PBS Takes a Long, Hard Look at 'The Vietnam War'

Vietnam is the war that just won't quit. Almost half a century after the war, voters chose between a war protestor and a master of draft deferments in the 2016 presidential election.

Filmmakers Ken Burns (who directed The Civil War for PBS in 1990) and Lynn Novick (who co-directed the WWII classic The War with Burns in 2007) have spent the last six years making The Vietnam War, a 10-episode, 18-hour documentary that examines the war from all sides.

The program will premiere in September 2017, but we've got a first look at the documentary embedded below.

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“The Vietnam War was a decade of agony that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans,” Burns said. “Not since the Civil War have we as a country been so torn apart. There wasn’t an American alive then who wasn’t affected in some way — from those who fought and sacrificed in the war, to families of service members and POWs, to those who protested the war in open conflict with their government and fellow citizens. More than 40 years after it ended, we can’t forget Vietnam, and we are still arguing about why it went wrong, who was to blame and whether it was all worth it.”

Are you planning to watch The Vietnam War? Is 2017 a good time to revisit the conflict that defined a generation every bit as much as World War II defined its time?