My wish list for Ken Burns and Lynn Novick Vietnam series, starts with; please cover the war in a foreign country called Vietnam separately from the political/social conflict in the US. Blending the two into a single subject is and has not been fair to Veterans because the argument about who won and who lost along with why, dominate most discussions, which puts veterans on the defensive as if they were responsible for the way it ended. My first disagreement with the idea of arguing about did we win or lose, is that we were not responsible for the final outcome of the war and it was not ours to win or lose, we were there to help an ally. We had much to do with the running and installing of the SVN government but it was still their country to win or lose, not ours. We were leaving at some point and that should have been obvious to all parties including ourselves, so in the end the results were in the hands of the Vietnamese.
Making sense of our domestic turmoil will be much more difficult and more likely to reignite the angry passions of that time in our history. That could happen! A better outcome would be that people talk over their points of view and come to understand that many of us had varied interests and views that are real and evolved over the span of our open involvement. The people that fought in the war and those that protested our involvement came mainly from the same generation. I did both. I served in Vietnam and came home in late 1969 and protested to stop the war, I did not want more friends to die or be injured in the war I had seen.
