Vietnam: The War That Changed America puts "a different lens" on the conflict

Like those films, the six-part Apple TV+ documentary Vietnam: The War That Changed America has an evocative period soundtrack featuring Tamla Motown artists and rock bands like the Doors and the Animals. But the series, narrated by actor Ethan Hawke, is very different to previous documentaries about this traumatic conflict.

“There have been a lot of fantastic series that tell you a lot about the politics and the terrible things that happened,” explains its director, Rob Coldstream, “but we wanted to put a different lens on the whole conflict.”

The Vietnam War, fought by the US against the North Vietnamese NVA and Viet Cong guerrillas, was the first to be broadcast on the evening news; wherever the soldiers went, camera crews and reporters followed. “From a film-making point of view, it was absolutely magnificent,” says Coldstream. “We found hundreds of hours of footage, incredible combat scenes, soldiers almost being interviewed during the battle.”

Where possible, the producers have interviewed the people in that footage, an endeavour that required huge amounts of research but paid rich dividends. The men and women we meet are pensioners now and, like America itself, marked by their time in Vietnam.

One US veteran, CW Bowman, a “tunnel rat” tasked with searching the Viet Cong underground chambers, talks about the moment he killed a guerrilla with a machete and the disturbing feeling of power it gave him. “It was spine-tingling,” says Coldstream. “We were all crying in the room, this tough old dude opening up in that very vulnerable way.”

Life and death in Vietnam were often decided by the behaviour of those next to you, and throughout the series the film-makers reunite comrades who served together. Grey-haired and carrying extra pounds, their meetings in bars or coffee shops, where they blink back tears and embrace, are quietly poignant.

“It was the stories of the love or the friendships in different forms that are at the heart of the series,” says Coldstream. “There were times when we would stop filming to allow them to compose themselves. A lot of these guys went through very traumatic experiences and some of them have never really fully got over it.”

We also hear from the other side. One Viet Cong fighter recalls bringing down an American jet with a heavy machine gun; another remembers disguising himself as a Saigon shoeshine boy so he could spy on American troop placements ahead of the Tet Offensive, the series of bloody battles in 1968 that broke the idea of US invincibility (or, as one US veteran remembers it, “14 days of pure blood and guts and death and destruction”).

News footage of the Tet Offensive, particularly the audacious Viet Cong assault on the US Embassy in Saigon, went round the world. Those shocking scenes of combat at the heart of American power in Vietnam were seen in England by American Bill Broyles, a 23-year-old Marshall Scholar at Oxford University who later became a Hollywood screenwriter, working on Apollo 13, Cast Away, Polar Express and the 1988 Golden-Globe and Emmy award-winning television series China Beach, set during the Vietnam War.

“Watching the Tet Offensive was a real turning point in my life,” says Broyles, who is now 80. “I’d never seen anything like it, the immersive quality and being right there with bullets flying around and going through the jungle.”

As a result of what he saw, Broyles volunteered for Vietnam and found himself, a middle-class lieutenant intent on serving his country, in charge of blue-collar conscripts who had already seen months of combat. “We were living like feral dogs,” radio operator Jeff Hiers says in the documentary. “We were leaderless.”

As the war dragged on there were increasing incidents of “fragging”, men dropping a hand grenade in their officers’ dug-outs as they slept. “There were 300 cases of US officers being killed by their own men in 1969 and 1970,” Broyles tells me. “So it’s in the back of your mind, right?”

The first time Broyles came under fire by the Vietnamese, his mouth dried up and he wasn’t able to speak. Instead, Hiers took the initiative, calling in the evacuations and giving the orders that Broyles couldn’t.

From that point Broyles dedicated himself to one aim: saving the lives of his men. “People were being withdrawn around us to go home; they were negotiating peace talks, it was over. How do you ask the last man to die for a mistake? I didn’t want that to be one of my men and I didn’t want it to be me, to be honest.”

He didn’t lose a single man under his command but was so affected by the war that he finds it “extremely hard” to watch footage of contemporary conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. “Part of it is, I’ve been there. I’ve walked through burning villages and seen people crying who have lost their homes and are trying to hold on desperately to their children, alive or dead.”

Vietnam: The War That Changed America matters for Broyles, not just because it reminds us of history but because it illuminates contemporary conflicts where young men are still sent out to do terrible things.

“The documentary makes the Vietnam War present but also the war in Iraq and Afghanistan that just finished, which my son was in. It makes you realise that all war is the same. Vietnam is not ancient history; it’s happening right now. It’s always with me I can’t get over it; I’m stuck back there.”

Vietnam: The War That Changed America is available to watch on Apple TV+. Sign up to Apple TV+ now.

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