They’ll Never Watch This
By Matt Weiland
It’s hard to know who to hate anymore, with so much humility happening.
You never know who might be a Vietnam vet because they often wear reticence instead of the Bronze Medals they have earned.
I barely know Nelson and I am friendly enough with Eddy, but I know they both were there and go to the VA and wear their Semper Fi baseball hats with quiet poise and that’s about it.
I have thought of those two while watching the film. It is, as expected, tremendous, especially for narrative buffs, for history buffs, for analog film buffs and nostalgia aficionados.
But perhaps the most striking thing is to see and read the subtitles for the North Vietnamese veterans.
Being so attuned to the timber of the older male voices ten years older than me – the ones who were driving cars and listening to the Rolling Stones, and smoking doobies while you were tricycling around the sidewalk watching them drive away – those voices are familiar. But to hear the same timber in a different language, the same aging, the same humble strength of warriors at rest, it has been revelatory, especially in parallel editing where one experience is told like Roshomon from three or five different perspectives.
This might be helpful, I have wanted to say. See? We’re all kind of really alike and our mutual experience might sync in harmony with unification.
“You should watch it,” Eddy said sincerely, as he was grilling burgers for the bar outside in back during the second Sunday of the football season. “I saw it already. If I watch it again, I would go stand out in traffic and start shooting.”
Have come to kind of learn that one can process only so many intricacies in these short lifetime. Personally, Vietnam, Watergate, the Mafia, Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, the Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad are about it for me. – And with PBS’ airing of Ken Burns Vietnam, we’ve come full circle to Vietnam.
Being born into and toddlering through the arc of the Vietnam War, it was as much fairy tale, folklore, and parable with which many in the Gen X have grown. The best documentary personally was HBO’s “Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam,” based on a book by the same title published a year or two earlier.
“I saw it already. If I watch it again, I would go stand out in traffic and start shooting.”
After that, the “Deer Hunter,” “Coming Home,” and “Apocalypse Now” were seventies primers for the context and atmosphere of the war era. Television news reel footage of Khe Sahn can be as warm as tea steeping in Grandma’s kitchen for the Gen X that recalls Vietnam and Watergate as part of a childhood that warmed with the likes of Captain Kangaroo and Winne-the-Pooh.
It’s always before us, prior to us, and thus mysterious.
So Ken Burns Vietnam documentary is exceptionally enticing for it puts my lifetime’s seal on the definitive history masterpiece and latest entry into the Peter Coyote oeuvre that you kind of feel like Windsoring up a tie before lying in bed to watch it.
I knew an older guy growing up, ten years or so, who lived two doors up from the family of one of my most long-time friends.
He turned us on to the Beatles, the Stones. We played hoops in his back yard. He went along Christmas caroling one year and we had a Crown Royal sing-song blast. He stuttered. And my most long-time friend told me quietly one afternoon that he had been in Vietnam. The war was less than eight years old. He had never stuttered before the war. He was on point for his platoon. The stutter happened after he’d come back home.
Haven’t seen him in years. But I am sure that likely he isn’t watching either.
