This is a rather flawed presentation of overall U.S. policy in Vietnam, with a particular focus on the Tet Offensive in 1968. For a film produced in 1997, with all the information available concerning the realities behind this war (e.g., McNamara's memoir, etc.), it is very surprising to find such a celebratory account.
For example, there is a blanket statement concerning "North" Vietnam's "invasion" of "South" Vietnam, totally ignoring the facts of the 1954 Geneva Accords. Vietnam was one country temporarily divided into two "zones," not two separate countries. The U.S. and its manufactured government in the South were the only parties who accepted this fiction of one "country" "invading" another. In reality, the only invaders here were the U.S. and their allies, as the Pentagon Papers made clear in 1971.
The film notes that at the beginning of the war, there was widespread support at home. Gradually, however, as things got hotter, this support began to wane. Things were becoming rather confused for U.S. troops as well, as they "began to terrorize the very people they were sent to defend," according to the film's narrator. In the film it is explained that the war had to be fought, no matter how difficult, because, according to President Johnson and General Westmoreland, "world communism had to be destroyed."
This attitude takes the viewer to the Tet Offensive of 1968, which, according to Walter Cronkite, was "intended as a morale
breaker." His news broadcast of February 27, 1968 is presented in the film as a turning point in itself. When Cronkite pointed out that the war was likely to "end in a stalemate" and that the U.S. should now "negotiate," suddenly the whole country turned, according to the producers. Johnson is quoted as saying, "If I have lost Cronkite, I have lost the war." The film claims that this then caused the youth to focus their anger on the "truth of the war in Vietnam," which completely ignores the organizing against the war that began as far back as 1963.
In addition, the film misses the depth of the antiwar sentiment among a wide range of the U.S. and world population, including dissent and resistance within the U.S. military and among veterans
of the war.
While the film points to this period of the war as the "turning point in America's attitude toward her role as world peace keeper," the viewer is never really given a broad enough context in which to understand this turn. This film may be useful in generating discussion of the war, but educators will need to be prepared to fill in some major gaps and correct outright mistakes in this presentation of the war and its consequences.
