Netflix Goes to Vietnam

On April 30, 2025, Netflix released a five-part, nearly seven-hour documentary on the Vietnam war. This marked the 50th anniversary of the fall—or was it the liberation?—of Saigon. The Vietnam war as shown on Netflix does not look like the war that Ken Burns filmed for PBS in 2017. It is not a war “begun in good faith” by honorable men. It is a war begun in bad faith by men who ended up being skunked by history and hubris.

The opening shot in Turning Point: The Vietnam War introduces us to Scott Camil, who recounts his trajectory from gung-ho Marine to antiwar activist. One of the organizers of the Winter Soldier Investigation—held in Detroit in 1971 with the aim of revealing American atrocities in Vietnam—Camil confessed to committing war crimes and would later join the 800 other veterans, including future senator John Kerry, who marched on Washington to throw their military medals onto the Capitol steps.

As Camil testified in Detroit, it was not uncommon for America’s soldiers in Vietnam (of whom there were half a million) to cut off ears, cut off heads, torture prisoners, napalm villages, rape women, massacre children, slaughter animals, and shove captured Viet Cong soldiers out of helicopters. Peasants were herded into concentration camps while Vietnam was drenched with chemical defoliants and bombed with more tonnage than was dropped in World War II. Camil was inscribed on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list,” and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered that he be “neutralized.” Camil was shot by federal agents and nearly killed in a drug sting in 1975.

As Camil said of his two tours of duty in Vietnam, “I got two Purple Hearts. I was wounded. I killed lots of people, and where was my thanks?”

In May 2024, I receive an email from Bo Kovitz, who identifies herself as a producer on the Netflix Vietnam series, which is being directed by documentary filmmaker Brian Knappenberger. I have written extensively about Vietnam, the war, and its legacy here in America, and she wonders whether I am willing to be interviewed on film. “The series,” she writes, “aims to give Netflix’s vast audience a comprehensive understanding of the roots and ongoing realities of the Vietnam War, with an emphasis on first-hand accounts from all sides.”