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

(helicopter blades chop)
(crowds murmur)
- I think the Vietnam War drove a stake
right into the heart of America.
Unfortunately we've never moved
really far away from that,
and we never recovered.
- There was no way we could
avoid telling this story.
Wars are so extraordinarily revealing,
obviously of the worst of humanity,
but as it turns out, also
the best of humanity.
- There's been a lot
done about this subject,
books, documentaries,
feature films, novels.
I mean, it's not like no one's ever tried
but it remains this kind
of unfinished business
in American history.
- So it's time now.
The decades have passed
and it's important now to go back
and try to understand it.
- The real heroes are the men that died.
To see these kids who
had the least to gain,
and yet 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?
- We wanted to get to know the people,
we wanted to get to know the place,
we wanted to spend time there
trying to figure out how to do what we do,
and Vietnam was really a challenge.
- There's no one American side,
and then within Vietnam,
there's the winning side,
there's the losing side.
They were our enemy and our ally.
There's just so many
different perspectives.
We tried to bring them all together.
- This is, without a doubt,
the most ambitious project
that we have ever undertaken.
PBS is the only place
it could have been done.
- I think the country is
ready to have the conversation
we've never had about the war,
which we really need to have.
- This film is not an answer
but a set of questions
about what happened.
(melancholic music)