Why Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's Vietnam War PBS documentary took 10 years to make

Ho’s participation in the film would prove critical. Casualty rates among North Vietnamese troops were so high that many soldiers who went south between 1963 and 1966 did not survive. Record-keeping was sketchy, and North Vietnamese units were combined and given new names as the war progressed. Novick and Botstein were more interested in the experiences of ordinary soldiers than those of generals, and they wanted to interview people from all over the country, not merely from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Ho said Novick also gravitated to veterans who had not repeatedly told their stories in Vietnamese media, worried that because of the country’s censorship, well-known veterans “may have told a decorated story, but not the true story.”

The result was what Wilkinson describes as a kind of detective work. Ho attended informal veterans’ reunions and followed recommendations and leads in newspaper articles to find people who had fought at battles such as Ap Bac and Ia Drang, a pair of fierce early clashes.

Novick came away from her interviews in Vietnam with a fresh sense of how deadly the war had been and how difficult each day had been for the soldiers who fought in it. One soldier told her a story that didn’t make it into the final film about what it was like when he returned home in 1975, having departed the North in 1967 when he was just 19 years old.

“His brother was waiting for him at the airport, but he didn’t recognize his own brother because he’d been away so long. He didn’t know what his mother looked like. And when he went home to his village, his mother couldn’t believe it because she has basically, after so many years of hearing not one word from him, has essentially decided that he had probably died,” Novick explains. “Those are just things that are kind of unimaginable for most Americans and certainly for me.”

Back in the United States, obtaining the rights to the archival footage that is so critical to the series required the filmmakers to address unresolved feelings about how Vietnam has settled into historical memory.

To get permission from NBC to use the rarely licensed video footage shot by cameraman Vo Suu of a South Vietnamese brigadier general, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, executing National Liberation Front combatant Nguyen Van Lem on a Saigon street, an event documented in Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, the filmmakers had to promise to show the footage exactly as viewers would have seen it on the nightly news in 1968.

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