Viet Nam War, Ken Burns

As a Viet Nam veteran the subject is of interest to me, so I had to watch it.  The first episode aired on PBS last night.  It goes all the way back to the French colonizing Viet Nam in the 1860's.  It brings the story up to about 1960.  They mention Ho Chi Minh showing up at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 with a petition for President Wilson to get some moderation of the French rule in Viet Nam.  They cover Ho Chi Minh's establishment of an independent Viet Nam right at the end of WWII, and how the British and the French moved in troops to turn the place back into a French colony.  This was a key moment, if Ho's regime had survived, running all of Viet Nam, the later Viet Nam war would not have happened.  If we Americans had been paying attention (we weren't) we could have told the British and the French to cool it.  This was 1946, and that year nobody dared talk back to the Americans.
     The show had an annoying number of "flashforwards"  Right in the middle of showing events of the 1940's or '50's they would cut to a scene from the 1960's, usually American soldiers in combat gear with a voice of from some veteran explaining how awful the whole thing was.  I didn't need this, I was there, both my brothers were there, I know how awful it was.  The antiwar movement in the '60s is still alive (smaller but still there) and they have made it plain to everyone how awful it was.  I was watching this to see what really happened not to hear yet another voice over telling me how awful it was.
   They told the story pretty straight, the way I remember it happening.  One minor goof,  in the early '50s they described Charles De Gaulle as president of France.  Actually that De Gaulle didn't come out of retirement and take over France until  December 1958.  One thing was new to me, they said that President Truman authorized $23 million in 1949 to support the French in Viet Nam.  They didn't explain just how this happened.  Did Truman just come  up with the money out of some fund somewhere in the vast federal budget?  Did he slip the money into an appropriate bill somewhere?  Who in the Truman administration  thought backing the French against the Viet Minh was a good idea in 1949? 
   The rest of the history, Diem Bien Pho, the partition into North and South, the promised election that was never held because everyone thought Ho Chi Minh would win it, the rise of Nguyen Do Diem in the south, is they way I remember it.  The episode ends before Tonkin Gulf, Johnson landing the Marines, but it's a good opener, covering important background.
   They did not discuss any "might have beens".  Times where someone could have changed the course of history and prevented the war from happening.  And they didn't discuss the mind set of most Americans, especially the American leadership.  Everyone remembered Munich, where decisive action could have deposed Hitler and prevented WWII.  They saw Ho Chi Minh as a communist (he was) and thus an agent of Russian expansionism.  In those years we saw the communist takeover of China as Russia taking over China (not true) and we were not going to permit any more communist expansion anywhere.  Opposing Ho Chi Minh was seen as what we should have done at Munich back in 1938.  This widespread attitude goes far to explain how we Americans got sucked into Viet Nam.