jtg01 I was born just shy of 10 years after Saigon fell so I had no relation to the war. I do have a strong interest in history, especially military history, but I must be honest, I avoided this documentary for a long time because Vietnam can be a hurtful subject and everything about the war since it ended has been so negative. I would never argue we, America, won the war, but everything I have ever been shown, taught, or read pretty much makes the point that everything about the war was evil or wrong. No exception. One evening I finally watched this documentary and I have to say it was perspective changing. I cannot tell you firsthand what Vietnam was like, but I can tell you first hand that if you started school in the 1980s or later, you have never been taught an unbiased view of the war. This documentary is the closest thing to an unbiased take on Vietnam I have yet encountered. This documentary does exactly what a good documentary should; open you to multiple perspectives by exposing you to film and primary sources and interviews. That exposure challenges you to think on your own. I came away with a new opinion on the whole war.Many reviewers criticize and say this documentary is jingoistic by trying to convince people the war was being won. On the contrary, the only reference to 'winning' I saw was the quotations of the Johnson administration about how we were 'winning' in body counts and the documentary uses this directly as a contrast to the reality the soldiers were facing of the ground. That is the endless Search and Destroy runs where people would die and gained territory was quickly abandoned. This documentary pulls no punches and is not afraid to showcase the insanity of the Vietnam War. Lots of stupid things were done. Lots of opportunities were missed. This documentary does not hide it.On the other side, this documentary doesn't write off the war as inherently evil or as a perpetually lost cause. It does not hide the fact we now know the NVA was nearly crippled after Tet and the US didn't capitalize on it. Similarly it doesn't hide that Nixon balked at destroying Vietcong supplies in Cambodia after Kent State. Are those things controversial? Yes. Missed opportunities? Maybe so. The documentary doesn't tell you what to think, it simply exposes you to fresh perspectives that my grade school teachers never offered me.Don't let commercial reviews fool you. This documentary is not overly simplistic. It is simply a fresh overview of a very complex subject. Overviews have their place. I guarantee that you will take new things away from this film. This documentary overviews the good bad and the ugly. Before I saw it all I was ever taught was the bad and ugly.Ultimately, this documentary really shines in giving our G.I.s the credit they deserve for sacrificing everything in the absence of clear objectives. Don't marginalize them or this documentary just because a majority of historians feel that Vietnam has to be portrayed a certain way.

darkshad3 I'm giving this one a 5 for the footage. It's nice to see so much original footage and that's what I'm always looking for. I admire the people with the cameras in the field. So using their footage means giving them credit for what they did. They shot with cameras, not with guns. Too bad, however, that it's almost all US footage, almost no North VN footage was used.Other than that, this is yet another very one-sided documentary of the Vietnam war. From the first second to the last everything shouts "look at us heroes, we're so awesome, we did so good". Americans seem to be utterly incapable of objectively reporting on the subject of war. It seems to me that with every documentary on the subject they're doing all they can to cover up the fact that they got their asses kicked. By a much weaker force by the way. Just admit it and move on. Terrible things happened and those are the facts. That's what I want from a documentary, the facts! Not a deep-sounding voice telling me how difficult some General's decision was, how long he had to think about it just to portray him as a good guy. State the facts please, and leave it at that. Don't put the ever-American gloss over it to make it look more than it is.Conclusion : If you want a 50/50 mix between some Band Of Brothers with some info put in and everything video and audio pointing out they were incredible heroes, than watch this. If you're looking for a good documentary stating the facts and looking at this war from both sides, keep looking, this is not it.

jasherjasher I liked this a lot. It seemed that the series strove to maintain a neutral point of view in regard to the causes and/or futility of the war while maintaining focus on the individuals they profiled, and in my opinion they largely succeeded. Unlike a previous reviewer, I did not find it to be overly narcissistic, pro-war, or even all that pro-American, though the focus was definitely on the American experience. Some time was also devoted to other factors, such as life for the families back home, protests and movements, and U.S. administration positions on the war at various points, though the main focus remained with the progress of the war and the battlefields themselves. Leaving the controversies aside, I thought that what the series tried to do -- portray the experiences of various individuals at certain key places and events in the war -- they did quite well. I also liked the graphics and illustrations and, as opposed to other documentaries I have seen, I thought that these were distributed well and did not get in the way of the real story. The CGI stuff was good and not overdone, in my opinion.The thing about Vietnam is that once you start discussing the controversies and what we now know to be untruths, it is a discussion without end, full of passion and short on facts, not because of the people discussing it but because the whole thing was based upon a twenty year series of lies and deceptions on the part of the governments involved. Wherever there are lies there will always be arguments, and the subject of the Vietnam war is proof positive of this on a massive scale. This series did not attempt to take any of that on, and wisely so. Though at times I found this irritating -- for instance, the neutral announcement of the events in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 as legal cause for Johnson's escalation, when we now know that at least one of the incidents never happened -- I could recognize it as necessary in telling the story. If they had taken on any one of the many controversies or governmental lies, it would have been a quicksand from which the series would not have recovered. I'm glad they didn't! It is good to remember that many of those fighting were not volunteers but draftees: it was a federal charge and prison time to dodge the draft. In that light, I do not think that talk of honor and duty is narcissistic or out of place: many did not choose the war, but were sent by force. These went in service to their *country* -- if not the war itself -- and acquitted themselves on a personal level largely with great honor, regardless of the legitimacy of the war or their belief in it. Many times in the series you hear the soldiers referring to the war as a lost cause, and yet they gave their lives for it, if only because that was what they personally felt was the honorable thing to do. I believe that this *personal* honor, courage and heroism on an *individual* level is what this series was trying to bring out, and I think it succeeded very well.I enjoyed this series in spite of its neutral point of view, and I think it was very nicely done given the incredibly controversial nature of the war and its premises. While I would NOT recommend this series as a primer on Vietnam, nor even a good outline or overview -- you'd be better off going to Wikipedia for that -- it did very well with what it tried to do, and it's well worth a watch if wartime documentaries are something you like. Enjoy!

camera-shy I was surprised to see there was only one review of this , i was expecting a couple of hundred at least. Clearly the other poster was not impressed by this series and i agree with a lot of what he said but i also think that these pages in history shouldn't be forgotten and if that means some cheesy music and a bit of hammy voice acting then so be it, although i think Michael C Hall was the ideal person to narrate this.Putting the production aside there is a wealth of archive footage that gives you a glimpse of what it was like over there, I've never been in a war but I feel I should at least watch these documentaries and try to understand what they go through. I'm not even American and I feel I owe them that which is why i was surprised to see such a small number of reviews.I make a point of watching and reading as much as I can on any conflict that people have fought and died in, to recognize and remember what they did is the least we can do. Listn to the real guys talking ,look at their faces in the archive footage and read between the lines...ignore the music, that is how you watch a war documentary.