Many of us of a certain age are this week reliving a painful chapter of our past with nightly installments of Ken Burns’ documentary The Vietnam War on public TV. For me it’s not just revisiting the confusing times and political turmoil of then, but beginning to understand some parts of that complex era for the first time. I vaguely recall studying newspaper accounts in the 1960s, trying to figure out the difference between the Viet Cong and the National Liberation Front, or where and what, exactly, is the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Few of us knew then the pre-American roles of the French and the Japanese in Vietnam, nor did we understand why the Buddhists were burning themselves. If only we had known then what Ken Burns knows now. –Fletcher Farrar, editor and CEO
This article appears in Sep 21-27, 2017.
