I recently watched the Ken Burns documentary Vietnam. I went in expecting to see a leftist slant on the history of the Vietnam War and that was pretty much what I got. Ken Burns is a product of his culture and Vietnam is the the pivotal event on which many worldviews were defined. I wouldn’t call it a bad film — many aspects of it were very good indeed — but it fails in the same way that much retelling of history does; the problem with bad teaching of history is not in what is told, but rather in what is left out.
Today I’d like to discuss a scene from the film We Were Soldiers. This is part of an ongoing series on war films and the life lessons we can learn from them.
Setting: Battle of the Ia Drang Valley
November 14–16, 1965
Central Highlands, Vietnam
The young man in the scene above is portraying Joseph Galloway, the journalist who would go on to write the book We Were Soldiers upon which this movie is based. The Vietnam War is not one of my main areas of study, though I’ve read several books about it (We Were Soldiers included), and I have more on my shelf I haven’t gotten to yet. One book I rather enjoyed was Ride The Thunder by Richard Botkin. It was the first book I’d read that told the tales of the South Vietnam Marines and the U.S. Marines who trained them.
I never learned about these men in high school or even college, and what little Ken Burns mentioned of them painted them as incompetent at best. Telling the tales of bravery, sacrifice, uncommon deeds, and unsung honor is a sacred trust we need to take seriously. The whole course of human history is available for study in a number of ways, or just as easily ignored because there is always another distraction. What remains, what gets shared and analyzed or commemorated, is up to us — and we can choose to write it off or hastily skim through it, but in doing so we will inevitably skew the understanding of its history.
I have eight children. My wife and I homeschool them together, and this year my oldest daughter is studying high school U.S. History. She doesn’t have the love of history her dad does, so it’s a challenge for me to find the right books that she will a) enjoy, b) learn truth from, and c) manage along with all of her other school subjects. But that’s not what has me frustrated. What has me frustrated is that somehow I need to cram The Civil War, Reconstruction, The West, The Gilded Age, WWI, The Depression, WWII, The Civil Rights Movement, The Cold War, International Relations and Islamic Fundamentalism, Iraq and Afghanistan all into one year.
Did you notice I left something out?
Somewhere within the words Cold and War I’ll need to squeeze in a little ditty about Hal Moore and the First and Second Battalions of the 7th Cavalry, and what happened that day in Vietnam. At least, I’ll try. But I doubt we’ll get a chance to tell the tale of Vietnamese Lieutenant Colonel Le Ba Binh, his heroism, or what the Communists did to him for years afterward. And maybe that makes me a small part of the problem, because the problem with teaching history is not necessarily about the tales we choose to include — it’s always about what we choose to leave out.
Watch the full film on Amazon Prime Video.
Prior posts:
Black Hawk Down
Gettysburg
Saving Private Ryan
The Longest Day