Saturday night I watched the last installment of Ken Burns’ documentary on the Vietnam War. There were scenes I didn’t remember – Spiro Agnew debating with war protestors on the David Frost Show – and scenes I remembered incompletely. I of course knew that Jane Fonda visited Hanoi (as did Joan Baez and Susan Sontag) but I had forgotten Fonda saying that the American POWs should be tried and, if found guilty, executed. My favorite scene was of a group of those POWs on an airplane flying home.
At the end of the documentary, statistics appeared on the screen: over 58,000 American dead, over two million Vietnamese. My thoughts go out to them all today.
