Slightly P: Ken Burns//The Vietnam War

[Keith Davis]

Thanks for sharing this, Becky.

I believe you recommended the Amitav Ghosh trilogy? Fantastic!
Turned a friend on to it, and he digs it, too.

Www.innergroovemusic.com

> On Sep 30, 2017, at 5:02 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> 
> I don’t think I can finish watching the documentary.   It’s still too close to home - to brutally painful about it.  It’s for people the age of my kids who don’t know what it was all about because they were kids then.  My kids are late 40s now.   It’s for my grandkids who know nothing about it.  
> 
> - an aside -  I don’t even want to think about what the Civil War - with 750,000 casualties and more in the South with a smaller population   -  did to people - to communities.  That’s why we don’t talk politics in this country as much as others elsewhere do (Australia) because we’ve seen firsthand what happens when it gets too hot.  
> 
> - back -  In 1968 I was 20 years old with several high school friends in Vietnam.  My town,  Porterville, CA,  with a population of 12,000 people,  lost 40 men - the number of names on our memorial.   (The most per capita in the nation - the average age of our guys who died was 22.5. )  
> http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/AFTER-VIETNAM-20-Years-of-Sorrow-Immeasurable-3035349.php
> 
> The war was hugely divisive here - HUGELY!   My now late hubby and I traveled to the Berkeley marches and petitioned the local city council (whatever a small bunch of us could think up).  We had friends in Berkeley and in LA.    I wrote to the local paper and got phone calls because of my letters.   I was invited to speak at the Unitarian Church.  I was definitely a known activist and probably tracked by someone as possibly being in the SDS (I wasn’t but only because there was no chapter near me.)   My hubby and I helped several friends with CO status or travel to Canada.   A local doctor helped some guys get a status “F” -   A girlfriend’s husband was listed as dead and he returned about 6 years later as a P.O.W. instead.  She’d remarried in the meantime - his child was 8 when he returned.  (They tried again but it couldn’t work out.)   So many tragic stories.  
> 
> My brother was a CO but later joined as a preacher’s assistant - helped kids returning to get off drugs.   My hubby had been discharged from the Navy in 1967.  Still,  we were worried about his brother and friends.   There was no “lottery”  yet.  That started in Dec of 1969 and my brother-in-law got a very good number.      
> 
> We lost so much.  It was so hard.  And we watched those clips on television every night - for years - and we listened to the lies.  My dad almost disowned me for being a “Communist,”  but later he supported my brother’s CO status in part because times changed.  After about 1971 news of the drug stuff got to my folks and their attitudes changed.  
> 
> The War in Vietnam united the various action groups around the whole country into a movement -  Blacks, women, environmentalists,  some unions,  draftable men and their wives or girlfriends,  churches,  etc.  (And they all split up after the war kinda-sorta ended in 1973 or so.)   
> 
> As I said,  I don’t think I can watch the whole documentary - it’s still too emotionally close to home.  I watched the first segment.  My girlfriend (not the same one as above) watched the whole week and cried - she needed some healing,  some closure I guess.  I can’t even open the wound yet.   I can get close - I read Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald (Pulitzer Prize in 1972) a few years ago - I read Tim O’Brien’s The Things We Carried.  I think that’s all for the US stuff.  
> 
> The book “The Sympathizer”  by Viet Thanh Nguyen is super good - Pulitzer last year?  -  He’s written some nonfiction, too -  and short stories.  He kind of specializes in the stories of the refugees because he is one.  I taught refugee kids between 1992 and 1995 (?)  -  Hmong Thai, Lao, -  sad even after all those years.  
> 
> Becky
> https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com
> 
>> On Sep 30, 2017, at 9:51 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> My father was in Vietnam in 1968, with a wife and three kids at home. I was 7-8 years old. My brother and sister were 5 and 2. He was at Nha Trang Air Force Base. He wouldn’t talk about it for 30 years. When he did, all he would say was, “we should never have been over there”.
>> 
>> Www.innergroovemusic.com
>> 
>>> On Sep 30, 2017, at 10:46 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Perhaps, but this article is still worth reading.
>>> 
>>> Www.innergroovemusic.com
>>> 
>>>> On Sep 30, 2017, at 9:33 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I am not even going to bother to read it to say IT DOES NOT!....I have NOT been able to get the repeated huge numbers out of my head--because I, hating to even read about war, had NO IDEA they were so high---with scene after scene of massive numbers 
>>>> of dead Vietnamese...When we see that bombing and extrapolate--how else can it be done?--and see the deaths and extrapolate......THE HORROR, THE HORROR....
>>>> 
>>>> and they come up in EVERY discussion I have had--and I am in a discussion group about it in my soft liberal bourgeois town. 
>>>> 
>>>> "Sometimes simply seeing what is on front of one's eyes is the hardest thing"---G. Orwell, surely paraphrased. 
>>>> 
>>>> On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 9:21 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>>> This is a brief article by Nick Turse who wrote an important recent book on Vietnam.
>>>> https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/29/ken-burns-vietnam-war-documentary-glosses-over-devastating-civilian-toll
>>>> 
> 
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l