Must-See TV: The Real Vietnam War

Nothing has captured the catastrophic effect of the war on this country, its warriors and the Vietnamese on both sides like the gripping new series from Apple+ TV, writes Marine veteran Henry Allen

The staff sergeants used to say:  “It ain’t much of a war but it’s the only war we got.”

We’ve still got it. Though it ended half a century ago, it’s still here.  It won’t retreat into history, become a quaint museum piece. It’s as long ago now as World War I was in the 1960s but it feels like the present. 

Now it’s on Apple television in six episodes: Vietnam: The War that Changed America—the helicopters, the dirt-green jungle, the frantic civilians, the bewildered faces of our soldiers and the era’s rock and roll soundtrack, Gimme Shelter, Light My Fire.

“It never leaves you,” says Melvin Pender, a sprinter and lieutenant the Army pulled out of Vietnam so he could win a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics. Then it sent him back to Vietnam where he won a Bronze Star.

Oh, the irony. The air creaked with irony in Vietnam, a fact missed by some other Vietnam accounts—Ken Burns’s stately documentary or the grandeur of helicopter operas like Apocalypse Now.

Irony arises from startling smallness, not stately grandeur. Sorry ‘bout that, men would say when a booby trap took off a buddy’s leg. Better him than me. 

If you were there the war didn’t happen as a sweep of history but as one small moment at a time, one C-ration can of ham and limas, one dirty grenade blast, one marijuana joint, one ambush, small moments that proceeded until we lost the war and came home—lost it the way we’ve been losing wars ever since, most recently in Afghanistan, as if Vietnam has become a tradition, the American way of war. Sorry ‘bout that.

We start with the battle of Ia Drang, 60 years ago in the shroudy grasses and the stuttery gunfire that through the whole series will produce corpses in skewed, accidental poses, as if death were a moment rather than an eternity.