Memory,remembrance and nostalgia in Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War

From memory to remembrance

To be clear, the earlier documentaries are items of history and memory. They are not items of remembrance. And they are not nostalgic responses to remembrance. To define these terms more clearly, memory consists of testimony, recollections, and the summoning of experience and experiences. Remembrance is both an institutionalized organization of memory—which might come in the form of a day or anniversary set aside for its enactment or statuary, monuments, and even museums—and an individual’s own attempt to put memory in a wider social context. Nostalgia often serves as an attachment to remembrance.

In the Year of the Pig has little to no room for remembrance or nostalgia. Unconventional for its time, its use of history and historical antecedents turned out to be a template for many subsequent documentaries on the subject. It is more than a breakthrough in its criticism of the war. Certainly, its conclusions, so angrily denied at the time, seem commonplace and conventional today. But its presentation verged on the radical, employing what was essentially a Brechtian technique of alienation. Brecht (Brecht, 1982: 39, 193) wanted discordant imagery and sound to awaken audiences from their perceived stupor and engage them directly in a debate on issues. The intent was to create a clash, presenting images and sounds in a way that mimics Marxist dialectics. Audiences would then be led to grapple with exploitative and oppressive incidents and 'diagnose’ them. Instead of being lost in the lyrical, emotive illusion of reality, theatregoers would engage with ideas. And a key part of this structure in In the Year of the Pig is its testimonials and interviews.

In the Year of the Pig begins with what the director, Emile de Antonio, calls a ‘concerto of helicopters’ (Browder, 2016: 7). This sound is imposed over a montage of images of American Civil War soldiers, Vietnamese, self-immolating Buddhist monks, and American soldiers in Vietnam, urging audiences to connect with the idea of a 'just war’ being one fought hand in hand with North Vietnam, not the United States. Elsewhere, the French national anthem, La Marseillais, plays with traditional Vietnamese musical instruments, while the footage shows French graves and French troops departing from Vietnam. Similarly, the Battle Hymn of the Republic plays over the closing image, which is the same Civil War soldier highlighted at the start, but this time projected with the film negative. What history there is, here combines with contemporary testimony to advocate for an end to injustice and war. If there are elements of remembrance, they are brief and used ironically, not nostalgically, with the shot of the statue of the Civil War soldier.

This style is in contrast to the second milestone documentary produced during the war years, Hearts and Minds. This film more directly makes use of testimony and recent memories. And it does so without the Brechtian manipulation of form. Filming in South Vietnam took place in the fall of 1972, when the American troops deployed there stood at around 100,000, down from the almost 550,000 at the height of the war in 1968. Interviews capture the participants in the war as it is still happening. It features a series of testimonials with war veterans and Vietnamese civilians and officials. Intercut with the interviews is contemporary news footage and commentary about the war itself from American policymakers. The strength of the interviews lies in the willingness of the filmmakers to indulge in long takes, trusting the subjects to develop and reveal their own stories as the camera is rolling. Relatively unmediated, the interviews grow in impact due to the patience of filmmakers, which also, intentionally or not, allows the subjects to recollect their memories more fully. Additionally, the interviews are not separated out from their context. That is, we see and listen to the stories in situ. Peter Davis, the director of the film, says:

The networks cannot stand quote, dead air unquote. They have to have a narrator, they have to have a guide, a correspondent, a reporter, who stands between you, the audience, and the very thing being described or depicted. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to present the war as directly with as little intermediary interference as possible. It wasn’t until I got to Vietnam that I had that moment of revelation about dead air. I realized that I didn’t want anybody talking over this footage. I wanted the subjects to be the focus, not me as filmmaker. In other words, just as I did not want a correspondent I also didn’t want as a filmmaker to be trampling all over my subjects (Davis, 2014).

Back in the United States, the camera captures US Air Force Capt. Randy Floyd sitting on his front porch. Returning veteran Mike Sulsana, an amputee, is pictured in and among fellow disabled veterans in a rehabilitation centre. With marine lieutenant Bobby Muller, who later founded Vietnam Veterans of America and became a peace activist, and army Sgt. William Marshall, lengthy segments allow their stories to unfold slowly. The camera matches the unfolding, gradually pulling out until we see Muller in a wheelchair and Marshall with scars resulting from 'friendly fire’. Also, the ambient sound, no matter how much it seems to distract at times, is locked in place. This choice not only yields an authenticity to the footage, it also makes most of the subjects more likely to provide a candid response, as they are in a familiar environment. Lastly, Hearts and Minds has as its focus life in two small towns, Linden, New Jersey and Hung Dinh Village just outside of Saigon. The gulf between the two cultures could not be greater; the Vietnamese village left in tatters from bombing and the town of Linden joyously deceived by its own government’s propaganda. Here, once more, remembrance is used ironically, as Lt. George Coker, back from being a POW in North Vietnam, addresses his homecoming crowd and lists the town’s traditional virtues and how they enabled him to survive. Coker’s homecoming parade contrasts with the devastation unleashed on Hung Dinh Village.

The look of those documentaries, the quality of their images, and roughness of most of the footage is very much how contemporary viewers of news in the late 1960s and early 1970s received and processed information about the Indochina wars. If there is a nostalgic effect in the documentaries it is this, ironically, which may serve to foreground the imagery, whereas at the time of the original production, the images were simply expected to be grainy, blurred, and shaky. All these formal devices are in contrast to current documentaries that place an emphasis on remastering techniques that enhance the footage of the era from standard definition to high definition. Similarly, colourisation, re-enactments, or ‘staged illustrations’ of events have moved into being acceptable tools for serious documentary filmmaking (Nichols, 2008: 72). They are seen as improvements that make the film more marketable, particularly to commercial cable television. In applying these enhancements, however, not only do those documentaries using them falsify events, they also falsify the experience of events as they were broadcast to audiences throughout the world 50 or 60 years ago. All filmic experiences are mediated in one way or another, but enhancements as defined above add yet one more layer of mediation, except in this case the effect is to contribute to the false continuity of an authenticity that is, in fact, becoming more and more distant from the original event.

The same occurs with sound and narration. The earlier models demonstrate a different intent, as well as a reliance on more unsophisticated film technology. As mentioned above, Richard Basehart narrates Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War. Meanwhile, Will Lyman, a veteran voice over artist, narrates Vietnam: A Television History. Both project resonant tones and an authoritative quality. This aspect is especially true of Basehart, one of the most recognized American actors and voices from the 1960s through the 1970s. Notably, Ken Burns takes a different tack in The Vietnam War, employing the distinctly higher pitched Peter Coyote as his narrator.

For someone such as Coyote, who, as Clara Bingham points out, was an iconic figure of the counterculture during the war, it is indicative of Burns that he uses a voice that is also perceived as more even toned. It reflects the search for 'fairness' that Coyote claims was crucial to Burns:

people were talking about how I had sold out and what a shithead I was…Ken wanted to make a film that would be seen by the mass of Americans. And the mass of Americans would see American generals lying, presidents lying, massacres at My Lai and other places. He was even-handed. He showed the Vietnamese, he showed the Americans (cited in Bingham, 2017).”

The choices of Basehart and Lyman, on the other hand, demonstrate a different strategy, a decision to use tonal counterpoints to the images. That is, the images of the Vietnam War emphasize disorder, chaos, and a lack of structure that, visually speaking, is high pitched or high toned. The voice of the narrators supplies a contrasting low resonance that re-establishes perceived orderliness in sound. The inherent juxtaposition of image and sound prevents viewers becoming immersed into the mere sensation of war. Instead, the documentaries create an identifiable narrative stance—order out of chaos and a critical perspective. They emphasize the rational over the emotional. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary, alternatively, with Coyote’s narration, calms the viewer. More than that, even, it disarms them. Voice matches imagery and the narrative of ‘fairness’. A critical stance disappears as the viewer indulges in feelings about the war, especially feelings among many that were living during the years of the war itself. And, once again, the filmmakers identify these feelings in their stated goal to 'focus instead on what [the war] can teach us about courage, patriotism, resilience, forgiveness and, ultimately, reconciliation'.

This is a vital difference between Burns and Novick’s overall perspective and that of the earlier documentaries. Burns and Novick produce the experience of nostalgia—and it is a nostalgia of the most reactionary sort—to please and satisfy the viewer with what at most is a melancholy ending (the past filtered of the immediacy of violence and destruction), which, contrary to expectations, can be an enjoyable experience. Burns and Novick’s use of music throughout their work underscores this strategy. Significant parts of it consist of rock music from the era. Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Colleen Flaherty interviewed a panel of historians critical towards Burns because of the absence of professional historians from the series. One comment, in particular, reveals Burns and Novick’s perceived weak point:

I have number of very serious criticisms of this film, but I’ve talked to a number of friends outside of academic life who will say something to this effect: “Yeah, it wasn’t critical enough for you, but there was a great soundtrack, incredible archival footage, really a lot of history and I didn’t know any of this stuff" (cited in Flaherty 2018)

This is the anti-Brechtian aesthetic, completely in contrast to that first established with In the Year of the Pig. In most ways, then, with The Vietnam War, the critical attitude has turned over, from critical engagement towards a satisfied complacency.

Burns and Novick thus display a very different trajectory—and it is one being taken by many contemporary, popular documentaries. For it is not just The Vietnam War that incorporates this strategy. As with many documentaries touching on sensitive and controversial topics of history, it strives to satisfy all audiences—at least in its emphasis on finding common ground or agreements in feelings. In a time in the United States when there is very little consensus about anything political, cultural, or economic, the Indochina war, at least as projected through the lens of Burns, has settled for a consensus of feeling.

History, memory, and remembrance

Just how the consensus arrived at its point of resolution can best be seen through a comparison of two episodes: first, ‘Soldiering On’, episode nine in the syndicated version of the series, from Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War and a second, episode 10, ‘Weight of Memory’, from The Vietnam War. They illustrate the transition from history and memory to memory and remembrance. As Daniel Schacter states of memory: 'we recreate or reconstruct our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them. Sometimes in the process of reconstructing, we add feelings, beliefs, or even knowledge…[W]e bias our memories of the past by attributing to them emotions or knowledge we acquired after the event’. (Schachter, 2000:9). This dynamic aspect of memory at work shows itself in the 37-years span of time between the two episodes. ‘Soldiering On’ excavates the recollections of its interviewees to pair their immediate memories (it was only 5 years after the end of the Indochina War) with historical context and archival illustrations. By the time of 'Weight of Memory’, almost four decades had been at work constructing a pattern of institutionalized remembrance out of those original but altered memories.

Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War made use of more than a score of interviews, not including archival material. Among them was that of Jim Webb, a marine lieutenant and platoon commander in Vietnam who was later elected to the US Senate. Intercut with Webb’s commentary are colour photos emphasizing the youth of US soldiers during the war: 'What happened is you have basically an immature human being. The average age of an American soldier in World War II was 26 years. The average guy in my unit in Vietnam was 19 years old’. While he did not write about the Indochina war per se, Fred Davis did note that these were the circumstances that would make for the most fertile grounds of later nostalgia. In general, he writes:

Whether it be a matter of starting work, going off to college, performing military service, getting married, becoming a parent, or simply leaving home…the essential psychosocial transition involves being carried in relatively short order from familiar places and persons to settings that are new, unfamiliar, and thus problematic in crucial respects (Davis, 1979:57).

If merely joining the army might provide the material for nostalgic feelings because of the abruptness and severity of the transition from a safely understood life, then how much more might actual war in an unknown and, for most, unknowable region of the world do so? Other interviews reflect the same shock of transition but from the perspectives of a medic, Jack McCloskey, a special forces captain and military adviser, Brian Jenkins, and an army sergeant in the field who went on to become a chronicler of the war in novels and short stories, Tim O'Brien.

O’Brien appears in Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War as a witness to events in the war that led to atrocities. While disowning and condemning acts such as that at My Lai, he nevertheless explains the background which made such things possible. It is not too far away from Jim Webb’s explanation that pinpointed naivety and immaturity. ‘I didn’t know the language’, O'Brien says. ‘I couldn’t communicate with [the Vietnamese villagers] except in pidgin English. I knew nothing about the culture in Vietnam. I knew nothing about the religion. I knew nothing about the village community’. And finding the enemy, he states, 'was like hunting a hummingbird’. O'Brien goes on to describe Vietnam as a ghostly, ethereal place. Aside from the muck, mire, rain, and mists, his Vietnam is largely a place of bivouacs, firebases, camps, and outposts. In fact, probably his most lingering vision of the country comes from 'In the Field’, in his book of short stories, The Things They Carried ([1990] 2009). O'Brien describes an engagement in which an American dies, and its aftermath in a field that turns out to have been a village toilet:

He remembered how the water kept rising, how a terrible stink began to swell up out of the earth. It was a dead-fish smell, partly, but something else, too, and then late in the night Mitchell Sanders had crawled through the rain and grabbed him hard by the arm and asked him what he was doing setting up in a shit field. The village toilet, Sanders said…A stupid mistake. That's all it was, a mistake, but it had killed Kiowa (O’Brien, [1990] 2009:161).

This could be O'Brien’s metaphor for the entire war. And it was already taking shape when he talked about his experiences in Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War. It is the stuff not only of psychosis. It can also be a memory that finds its way working towards nostalgia.

In the prologue to The Vietnam War’s ‘Weight of Memory’ episode, Tim O'Brien appears yet again. Reading from the opening story, 'The Things They Carried’, in the book of the same name, O'Brien himself intones:

They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam (O’Brien, [1990] 2009: 14).

The narration overlays black and white still photographs of US soldiers in the field intercut with a shot of the now aged O’Brien looking down at his own pages as he reads. It is another iteration of the imagery associated with the platoon bivouacked in the village toilet. Mists, rain, mud and misery predominate. O'Brien repeats and extends his reading to close the episode in an epilogue where his written words once more overlay images. But this time it is a roll call of all of the participants who provided commentary in the episode.

Such are the continuities. The differences are another matter and are more striking. For more than the aging of years separates the O’Brien of Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War from the O'Brien of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s film. The formal presentations yield two different effects. The contrast in the use of music is noted above. But an even more significant difference occurs in the lighting and storyline of the two productions and their on-camera presentations of commentary. Much like the PBS series, Vietnam: A Television History, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War makes use of high key lighting and places the subjects of its interviews against a backdrop of easily identifiable and varying settings. This matches well with the archival compilations intercut into the narrative. Quite literally and figuratively, both earlier documentary series illuminate the story of the war and the experiences of the people who planned it, administered it, fell victim to it, and fought it.

Burns and Novick take a different approach. Not only do they rely on Burns' now recognized mastery of creating motion with static images through zooms and pans, but they also create an overall visual atmosphere that isolates their human subjects from the stream of historical events. They achieve this effect repeatedly with low key, high contrast lighting and shallow focus photography of the on-camera participants. Throughout The Vietnam War, the effect is uniform. Citing Novick, Ian Parker writes:

These sessions use a single camera. The eyes of an interviewee are flooded with light, as if for an ophthalmological examination. The setting, Novick told me, has to register as “a real place—not a studio—but not so much of a real place that you’re curious about where you are.”

He also notes that Novick conducted 85 of the series’ 100 interviews. The final effect, of course, is that not only do the interviews occur in ‘not so much of a real place that you’re curious about’ but also serve to remove the subjects from context and time. Instead, they bathe in a feeling of ‘reconciliation’ (the last word that the narrator speaks before the episode launches into O'Brien’s final reading) and bittersweet sadness—not the ingredients for psychosis, not anger, not despair, and not depression (the unfortunate marine veteran, John Musgrave, with his sardonic grin and involuntary twitch, comes closest to that state). This is the hallmark of nostalgia, a brake put on the present before plunging headlong into an undesirable future (Davis, 1979:116). It is a future forever made undesirable because it will always be severed from the world that existed prior to the United States' large-scale intervention and war. For North Vietnamese, it was a world before the bombings in the north, before the uncountable losses along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and before the offensives that repeatedly failed until the final victory in 1975. For South Vietnamese, it was a world before free fire zones, strategic hamlets, widespread defoliation, successive military defeats, and ultimately, for somewhere over one million people, fleeing Vietnam as refugees. For Americans, it was the time before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, before the war started to become more noticeable in 1965, in particular, when American economic, political, and cultural power was at its apex.

That landscape is in evidence in O'Brien’s writing, while it is only implied by his appearance in The Vietnam War. Not only in The Things They Carried but in his other works as well, he pictures a life in the United States that is vivid, full of bright colours and innocence, the very opposite of Vietnam. Yet Vietnam continues to intrude into that world. In ‘On the Rainy River’, for example, O’Brien relates the struggle in his mind to escape the draft and either go to Canada or go to war:

In the morning, after gassing up, I headed straight west along the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada, and which for me separated one life from another. The land was mostly wilderness. Here and there I passed a motel or bait shop, but otherwise the country unfolded in great sweeps of pine and birch and sumac. Though it was still August, the air already had the smell of October, football season, piles of yellow-red leaves, everything crisp and clean. I remember a huge blue sky. Off to my right was the Rainy River, wide as a lake in places, and beyond the Rainy River was Canada (O’Brien, [1990] 2009:45).

This is detail absent from the grey skies and humidity that linger over Vietnamese rice paddies and US Army outposts. It is a ‘nostalgic reaction’ that Fred Davis describes as similar to 'a psychological inversion of the figure-ground configuration of daily life’. Comparing it to the gestalt silhouette of a vase, Davis writes:

During the developmental transition from adolescence to childhood it is, on the mundane plane of daily life, the anxieties, uncertainties, and feelings of strangeness about the present and future that constitute figure for the youth while ground is composed of familiar likable persons, places, and identities from the past…[T]he nostalgic reaction inverts the perspective: the warmly textured past of memory that was merely backdrop suddenly emerges as figure while the harshly etched silhouette of current concerns fades into ground (Davis, 1979: 58).

Four years later, O’Brien wrote In the lake of the Woods. It made use of a similar setting, Lake of the Woods County, Minnesota, along which runs the Rainy River and the border with Canada. He once again describes the natural wilderness in vivid detail. But this time the war comes back to haunt O'Brien’s protagonist, John Wade, a failed candidate for the US Senate, when the press reveals Wade’s involvement in a wartime atrocity in Vietnam. His life comes apart along with his marriage to his wife, Kathy. The surrounding wilderness is no more of an escape or answer than it was in ‘On the Rainy River’. Life and psyche both shatter. The shattering recurs throughout O’Brien’s stories and in his testimony for Burns and Novick’s film. It also becomes the narrative storyline of the entire Burns and Novick series. This is the Vietnam experience—for all sides.

O’Brien and the other interview subjects serve to create a sense of authority in Burns and Novick’s film. This authority emanates from the source of their comments. O'Brien reads his own words, and in so doing inscribes them on the documentary. He becomes the author/authority. This position reflects itself onto the other individuals that weave into O’Brien’s final reading: Bao Ninh, a writer of war stories who might be seen as the (North) Vietnamese version of O'Brien; Huy Duc, a journalist and historian often critical of the current Vietnamese government; Bill Erhart, widely acknowledged as a ‘Vietnam War Poet’; Duong Van Mai Elliott, a memoirist and author closely associated with the RAND Corporation; Philip Caputo, a war novelist and journalist; Roger Harris, an educator and professor at Boston University; Le Minh Khue, an author of Vietnam war stories; Karl Marlantes, a Vietnam war novelist; Merrill McPeak, former US Air Force chief of staff and board member of several corporations; and perhaps the most sympathetic figure to appear in the documentary, John Musgrave, a veterans counsellor and war poet. Among the others are judges, a physician, a family counsellor, and career military retirees. But writers predominate. One other fact also overwhelms the series: the participants are all aged. This is a documentary of the old and perhaps for the old. Youth exists only in the photos of these same individuals earlier in their lives during the war.

In effect, memories have become remembrance, a digital visual monument that commemorates the events, lives, and deaths in a conflict that ended 42 years ago. Burns makes the point clear in the centrepiece of this last episode, which focuses on the US Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Just as Tim O'Brien inscribes his memories on the opening and closing of the episode, and thus on the series in general, so does the war memorial inscribe the names of the dead and like a mirror reflect back the images of those who visit the site to remember the dead. At one particular moment, with one particular shot, memory, remembrance, nostalgia, and reconciliation fuse. This comes when Burns captures a view popular with visitors to and photographers of the memorial: a shot from the centre point of the memorial slightly angled upwards to include the Washington Monument in the background. Apparently shot slightly before and at sunrise, during ‘golden hour’, the sun’s reflection glances off the memorial wall and floods the frame with sepia tones. The two interviews surrounding the shot also match the colouration, having been lit for more sepia tones as well. The past, and in particular old photographic images of the past, are often presented with sepia tones, an effect which itself is associated with nostalgia. And the episode locks onto a static image that seems frozen and lifted out of its own time, something cast into an age many years ago.

Conclusion

Attached to The Vietnam War’s segment about the memorial wall is a ‘Return to Vietnam,’ wherein the episode details the attempts of several veterans to reconnect with Vietnam and the Vietnamese. Tellingly, most of the film footage is 30 to 40 years old: villages, impoverished youngsters playing amidst shanties or huts, palm trees, dusty roads, villagers preparing their fields. The Vietnam of 1985 or 1996 does not look noticeably different from the popular images of Saigon or the rest of South Vietnam in 1975. Subsequent footage of today’s Vietnam does not alter the impression. It has footage of rice paddies, emerald-coloured mountains, streets filled with scooters, and a lone boat on a body of water at sunset—the frame flooded with sepia tones. It is not that these shots are false in and of themselves, but they do create a misleading impression. This is not the Vietnam or Southeast Asia of today, which does not have much time to focus on the Indochina wars. The Vietnam War leaves the impression that little has changed. And even in the remotest of Southeast Asian countries, Laos, that is not true. Almost nothing in the series connects to the Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, Hanoi, Vientiane, Phnom Penh, or Bangkok of today. And nothing connects to the people who live their lives in those cities today. The sepia-toned bubble of nostalgia and reconciliation might burst if the film went too far into those areas. Like the selected footage implies, Southeast Asia, for Burns and Novick, remains a place only of rural hamlets unplugged from the current of history.

‘History’, writes Jay Winter’ is not simply memory with footnotes…’ (Winter, 2006: 6), yet that is what a great many social-war documentaries attempt. Interviews provide the memories. News footage supplies the footnotes. They forget that memories are dynamic, that they change, and that the documentation of these changes is often the most interesting aspect of social history. They also forget that there are frequently discoveries of new source materials, or at least new perspectives on old news footage. That is the challenge of melding history to memory and documentary filmmaking, and documentaries such as In the Year of the Pig, Hearts and Minds, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, and Vietnam: A Television History met that challenge for the most part. The alternative is plucking memories from the current of time and isolating them into a forced consensus. The latter is a different enterprise than history. It is an artistic endeavour. And that explains perhaps just why Burns himself describes his work as 'emotional archaeology’, artistic pieces that ‘just happen to work in history’ (Parker, 2017). That is where remembrance becomes a monument and where memories generate nostalgia.