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Ken Burns' Vitenam War on PBS


TMoney

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Ken Burns' 10-part, 18-hour The Vietnam War begins to air this Sunday, so don't forget to set your DVRs!

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/home/

The early buzz is that it is outstanding. I'm more excited for it than I have been for anything on television this year.

Soundtrack by Reznor and Atticus Ross should be interesting as well.

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The New Yorker did a nice profile on Ken Burns ahead of the series premier that is also worth reading.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/04/ken-burns-american-canon

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I'm caught up now through episode 6 which aired last night and covered the Tet Offensive and the first half of 1968.

Boy, it took a few episodes but the series has really grabbed me. I went to bed last night feeling ashamed to be an American.

1968 really was a terrible year. The futility and waste of everything that had happened up to that point coupled with the realization that the war still has another FIVE YEARS left to run is pretty crushing.

I feel terrible for the suffering of the people of South Vietnam.

Edited by TMoney
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I finished the final episode last night. Wow, that was some powerful stuff. The discussion of the Vietnam Memorial in particular is as emotional as anything I've seen on TV in quite a while. Have the tissue-box ready.

Bravo to Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Really outstanding work. I especially enjoyed how personal the interviews were, particularly the interviews with the Vietnamese. A lot of the most poignant moments of the documentary are theirs, and the documentary is so much richer with their participation that it would have been without it. The other real standout for me is seeing the color video that accompanied the most iconic photographs of the war. It is often as shocking and unsettling to see the video for the first time as it was to see the photos in the first place.

My parents, who were both born in 1955 and were old enough to remember but young enough to have not gone/protested tell me the documentary has been quite hard for them to watch.

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