HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam, May 6 (UPI) -- While the Vietnam War has been revisited countless times by American authors and filmmakers, a new Netflix documentary series looks to shake the dust of history off the conflict that ended five decades ago and draw a direct connection to the present day.
Released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Turning Point: The Vietnam War anchors its gripping five-episode dive into the war around the political divisions, cynicism and mistrust of government and media that emerged during the Vietnam era.
"The America that existed before the United States engaged [in Vietnam] is a very different country than the America that emerged after the troops came home," director Brian Knappenberger told UPI in a Zoom interview. "And the America that emerged is a lot more like the world that we live in now."
The series, the third in Knappenberger's Turning Point anthology (the first two covered 9/11 and the atomic bomb), traces the nearly two-decade war with perspectives from historians, journalists, activists and participants from all sides of the conflict. CBS News archives, declassified government records and rare Vietnamese footage bring the story to life in unflinching detail.
Especially potent is Turning Point's access to secret White House recordings that illustrate the "credibility gap" between what Washington was saying publicly and what was actually happening on the ground.
The first episode of the series, "America Goes to War," shows President John F. Kennedy escalating the presence of American advisers embedded with South Vietnamese troops, but hiding their growing involvement from the media.
"[Kennedy] didn't say that they were reinforcing the South Vietnamese military with heavy weapons and aircraft," journalist Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the conflict, said in the series. "He didn't say that American so-called advisors would fly the planes going out on bombing missions."
The gap between public statements and private sentiments grew wider under the subsequent presidencies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, whose calculations sought to minimize the impact of the war on their own political fortunes.
"You start to understand just how connected this was to the presidential elections in the United States," Knappenberger said. "Nobody wanted to be the president who lost Vietnam. And they'd all had doubts from the very beginning about the winnability of this war."
Knappenberger, whose father served in Vietnam, does not limit his scope to the American perspective. Turning Point includes a broad cross-section of Vietnamese voices, from author Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose family fled to the United States after the fall of Saigon, to Vo Thi Trong, a woman who fought on the side of the National Liberation Front, or "Viet Cong."
"One major motivation was to try to understand as many sides of this perspective as we possibly could," Knappenberger said. "You don't understand the story, Vietnam, without understanding all of the people that participated in it."
While not as exhaustive as 2017's encyclopedic 18-hour Vietnam War opus by Ken Burns, Turning Point goes into considerable depth on many of the key moments of the war, from the Tet Offensive to the massacre at My Lai to the chaotic withdrawal of Americans and South Vietnamese as the North's tanks and troops bore down on Saigon.
Meanwhile, examinations of the anti-war movement and the growing social upheaval in the United States, including the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and the killing of four protesters at Kent State, highlight the legacy of division and distrust that is still felt today.
"This was when the American people really understood that our leaders in Washington, D.C. aren't always doing what we think they're doing," Lien-hang T. Nguyen, professor and author of Hanoi's War, said early in the series. "During the Vietnam War era, the American people saw that leaders for the first time lied to them."
Turning Point also touches upon the lessons that America's policymakers didn't seem to learn from Vietnam, with its deceptions and mistakes echoed some 30 years later in Iraq, as well as the schisms that still exist within Vietnam and across its far-reaching diaspora.
"I think that there's a tendency for history to live in dusty textbooks or in detailed facts," Knappenberger said. "And the truth is, it doesn't live that way. It lives in people's memories and it lives in the way that it's shaped us whether we live through it or not."
Ultimately, Turning Point finds its most powerful moments in the individual stories of the people who experienced the Vietnam War firsthand, in the small, telling details that bring its devastation home.
In Episode Four, "Why Are We Even Here," American soldier Dennis Clark Brazil describes meeting his parents and siblings at an airfield on his return from Vietnam.
"They came running out on the tarmac and started hugging me and kissing me," Brazil says.
"And I was so happy to see them and they were so happy to see me," he continues, tears welling and voice breaking. "But I wasn't the same person anymore."
