Tonight, Ken Burns’ documentary The Vietnam War will air on PBS stations nationwide and locally on WEDU Ch. 3 at 8 p.m. A decade in the making, this 10-episode, 18-hour project explores a conflict that divided America.
Rolling Stone notes that the documentary “isn’t just a corrective to the fact that generations have grown up being taught little more about Vietnam than ‘we came, we lost, now forget about it.'”
“It’s also the deepest exploration yet of the origins, the fighting and the fallout of a conflict that virtually defined the Sixties, and the first to let ‘the enemy’ speak at length alongside familiar American voices, including Pentagon policy wonks, Army privates, anti-war protesters and grieving parents.”
Robert Lloyd of The Los Angeles Times notes, “There are many good reasons to watch The Vietnam War. Unless you are very well informed, it will teach you things you do not know and correct things you thought you knew.”
Lloyd continues: “It may be, if you are of those generations for whom the words ‘the war’ call to mind only Iraq or Afghanistan, that you know nothing of Vietnam at all. But there are lessons in this misadventure worth learning regarding the crooked course of human events and the collision of interests and individual lives. Its multiplicity of voices, from both sides of the war and the war at home, might make you a more thoughtful, less judgmental person in the end if you pay attention.”