‘The Vietnam War’ documentary director visits The Haverford School
HAVERFORD » William Ehrhart has been back to Vietnam three times since coming home from his tour of duty in March 1968.
Ehrhart spent time with former North Vietnamese soldiers — his former enemies — and found they had many experiences in common, he told an assembly of 9th through 12 grade students at The Haverford School, where he teaches English and history.
On one of those return visits, he said, “I got loaded one night with a one-armed Vietnamese soldier. We closed a restaurant down. We’re coming out of this place. He throws his one good arm over my shoulder (and says) ‘Mr. Bill, I’m glad I didn’t kill you.’”
Ehrhart, who served in the Marine Corps, is featured in “The Vietnam War,” a 10-part series airing this fall on PBS. He brought director and filmmaker Lynn Novick to the school recently to talk to students about making the film and the Vietnam War itself. Novick, 55, of Florentine Films, directed the documentary with Ken Burns, with whom she’s produced and directed numerous highly praised documentaries, including “Prohibition,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “Frank Lloyd Wright” and “The War” — a seven part, 15-hour exploration of ordinary Americans’ experiences in World War II.
The students watched a few segments of the 18hour documentary then asked questions of Ehrhart, Novick and Headmaster John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and author.
“With insurgencies like the one in Vietnam grinding on in Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq and a dozen countries around the globe, we are truly fortunate Lynn Novick and Ken Burns have turned their attention the Vietnam War,” said Nagl.
Ehrhart said Novick contacted him in 2011 to see if he would agree to take part in the project. He had not been interviewed in 20 years because he hadn’t like the results of those interviews. Later, via email, Ehrhart added, that he agreed to be in the film “because a friend of mine, the former CBS reporter Jack Laurence, suggested that I do it, and subsequently because when Lynn Novick first contacted me, she had clearly taken some time to learn who I was before she contacted me.” Something previous documentarians had not, he said.
Ehrhart told the students that while Burns is more famous, Novick “really did the grunt work” on the documentary.
“It was a very difficult project to do because it’s a very complicated story that no one really understands, including us when we started,” said Novick, adding that a team of people worked on the film. She said she’s grateful that her subjects who lived through the war told their stories in the film, including Ehrhart.
“It’s a dark and painful, wrenching story to understand,” she said. “There’s no happy ending in the Vietnam War.”
Of the 100 people interviewed during the nearly 10-year-long project, a third are Vietnamese and their voices are in their language with English subtitles so viewers can hear them and not an Englishspeaking announcer. She said it would be “counterproductive and inhumane” not to understand the character and humanity of the people we fought.
Novick traveled to Vietnam several times in the course of making and researching the film to get the Vietnamese perspective.
After the U.S. entered Cambodia in 1970 to try to shut down the North Vietnamese insurgents’ supply chain, America erupted in protests, especially on college campuses, although anti-war protests had occurred since the late ’60s. At Kent State University in Ohio, National guardsmen opened fire on protesting students.
“For reasons that are somewhat murky, the National Guard opened fire on people who were peacefully protesting,” said Novick, in response to a student’s question. “In 13 seconds they fired 57 bullets. Four students were killed and many others impacted.”
In the film, Ehrhart, who grew up in Perkasie and joined the Marines at 17 in 1967, said that the Kent State tragedy was the catalyst that caused him to join the anti-war movement. When he saw the front page of a newspaper about Kent State he broke down in a torrent of tears.
“I’ve been talking and writing about this stuff for almost 48 years now and the only thing different is somebody is actually listening,” Ehrhart told the students. Later, when asked if he was now at peace with his experiences in Vietnam, he said, “I don’t lie awake at night chewing on my lip and agonizing over what I did in Vietnam. But how am I supposed to ‘be at peace’ with my experiences? Ask the people I killed if they’re at peace with their experiences. Go put your hand on any name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC, and ask that person if he’s at peace with his experience.
“I went halfway around the world to kill, maim, and make miserable people who had never done me or my country any harm, nor ever would or could,” said Ehrhart. “I served my government, but I did not serve my country or the Vietnamese or humanity. You tell me how I am ever supposed to be at peace with that. I’d like to know, especially when my government is still sending young men — and now young women, too — on fools’ errands at terrible cost in blood and sorrow.”
Ehrhart had been wounded by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade during the fighting for Hue City in the Tet Offensive, he said.
A student asked whether recent protests over President Trump compare with those during the Vietnam War. Ehrhart said the scale of the protests was much larger than the societal divisions we encounter now. “I hope things don’t get as ugly as they did back,” he said.
Novick said that the roots of the mistrust of government and polarization of society stem from the Vietnam era.
“The essential question is what it means to be patriotic,” Novick said. To “question the government…those are questions that never really came to the fore before the Vietnam era in the same way.”
“Speaking as a veteran of an Iraq War that has gone on longer than the prime years of the Vietnam war and shows no sign of stopping,” there are fewer protests (now) because there is no draft, said Nagl. If the seniors had “a real chance” of “going to Iraq or Afghanistan,” instead of to college, they and their parents would be more involved.
“You don’t have skin in the game the way Bill’s generation had skin in the game,” said Nagl.
In response to another question about Kent State, Ehrhart said, it was “the culmination of years of anger and resentment among those kids who held the rifles…they were the same age as the kids who were killed…An easy way to avoid dying in Vietnam was to join the National Guard or the Reserves. These were kids who were very poorly trained, who were very poorly led and who very much resented the wealthy college kids as they were perceived …Why on earth those kids had live weapons is just astounding to me.”
The Vietnam War was “a coming of age in America,” said Novick. “We’re not always right. Our leaders don’t always have good intentions.” Also Americans saw the “reality of war” in a way they hadn’t in the past.
Ehrhart, who wrote his dissertation on the Korean War that killed 37,000 American soldiers, said those soldiers who came back to the “red scare” and McCarthy era could not easily speak out against it without being labeled a Communist.
“When I came back, the anti-war movement was “eager to elicit my support,” he said.
The Vietnam War was “the first televised war,” said Nagl. “It literally came into the living rooms of America (in a way that) World War II and Korea hadn’t.” Other factors that swayed public opinion were the draft and the fact that it was an insurgency, “a different kind of war that America had not fought for a very long time…It remains so divisive 40 years later.”
In answer to a student query, Novick said the filmmakers did not worry about the opinions of sponsors.
“We try to get the facts right, which is extraordinarily difficult,” she said. About three years ago they brought an audience in to watch the first part of the film and gage their reactions. One who watched the early cut was veteran and author Tim O’Brien, who is interviewed in the documentary. He told them it “feels like middle school history,” said Novick. So they went back and worked on it some more.
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