Product Description

For decades, the war in Vietnam was the central drama on the stage of Southeast Asia. It was an intensely publicized war, the first television war that came roaring into the living rooms of America every night. Walter Cronkite tells the story of the long and divisive conflict as seen through the eyes of CBS News. Dan Rather, Morley Safer and Ed Bradley report the stories of American courage, failed programs, an elusive enemy and ultimately an end to a tragic war. It is all graphically shown in these superb CBS documentaries which tell the story of the most divisive war in American history and its effect on those who fought it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19950 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-03-01
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 3
• Formats: Black & White, Color, Dolby, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 3
• Running time: 720 minutes

Customer Reviews

Superb
Im surprised not more has been said or written about this fantastic piece on the vietnam war. The footage and stories from the reporters in Nam were simply mesmerizing.

Basically there are several stories by reporters including a teenage looking dan rather. Walter cronkite is the host from a studio although he is on location sometimes...the stories are rarely seen footage...I've been watchign vietnam documentaries for years and until I saw this dvd I had never seen some of the footage shown...actual firefights and interviews with soldiers in the bush...its captivating....

I liked the story about the sequence with the vc sniper, also the rebellion by charlie company after the good lieut. leaves and is replaced by a more gung ho one...the company refuses to follow orders and go down a road because they know its set up for an ambush....great drama.

The story about the taking of a hill is another one....great footage and details about going up a hill and getting ambushed by snipers and then hit by their own artillery...

this DVD set is really well done and footage that you've rarely seen before....not in PBS, letters home from vietnam, or anything else....many hours of nam...you'll feel like you're actually in the bush for once...

a must buy for those who want to know how the war went on TV
These three DVDs are actually the news clips appeared on CBS during the 60s' and 70s'. They are very worth buying if you want to know how the war appeared on TVs of the American families. Many scenes are touching, deeply moving and difficult to find elsewhere. For those who are younger than 40 like me, these DVDs can tell us what has really happened during the Vietnam War (though only from the eyes of western reporters).

TV Reporting
I used portions of the DVD in a course I taught on the "History of Television". Many of the segments are the closest thing that you can come to recreating for students today what was meant by the often used phrase "living room war" or "television war"...of how television affected Americans' perception of the war and the power that the visual image had in emotionally affecting viewers. Many of my college students were profoundly affected themselves in viewing images from those CBS news reports--such as the report on "enemy body counts", where a helicopter airlifts a netload of Vietnamese corpses or a segment where we learn of young Americans who eventually died in the process of claiming and relinquishing nameless hills. The students experienced first-hand a sense of what it was like in the 1960s/1970s to turn on your television and have to deal with war and death, and the cognitive dissonance the nearly 40-year-old images created in their minds.