“Turning Point: The Vietnam War” opens with Brooklyn-born Scott Camil telling his piece of the American story. Camil says his stepfather was involved in the John Birch Society and hammered into him that his job would be to stop communism in any way he could. For Camil, that meant enlisting in the military to be deployed in Vietnam.
Dehumanization was central to basic training, Camil remembers, and he illustrates that by singing a few bars of a song they sang as they jogged. “I’m gonna go to Vietnam/I’m gonna kill some Viet Cong,” he half sings. Camil’s lips start quivering after this line, and he fights back tears as he haltingly finishes. “With a knife or with a gun/ Either way, it will be fun.”
Fifty years after the Fall of Saigon, we’re still figuring out how to look at the Vietnam War and talk about it.
Camil, a recurring voice throughout the five-episode documentary, embodies the war’s impact on the nation’s psyche. Raised as a true believer in the American way, the gruesome fighting in an entirely foreign land transformed the way he viewed his government and, eventually, the war itself.
Upon being discharged, Camil returned to the U.S., went to college and learned more about his country’s involvement in Vietnam. Soon after, Camil became one of the faces of the anti-war veterans’ movement, growing famous enough to inspire Graham Nash to write a song about him called “Oh! Camil (The Winter Soldier).” All these years later, Camil doesn’t seem pleased by that notoriety. Neither does Nash apologize for his choice.
That this detail sits so prominently in my thoughts about Brian Knappenberger’s limited series speaks to Camil’s symbolic power within a concisely mapped arc that cautions against forgetting why such symbols exist.
Camil’s perspective is among a comparatively vast and diverse chorus of American and Vietnamese voices comprising “Turning Point: The Vietnam War” — some famous, many ordinary, most complementary and others contradictory. They all land on some version of the same conclusion crystallized by author and journalist Peter Osnos.
“The story of the United States in Vietnam was a story of ignorance, hubris and arrogance,” Osnos says. “So much of what we see now about the war in Vietnam is a function of the individual personalities and characters of people and their inability to just get tough with themselves.”
That’s a very nice way of placing the failures of the Vietnam War, as we know it – the Vietnamese call it the American War – at the feet of a handful of leaders who overestimated America’s might and capability in a land they knew next to nothing about.
Scott Camil, Vietnam Veteran, U.S. Marine Corps (R) (Courtesy of Netflix)Knappenberger’s third installment in his “Turning Point” series follows a look at the ways the nuclear bomb reorganized the global order, “The Bomb and the Cold War,” and “9/11 and the War on Terror.” The Vietnam War sits between the events marking both those society-shifting moments. It is not a game-changing flash but a nightmarish slog extending through three presidential administrations whose leaders lied to the American people.
Fifty years after the Fall of Saigon, we’re still figuring out how to look at the Vietnam War and talk about it. Viet Thanh Nguyen, who offers his perspective in “Turning Point,” sought to remedy this in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer” by presenting a varied if fictionalized view of what it meant to stand astride the cultural dividing line between the Vietnamese and American cultures.
Knappenberger’s approach applies much-needed but heretofore scarcely presented doses of cynicism to America’s motivations for prosecuting and escalating this war.
Of course, his book and HBO’s limited series adaptation came well after Ken Burns dropped his and Lynn Novick’s decade-in-the-making opus, “The Vietnam War.” They got the broader strokes right, showing us the ways that the Vietnam War taught Americans to distrust their government.
Knappenberger’s view takes this several steps further, presenting the years-long conflict not as a memory but as a very present concern that leads into Watergate and replays with the Iraq War and our failed 20-year conflict in Afghanistan. As many experts have pointed out since “The Vietnam War” debuted, this is something America’s storyteller should have done but omitted.
Projects like “Turning Point: The Vietnam War” aren’t rebukes of Burns’ effort, however. They’re reminders that those of us who were raised on his documentary series — people like me — are best off treating them as gateways to history and not necessarily comprehensive accounts of any subject. It took my awestruck reaction to 18-plus hours of “The Vietnam War” in 2017 and its subsequent thrashing by historians and people who lived through that era to reach that conclusion.
That said, as several experts in “Turning Point: The Vietnam War” mention, I am far from alone in my embarrassingly limited grasp of this history’s nuances. People belonging to Generation X and younger may have encountered their elders’ reluctance to talk about it, perhaps because it was close enough for some of our parents to have fought in it, and because our defeat contradicted the post-World War II orthodoxy of American strength and goodness.
The Vietnam War” purports to be our document of record, a film meant to bring us all together in some kind of agree-to-disagree unity. Forget it. There are two sides to every story, but in this case one is right and the other very wrong. It cannot be made otherwise, and Burns’s failure lies in his failure to acknowledge this.
This is not to be taken as some “watch this, not that” suggestion – although it must be said that in under six hours, “Turning Point: The Vietnam War” manages to holistically cover the 19th-century French colonialist origins of Vietnam’s liberation struggle through America’s miserable exit in 1975.
It also dares to do what previous large-scale treatments shy away from, which is to specifically present America’s actions over three presidential administrations and two decades as what it was – an aggression. The late Richard Nixon shouldn’t expect to come off well in these histories, but neither do John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the latter of whom was especially susceptible to Gen. William Westmoreland’s persuasiveness.
But Westmoreland comes off merely as bungling next to the late Henry Kissinger, whose hawkish influence in the closing acts of the war, along with expanding the conflict to Laos and Cambodia, rightly earned his war criminal designation. “Turning Point” doesn’t say this, to be clear, choosing to show the evidence by having several subjects wonder aloud why the Americans were dropping massive bombs on villages while peace talks were underway in Paris.
All told, Knappenberger’s approach applies much-needed but heretofore scarcely presented doses of cynicism to America’s motivations for prosecuting and escalating this war. Brutally candid conversations with veterans and historians take center stage, but so do interviews with people who fought with the National Liberation Front, like Võ Thị Trong and political aides such as Tôn Nữ Thị Ninh, who translated for Vietnam delegates negotiating at the Paris Peace Accords. We hear from South Vietnamese people who left the country and learn about the experiences lived by those who chose to stay after the People’s Army of Vietnam took Saigon.
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Anti-war protesters, orphaned children of American soldiers brought to the States as part of America’s withdrawal, and Black, brown and Asian veterans are all represented. Retired CBS anchor Dan Rather has a sizable presence – unsurprising, given the series’ extensive usage of CBS News’ archival footage, along with previously unheard White House recordings from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
We also walk alongside the survivors of the My Lai massacre, whose wrenching accounts bring new layers of humanity and sorrow to Ronald L. Haeberle’s photographs—images he captured that day with his personal camera, he explains in the series, because he knew the military would sanitize any visual evidence shared with the public.
With each new Vietnam War documentary, we’re exposed to information we didn’t previously have and tragedies we didn’t know about. “Turning Point: The Vietnam War” proves that the more we piece together, the clearer the deception’s atrocious expanse becomes. They also clarify the damage wrought by our collective amnesia and our refusal to learn from history – an outgrowth of our propensity to view our place in history from an exceptionalist perspective.
“Turning Point” takes Ellis’ conclusive view. “It’s the human toll that I think of when I think of that war,” he says, “both American soldiers as well as the Vietnamese.”
“Turning Point: The Vietnam War” is now streaming on Netflix.
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