Battlefield Vietnam (1998) Discovery Channel

Showdown in the Iron Triangle

Review by Amazon.com

This series, Battlefied Vietnam is an outstanding view of the War in Vietnam, focusing on the military aspects of the conflict. There are no interviews with experts or participants and no description of small-scale engagements, only the hard military operations and the high-level political decisions that guided the commanders at the scene. Much like the First World War, many histories of Vietnam get bogged down in things like "the senseless of the conflict", the emotions involved and the reactions back home in the US so the viewer (or reader) really doesn't get to understand the decision-making that went into the matter.



This episode deals with the efforts of the the US Military, led by General Westmoreland to root out the powerful Viet Cong stronghold west of Saigon called "The Iron Triangle", in addition to areas called "War Zone C" and "War Zone D". Here the Viet Cong built a vast infrastructure of tunnels and war supplies in the villages in the area. The Americans repeatedly carried out large-scale operations attempting to clear this area out. The program shows how the Viet Cong built up this infrastructure, especially their amazing underground cities where they could hold out for long periods of time, even while the Americans were conducting "Search and Destroy" operations on the ground level above them. General Westmoreland's strategy was to try to force the Viet Cong out into the open where the overwhelming superiority of American firepower would win the day, but this program shows how exceedingly difficult this was to execute.

In the end, the relentless American pressure was succeeding in pushing the Viet Cong out of these strongholds and inflicting significant casualties on them. In order to prevent the Viet Cong from returning to this jungle area, large-scale defoliation was carried out by aerial spraying of the toxic Agent Orange, leaving vast areas of this region a lifeless desert. However, the Americans themselves were suffering casualties as well, leaving General Westmoreland frustrated at the slow pace of progress. He wanted a large-scale battle out in the open. No one knew how long this mutual war of attrition could go on nor which side would break first. Finally, the North Vietnamese sponsors of the Viet Cong decided that a massive offensive into the populated centers of South Vietnam would break this cycle of attrition to their advantage. This would become the well-know "Tet Offensive" which is covered in subsequent episodes of this series, and it would finally give General Westmoreland the chance to face the enemy in the way he preferred. Unfortunately for him, it came too late for him to be able to exploit it.

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.