I am emotionally exhausted. By the end of this month, I will have seen 36 hours of documentary film about a momentous event that is the backbone of my identity. It doesn’t matter that I was born after the fighting ended. Whether I like it or not, the Vietnam War is my war, too.

The first time I viewed all 10 parts of “The Vietnam War,” I was preparing to interview Ken Burns and Lynn Novick for “Second Wave,” my new podcast about American stories with connections to Vietnam. Since the premiere of the documentary on PBS, I’ve watched it almost nightly, as well as several hours online with my dad so that he could see it captioned in Vietnamese.

I’ve been surprised by the strongly negative reactions by some of my fellow Vietnamese-Americans to this film. After the first night, they took to social media and email chains: This is fake news! The producers are Communist sympathizers! It makes the South Vietnamese look bad! It’s another patronizing film made by two white people!

As a longtime journalist turned producer, I initially found the series to be enlightening and more nuanced than previous treatments of the Vietnam War. I can definitely say I know more about this war now than I did before. I felt gutted at times – a mix of disbelief, anger and profound disappointment in humanity, American foreign policy, and the egotistical leaders who inflicted extreme violence on innocent people.