Ken Burns focusing on Vietnam for next film

Hal Kushner, an Army doctor, had been a starving prisoner of war in Vietnam for weeks when he and his desperate comrades decided to catch and eat the prison commandant’s cat.

They tried to conceal their deed but were caught before the meal. Kushner was beaten and tied up, and the cat’s carcass was draped from his neck. Tragically, he recalled, he and his buddies never got to eat the cat.

The scene, as related by Kushner, is among the most poignant in a 10-part documentary by filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

“The Vietnam War” — the most ambitious film for Burns, who is known for his documentaries on the Civil War, jazz, baseball and others subjects — will air in September on PBS.

It covers the war from its genesis to the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, completed in 1982.

Burns and Novick spoke Monday at the memorial and served as grand marshals of the Memorial Day parade in Washington.

The documentary covers the war from all sides, folds in the antiwar protests it sparked, and includes the assassinations, racial unrest

and social divisions that tortured the country in those days.

It covers the American massacre of civilians at My Lai, and the enemy’s massacre of civilians at Hue; the killing of American students at Kent State and Jackson State universities; and the veterans who trashed their war medals during a war protest outside the U.S. Capitol.

The film discusses the controversial Agent Orange defoliant, the visit to Hanoi by the actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda, and the release of the Pentagon Papers.

It features, among others, soldiers, Marines, nurses, pilots, POWs, protesters, “deserters,” anarchists, veterans of the South Vietnamese Army, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army.

An American pilot, later the Air Force chief of staff, says the United States was fighting on the wrong side. A war protester tearfully apologizes for the things she said about those who were fighting in Vietnam. And an American soldier says he lost a part of himself when he beat and strangled

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an enemy soldier while battling hand to hand in a tunnel.

“War awakens a savagery in people,” Nguyen Ngoc, a North Vietnamese army veteran, says. “I was in the jungle a long time, and animals aren’t that savage.”

Yet Viet Cong veteran Le Cong Huan says: “I witnessed Americans dying . . . I saw them crying and holding each other. When one was killed, the others stuck together . . . I witnessed such scenes and thought, ‘Americans, like Vietnamese, have a profound sense of humanity.’”

Burns and Novick and their team worked on the documentary for a decade. They made several trips to Vietnam; filmed interviews with 100 people and examined 100,000 still pictures and 5,000 hours of archival footage. In the process, they got to know the stories of some of the 58,000 troops and veterans whose lives were claimed by the war — and whose names are etched in the wall of the memorial.

Said Novick during an interview Sunday: “It’s a profound experience coming here, even if you don’t know anybody (on the wall), to see all those names.”

“Symphony@7” — Robert Schuman’s Symphony No. 3, the “Rhenish”