♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: ken burns and lynn novick here to introduce their magnificent new pbs series about the vietnam war. more than 40 years after the war ended, americans are struggling to make sense of it. the war lasted more than a decade and cost the lives of 58,000 americans and even more -- even more vietnamese. the film looks back at the cataclysmic years. "the vietnam war" is a 10-part, 18 hour documentary. it took 10 years to make.

"the washington post" says it is a masterpiece and a model for assessing our history. here is a look at the trailer. >> i think the vietnam war drove a stake into the heart of america. unfortunately we have never , moved far away from that. we never recovered. >> there was no way we could avoid telling this story. wars are so extraordinarily revealing. it is the worst of humanity but as it turns out also the best of , humanity. >> there has been a lot done on this subject. books documentaries, feature , films, novels. it is not like no one has ever tried. but it remains unfinished business in american history. >> the decades have passed and it is important to go back and try to understand it. >> the real heroes are the men that died. to see these kids that had the

least to gain, and yet, their loyalty to each other and courage under fire. it was phenomenal. you would ask yourself, how does america produce young man like this? >> we wanted to get to know the people and the place and spend time there. try to figure out how we do what -- how to do what we do. and vietnam was a challenge. there is no one american side. within vietnam, there is a winning side there is a losing side. they were our enemy and ally. there are so many different perspectives and we tried to bring them all together. >> this is, without a doubt, the most ambitious project we have undertaken. pbs is the only place it could have been done. >> i think the country is ready to have a conversation we never had about the war. which we really need to have. >> the film is not an answer but a set of questions on what happens. -- about what happened.

charlie: joining me now are the and lynns, ken burns, novick. i am pleased to have both of them back at this table. these are friends of mine. i am hugely admiring their work. this and other things. the war left so many questions. what is it that divides the country about vietnam? ken: the principal thing is that the experience that -- of it for americans was so wrenching. it'd not have the definitive look good and bad side like world war ii had. most people fighting in it were children of world war ii veterans. or you knew someone who was a world war ii veteran. it also didn't turn out very

well for us. we did a couple of things. we left it unexamined and buried our heads in the sand like ostriches. or, we retreated to our hardened silos were we have a definite opinion or argument that is without any factual base. we have tried over the last decade to take advantage of 40 years of new scholarship and access to the country and also the startietnamese -- asking the question what , happened? we spent that decade and 18 hours not answering it but fully , investigating all the aspects of why this war remains of such a lightning rod. charlie: is it an achievement because you insisted on this? we see the vietnamese side and hear the vietnamese voices.

we want to know how they saw what we saw. it was a big question mark. can we get to know them the way we met people here? it turned out to be challenging, but no more challenging than finding veterans and other people who experienced the war to tell their stories. it was such a painful, tragic events. people are reluctant to speak about it there. it is shut into a closet in vietnam because it was so painful, the scale of tragedy and lost, monumental. and the government has perpetuated the story of the war that doesn't have people in it. it is a grand political narrative. charlie: therefore, they were resistant to open up because it went against the narrative they had? paradoxically, that was true. but also they were willing because there was an opportunity to tell a human story that they don't normally have the chance to do. part of our job was to find the

people who are willing to openly and describe the true horrors and terrors of the war and the losses. every family in vietnam lost at least one person. it is epic. charlie: you set out to do this 10 years ago. what did you know you had to have? you had to have people who fought the war. you knew you needed to have the people on both sides. you knew you needed to have what factors led them to war. ken: that is right. we needed to unpack everything that had happened in a war that , sobecome so superficial imprisoned by conventional understanding, that it needed to be liberated. and that meant, with americans, we had to have gold star mothers and a draft dodgers and antiwar demonstrators and deserters and military families torn asunder by those political questions, as well as the policy wonks from the pentagon.

as well as what behind the ears reporters were anxious to go there and report on the triumph of democracy over this evil communism. only when they got there they realized the reports from the field were not what the press offices in saigon or the pentagon were saying. they suddenly become our agents, what is going on? and then we have these two presidents, johnson and nixon. they are tape-recording themselves and had forgotten it. which is the greatest gift to historians. charlie: we will hear from johnson. but we will hear his doubts about the war. ken: usually we are trying to do a bottom-up story of so-called ordinary people and then you have this more abstract top-down policy consideration. but when you have a guy making that policy, showing his anxieties and his concerns, or you hear -- charlie: he is almost crying out to his friends, saying, what do i do? i do not want to send these young men to die. ken: he said i feel like a jack

-- in a texas hailstorm. nixon, you can hear the calculations that run counter to what the positive public pronouncements are about the war. charlie: including the generals. lynn: what is devastating is they are getting advice it is not going to work out. they have very accurate advice from the cia intelligence. this is not going well and it will not work out and yet somehow the option to not do it is not an option that is taken seriously. charlie: johnson was scared of the idea that he might be the person to lose a war. lynn: exactly. ken: and nixon spent four years from the time he took office to the time of the peace treaty avoiding and doing a sleight-of-hand trick so he is not the president who lost the war.

he redefined the terms of it and focused on prisoners of war. he suddenly made it not about south vietnam and our defense of them, but something else. there was a lot of smoke and mirrors. but there were a lot of dead americans and vietnamese, by the hundreds of thousands in the latter case. there is a lot of explaining to do. we do not have a political agenda or an ax to grind. we're trying to be umpires calling balls and strikes as we see them. we want to make sure we can bulldoze into our audience's view, no matter how complicated. storytelling is in itself a kind of editing and simplification of complex stuff. what we tried to do in the hallmark of the 10 years was was relishing in what we did not know, so we could put our baggage away. but also relishing that every single thing we would talk about was more complicated than we thought. even when we knew was complicated, it got even more complicated. we tried to make a film that

would contain those complications and trust in our to pute's intelligence it together however they wanted to. it is for everybody. if you think we should still be in vietnam, there is a place for you in this film. if you got from the beginning it was wrong there is a place for , you. more importantly, it has people and examples that represents all the confusing stripes. the battles are not just taking place on the ground. they are inside people in this film. they are undergoing startling psychological changes. charlie: how is it reflected in political life today? lynn: how is it not? we started on this odyssey because we felt this war was still the half-life, reverberating through most aspects of our political life. the mistrust of government, the lack of faith in ourselves and our ability to do good in the world. the differentiation of tension between classes.

between red state and blue state urban, rural, working class. or things of entropy falling apart, the center cannot hold -- that kind of feeling, very much bubbled up in vietnam and exploded in 1968, an epic year, which is coming up on sunday night in our show. there is a sense we are coming apart at the seams and we do not like each other very much and we cannot get around to having a civil conversation about something very important. we feel the roots of all of that you can find in "the vietnam war." charlie: your story began with americans leaving the embassy and then you go all the way back to 1858. ken: that is when the french invade, takeover, i control of in that grand, patronizing, colonial way what is called indochina, laos, cambodia and

vietnam. they plow forward very quickly into the end of world war ii, where americans are essentially on the side of ho chi minh arming him and saving his life. , we are caught in a dilemma, which is our natural inclination as americans, the original anti-colonialists, is to go with this guy declaring independence citing thomas jefferson or our french allies who insist if we do not help them restore their colonial empire, they may at how -- have to fall into soviet rule. it is threatening. it is an overlay of so many things. a civil war and independence, and then a cold war dynamic. good and evil and we know who was good and we know who was evil. it plows towards that. a lot of those mistakes are the super imposition of this globalist sense that if we

cannot fight a thermonuclear war that would end the world, we will have a limited wars, proxy wars, in these places. this was a proxy war. the casualties are immediately the truth, the culture of the people, the language, the traditions, on to the ground -- on the ground exigency. you are now faced with a guerrilla movement, it is not going to turn out well for you. charlie: let's talk more about what you did in this film. you have your narrator at the end. ken: but it is jeffrey ward's words. i don't think he ever wrote a script as beautiful as this. to be a writer for film means you do not turn in the script and that is it and it is printed, it undergoes 20 or 30 revisions. you are constantly learning. he is a main member of the team. lynn: because we did not have a

political agenda, the writing was important to not have opinions. to explain what happened in a very neutral way without a lot of adjectives and shading one way or another. just telling what happened in a direct way in making it come to life. ken: jeff would say i need to talk to you about something. he would say there is an adjective or adverb and i think it is too much. maybe we needed it in the beginning, but now it is -- let's take it out. all that does is put an imperceptible thumb on the scale and we do not want that there. ♪ ♪

things: you use all the that made all your films great. you used photographs, and there are classic photographs coming out of vietnam. you used people on the ground including a young marine named , karl. how did you find him? lynn: we had the great fortune that he was in the marines and then he went into business. for 25 or 30 years he worked on a novel which he could not get published. when we started on the film his book game out after 30 years. it was called "matterhorn" was -- a novel about marines in vietnam. as soon as it came up, we called them up and said your book is

, incredible. it tells the story of the war that we have never seen. would you like to be involved in this project? charlie: is this the guy who went to yale? lynn: yes. he was in the marine corps officer training program when he was an undergraduate at. he was uncomfortable because the antiwar movement was powerful. he felt like a fish out of water. he was shocked the president would like to people. he was a naive country boy from oregon. he was awarded a rhodes scholarship and the marines said he could come back into his actual service in vietnam after the rhodes scholarship. he went to oxford and felt guilty to be there comfortably while other americans were fighting and dying in vietnam that he gave up his rhodes scholarship and went to vietnam. ken: even though he felt the war might be one of the great crimes of the 20th century. it is incredible. that is what i mean about the wrenching stories of battles within people as well as the

battles they will fight on hills and in rice paddies. lynn: he went back and got a philosophy degree. he is a philosopher of war and he lived it and he thought deeply of what it means to go to war. charlie: take a look. karl: one of the things i learned in the war is that we are not top species on the planet because we are nice. we are a very aggressive species. it is in us. people talk a lot about how the military turns kids into killing machines. i will always argue it is finishing school. what we do with civilization is we learn to inhibit and rope in these aggressive tendencies. and we have to recognize them. i worry about a whole country that does not recognize them. think about how many times we get ourselves into scrapes as a nation because we are always the good guys. sometimes i think that if we thought we were not the good

guys, we would get into less wars. raisedhe question you about why the war is so painful and divisive for us, i think karl is getting at that. there is a cognitive dissonance with who we think we are at the country. what we did in world war ii and the triumphant experience of doing the right thing for the right reason at a tremendous cost. that is ingrained in our dna. vietnam was not the opposite, but certainly undermined that sense and our exceptionalism and destiny and we have not been able to figure out what happened and how we feel about it because of that. i think what karl is saying is part of the issue. charlie: you do sense that soldiers are either side come to appreciate the great tree and -- the bravery and humanity of the other side. ken: this is what i found in

every war we ever studied -- no more so than in the civil war, but also here which is the opposing side, once you have separated policy and strategy and tactics and plans which go , out the window the second the firing starts, then you are dealing with human beings who you have asked to do really terrible things on both sides and they become very similar to us. what we have enjoyed is sharing this with our veterans and having them go -- we showed it to john mccain. he wanted to see what the north vietnamese talking about what they felt. guerrillas.g you begin to see what happens on the front line at the point of combat were none of us who haven't experienced it how vilified life is. they say not just the worst of us, but the best of us. charlie: this is a vietcong

soldier talking about the humanity he recognized in the enemy he was fighting. [speaking foreign language] ken: war is the ultimate dehumanization of the other. in order to fight a war, you have to create a one-dimensional portrait of the other as some

evil -- charlie: so you're not nervous to pull the trigger. ken: exactly. then you get into war, and begin to see that this pact you have to make with the devil, there are gaps in it. you can see the other side in his case. and the americans, as well. we have a marina talking about house garrett he was and how much he respected them and hated them in the same breath, the people he was fighting. you have a celebrated american colonel saying, i would like to have 200 of these of viet cong. they are the finest soldiers. he said they are the finest soldiers after he had held them off. this is charging charlie after , holding them off for days and days and days, a fighter pilot says in war you have to get on , the right side. i really have respect for the people down there that kept the ho chi minh trail open

as i was trying to bomb it. i am telling you, i'm unhappy that i was able to stop traffic there. that was my job. lynn: we translated the entire film into vietnamese. we have the subtitles streaming in vietnam. hundreds of thousands of people in vietnam are watching as we speak. there is great interest there. charlie: the irony, we have come to have a good relationship with vietnam. lynn: we have a potentially common enemy. charlie: an ally in whatever competition we have with china. ken: they are as conflicted about the war now as we are. charlie: they viewed it as a war of independence. ken: but they have a whole southern population were people were not involved and they haven't figured out how to reconcile. their strategy was, they would not count the cost. which means that they had those three million casualties and were agonizing, could we have done it better could we have

, done it with negotiations? the same way we are struggling they are struggling. ,they love the americans, they are an entrepreneurial, forward thinking people. they represent not just economic, but potentially strategic partner for us. you sort of wish we could skip to the reconciliation part right away. charlie: i want to get to two things. ho chi minh was not necessarily the most powerful person. ken: he was the george washington of the vietnam independence movement. he founded the army of the resistance movement. is great and remained a figurehead to his people and the world. the face of the revolution -- i would not say figurehead, that diminishes him. but he was competing with aggressive hardliners who were favoring much more direct engagement and more violence,

and he was more moderate and trying to temper that. he lost his power. we recognize another man as the person we were fighting if an ordinary grunt on the viet cong or north vietnamese thought it was johnson or richard nixon. charlie: take a look at this. tim o'brien is someone we knew who has written well about the -- about many things, including vietnam. you came to him and he said come i will do this on one condition -- that you include gold star mothers. lynn: yes, he did. ken: it was the best advice we got. charlie: take a look at this. on how tim o'brien courage was defined in vietnam. ♪ tim: somewhere around 80% of our casualties came from landmines.

vietnam for me, just to get up in the morning and look out at the land and think, in a few minutes, i will be walking out there and will my corpse be there or there? will i lose a leg out there? i had a voice thought of courage as charging enemy bunkers. or standing up under fire. through therelk come a day through diligent village, up the paddies and into the mountains, just to make your legs move was an act of courage. in siouxere living city, it wouldn't be courageous to walk to the grocery store and have your legs move back and forth. but in vietnam, i would sometimes look at my legs as i was walked and saying, how can i do this? it is the fundamental,

existential question of war. if your violent deaths is possible at any what happens to second, you? charlie: an interesting point. women who fight war don't like ideas of winning and losing, do they? they say all war is devastation. lynn: we have had the privilege of speaking to veterans on all sides, vietnam and in america. at this point, these veterans who have been in that place that can describe, they are not interested -- i will say this. when you ask what they want the world to know about this they people making decisions, the leaders, to think about the real cost of war. it is easy to start a war and these young men get chewed up. and nowadays, young women, as well. the people making decisions are not thinking about the actual human cost. these guys know what it was. it has been going around the country and i have been in vietnam hearing them say, why

don't the people to make decisions think about what the true cost is? people come home without arms and legs. people are badly damaged psychologically. mothers lose their sons. one of the north vietnamese soldiers we met in vietnam was the only one of six young men from his apartment building to come back home from his war. he carries that with him. charlie: the same thing on the vietnamese side. there is a mother who lost six sons. ken: and send the next one into the war. charlie: you ask the soldiers why they fought. they don't say i fought for my country. i lynn: fought for the guy next to me. when you are down in the trenches, the abstraction of country falls away, even if it propels you there. it is about saving your buddy. that was well known in world war ii. our military figured out that was how you train people.

in vietnam it became quite wrenching because there wasn't that overarching faith it was the right thing to do. charlie: it was unambiguous. ken: that alters the dynamic. you can see in the photograph of -- and in the clip of the americans grieving genuinely over the body of what is clearly a friend, not just an abstract person on your side it is a , buddy, a loved one. charlie: here is vincent on the heroism of service members who died in vietnam. vincent: the real heroes are the men that died. 19, 20-year-old high school dropouts. they didn't have escape routes that the elite and wealthy or privileged had. that was unfair. they looked upon military

service as like the weather. you had to go in and you do it. but to see these kids who had the least to gain -- it was not anything to look forward to. they would be rewarded for their service in vietnam. and yet, their infinite patience, there loyalty to each other, their courage under fire was just phenomenal. you would ask yourself, how does america produce young men like this? the soundtrack of this film was also the soundtrack of america in the ken: it was. 1960's. we were fortunate to get trent from nine another inch nails to produce hours of spectacular music. and -- got the

vietnamese tunes. we were able to enjoy through the efforts of our producers 120 songs from the period. the very best. perhaps the most fertile. from the rolling stones, beatles, bob dylan. we could not have afforded 12, had they not realize that we were doing, and willing to take artists like the beatles or and thestills, nash young, to license it to us and let us fold in and interbreed music that was so seminal to the time and sometimes commenting on the times come into this narrative, which i hope makes it that much more authentic. charlie: to speak about how you cover, and the significance and impact of the antiwar movement, which included veterans throwing their medals away. lynn: it was very interesting to see this and figure out the chronology.

the antiwar movement began as the civil rights movement in the early 1950's. there was a sense any war was immoral. they were quakers and peac enicks. as it escalated, more and more americans were sucked into it. the southvidence of vietnamese government corruption for incompetence and lack of stability. grew andar movement also the draft calls group. more and more men were called to the draft. it was unfair the way the draft was implemented. there was tension around that. essentially, the antiwar movement grew and grew and had more and more presence in our society. it also is not representative of every american's point of view. polls were taken where the american public had an evolving

perspective on the war and never wants to lose. eventually, by 1968, the antiwar movement, moral questioning of the war, the relentless casualties, the lack of credibility in the white house turns the public against the war. ♪ >> i never considered the vietnamese our enemy. they had never done anything to threaten the security of the united states, they were off, 10,000 miles away, minding their own business. and we went there to their country, told them what kind of government we wanted them to have. >> i see the war protesters. intellectually, i understood the -- understand their right to freedom of speech. but i will tell you that when i see them waving flags of the

enemy, that i and my friend had to fight and some of my friend had to die fighting, that does not sit very well with me. >> on november 15, 1969, half a million citizens turned out against the war in washington again. this time, buses provided an impenetrable wall around the white house. president nixon claimed he was too busy watching football on television to pay attention, but he did suggest that army helicopters might be used to blow out the marchers' candles. hundreds of thousands of others demonstrated in san francisco and new york. charlie: there were many times

[indiscernible] when cronkite went over. it was broadcast on cbs. ken: what we discovered in our research was that that was not true. charlie: cronkite didn't say it? ken: johnson didn't say it. cronkite came back with someone with so much experience of war and had a dynamic commentary at the end of the broadcast. it is really an important moment in american history and i cannot say johnson is uninfluenced by it and, the decision he will make, but there are other things happening. johnson did not say that. that is one of the things that we carried around as part of our baggage and we had to lose it in favor of much more complicated dynamics that obtain throughout the story of this complicated -- go ahead. lynn: there was this relentless stream of casualties and no progress. no sense of when this will be over.

how do we know when we won? that is what turned the country against the war. ken: once again, the conventional wisdom was had kennedy lived, he would not have gotten us in there. he did take on the entire foreign-policy apparatus. charlie: johnson inherited it. ken: you can hear johnson's hawkishness. there is a memo circulating around saying, it is so damning, we were there 70% to save face, 20% to contain china, and 10% for the good of the vietnamese people. that is an early, cynical memo that was one of the devastating evidences that what they are saying publicly is not what they actually believe and know. combined with the doubts of the efficacy of their strategies and fighting this guerrilla war, but

this is not going to turn out well. and it does not. charlie: we will continue the conversation. i know you have to go. thank you for coming. ken: thank you, charlie. charlie: speaking of lyndon johnson, here is the conversation. the national security adviser to president kennedy and president johnson. here is what he said expressing his doubts about vietnam. president johnson: the more i think about this thing, i do not -- it looks like me we are getting into another korea. i do not think it is worth fighting more and i do not know if we can get out. we just have got to think about -- look at this sergeant of mine. he has little kids. and i am thinking, what in the hell have i ordered him out there for? what is it worth to me?

what is laos worth to me? what is it worth to this country? we have a treaty but the hell, everyone else has a treaty and they are not doing anything about it. course, they start running, the communists. they chase you into your own kitchen. >> that is the trouble. that is what the rest of that half of the world is going to think if this thing comes apart on us. that is the dilemma. what action will we take? >> kill as few people as possible where the incentive to react is as low as possible. charlie: the domino theory comes up. we have to go there or there will be a domino effect come the entire anti-communist world. lynn: i find one of the most devastating pieces of footage is in 1966, senator fulbright met to discuss what was going on in vietnam.

they brought the author of the containment philosophy. this is basically, we have to contain communism. we have to contain it in asia. he says, if we were not already in vietnam, i see no reason why we should be involved, he said. i don't think it will matter or make any difference. our credibility is fine and we should not worry about a little problem on the other side of the world. i'm paraphrasing, but that is essentially what he said. he is prophetic. johnson keeps pursuing the same policy. ♪ what did we do before phones?

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charlie: when you came to this project, having worked with ken on the other films, what was your own sense of vietnam? lynn: i knew it was something terrible that happened and that our country was torn apart. i was born in 1962. i was a child. in my earliest memories of being aware of the world at all was, there is this war happening and it is terrible and people are dying here and in vietnam and children are getting killed. what for? the country was in the angst -- this terrible, angst-filled moment. and we didn't seem to get out of it. when you are a kid your sense of time was different. when the vietnam war happened in never seemed to end and i did

not understand it. i sort of became obsessed to figure out what was it, what happens, why. i read all the books, so the hollywood movies, watched the documentaries. i was always feeling like someday, ken and i will tackle the vietnam war because it is this thing we do not understand and it is important. we need to know. charlie: you've gone from the vietnam war to ernest hemingway. lynn: yes. that is been a pet project for a long time. visiting key west many years ago in going to his house, the study, looking and wondering around -- looking and wondering about the human being that created those remarkable works of art. the projects are things we do not know much about. at least in my case. we get paid to find out the answers to lots of questions. charlie: i want to go back and show you a clip from robert mcnamara. this is mcnamara talking and the idea was how he saw the war and

what he realized in the years. -- the intervening years. robert: i believe today that ho chi minh was not a follower of stalin, which i thought he was at the time. i believe the war in south south vietnam was not a war of foreign aggression. i believe it was a civil war. i believe it was the power of nationalism at stake. under those circumstances no , foreign army can substitute for the people of that country deciding the civil war themselves. it is impossible. these beliefs may seem obvious to you. they were not obvious to me five years ago. charlie: that was robert mcnamara coming to that conclusion. lynn: a little late.

i have to say -- it was not obvious to him, but it was not a secret or mystery, either. i cannot explain that. what i can to you, he seemed to have fixed ideas and wasn't open to hearing information that contradicted that. we interviewed several people that briefed him during the course of the war and tried to explain that you could not reduce the war to a statistic, that you had to take into account the human dimensions, that that korean -- vietnam government was important that , the government was not stable and the bombing was not working. he says, no one tells me these things. government officials said, you just don't ask. there's a sense of having blinders on. someone said robert mcnamara was , a giant of washington. he was a genius, a brilliant analyst. he believed that for every problem there had to be a solution. and that was his fatal flaw. not asking the right questions. charlie: he was not alone.

ken: no he was not alone. , charlie: journalists went over thinking they would see this, and quickly realized they would see something else. many came with one idea and came back with another. many soldiers who came back with the idea that it was going to be an easy victory, that we have all the firepower in the world, that the vietnamese wanted us to be there to help them throw off the communist aggression. soldiers quickly realized it was not working the way it was supposed to. if they have been open to seeing what was happening, maybe they would be open to seeing there -- the impossibility of what they were trying to accomplish. charlie: there is an expression that when a young man goes to suffer withher them. they into her, feel. sometimes they have the horror of somebody from the pentagon knocking on their door.

lynn: that is devastating. i had the privilege of speaking to jean marie crocker who lost her son in vietnam. she was in her late 80's and agree to do the interview. she had never spoken publicly about the experience. her husband had been the one to talk about it if anyone asked. she wanted to tell this story. i think she felt that by sharing her grief and her family's loss -- first of all, her son was away in vietnam and not knowing if he would come home. worrying and saying our country unraveling with questioning whether we should even be there and not knowing what to do with that. getting letters from him, where he was clearly despairing and not sure about what was happening to him. to manage that in real time and to tell us about the day the news came to their house. that was the worst day of her entire life. i don't know how she did it. i don't.

charlie: so many of them were so young. lynn: so young. he was 19. charlie: a year out of high school. lynn: yes. the half-life, the grief, for that kind of loss, is forever. they live their lives, it is never the same. there is courage and just getting up every day and getting out of bed. charlie: who are the heroes of your film? the people who fought the war? or the people in conscience who risked things to oppose the war? lynn: the story for us is a sense of what does it mean to be a hero? certainly, it is to be a soldier and be brave and save your buddies and to do courageous things under fire and the selflessness of that is admirable and gets rewarded with medals, hopefully, and recognition.

there was no question that is her relic. but it is also her relative to stand up to your country, if you think your country is not doing the right thing, and ask westerns. people who protested the war, some of them were soldiers who came home and thought it was wrong. they wanted it to stop because they did not want their friends to die. that was brave, too. there are people in the film who wrestled with their conscience getting drafted late in the war and annoying a lot about what was happening in the early years, not wanting to go, feeling the courageous thing would be to go to canada or to jail and instead feeling guilt that they went to war instead. it kind of upends your notion of what it means to be a hero. charlie: tell me about the general you interviewed who had a chance to see the film. you asked what it taught him. lynn: he is a remarkable human being. he was a very successful fighter pilot and he rose to be the air force chief of staff after the war.

he was running the air force during the first gulf war. he is extremely smart and knowledgeable, and curious about what happened in vietnam. and 1969.re in 1968 he said he could see it was not going well and he thought, his job was to bring the guys home. the overall big picture he could see, it was not going to work out. to learn the lessons of vietnam from a military perspective. he was also curious about the enemy, what they were doing. he studied the ho chi minh trail because he was trying to stop the traffic, unsuccessfully. that frustrates him to this day. he became a student. how did they do it? why couldn't we stop the traffic? we dropped so many bombs and it still didn't work. he was deeply interested in that. when we were preparing to go to vietnam, he talked, what would

you like to know from them? he asked what they would want to know from him. they had a conversation in the film, even though they had never met. he helped us come to screening and look at the film from a ,emove, having been there high-ranking military official in student of the war. he has been indispensable. charlie: the civil war was divisive it split the country , apart. this war is probably the most divisive war this country has fought since the civil war. lynn: it is very painful to this day. we have talked to so many people who lived through this time to get upset even if you bring up the word vietnam. people of said, i do not think i can watch the film, it will be too painful. or, why do you want to make a film about the vietnam war? it is throwing salt in the wound. we have said, we do not think so. we think maybe by shedding light on the story, we can get the country a way to talk about it

-- i hate to use the word healing, but people can come to the screenings with many perspectives about the war. because of the courage of the people speaking and their honesty about their own feelings about what they went through and a variety of perspectives -- there is something about the way people are open to telling their stories in the film. what we have seen his people willing to watch it and listen to each other in a different way. we have seen it over and over again as we have been going around the country showing clips and screenings internally as we develop the story. 58,000ivisive because people died and we cannot come to any consensus about why. it took you 18 hours in 10 episodes to tell the story. did you tell the story wanted to

tell? lynn: that is a great question. we thought about it a lot. when we started it was just an , idea. we are going to tell the story of the vietnam war from -- through the eyes of ordinary people in america in vietnam. we will find out what happened. if we could have predicted what the film would look like, i do not think it would be possible. it exceeded our expectations in every possible way. the nature of the testimony, the variety of perspectives, the genius of our editors, the -- in bringing together the treasure trove of visual material. we did not know if we could bring back the different ways the vietnamese felt during the war. the generosity of the south vietnamese. the vietnamese americans who suffered unimaginable loss of country and family members and are here trying to make 's. so many people opened their hearts to us and our job was to try to fill in the pieces of the puzzle. we would wonder if we could pull

it off will it make sense? , will it be coherent? will it help shed light on the story? i think all of us who worked on this field very honored to have been part of this effort. charlie: once you finish it, tell me what that is like. this is a 10-year project. were you working on other projects all along? lynn: yes. we were working on people who were incarcerated who are going to college. also a film about hemingway and other projects. when we finished the editing on this project, i certainly cried. many people were emotional because it feels like the most challenging work we had ever done. because of that, the most rewarding and perhaps most meaningful. it was a joy to work on it every day, and it was incredibly hard. i do not know what we will do now another we do not have to do it anymore. all of us who talking about it last night, we watched episode

three with a number of people. everyone is happy to see the film go out and very sad we don't get to work on it anymore. charlie: thank you for joining us and congratulations. lynn: thank you for having me. charlie: ken had to leave. lynn: thank you for keeping me. charlie: let me mention a couple of things. "the vietnam war" continues. it is 18 hours over 10 evening. episode four is -- five is tomorrow night. jeffreyanion book by ward is called "the vietnam war." jeffrey ward and his own sort of brilliance with language. all of that here on pbs. it is as good as pbs does. thank you for joining us. see you next time. ♪ is this a phone?

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and you are watching "bloomberg technology." puerto rico has been declared a federal disaster area after hurricane maria battered the u.s. commonwealth. that makes puerto rico eligible for financial assistance. officials say it may take months to restore electricity across the island. president trump is planning a visit to view the damage. a mexican officials says there is no missing child after a collapsed building that became the focus of rescue efforts. they believe an adult might be alive in the rubble. more than 50 people have been rescued. the death toll is at least 245.