‘Vietnam: The War That Changed America’ examines the human stories of war
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“I wanted to be a hero,” Bill Broyles recalled in a recent interview about why he volunteered to go to Vietnam.
These days, Broyles is best known for creating “China Beach,” co-writing “Apollo 13” and “Polar Express” and for writing “Cast Away” and “Jarhead,” but in 1968, Broyles, then 24, had just gotten a master’s degree from Oxford University when he decided to follow his father’s footsteps and head into the military. When Broyles landed in the jungles of Vietnam, every expectation he had was quickly shattered.
In “Vietnam: The War That Changed America,” a six-part docuseries debuting Friday on Apple TV+, Broyles recounts how he was so scared in his first firefight that he lost his voice and had to rely on his radioman to keep his platoon alive. Later, Broyles talks about the disillusionment tearing through the ranks and how enlisted men were “fragging,” or killing, superior officers like him.
Ultimately, he earned his men’s respect and trust because instead of following orders and embarking on a dangerous and pointless mission, he faked radio calls to make higher-ups think they were doing their job while keeping his men safe on the sidelines.
“We originally thought we’re going there to stop the spread of aggression like we did in World War II, but by the time I got there, it was a different war,” Broyles says. “It’s one thing to fight when you think you really are fighting for freedom. But none of those guys wanted to die for Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger or for me. So my mission became to keep them alive.”
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Broyles’ story onscreen is intercut with that of his more radical and insubordinate radioman, Jeff Hiers. Later, the series shows the men reuniting in the present. It’s all part of director Rob Coldstream’s distinctive approach to retelling the story of the war.
“We wanted to put you there, so you see how the people living through it saw it,” he says in a video interview. “We wanted to make it feel cinematic and immersive, rather than just telling the viewer stuff.”
That immersive approach is apparent in the jarring, hand-held footage capturing one of the war’s first firefights and in numerous memorable stories.
C.W. Bowman was a “tunnel rat” sent as point man into the Viet Cong’s network of tunnels.
When his best friend, Gary Heeter, gets his legs blown up, Bowman says that he felt “nothing mattered anymore” and that he “went crazy.” After killing an enemy soldier with his machete, Bowman recounts feeling a power that made him sick: “I was mad at God and mad at everybody who put me in that position to have me feel good about it.”
Dang Xuan Teo, one of several former North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong interviewed in the docuseries, recalls how he disguised himself as a shoeshine boy to scout details for an attack on the U.S. Embassy during the Tet Offensive.
Malik Edwards grew disillusioned not only with the war but also with what was happening in America, and he eventually left the Marines to join the Black Panthers. (In the series, Black soldiers recall North Vietnamese propaganda about how they should be fighting for civil rights at home instead of killing Vietnamese soldiers in the name of the American government.)
Huan Nguyen watched as his entire family was slaughtered by the Viet Cong; later, after a Viet Cong captain was assassinated in the streets — captured in Eddie Adams’ famous photo — he was told by the killer that this captain was responsible for the massacre of his family. Nguyen later emigrated to America and joined the U.S. military.
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Scott Camil talks about starting out anti-Communist and gung ho; he then came home from Vietnam, heard Jane Fonda speak and was transformed into an antiwar activist who publicly testified about atrocities he had committed.
Nhan Lee was a young boy whose father was a South Vietnamese military pilot and who stole a plane on the day Saigon fell, whisking his wife and son away — they survived only because an American officer, Larry Chambers, ordered the men on his warship to dump millions of dollars’ worth of helicopters into the sea to give the Lee’s plane space to land.
“We watched 400 Vietnam documentaries, and some are amazing — the Ken Burns series is incredible — but we didn’t think we’d seen any that first and foremost really got you inside the human experience,” Coldstream says.
Although there’s some historical and political context provided by Ethan Hawke’s narration, there are no pundits or historians as talking heads in the docuseries. Coldstream says that instead of relying on clip reels, they scoured the archives of full films brought back from Vietnam by journalists and others.
His team would then try tracking down people in the footage to get their story, such as Paul Healey, a private whose heroism helped stave off the attack on the U.S. Embassy.
In the case of the Lee family, whose plane landed on the U.S. ship, the American officer‘s story had been told multiple times, but Coldstream says he believed the Lee family had never been interviewed about its dramatic escape.
He acknowledges that this approach leads to some shortcomings. Kissinger, thought by critics to be a war criminal for the tens of thousands of deaths caused by America’s secret bombing of neutral Cambodia to flush out the North Vietnamese, is essentially presented as the diplomat who negotiated the treaty that ended the war. (Additionally, the timeline for some soldiers’ stories gets “blurry” when spread across several episodes.)
“We didn’t want to go up to the level of the generals and the politicians — others have covered the politics and once you start … it could take us too far off our trajectory,” Coldstream says.
So they kept their focus squarely on the folks on the ground, from soldiers to nurses to Vietnamese civilians.
“We talked to thousands of people,” says producer Caroline Marsden, who oversaw the primary research on contributors and archival material. “We were looking for stories that were new to us and that surprised us.”
Marsden cites a scene when a soldier talks about all the drugs they consumed.
“It could seem flippant, but he was making a serious point, saying, ‘I felt like I was going to be sacrificed, so this is what I wanted to do before that happened.’ It helps give you the feeling of what it was like to be there.”
Marsden also points out that Nguyen’s tragic story had a moment of unexpected grace.
“He’s underneath his mother, who is dying, and he’s 9 years old, and his whole family has been killed, but when she asks how everyone is, he lies to her and tells her everyone was OK,” she says. “It was an incredible moment beautifully told.”
Marsden says that Nguyen hadn’t previously told that part of the story on camera but that 50 years on, “there were a lot of people who felt able to tell stories that they hadn’t before.”
Coldstream says there’s something poignant and vulnerable about seeing these aging men and women reflecting on what they went through.
He points to Bowman, who, before he recounts killing that soldier with his machete, says: “I don’t think I should tell you this” but who then can’t hold back. “He had been living with this for years,” Coldstream says.
Stephanie Dinh, whose family fled as Saigon was falling and was fortunate enough to end up on an American warship that took family members to safety, says she wasn’t even sure she’d be able to tell her story on camera. “It is still too emotional for me,” says Dinh, who now lives in San Diego. “But people have misconceptions of the Vietnam War, and if they hear firsthand stories, they can really understand the hardships and fears of the people who lived through it.”
Broyles, whose son served in Afghanistan (“the longest war in American history,” he noted), hopes the series can show how the war has affected those who were there for their whole life.
“It can be a reminder of the impact of what war does to individuals and to a culture,” he says, “and maybe we can see it now and realize that more can be solved in our foreign policy and in our culture if we just brought a little more humility to our approach to the world.”
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