Viewers who know that "The Vietnam War," the new 18-hour, 10-part PBS documentary, was made by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick might have certain expectations.

In his more than 35 years of filmmaking, Burns' storytelling has made history come alive, and illuminated the larger context around everything from Prohibition to baseball.

Even when Burns' documentaries explore traumatic events -- as in "The Civil War" and the World War II chronicle, "The War" -- we come away feeling better about the United States, its promise and resiliency.

But "The Vietnam War," which premieres Sunday, Sept. 17, is unlike any project Burns has done before.

"The Vietnam War" is both the most powerful film Burns has produced, and the most despairing. There's no optimism here, no moments of lyricism.

At the end of "The War," or "The Civil War," there was some comfort in knowing the carnage and suffering of those wars resulted in, respectively, fascism being defeated, and slavery ending.

At the end of "The Vietnam War," by contrast, we know that more than 58,000 Americans died, along with some 250,000 South Vietnamese troops, more than a million Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers, and millions more civilians.

And for what?

"The Vietnam War" is painstakingly balanced, and, as Burns says, was made without any "thumb on the scale," slanting it to one political point of view.

But Burns, Novick and their team have done a thorough job of throwing viewers into the war. They methodically explain what made it happen, and why it continued even when American presidents knew it was unwinnable.

They document the bloody, terrible damage the war inflicted on the United States, and on Vietnam.

Interview subjects include Vietnamese from both sides of the conflict, American veterans, antiwar activists, war correspondents, and a mother who lost her son in the war.

By the end of the fascinating, sometimes wrenchingly hard to watch 18 hours, it's impossible to regard the Vietnam War as anything other than an agonizing failure, one that taught Americans to be cynical about a government that lied to them, sent Americans off to risk their lives, and made one costly bad decision after another.

In an interview during the recent Television Critics Association summer press tour in Los Angeles, Burns and Novick talked about the 10 years it took to make "The Vietnam War," the parallels they found in decades-old history and current events, and the importance of having Air Force Chief of Staff and retired four-star General Merrill McPeak, who lives in Lake Oswego, as a consultant on the project.

"We had no thumb on the scale," Burns said. "We had no political agenda. We didn't have an ax to grind. We were umpires calling balls and strikes."

Burns said he hopes the film, and the discussions it will inspire, can go "some distance towards ending the kind of divisions that Vietnam sponsored, and that are still with us today."

The objective, Burns said, "is to basically get to a place where our country can feel like it's back to shared stories, and not 'us against them.'"

"The Vietnam War" goes into great detail in tracing the history of the conflict, going back to the 19th-century, the era of French colonial occupation, the division of Vietnam, and how the north fell under Communist control, while the south fell into a cycle of rule by often corrupt government officials.

Burns and Novick go deep into how the U.S. became involved, from John F. Kennedy's presidency, through Lyndon Johnson's, and up to Richard Nixon's. What began as a war about keeping Communist influence at bay out of fear of the so-called "domino theory" escalated into a no-win quagmire that split the country apart, and finally ended -- for the U.S. -- with American forces withdrawing in 1973.

Novick said that interviews with veterans -- including Karl Marlantes, the Astoria-born Northwesterner who gave up a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford to join the Marines and go to Vietnam -- brought back strong memories for those who served.

As soon as you start talking about the war with those who lived through it, Novick said, "it's a very emotionally fraught time in peoples' lives," and "people are immediately right back in that place, in a very visceral, and very immediate way."

For the filmmakers, Novick said, the job was "to try to understand why this experience is still so painful, and such a raw nerve," a process that included interviewing Vietnamese who recalled the conflict, many of whom, as she said, "experienced tragedy that Americans can't begin to comprehend."

In the film, McPeak recalls arriving in Vietnam in late 1968, with the initial task of providing air support for the Army. It didn't take long, he says in the documentary, to realize "we were fighting on the wrong side," that the government in South Vietnam "was corrupt," and the people knew it.

Burns said that McPeak not only provided "an extraordinary interview," he also helped the filmmakers ensure their technical details were correct.

"General McPeak came to screenings," Burns said, and provided valuable input on such specifics as "those are Army helmets, not Marines, and you're talking about the Marines," or "those are M16s, and they're not yet in use."

McPeak was a source "down to the sound of the engine" in archival footage, Burns said. "Not just that we got the right jet, but that we had the right sound of the jet."

Because "The Vietnam War" is a multi-dimensional portrait of an America in danger of coming apart, Burns said he hopes viewers will appreciate the accumulated details from all the voices who are part of the film's fabric.

Novick added that, while "The Vietnam War" is a reminder of one of the most painful times in U.S history, it also shows how "our country went through a maturation process. You could call it disillusionment, but it's also maybe growing up, to understand our leaders are fallible, they make mistakes, that we as citizens are obligated to understand what's going on, and to hold them accountable."

"The Vietnam War" premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 17 on PBS/10. The film continues at 9 p.m. Sept. 18-21 and Sept. 24-28.



-- Kristi Turnquist



kturnquist@oregonian.com

503-221-8227

@Kristiturnquist