HARI SREENIVASAN: This Sunday
night, PBS will air the first
of 10 episodes of the new Ken

Burns and Lynn Novick
documentary "The Vietnam War."

It's been 10 years
in the making.

And Judy Woodruff met with the
co-directors at the Vietnam
Memorial recently to talk about

why this topic and
its resonance now.

LYNN NOVICK, Documentary
Filmmaker: Thinking about every
single name here as a story.

JUDY WOODRUFF: That's the tall
older of the latest Ken Burns
and Lynn Novick documentary,

"Vietnam."

LYNN NOVICK: We just
tell a few of them.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The team
culled hundreds of hours
of footage into 18.

It's a flash point in history
that's been examined countless
times, but they say it's

still not fully understood.

KEN BURNS, Documentary
Filmmaker: There's
one way to think about
it, is there's really

only one name on the wall here,
which is your name, your story,
your brother, your uncle,

your father.

That's the important thing.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Vincent Okamoto
is the most highly decorated
surviving Japanese American

veteran of the Vietnam War.

VINCENT OKAMOTO, Vietnam War
Veteran: The real heroes are the
men that died, 19-, 20-year-old

high school dropouts.

They didn't have escape routes
that the elite and the wealthy
and the privileged had.

And that was unfair.

They weren't going to
be rewarded for their
service in Vietnam.

And yet, their infinite
patience, their loyalty
to each other, their
courage under fire was

just phenomenal.

And you would ask yourself,
how does America produce
young men like this?

JUDY WOODRUFF: After tackling
the Civil War and World War
II, Novick and Burns vowed:

KEN BURNS: We're not
going to do any more wars.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But as they
realized hundreds of Vietnam War
veterans were dying each day,

they decided to take on what
they call the most important
event in the second half of

the 20th century for Americans.

KEN BURNS: There's
an interesting thing,
having done these three
wars, that the Civil War

and the Second World War are
really encrusted with the
barnacles of sentimentality.

And that's not a
problem with Vietnam.

And so, in a way, we get it raw.

Nobody's going to
sentimentalize Vietnam.

It defined who we were.

It was this horrible loss.

And I think a lot of
the divisions that we
experience today had
their seeds in the Vietnam

conflict, and we haven't
really gotten over them.

LYNN NOVICK: It's still with
us in this very present way.

I think we came across a quote
after we finished the film that
all wars are fought twice, on

the battlefield
and in our memory.

I think we're still fighting the
Vietnam War in many, many ways.

The great gift for this project
was that so many of the people
who lived through it are

in their 60s and 70s, and
they're here today, and they
remember it very, very well.

And they told their
stories to us in the most
generous and brave way.

People took tremendous risks
to kind of open themselves up
and just tell us what it was

really like.

MAN: You adapt to the
atrocities of war.

You adapt to killing and dying.

After a while, it
doesn't bother you.

Let's just say it doesn't
bother you as much.

I was made to realize that
this is war and is what we do.

And that stuck in my head.

This is war.

This is what we do.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The documentary
comes at the war from all sides,
the divisions among Americans

and the divisions
among Vietnamese.

Burns and Novick say they wanted
to include all voices, but avoid
passing judgment themselves.

KEN BURNS: In addition
to a whole cast of
American characters,
every possible stripe,

we have also got North
Vietnamese soldiers,
and Vietcong guerrillas,
and North Vietnamese

civilians, and South Vietnamese
civilians, and South Vietnamese
soldiers, and South Vietnamese

diplomats.

But we're not putting the
thumb on the scale of any
kind of political agenda.

We are just interested in
sharing the stories of a
remarkable set of people.

NARRATOR: As many as
230,000 teenagers, many
of them volunteers,
worked to keep the roads

open and the traffic moving.

More than half of
them were women.

Le Minh Khue, who had left
her home in the North with a
novel by Ernest Hemingway in

her backpack, observed her
17th birthday on the trail.

LE MINH KHUE, Lived
Through Vietnam War
(through translator):
We all had to endure.

The jungle was humid and wet.

Bombs fell day and night.

We women had to find
a way to survive.

We thought it was terrible.

MAN (through translator): My
brother, the seventh child in
our family, joined the local

resistance.

The Americans came through
on a sweep and killed him.

Another brother was
ambushed while he slept,
shot through the heart.

MAN: I never considered
the Vietnamese our enemy.

They had never done anything
to threaten the security
of the United States.

They were off 10,000 miles away,
minding their own business.

And we went there to their
country, told them what kind
of government we wanted them to

have.

JUDY WOODRUFF: There have
obviously been hundreds, if
not thousands of books...

LYNN NOVICK: Indeed.

JUDY WOODRUFF: ...
written on this here and,
I'm sure, in Vietnam.

Do you think you now
understand this war, Ken?

KEN BURNS: No, I think there's
something -- just like you can
be married for years and years

and years, and that other person
remains kind of inscrutable to
the end, this is the arrogance

of history and biography, that
we think that we can know,
go into the past, and do it.

Every day was a
daily humiliation of
what we didn't know.

We always had not just
scholars, but veterans present.

And their B.S.
meters are so fine.

And they would go,
you know what, I'm not
so sure about that.

And they'd say, in my
experience, it was like this.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The documentary
team shot about 40 times the
footage they eventually used,

and spoke with more than
1,000 witnesses in the
U.S. and Vietnam, one-third
of them Vietnamese

or Vietnamese-American.

Research took them to
almost 20 countries.

Facts were checked
and rechecked.

In addition to sorting through
5,000 hours of historical
footage and photos -- one took

a year to locate -- they wove
120 pieces of music from the
period in with original music,

led by composers Trent Reznor
and Atticus Ross, who did
the soundtrack for hit movies

like "The Social Network"
and "The Girl With the Dragon
Tattoo," as well as from Yo-Yo

Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble.

The filmmakers say they
hope that, by airing
this documentary, what
happened will become

clearer, even if the why
continues to provoke debate.

The documentary comes out
at a moment in American
history when we're thinking
a lot about America's

role in the world and
how important Americans
are and America compared
to the rest of the

world.

And judgments are being made.

So there's a timeliness
here, isn't there?

LYNN NOVICK: Yes, people ask
us how -- what does it feel
like to have the film coming

out in this moment?

And it's just the sense that
we live in this extraordinarily
polarized and divisive moment,

and we don't seem
to be able to talk.

We don't seem to
be able to listen.

We don't seem to be able
to agree about basic facts.

And yet so much of that
really started escalating
during the Vietnam War.

The resonances of where we are
in the world and who we are
in the world, especially -- we

have been in several wars that
are not unlike the Vietnam
War for the last 15 years.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, inevitably,
there are the questions of
lessons from this war, so

many lessons that may or
may not have been learned.

What do you think they are?

KEN BURNS: Well, they're legion,
but the one that we could agree
on is that we're not going

to blame the warriors anymore.

History is the set of
questions we in the
present ask of the past.

If we can't talk about the
current toxicity, let's go back
and look at the other one, and

maybe, with the kind of
courageous conversations
you can have, permitting
people to have and

hold views opposite of your
own, you could really begin to
have something, and not just

the talking at or the shouting
over that we do today.

MAN: For years, nobody
talked about Vietnam.

It was so divisive.

And it's like living in a
family with an alcoholic father.

Shh, we don't talk about that.

Our country did
that with Vietnam.

And it's only been very recently
that I think that the baby
boomers are finally starting

to say, what happened?

What happened?

JUDY WOODRUFF: You can see more
of my conversation with the
filmmakers in our next piece.

The documentary will air
for the next two weeks.

HARI SREENIVASAN: "The
Vietnam War" premieres
Sunday at 8:00 p.m. Eastern
on most PBS stations.

You will find more online
information right now, including
an excerpt about a Navy pilot

who spent more than eight years
in captivity, making him the
second longest held American

prisoner of war.

That's at PBS.org/NewsHour.