http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/watch/I have been watching this shit with a mix of amusement and disgust. The sheer absurdity of trying to paint the US involvement in Vietnam as the result of the best intentions gone awry puts this Koch and banker-funded tripe in the realm of the surreal. The use of the term "Viet Cong" to refer to the NLF is just one aspect of the atavistic red scare garbage that unerlies this profaning of history.
There was no "South Vietnam" until the US built it after the Vietnamese resistance crushed the French imperial lackeys for whom the US tax-payer footed the bill in the fifties. When the French proved unable to murder enough Vietnamese people on their own land to keep control of the region, Uncle Sam sent Ed Lansdale, one of the worst human beings who ever lived, to foster a puppet regime of Roman Catholic quislings and drug lords in order to maintain Japan's cheap food supply.
Somehow this fact seems to have escaped Burns and Co. in their formulation of this eighteen-hour homage to the heroism of anti-communist American jihadis.
