For the US and its allies, postwar foreign policy conforms to a pattern. In the planning and execution stages, this new war is strategically essential and a moral imperative, and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor; decades on, when it’s too late, it’s admitted that the same war was a folly or perhaps even a crime. Usually, though, the war was bad because of what it did to the US, not what it did to the other nations involved.
The six-part documentary series Vietnam: The War That Changed America sticks to that brief. There are a handful of Vietnamese interviewees, and the extent of the carnage wrought upon the country’s people is touched upon, but the subject matter is the effect the war had on the psyches of US soldiers – and on the mindset of the US itself. This does not, however, make the enterprise worthless. Accept those narrow parameters and the stories it tells are powerful, often stunningly, movingly so. Maybe it’s indictment enough.
