TThe Vietnam War ended technically 50 years ago when the Communist North Vietnamese captured Saigon in South Vietnam supported by the United States on April 30, 1975. But the war had not had the impression that it was finished for the Americans and the Vietnamese on the ground. The withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam has caused lasting disorders and psychological effects.
Turning: the Vietnam War, A documentary series on Netflix, focuses on the human costs of what was the longest American war at the time (1955-1975) thanks to interviews with American veterans, Vietnamese survivors, recordings of American presidents analyzing the state of play and CBS press images never seen before. It is estimated that 58,220 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese died.
Again and again, the American presidents declared that they were simply trying to prevent South Vietnam from being taken up by the Communists, arguing that if it was, there would be no hope of democracy in Asia. But over the war, the roadmap to win the war has become less clear.
“There was not a clear enemy,” said director Brian Knapnberger. “Were there to stop communism?” Were there to win the heart and mind of the Vietnamese?
More than five episodes, Turning point Examine some of the most horrible moments in the Vietnam War and how its consequences are still felt today.
Drug use among American soldiers
In Turning pointAmerican veterans are intended for the consumption of drugs while serving in Vietnam.
Marijuana was abundant. They were able to get their hands on opium in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The series includes images of a CBS News correspondent, Ed Rabel, reporting on a Congress survey which revealed that 10 to 15% of all American troops consumed heroin.
“Many veterans we interviewed have turned into a high consumption of drugs to manage the daily life of the war and what they saw,” explains Knapnberger. “They came home with these outbuildings, which lasted many years after the war and some people almost did not rely. It has destroyed many lives and the life of their families. ”
“I started smoking marijuana every day all day to hide, hide pain and fear,” said Dennis Clark, veteran of the American army, in the doc.
Eldon J. McGhee, another veteran of the American army, says that when the doctors stopped giving him morphine for an injury, he became addicted to the heroine. “It has completely ruined my life.”
Drug tests have become more routine after Vietnam.
The American soldiers killed their express bosses
In what is known as a fragment, some disappointed American soldiers killed or tried to kill their officers. Fragage is the slang for the M67 fragmentation hand grenade which sends tiny metal fragments in all directions. In the series, the CBS News correspondent, Jed Duvall, saw the hand grenade of the M67 fragmentation during a new television segment.
There have been some 90 cases of “fragment” in the body of the United States Marines and 600-800 bodies in the American army during the war, carried out by soldiers in the form of reprisals.
American veteran Marine Mike Nakayama said in the series that a money pot had been collected and given to the one who killed an officer.
While Nakayama was in Vietnam, an explosive was placed in the tent of a sergeant, killing the man and three soldiers divided the money jar.
“You can somehow call it justice,” said Nakayama.
Torture of Vietnamese South
After the fall of Saigon, the new communist government sent hundreds of thousands of former Vietnamese soldiers who helped the American cause in one way or another to rehabilitation camps.
In these prison -type facilities, the detainees were separated from their families and subject to famine, tobacco and disease passages. The objective of the rehabilitation camp was to “wash the brain and force us to do hard work work,” said Chung Tu Buu, a prisoner of war for about 14 years, explains in Turning.
The filmmakers interviewed men who were in the rehabilitation camps, as well as a woman who lost her husband in a camp.
The South Vietnamese journalist seen Thanh Thuy said that her husband had been sent to a re-education camp and that she had to take care of their two-month-old baby on her own. “I thought of committing suicide during these days,” she said in the series. Her husband escaped from the camp and a priest hid her in a church, part of an underground movement of South-Vietnamese. They were gathered and managed to flee the country in 1979.
“The rehabilitation camps … with difficult conditions, I do not hesitate to say that it was a serious mistake that we made,” said your Nu Thi Ninh, former vice-president of foreign affairs of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
The tragic operation Babylift Plane Crash
This year also marks fifty years since a tragedy: Operation Babylift, a humanitarian mission designed to evacuate Vietnamese orphans in the United States, went wrong when a freight plane carrying hundreds of infants and toddlers crashed shortly after takeoff on April 4, 1975, in one of the worst civil disasters in history. About 50 adults and 78 infants died, plus 35 American soldiers.
Turning point Includes the memories of the accident of a survivor of Operation Babylift, Jennifer Kruse, a South Vietnamese orphan who was adopted by American parents. Growing up, Kruse said that she had always been told that she had been put on this plane because her mother wanted her to have a better life. During the war, it was common for us, soldiers, impregnated Vietnamese women, and some of these children were on the plane, in the hope that they would be confronted with less discrimination in the United States
Kruse remembers seeing smoke as she floated on a certain type of debris. His latest memory of Vietnam is “floating on these debris, looking … I'm just blackened. I have no memory of my rescue. My next memory would be in America. ”
