up ourselves. A lot of that has to take place by putting away the very simple, binary way that almost everything in our media culture today reinforces. Everything’s got to be an argument. Everything has to be Red State, Blue State. Everything has to be right or wrong.
“We can grow up. That’s the only way we can heal. That’s the only way reconciliation can take place, if you realize the other person has an opinion that’s equally valid as yours. I think a good deal of our mode today, that ‘my way or the highway,’ is a byproduct of Vietnam. So if you can get to some new relationship with Vietnam, would it then be possible to grow a little bit?”
The filmmakers said their own views of the war changed as they worked on the project. Burns, 63, is old enough to have served — he had a high draft number in the last year of the war and didn’t go — and he said he thought he understood a fair amount about Vietnam.
“Everything exists in our minds in preconception and conventional wisdom and something that’s ultimately very, very superficial,” he said. “And then you get involved in a project like this and you are daily humiliated by the fact that you know nothing. You kind of have to forget everything, take the Etch A Sketch and turn it upside down and shake it and say, ‘OK, now let’s rebuild this.’ In essence, that’s what our film is.”
Novick, who is in her mid-50s, said her childhood was shadowed by the war in ways she didn’t recognize until she started hearing the stories of the people interviewed for the documentary.
Vietnam was different from other wars, she said, by “how divisive and how complicated our feelings are about it. People were unsure about whether we should be there and whether we could win and whether it was worth doing. And then after it was over, whether it was worth the sacrifice. That created such enormous tension and rancor and ill will and just angst in our society that we’re still dealing with it.”
Valdez, the Marine veteran from Oceanside, agreed. He was interviewed for the documentary a couple of years ago by Novick and co-producer Sarah Botstein. Watching the excerpts Tuesday night was hard, he said, “like opening old wounds.”
He served a combat tour in 1965-66 and came back in 1974 as part of the security detail at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. On April 29, 1975, as Viet Cong forces moved into the capital city, Valdez was the last man on the last helicopter to leave the embassy. The war was over.
Or not.
“We can’t seem to let it die,” Valdez said. “Maybe it’s because we lost. I call it the war that won’t go away.”
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