Josh Clark

heart-rending, unflinching stories of what the soldiers fighting for the United States were doing in Vietnam and what was being done to them.

And it really shaped America's view of that war.

Yeah.

I mean, it definitely made the mood and how we saw the war pretty dour.

But people...

Going into Vietnam, there were a lot of people already, before even the coverage started, that were like, what are we doing in Vietnam again?

It wasn't like World War II where the Nazis were trying to take over the world.

And so this just made everything worse, but worse in a positive way because it was showing the reality of things.

It wasn't government-controlled.

I'm sure there were just countless meetings

behind the scenes in the Oval Office where they were like, we're getting crushed by the reality of this war and how it's being depicted in the media.

I'm sure they were pretty upset about losing control of that narrative.

Yeah.

No, they definitely were.

And later on, I think the Iraq War was considered another television war.

Certainly the Gulf War, the first one, was.

And the government kind of learned from losing control over the narrative in Vietnam.

but they weren't able to regain control.

And so the sentiment toward Vietnam and the United States just kept getting worse and worse, and protests were getting bigger and bigger.

There was a very healthy anti-war movement.