Original subtitles

History is not an exact science.

It is never set in stone.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

As time passes knowledge of the past is refined and evolves?

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

But, by definition existing ideas have thick skins

and are hard to shift.

(UPLIFTING MUSIC)

(HELICOPTER WHIRS)

(ROCKET LAUNCHES)

(EXPLOSION)

(INDISTINCT ANNOUNCEMENT)

(CROWD CHEERING)

To understand the realities of the world

you sometimes have to shake them up

and decipher the facts by looking at them another way.

Posterity has made the Vietnam War an American war.

And, yet...

(THEME MUSIC PLAYS)

February 25, 1954.

Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader, about to inspect his troops...

For close to nine years,

he has been fighting to free his country

from French colonial rule.

A country riven by a fault line,

which pushed some of his compatriots to fight against his ideology.

(INTENSE MUSIC)

But, between a young Vietnamese subsidiary soldier

in the French army

and a young soldier from the Viet-Minh army,

only the uniform differed.

The wounded shared the same pain

and the dead the same soil.

Their fratricidal struggle had only just begun.

(SOFT INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC)

Three months later,

the communists triumphed at the battle of Dien Bien Phu.

Humiliated, France was forced to leave the territory

after 80 years of domination.

Finally Free, the victors rejoiced,

but the ideological divides remained.

During the Cold War, in a world cut in two,

the Geneva Accords established the division of Vietnam

into two distinct entities on either side of the 17th parallel.

The North passed under communist control,

while a pro-Western regime supported by the USA settled in the South.

Two antagonistic states faced each other

and the population had 300 days to choose its side.

Frightened by the severity of the coming regime,

the North experienced a real haemorrhage, exodus.

Catholics, soldiers loyal to France,

and anti-communists of all stripes left their native land.

Propaganda did the rest.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Almost one million reached the South,

leaving behind most of their possessions.

The waves of these would-be exiles made the news.

The evacuation now Northern Vietnam is progressing

within the terms of Geneva armistice agreement

these refugees are passing through a check point at high fund

before boarding French ship Esperance

but it is suitable name for this vessel

with its promise of a more hopeful future

for this unhappy people.

One of the desperate castaway is confided,

"I have never forgotten our last sight of Hanoi,

"the city we loved so much.

"My friends and I had tears in our eyes."

(OMINOUS MUSIC)

(CLOCK DINGS)

In the South, the uprooted arrived in a territory

in the throes of chaos.

Entire regions were under the control

of powerful religious sects,

whose paramilitary factions

flourished during the war against the French.

Entrenched in their strongholds,

their leaders refused to submit to the new state.

Worse, their demonstrations multiplied

and reached the heart of the capital.

(SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE)

One man would put an end to these clashes,

Ngo Din Diem, Prime Minister of South Vietnam.

In the name of national unity,

he engaged in a ruthless campaign to quell the rebellion.

On November 26, 1955.

After a bloody victory,

Ngo Dinh Diem proclaimed himself president.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS)

At the same time, in North Vietnam,

the roar at the end of fighting

gave way to a completely different score.

Looking like an ascetic old sage,

President Ho Chi Minh established a totalitarian regime

based on the Chinese model.

The red order was spreading.

On the menu, single party and personality cult.

Very quickly, cities were brought to heel.

Starting with Hanoi,

suspected of being infected with traitors,

it had to be purified of its germs.

Arrests of real or presumed troublemakers

struck the population.

An inhabitant of the Northern capital

summed up the situation,

There are not many families left

who don't have a loved one in prison.

Like a contagious disease, fear is spreading everywhere.

And, this purge did not spare the countryside.

Under the pretext of redistributing the land,

an agrarian reform eliminated anyone considered a landowner.

A farmer revisited this social purge,

This estate belonged to Mme Nguyen Thi Nam,

a patriot who had helped the communists.

Both her sons were officers.

One was even a political commissioner.

Yet it was concluded that she was a landowner.

Mme Nam was sentenced to death and executed.

During these summary executions,

close to 15,000 Vietnamese were executed by other Vietnamese.

As in China, denunciation wreaked havoc.

Kangaroo courts and self-criticism sessions smashed all dissent,

under the tutelary figure of the father of the nation.

In the other half of Vietnam,

President Ngo Dinh Diem also left his mark,

aided by a large number of portraits.

Behind a facade of democracy, the prisons were full,

public opinion muzzled, and the press censored.

Elections were a farce,

thousands of opponents were secretly executed.

A refugee proclaimed his disappointment,

The people here do not have a better life than in the North.

The constitution is used to disguise a dictatorship,

we have no freedom

and our independence is subordinated to the United States.

A police regime reigned supreme,

supported by its main backer, the USA.

This was proven by the warm welcome President Eisenhower

reserved for his protege...

Or the arrival of the Archbishop of New-York in Saigon,

bringing his blessing to the strong man of the country.

A fervent Catholic,

Diem had a visceral hatred of communists.

Since the execution of his elder brother

and his nephew by the Viet-Minh, he had vowed to eradicate them.

On either side of the 17th parallel,

two authoritarian regimes were imposing

their intransigence on the population.

A counter-revolution was responding to a revolution.

All it lacked was a spark to ignite the powder.

(SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE)

The Geneva Accords had provided for a referendum

to decide on the reunification of the Vietnamese territory.

However, President Diem did not intend

to proceed with these elections...

In his eyes, South Vietnam had to remain independent.

Catholics, pillars of the regime, brought him their unfailing support.

Deprived of this vote, the North retaliated.

If reunification couldn't be achieved

through the ballot box, it would be via weapons.

Everyone was encouraged to take part.

To free their brothers from oppression,

a vast operation to infiltrate the South was set up.

Driven by a patriotic fervour,

many volunteers would join the Nation Front for the liberation

of South Vietnam.

(INDISTINCT SHOUTS)

Before undertaking their mission,

recruits were subjected to a harsh test.

Urged to make sacrifices,

many would pay a high price for their commitment.

(INTENSE MUSIC)

One of these young patriots admitted,

"Dying in battle."

We never questioned this ideal.

But, we didn't realize that our superiors were unconcerned

about our place in history.

A complex network of paths for vehicles

was created to discreetly transport these combat units.

The legendary Ho Chi Minh Trail

winds like an umbilical cord through jungle and mountains.

Gradually, thousands of men, tonnes of weapons,

ammunition and equipment

would thus be directed southwards to supply a formidable guerrilla.

First, it spread in the countryside.

Hamlets loyal to the Southern regime were torched.

To stem these incursions into his territory,

Ngo Dinh Diem mobilized his army.

Close to 1,70,000 men,

equipped from head to toe by the United States.

US instructors took charge of the troops' training.

Soon, clashes between the South

and those then referred to as the Viet-Cong multiplied.

Caught in the crossfire, a farmer testified...

"If the soldiers from the South

"were elephants trampling our villages,

"the Viet-Cong were snakes who would come at us in the night."

An old Vietnamese adage

states that war has no regard for the most humble,

nor for family or friends.

That would turn out to be brutally true.

For a time in the early 1960s,

all dialogue between those in the North

and their hostile brethren in the south was broken.

Since the division,

a weighty silence had fallen on the hearts of families

who hid their grief with dignity.

(MAN SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE)

(WOMEN SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE)

Meanwhile, in Saigon,

the intolerance and brutality of the regime

were gradually undermining its foundations.

President Diem's unpopularity fell under the spotlight...

Students launched a protest movement.

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

In the countryside,

Viet-Cong attacks increasingly mobilized

the national army.

(INTENSE MUSIC)

(HELICOPTER WHIRS)

(GUN SHOTS)

(GUT SHOT)

The United States was concerned

about the escalation of guerrilla fighting.

Kennedy feared that the communist threat

would set the whole of Asia ablaze.

Hoping to contain this surge,

Washington tripled the number of military advisers on the ground.

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

However, nothing could stop

the relentless machinery of turmoil in Saigon.

It was now the turn of the Buddhists

to invade the streets of the capital.

A majority in the country,

they denounced the pro-Catholic favouritism of the government

and proclaimed their discontent.

(INDISTINCT SHOUTS)

A ferocious repression fell upon them.

As a sign of protest,

the venerable Quang Duc set himself on fire.

The image shocked the public imagination.

As much as the intervention of Mme Nhu,

President Diem's sister-in-law, who commented on the event.

The only thing they had done, they have barbecued

one of their monks, uh, whom they had intoxicated,

whom they had abused the confidence.

An irony revealing the blindness of the regime,

which this time,

failed to put a stop to the uprising.

With the pagodas revolt, the crisis dragged on,

leading to more suicides.

The situation irritated the US.

Regular army generals then incited a coup d¹etat.

CIA and military advisors were taken into their confidence.

With Washington's backing, the conspirators took action.

On November 1, 1963, at the end of mass,

Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu,

his faithful advisor, were assassinated.

Their troops who had remained loyal were arrested and imprisoned.

Rid of the dictator, people rejoiced.

The headquarters of the presidential party

was ransacked

and its propaganda fuelled multiple fires.

However, despite the assassination of the President,

the fracture of the population remained.

Confrontations between Buddhists and Catholics turned into riots.

While a fiercely nationalist opposition

denounced the interference of the United States

in the country's affairs.

Deaf to these complaints, the military seized power.

South Vietnam was plunged into chaos.

In Hanoi, on the other hand, the regime held its course.

Communism reigned supreme

and reunification of the territory remained its leaders' obsession.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail had become a real highway.

Day and night, it was traversed

by an uninterrupted stream of fighters.

As they progressed south,

hundreds of villages rallied to the cause,

often willingly, sometimes through force.

A doctor lamented...

"Families were torn apart.

"One brother could fight for the North,

"another for the South.

"They could kill each other."

(OMINOUS MUSIC)

No matter how hard the southern army tried,

its men wore themselves out trying to flush out an elusive enemy

that attacked by surprise...

Then disappeared into the jungle,

after sowing its share of desolation.

The United States was alarmed.

Their rampart against communist invasion was cracking.

The time had come for Washington to take things in hand.

In the summer of 1964,

the opportunity finally presented itself.

My fellow Americans, renewed hostile actions

against United States ships on high seas and Gulf of Tonkin

have today required me to order the military forces

of the United States to take action and required.

President Johnson, Kennedy's successor,

used the pretext of a North Vietnamese pseudo-attack

against one of its destroyers,

to fly to the aid of its South Vietnamese ally.

On March 8, 1965.

An initial contingent of 3,500 marines

landed on Da Nang beach.

The arrival of the mighty United States,

shifted the perception of what was until then

only a conflict between Vietnamese.

A proxy war began,

and the Americans played a starring role.

To track the Viet-Cong

who swarmed through the southern territory,

the US Army sent in its ground troops.

And, against the North which supplied the Viet-Cong,

a vast bombing campaign was launched.

In three years,

Operation Rolling Thunder dropped as many bombs

as had fallen on Europe during the Second World War.

All kinds of devices napalm, fragmentation, phosphorus.

In addition, some 80 million litres of Agent Orange

and other defoliants were used.

Hundreds of hectares of forest disappeared

to deprive the enemy of any refuge.

In vain.

Far from folding under the firepower,

the Northern leaders profited from the war of massive destruction.

Ho Chi Minh embodied David in the fight against Goliath.

He became the voice of a people and its fierce determination.

(SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE)

By the end of 1966,

close to 2,00,000 GIs were committed alongside South Vietnam.

Three years later, it was almost half a million.

5,00,000 men mired in a national conflict

whose stakes had been gradually diluted.

At the same time, 3,20,000 Chinese soldiers

came to support their communist brothers

in the North.

In particular, for air defence.

However, behind the presence of these foreign players,

the main protagonists remained Vietnamese.

Drawn into a war where the boundary

between male and female was blurring,

women made an unrecognised

and largely underestimated contribution.

In the North, their mobilization was total.

Hundreds of thousands of them answered the call

of enrolment campaigns.

Hailed as heroic patriots,

they would face anguish, hunger, cold,

as well as violence and enemy fire.

One of their comrades testified to their involvement...

"They were as tough as seasoned old staggers,

"they'd shout orders and carry their weapons

"like the Saigon girls wore their jewellery."

Very young girls, most often of peasant origin,

were integrated into the "Shock Youth" battalions.

Assigned in particular

to maintaining the Ho Chi Minh Trail,

they would go through the conflict with nothing but an ideal,

shovels and pickaxes as their only baggage.

Others, assigned to industrial production,

would leave their homes

to fill the ranks of the defence militias.

In the South too, women bore the burden of war.

While some signed up for the female cor

of the armed forces,

others, in order to survive, joined the militia.

One of them confessed...

"It was the rapes that made me see the true face of this war.

I felt that to defend my life and the lives of my family,

"I had no choice but to join the other women in the fight."

Similarly, teenage girls recruited by the Viet Cong

would go deep into the jungle, ready for any fight.

Others refused to choose sides, but like their sisters,

bore the stigmata of a civil war that did not speak its name.

(SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE)

Early 1968.

Saigon, unlike most cities in the South,

remained unscathed

by the fighting that ravaged the rest of the country.

But, this respite would not last.

For Hanoi, the prolonged guerrilla strategy had had its day.

To win a decisive victory, a general insurrection was required.

All resistance movements were mobilized for the occasion.

January 31, 1968.

As the Vietnamese were preparing to celebrate the lunar new year,

the Tet offensive was launched.

More than 50 cities in the South were targeted.

80,000 fighters left their hiding places in the jungle

looking to trigger a popular uprising.

Armed with blacklists of officers and officials,

they were ordered to eliminate all traitors,

and crush as many enemies as possible.

Three days later, the city of Hue was taken,

and treated to a revolutionary purge.

Faced by an intimate enemy, often a close friend or family,

thousands of civilians were executed.

(INTENSE MUSIC)

A survivor recalled, "There was Doan,

"who had studied at the same school as me.

"She had suddenly returned to Hue with a gun,

"enthusiastic about finding

"such and such a person and shooting them dead."

The response was led by the South Vietnamese army

and supported by the Americans.

After 24 days of fierce fighting,

the former imperial capital

was transformed into a field of ruins.

The Viet Cong were wiped out.

In Saigon, the US Embassy

was high on the communist forces' target list.

Reputed to be impregnable,

the building was stormed by a suicide squad

of nineteen fighters.

There were clashes at every crossroads.

It took several days for the national army

to regain control of the capital.

Street by street.

House by house.

On February 1, 1968,

A frail Vietnamese man in a plaid shirt,

arrested by Southern soldiers

appeared on screens all over the world.

Suddenly General Nguyen Ngoc Loan drew his Smith and Wesson.

The victim was a Viet-Cong, accused of murdering a policeman

and his whole family during the clashes.

Among the journalists present that day,

Eddie Adams immortalized the scene.

His photo gave an indelible face to the war

waged between the Vietnamese.

(HELICOPTER WIRES)

From Dalat to Nha Trang and from Chu Lay to Can To,

it was the same spectacle.

The same victims of an unrelenting fratricidal war.

The Tet Offensive ended in disaster.

The expected general uprising never materialized

and more than half of the Viet Cong troops lost their lives.

Despite this stinging defeat,

the leaders in Hanoi showed no signs of giving up.

General Giap, declared...

(SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE)

A Military setback but a psychological victory.

The excessive media coverage of the conflict

crystallized the anger of the pacifist movements,

and the United States was held responsible

for the violence tearing the Vietnamese people apart.

Disavowed, President Johnson was shunned from office.

In January 1969,

he gave up his position to Richard Nixon,

who had campaigned on American disengagement.

In one year, 100,000 GI's were repatriated.

From then on, the new president of South Vietnam,

Nguyen Van Thieu,

took note of the scheduled departure of his powerful ally.

To compensate for the withdrawal of US forces,

the general mobilization of all men

between the ages of 18 and 38 was declared.

Swiftly, from a land of 17 million,

the Southern army added one million conscripts.

They were joined by young people of 16 and 17,

the self-defence forces of villages and hamlets.

It was their job to prevent the last rural areas

that weren't communist

from succumbing to the sirens of propaganda,

and seeing their inhabitants join the enemy.

With the Americans' departure,

the conflict showed its true colours.

That of a fratricidal war.

Prisoners were sometimes from one side

and sometimes from the other,

but all were Vietnamese.

Sometimes the barbarity of these clashes led to tragedy.

Such was the case with the bombing of Trang Bang.

Perpetrated not by the Americans but by the South-Vietnamese.

On June 8, 1972.

One of their aircraft unloaded its cargo of napalm over its target.

Purported to be a hideout for Viet-Cong fighters,

the targeted temple housed civilians,

and among them, children.

The iconic image

of this nine-year-old girl running naked,

racked with pain, and alone

embodies the full dimension of the Vietnamese tragedy.

January 27, 1973.

After years of negotiations,

France invited all belligerents

to put an end to this lawless conflict.

(SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE)

The United States ended their involvement in this war,

a war carried out,

without ever being formally declared.

The two hostile brothers, meanwhile, agreed to a ceasefire.

However, peace would be long in coming.

With the country no more than a mass of shapeless roads,

a magma of tears and blood.

Nothing could overcome North Vietnam's determination

to continue the fight with its neighbour

until reunification.

Pham Van Dong's declaration was unambiguous.

(SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE)

In December 1974,

an army of 1,00,000 foot soldiers set off for Saigon.

The campaign baptized Ho Chi Minh

in memory of the leader who died five years before

was carried out with great speed?

The communist troops progressed in leaps and bounds.

In Da Nang, panic seized the inhabitants.

They stormed the port in the hope

of finding a ship that would reach Saigon.

Thousands drowned offshore in makeshift crafts.

At the airport, they swarmed over the last aircraft.

On March 29, 1975,

the fall of the city sounded the death knell

of the South Vietnamese regime.

The roads were filled with hordes of families still fleeing south

in the mad hope of finding refuge there.

The national army was in disarray.

Nothing could stop the triumphant march

of the communists to the capital.

One month later, Saigon was in meltdown.

The roadblocks designed to channel the influx of hundreds of thousands

of refugees provoked harrowing scenes.

The perimeter of the US Embassy was overrun

by those desperate to leave the country.

A few lucky souls were evacuated by helicopter,

among them President Van Thieu.

(HELICOPTER WIRES)

But, for most, Saigon was turned into a dead end.

Southern army soldiers had already ditched their uniforms

and got lost in the crowd, hoping to save their skins.

Finally, the North Vietnamese vanguard entered Saigon.

On April 30, 1975,

just before noon the first communist soldiers

occupied the presidential palace.

General Van Minh,

last representative of a dying power,

tendered its surrender.

(SPEAKS FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

As a denial of the civil war, with the guns finally silent,

a colonel from the North declared,

"Our victory is the victory of the entire Vietnamese people,

"only the American invaders have been defeated."

Pragmatic, Saigon quickly adopted the colours of the victors.

An officer wrote with humour,

"Before 1975, it was dangerous in the North

"to admit that one had relatives in the South.

"After April 1975, the trend in the South

"was to recognize their family in the North."

Overnight, the traces of the past disappeared.

This was not enough for the northerners,

who wanted to make their mark

by naming the city after their spiritual father.

(SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE)

July 2, 1976.

The dreams of Hanoi's old guard had come true.

Ho Chi Minh was no more, but his will had been fulfilled,

Vietnam was now a free country, independent and reunited.

But, the path to unity began with ideological unification.

The communists had not quite finished

with their former adversaries.

Considered traitors, henchmen of American imperialism,

soldiers from the southern army, civil servants,

religious figures and intellectuals

suffered the violence of political re-education.

Nearly 150 so-called "Rehabilitation centres"

were set up throughout the country.

Prime Minister Pham Van Dong explained their philosophy.

(SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE)

The propaganda images showed attentive pupils

paying attention to the socialist lessons

being taught to them.

In reality, national reconciliation took a punitive form.

Locked up in forced labour camps,

these men and women experienced hunger,

sickness, ill-treatment and torture.

Among the thousands of deported South Vietnamese,

many would spend up to 15 years in these morbid antechambers.

Those that did not die there...

Others were moved to New Economic Zones.

This was a euphemism used to designate desolate lands,

most often devoid of any infrastructure.

There they would learn the life of a peasant,

wielding spades in mine-infested fields of cassava.

To the communist leaders,

yesterday's enemies remained enemies.

Deprived of civil rights,

such discrimination also applied to their children.

A father shared his dismay,

"I cannot accept that my daughter cannot go to university.

"She is condemned to live like a murderer's child

"with shame written on her forehead."

This vindictiveness also struck the mothers,

sisters and wives of the vanquished.

The contempt and mistrust shown to them made their lives impossible,

many shut themselves away in internal exile.

One of them confessed...

"It is terrible to live in the world of silence.

"With every action, every step, I was on a field riddled with mines.

"Sometimes I no longer dared breathe for fear of myself.

"I didn't want to hear my heart beating."

As for those called the dust of life,

street children born with American blood in their veins,

their mother's native land would be denied to them

all their lives.

Often abandoned at birth,

as shamed as too overwhelming

for those who in the eyes of the victors

had betrayed the nation.

They had to learn to live with their differences.

Downgraded, stigmatized and repressed,

thousands of families chose exile.

Having experienced the split between North and South,

the fracture was perpetuated worldwide.

Between 1975 and 1985,

close to 8,00,000 Vietnamese managed to leave their country by sea,

risking their lives.

0.5 million others fled over land

to end up in grim refugee camps in Thailand.

In all, over 1.3 million Vietnamese abandoned their homeland.

And, though the fratricide finally ended,

it was only for lack of fighters.

In 1995, President Clinton announced the normalization of relations

between Hanoi and Washington.

Many saw this as the end of a conflict

that pitted the US giant against the Vietnamese minnow.

It is true that for years, Hollywood,

through its planetary blockbusters,

always pitched the war as an American war.

an impression the Vietnamese leaders were able to use to their advantage.

By basing its legitimacy on the rhetoric of a just war,

fought for freedom and independence,

Hanoi largely contributed

to obscuring the reality of a civil war

that pitted Vietnamese against Vietnamese.

But, the power of myths often outweighs the logic of reason.

Captions edited by Ai-Media ai-media.tv