The War That Broke The Country

Ken Burns takes on the cataclysm of Vietnam

- Karl Vick

YOU THINK IT’S BAD NOW? THERE WAS A TIME— not long ago, really, within living memory for perhaps a third of the country—when Americans attacking one another in the streets was a matter of routine. Bombs went off so often in some U.S. cities that a smaller explosion might not make the morning paper. The country was divided as it had not been since the Civil War, and the issue was not a President or an election but rather the ground beneath our feet.

Everything felt like it was buckling as the 1960s churned into the ’70s. And if the one constant seemed to be the war in Vietnam, it seeded strife like nothing else. The war began in one era, when U.S. military endeavors summoned unity and lasted, at most, four years. Yet as the war ground on and on, it encouraged almost every one of the divisions that changed the course of the nation, for good and ill.

We know this both from the gradually accumulated perspective of half a century and—all at once— from The Vietnam War, the compelling new documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The 10-part series, which runs for 18 hours on PBS starting on Sept. 17, is all the things you expect from a Burns opus: elegant, deeply felt, cerebral. But it is also warm-blooded in ways no previous project could be. The history at hand is too recent for elegy. Transitions are not slow dissolves into tinkling piano but abrupt metallic rips, the sound of a sword pulled from a scabbard. The soundtrack is rock and folk, and the on-camera subjects describe killing people with their bare hands. “There are no armchair historians dispensing safe avuncular wisdom from their studies,” says Burns in an interview with TIME. “These are all people who were in the fray.”