Because the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick PBS series on Vietnam pays scant attention to the context of a hundred years of French colonization that preceded it the result is a certain illiteracy that bends how the film series views the twenty years of war that follow. Perhaps the lengthy French occupation is not shown because it had a clearer more revealing purpose, one that begs us to look the other way. It was to extract the region's rich mineral and natural resources for the profit of French enterprise. This purpose was sacred, supported by Catholic missionaries teaching a version of Christianity to the Vietnamese intended to pacify them to accept their own victimization; that is, moving their natural wealth into European hands.
It's this colonial history that frames the political and spiritual reality of the years after the brief WW II Japanese occupation and after the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu. Irregardless of how both Catholic and Protestant missionaries during the age of colonialism in China, India and Africa were dedicated to their Christianizing purpose they also served the same simplicism: that a higher moral purpose, God's purpose, required the servitude of native populations to build the wealth of Western nations.
Which may be why the U. S. State Department never showed President Truman the letters from Ho Chi Minh requesting American help setting-up a democracy in Vietnam. For Secretaries of State such as John Foster Dulles God's purpose was served by enriching the U. S.
So much for the ancient biblical instruction about welcoming strangers and delivering justice.
Just so the U. S. could not escape its metaphoric identity as successors to French colonialism. The Burns/Novick film toils in each segment to respect the naivete, innocence, and heroic sacrifices of American soldiers in a misbegotten cause, but that does not illuminate how American leaders understood the slaughter of Vietnamese by the hundreds of thousands to be worthy of the sacred purpose to defeat Communism and save Vietnam for the West.
This role as faith-based champions against Communism makes the Burns/Novick segment incomprehensible when it shows the self-immolation of a devout Buddhist Monk protesting the American supported Diem regime in 1963. As the flames consume the Monk, Thích Quang Duc, he is surrounded by a large circle of followers kneeling in prayer. What Americans see--including the ambassadors, the President, the Generals--is an act of religious fanaticism, blind to understand this was a window into the spiritual center of Vietnamese culture.
This may help explain Ken Burns' illiteracy about the subsequent faith-based non-violent resistance to the war. By 1967 Jewish and Christian leaders were mobilizing their own opposition to the war and by 1968 a coalition named Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam had distributed twenty-four thousand copies of a 400 page paper-back, "In the Name of America." It was composed entirely of newspaper clippings of U. S. brutalities and indiscriminate destruction; e.g. CIA operatives interrogating captured Vietnamese then pushing them out of their helicopter. By 1969 forty thousand people of faith came to Washington to march by candlelight to Richard Nixon's White House, each carrying the name of one of the 40,000 dead U. S. soldiers at that point in the war. It marked a daily death toll of 40 U. S. soldiers per day.
The Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee distributed a shocking slide show about "The Electronic Battlefield" showing the use of cluster munitions with hundreds of shards of flying steel exploding above ground and shattering pigs, children and old folks working in the fields and villages. Shown repeatedly at the 1972 Democratic Convention, in some cities church volunteers bought multiple carousel projectors and slides to show the horror of the war to churches, synagogues and other groups. The point is that this resistance by non-violent interfaith movements during the war practiced a religious tradition that, like the Monk Thích Quang Duc, was not centered in illusions of American greatness. Strangely, leaders of the anti-war movement of the 1960's report that no one from the Burns research teams asked about their faith-based non-violent actions.
This is important today because the old time religion of the Vietnam war--faith merged with American nationalism, especially in the age of Trump, is still in play--sometimes for cynical reasons (Lindsay Graham on the "health policy choice between socialism and democracy"), more often because it asks for no moral engagement on the frontier of policy choices about equity, justice or injustice. Trump age heroes are the people with the most money and therefore the most power.
The irony is that the people supporting Trump are among the least advantaged by the turn to globalization that ended their jobs and who must now send their children--as a means of employment--to fight and die in Iraq or Afghanistan. The old paradigm still teaches that all this is a religious happening because God is making America great again. Whether people accept this today may be influenced by the lessons being taught, or not, by the Burns film about Vietnam.
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