Battlefield Vietnam (1998) Discovery Channel

War on the DMZ

Review by Amazon.com

This episode, from the outstanding Battlefield Vietnam series, is part of a two-part subset dealing with the events leading up to and culminating in the epic siege at Khe Sanh. General Westmoreland was frustrated during the war because he wanted to draw out the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army out into the open where they would be defeated by use of overwhelming American firepower. However, up until 1967, they wouldn't play the game Westmoreland wanted. At this point, the North Vietnamese leadership was beginning to worry that the large casualties the Viet Cong were suffering in South Vietnam, in addition to the damage the American "Rolling Thunder" bombing campaign was causing would lead to a drop in morale on their side. It was finally decided on a two-prong approach to try to deal a major defeat on the American/South Vietnamese enemy. One was to carry out the "Tet Offensive" in the urban areas of South Vietnam and second was to bring about a major engagement with the Americans near the Demilitarized Zone in northern South Vietnam. General Westmoreland wanted to get to grips with the enemy in this region because it was lightly populated, allowing freer use of massive American airpower, and because he viewed the area as a springboard for s possible American invasions of Laos in order to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail and even of North Vietnam. For this reason, Westmoreland set up combat bases in the region, the most powerful being at Khe Sanh, near the Laotian border. Most of the American troop presence in the area was that of the Marines and there were conflicts between Army-man Westmoreland and his Marine colleagues over tactics.

This episode and the following one give a clear picture of the fighting in the area and what each's side strategy was in this possibly most hard-fought campaign of the entire American War in Vietnam.

Features twelve episodes exploring the events of the Vietnam conflict from a military perspective. Twelve Classic One-Hour Episodes From The Acclaimed TV Series Devoted To Vietnam's Key Battles. Judgement of the Vietnam war has been clouded by issues which occurred away from Vietnam: the campus protests, the controversial presidencies of Johnson and Nixon, the agonised arguments over MIAs and POWs and the tormented veterans of that war. For so many people, the Vietnam War brings to mind events in America, not in Vietnam. When thoughts turn to Vietnam, attention focuses on a young girl burned by the napalm, piles of bodies at My Lai and the summary execution of a Viet Cong insurgent on the streets of Saigon. Those events are important, but they do not shed a great deal of light on the military realities of the conflict. Battlefield Series Three: Vietnam was the first definitive documentary of the Vietnam War as a war. It will intentionally avoid the subsidiary issues which cloud judgement of the war, so that a clearer picture of what actually happened on the ground and in the air will emerge.