Word: viets
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...Concerning the term "monk barbecue show," Viet Nam is a strange country where people often commit spectacular suicides before the gates of people whom they wish to curse. I find that custom barbaric. My aim was to try to stop the spreading of bad examples by ridiculing grotesque customs...
What makes Viet Nam: A Television History effective is less its grand scale than its telling detail. The opening hour, which concentrates on France's century of colonial control, offers chilling hints of why the Vietnamese nationalists were so implacable: in the first years of the 20th century, postcards of severed Vietnamese heads were mailed by French soldiers to their sweethearts; some 2 million Vietnamese died of starvation during and after World War II. The narrative recalls that North Vietnamese Leader Ho Chi Minh collaborated at the end of that war with U.S. intelligence agents and modeled Viet...
...hour describes the North Vietnamese, both as they viewed themselves and as they were seen by American prisoners of war, whom they abused and tortured. Subsequent shows chronicle the attempt to "Vietnamize" the conflict by withdrawing U.S. troops, the simultaneous expansion of the war to Cambodia and Laos, North Viet Nam's public relations triumph despite the military failure of its 1968 Tet offensive, the protracted peace negotiations, and the antiwar movement...
...private grief of veterans who gave back their war decorations as a gesture of protest and of families who gathered at fallen soldiers' gravesites. The final hours (the 13th is still being edited and will close the series Dec. 20) are to portray the collapse of the South Viet Nam regime in 1975, two years after the U.S. Army left, and the war's continuing repercussions in Southeast Asia...
There are shortcomings. The series gives glancing attention to the destructive American impact in South Viet Nam: corruption, prostitution, an overheated and dependent economy. The first twelve shows offer almost no impression of life in North Viet Nam or of what the Communists planned to impose on the South. As usual, the U.S. suffers for being an open society: there is almost no film or discussion of Soviet military activity, and the footage supplied by Hanoi often seems sanitized; while most of the Americans who are interviewed are thoughtful, there is no flicker of self-criticism among the people interviewed...