Press: A TV Monument to the TV War

PBS's chronicle of the sorrow and the pity of Viet Nam

For years it seemed like the war that dared not speak its name. There were few parades or movies to celebrate the 2.5 million Americans who served in Viet Nam or the 58,000 who died there, few political postmortems, even to apportion the blame for defeat. There was only a prolonged consensus for forgetting.

Of late, however, American scholars and the American public seem more ready for a reckoning. The reappraisal with perhaps the greatest potential for emotional impact is a 13-hour documentary series,...