There were very few grunts on the ground by 1973, so the last episode of Mr. Burns "Grunts of Vietnam" series has to focus on the only place Americans were in the picture (although only slightly at risk): the fall of Saigon. We get 30 minutes on that event, with a lot of coverage of the Marine guards at the embassy.

1. The Fall of Saigon

The episode plays true to the form I have been chronicling: brave Americans, flawed but genuine. Bad leaders, in the form of Ambassador Martin. Stab in the back from Congress. Its so predictable that it was written about two years ago, on the actual 40th anniversary of the event.

We will once again surely see the searing images of terrified refugees, desperate evacuations, and final defeat. But even that grim tale offers a lesson to those who will someday memorialize our present round of disastrous wars: toss out the historical background and you can recast any U.S. mission as a flawed but honorable, if not noble, effort by good-guy rescuers to save innocents from the rampaging forces of aggression. In the Vietnamese case, of course, the rescue was so incomplete and the defeat so total that many Americans concluded their country had "abandoned" its cause and "betrayed" its allies. By focusing on the gloomy conclusion, however, you could at least stop dwelling on the far more incriminating tale of the war's origins and expansion, and the ruthless way the U.S. waged it.

Here's another way to feel better about America's role in starting and fighting bad wars: make sure U.S. troops leave the stage for a decent interval before the final debacle. That way, in the last act, they can swoop back in with a new and less objectionable mission. Instead of once again waging brutal counterinsurgencies on behalf of despised governments, American troops can concentrate on a humanitarian effort most war-weary citizens and soldiers would welcome: evacuation and escape.

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2015/0/27/forgetting_vietnam_1111...

"Decent interval". That phrase keeps coming up. It is the title of talking head, Frank Snepp's, book about the end of the Vietnam war. It echoes the cynical discussions between Nixon and Kissinger about how, if Vietnam lasts 18 months after the peace treaty, no one will care if it falls.

Oh, look! We finally get an acknowledged, on-the-scene CIA talking head, Frank Snepp, to narrate the evacuation debacle. I had been aware of Frank Snepp since the war. I had thought he was a "truth teller". It turns out he is also a true believer in the covert mission. If he were a real truth-teller, he wouldn't be working for an NBC TV station in Los Angeles and writing editorials trashing Edward Snowden while trying to claim he is Snowden's equal.

Granting Edward Snowden clemency, as many have urged, would send a terrible message to other potential whistle-blowers. Yes, he may have sparked an important national privacy debate, but he did so through reprehensible actions that harmed national security.

If that's a harsh verdict, I have earned the right to it. In terms of sheer media hype, I was the Snowden of my day, a disaffected ex-spy who, in the late 1970s and early '80s, rocked the security community by publishing a memoir about intelligence failures I'd witnessed as a CIA officer during the last years of the Vietnam War. I did so only after the agency backhanded my repeated requests for an in-house review of our mistakes and refused to help me or anyone else rescue Vietnamese allies abandoned during the evacuation of Saigon.

http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/31/opinion/la-oe-snepp-snowden-nsa-...

So, enough for Snepp as a good guy. What is his role in the documentary? To play the good guy. To blacken the name of the US ambassador, Graham Martin; and make the CIA sound relatively sane. Now, Martin certainly deserves bashing. But, Mr. Burns uses his incompetence on this one day to hide a decades-long spook career. Let's begin with his NYT obituary (hardly a CT source - in those days )

(in) May 1963 (he) was named Ambassador to Thailand, where he negotiated for the use of secret airfields by American warplanes.

Mr. Martin was familiar with controversy. In a previous assignment, as Ambassador to Italy from 1969 to 1973, he helped funnel millions of dollars in covert aid to the Christian Democrats and other Italian parties opposed to the Communists.

In 1972, over the objections of the Central Intelligence Agency, he won approval of a payment of about $800,000 to Gen. Vito Miceli, an Italian neo-fascist, with no restrictions on how the money would be spent. General Miceli was later accused of right-wing plots to overthrow the Italian Government.

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/15/obituaries/graham-martin-77-dies-envoy...

Basically, the guy worked hand in glove with the CIA his entire career. He worked in Thailand, where the US was running the Secret War in Laos out of Udorn airbase. Nothing to see here, move along. OK. I'll move along to Peter Dale Scott

(About the so-called Borghese Coup)

an Italian-American businessman, Pier Francesco Talenti, had made his fleet of buses available to the coup participants. Borghese’s aide claimed that Talenti was the chief intermediary between the Nixon White House and the Borghese plotters...He developed relations with the CIA (and the American mafia) in the early 1960s.

Tim Weiner calls him “an Italian American industrialist with fascist tendencies and a vast family estate in Rome” who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Nixon’s campaigns from wealthy supporters in Italy...Weiner also reports that Talenti engineered the appointment of Graham Martin, a hard-line conservative and former Army colonel, as Nixon’s ambassador to Italy...In late 1970, Talenti weighed in again with Haig, proposing that the United States spend $8 million on a covert campaign to undercut the Left. “The U.S. government should not hesitate to resort to corruption in its own interest,” he declared.
The administration’s response, orchestrated by Ambassador Martin and the CIA station chief in Rome, was to spend millions of dollars to back leaders of the conservative Christian Democratic party, and millions more to support far-right politicians and neo-fascist activists. Martin’s covert spending totaled about $10 million.

Rather than discourage such plotting, Martin actually financed it. In 1972, with apparent approval from both Nixon and Kissinger, he secretly paid $800,000 to General Miceli, the fascist head of Italian military intelligence and admitted colleague of the “Black Prince” Borghese.

Dr. Peter Dale Scott, The strategy of tension in Europe and America (2007)

So, basically, Ambassador Martin was more Catholic than the CIA pope, including contacts in the Mafia and a stint running the war from Thailand. But you would never get that idea from Mr. Burns or Mr. Snepp. To them, he is just a doddering old man. How he got appointed in the first place isn't worthy of mention. As usual, "mistakes were made".

2. Vietnam immediately after the war

When we finally get to the end of the war, we get ten minutes on how the forced collectivization of agriculture destroyed the Vietnamese economy. There is some truth to that, but it is also true that the US embargoed Vietnam for over 15 years when the war ended. Mr. Burns also mentions the war the Vietnamese waged against Pol Pot (and its ally, China) as part of the bad times for Vietnam. He neglects to mention another open secret (similar to the Secret War in Laos) - that the US supported Pol Pot:

U.S. support of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge is thoroughly documented in an article in CAQ magazine (formerly Covert Action Quarterly) by Australian journalist John Pilger, "The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot."* Some quotations from that article:

"The US not only helped to create conditions that brought Cambodia's Khmer Rouge to power in 1975, but actively supported the genocidal force, politically and financially. By January 1980, the US was secretly funding Pol Pot's exiled forces on the Thai border. The extent of this support -- $85 million from 1980-86 -- was revealed 6 years later in correspondence between congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, then counsel to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation."

"In 1981, Pres. Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. The US", he added, "winked publicly" as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge(KR) through Thailand."

https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/polpotmontclarion0498.html

But, no time for all these embarrassing details.

3. The Memorial and the Series Epilogue

Its time to swim in tears, as we get ten minutes on the Vietnam War Memorial. The most truthful thing Mr. Burns said about the Wall was: "the only thing we could agree about was that these guys were dead."

This section was closure for all the veterans; but not for any of the antiwar protestors. But that is perfectly in keeping with the unrelenting focus of the series on the rehabilitation of the army and of the poor grunts. I do feel for the grunts; but this section was just over the top emotional manipulation.

With closure completed, its time for the epilogue. We get seven minutes of feelgood about the earnest, idealistic veterans who made person-to-person contact with the Vietnamese, despite the embargo. (Versus one sentence about the embargo.)

The excuse for the embargo was POW-MIAs. To hold an entire country (which you have just spent 30 years trashing) hostage for more than another decade on account of a few hundred missing soldiers in a war zone (when the documentary admits the NVA had over 300,000 missing) is the kind of vindictiveness that has, along with our treatment of Cuba, given the US a very bad reputation.

With it made clear that we finally got the Vietnamese to submit on the POWs, we end with eight minutes of random facts about who is where now, sort of like the ending of Animal House.

Just one thing: how do you do a documentary about the Vietnam War without saying one word about Air America? Just asking.

What a dispiriting ending for anyone who hoped the US media, the US MIC, or the Deep State learned anything from Vietnam other than to keep the press off the battlefield and to make college education so expensive that the working class will be put back into its place.

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After a period of detoxification, I will try to do my one-essay summary of this propaganda fest. Until then, adios.