Some Kind Of Closure

17 Ramadhan, 1441

I learnt a lot about America's involvement in Vietnam from Ken Burns's superlative documentary series The Vietnam War and I also found myself feeling a lot. At times the sense of despair engendered was almost overwhelming, but there was always the playing out of the stories of the individuals involved to give light to the darkness, even when these stories were sad ones, which was predominantly the case. The light came from the humanity involved, ordinary people capable of extraordinary depth of feeling and, above all, courage. If the programmes held such intensity for me, a viewer from an enormous distance, how must the actual participants, on both sides, felt watching them? (By the end there didn't seem to be sides anymore - just those terribly involved.)

The final episode, which I watched earlier today, seemed to me exceptionally well put together - and possibly the most powerful of all in terms of unrelenting impact. I half expected it might conclude with the Americans abandoning their embassy in Saigon, their involvement over, the war concluded. But the other half of me expected that real consideration would be given to the Vietnamese experience of the war ending, given the genuine concern for that experience apparent in every aspect of the series, and so it was. The pain continued well beyond the involvement of the U.S. for so many of the Vietnamese people, again regardless of 'sides', and this was dealt with in some detail - almost all unknown to me. And then followed sequences on the war memorial in Washington, the Wall, and the 'normalisation' of relations between the nations that somehow provided, not closure exactly, but an attempt at understanding the inexplicable pain of human folly.

There were many images and sequences in the final episode that spoke with a depth beyond their surface, but the one I'm remembering now was one of the simplest, and, I suppose, happiest. It involved one of the American veterans in Hanoi in the mid-90's being surrounded by a group of cheerfully smiling youngsters, obviously excited at meeting an American at last and getting to practise their English. I don't know exactly what it 'meant', if anything, but I'm glad I watched it.