THE VIETNAM WAR | PBS Previews: Echoes of Vietnam | PBS Video Lecture | The Impact of the Vietnam War Era on the Present day - Personal Learning

(bombs exploding)
(acoustic guitar music)
♪ Oh I march to the
battle of New Orleans
- [Narrator] Two weeks after
the Marines landed at Da Nang,
members of the University
of Michigan faculty
organized a nightlong discussion
between professors and
some 3,000 students
about the escalation of the war.
- I grew up in Ann
Arbor, Michigan.
Ann Arbor, Michigan
in March of 1965
had one of the first
teach-ins about the war.
It began in the
anthropology department
and my father was in the
anthropology department
and so our family was being
pulled in a lot of directions
just as my country was.
(man yelling)
- I was born in 1962.
As I was growing up, it was
sort of in the background,
this big, important and not
good thing was happening.
And I could sense that all
the adults were concerned
talking about it but I
really didn't understand
what was going on,
and as I got older
I began to sort of ask myself,
"What is this thing
that was happening?"
Sort of overshadowing my
whole childhood basically.
- So we had a very different
idea of patriotism.
So we began an era in which
two groups of Americans,
both thinking that they
were acting patriotically,
went to war with each other.
(acoustic guitar music
and birds chirping)
- We've spent a decade
trying to put our arms
around a hugely complicated
and controversial event
in American history.
We didn't have an agenda,
we didn't have an ax to grind,
we had a story that
we wanted to tell.
- We think we're making this
film at the perfect time
because the people
who lived through it
are very much alive,
very much aware
of what they went through,
and at an age where they
want to talk about it.
- We hope that we
might be some agency
of healing for the soldiers
who lived through it
to take whatever slight burden
off the already immense
burden they still carry.
- I think we have
tried to make a film
that everyone will be
interested in watching,
whether you're 18 or 80,
whether you're a man or a woman,
whether your politics
are left or right,
I think we want the film
to inspire a new conversation
about the war, but
also the film is asking
a lot of questions, and we
don't pretend to answer them,
we just want to
throw those questions
out for our country
to think about again.
(somber piano music)
- I've been to the
wall more than once.
When I look back at
the war, and you know,
think of the horrible
things we said
to vets who were
returning, you know,
calling them
baby-killers, and worse.
I've, you know, I feel
very sad about that.
I can only say that
we were kids too,
you know, just like they were.
- Wars are so
extraordinarily revealing,
obviously of the
worst of humanity,
but as it turns out also
the best of humanity.
(soft music)
As you dig deeper, as
you go in and reach
into the lives of the
people we spoke to,
you can understand new
dimensions of courage
and new dimensions of heroism,
and it may not take place
always in the case of this war
on the battlefield.
(slow drum music)
This is without a doubt
the most ambitious project
that we have ever undertaken,
and I would probably suggest
that this may be one of
the biggest undertakings
of our network, but the
most important thing
with regard to PBS is that
this is the only place
it could have been done.
This was the only network on
earth that would have provided
the bandwidth to
permit us to go in
and study it as we have
over the last decade
and come to terms with a
very complicated portrait.
(woman humming)
- I fear that there's a
kind of national amnesia
about Vietnam, that
we've erased the horror
of the kinds of
mistakes that were made.
I think this film, at
this point in history,
might be a terrific
antidote to that.
- To see these kids who
had the least to gain,
there wasn't anything
to look forward to.
They weren't going
to be rewarded
for their service in Vietnam.
And yet, their
infinite patience,
their loyalty to each other,
their courage under fire
was just phenomenal.
And you would ask yourself,
"How does America produce
young men like this?"
(humming and guitar music)