“The Vietnam War,” Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s panoramic 18-hour television documentary, includes 10 set-piece battle scenes documenting the action from multiple perspectives. Among them is the battle of Binh Gia, which took place in late December 1964, 40 miles southeast of Saigon.

Binh Gia, a so-called strategic hamlet that was home to some 6,000 anti-Communist Vietnamese Catholics, may not be well known in the United States, which in 1964 had yet to send any official combat troops to Vietnam. But the confrontation there was a turning point: both a testing ground for Hanoi’s newly aggressive approach, and proof, to many, that South Vietnam could not defeat the Communists without increased American support.

The battle was also unusually well-documented, visually speaking, by both sides. “We don’t always have material from a particular place, at a particular time,” Ms. Novick said. “But this was an incredible treasure trove.”

The nearly 15-minute scene, edited by Erik Ewers, draws on a number of sources, including a black-and-white battle film held at the Vietnam Film Institute in Hanoi, color home movies taken by an American officer and the filmmakers’ interviews with three people who were there: an American Marine, a South Vietnamese marine and a Viet Cong officer.