Fog of Culture

I didn’t like Fog of War as much as I liked Hearts and Minds. I just couldn’t ever really get into the movie. I feel like the music had a lot to do with that though. It was like ballet meets the war? and it just really threw me off. However, I did note some things that really peaked my interest. I really enjoyed Robert McNamara. He seemed to be pretty real and didn’t back down on his answers and when he said he wasn’t going to comment on certain questions he stood firm. Although many viewed him as “unqualified” for the job I feel he did as good a job as anyone else could have done. I feel he made strong points by using his hindsight of the events of the Vietnam War.

The phone calls between McNamara and Kennedy were also very interesting to me as was his relationship with LBJ. The interviewer straight up asked him if he thought the War would have played out differently if Kennedy had lived. McNamara is hesitant to respond. I believe the War would have been very different.

I also thought the artistic expression of the Domino Theory was really cool. Having the last domino fall on Saigon was another nice touch. This coupled with this music really did intensify and make the American fear of communism come to life.

“We didn’t know the well enough to empathize.”

“We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War, not what they saw it as, the Civil War.”

This really reminded me of Susan Sontag and Trip to Hanoi. I am now a pretty firm believer that a huge contributing factor to us losing the War was our complete and total lack of knowledge of the Vietnamese culture and history.

Robert McNamara goes on to recount his conversation with one of the Vietnamese officials where he says if we have known the history of Vietnam would have seen that they were not an ally of China.

This movie, although it was difficult for me to watch, really had me thinking about how knowing your audience in both rhetoric and a war is so very important. If you don’t know your audience you really just can’t win at anything.