All language subtitles for the.vietnam.war.2017.part04.720p.bluray.x264-brmp

Sometimes I would
hear a car crunch up in the snow,

and I'd think maybe it
would be somebody coming

to give us bad news.

Which was not
good for me to think.

It was an underlying anxiety

that I really think was
there all the time.

All his young
life, Denton Crocker, Jr.-

known as "Mogie" to his family...

had dreamed of serving
his country,

of putting his own life
on the line

in defense of what he called
"individual freedom."

He'd wanted to serve
in Vietnam so much

he'd pressured his parents
into granting their permission

for him to join the Army before
he was 18.

He was eager for combat and
pleased when he was assigned

to the 1st Brigade of the
celebrated 101st Airborne,

the "Screaming Eagles"
who had led the way on D-Day.

But he was quickly disappointed
to find himself attached

to battalion headquarters,
repairing weapons, making lists,

keeping records.

It was "boring," he wrote home.

I think perhaps
you will understand my disappointment

when you see that there is
little sense in being over here

unless one faces
the main objective,

the destruction of the VC.

Certainly one feels no sense
of accomplishment

when one's friends
are facing all the dangers.

I had a map on
the back of the living room door.

And I put pins in it
every time Denton Jr. moved.

And he moved a lot.

And I knew those names
at one time

as well as any area
of our own world.

Well, how'd
you have a good weekend?

Yeah, I did, Mr. President.

I hope you did too.

What's your thinking these days?

I haven't talked to you.

What's happening to our pause?

What are our generals saying?

See, I think you'll
find some foreign leaders

will criticize you
if you resume bombing.

As a matter of fact,
no other intelligence source

that I've seen indicates that
Hanoi is even considering

moving toward negotiation

in order to lead us
to extend the pause.

Intelligence information...

As 1966 began, the
president of the United States

was just learning
the name of the man

who was the most powerful member
of the Politburo in Hanoi...

Le Duan.

...First Secretary
of the Communist Party,

a man named Le Duan...
L-E capital D-U-A-N...

who today is putting
considerable pressure

on Ho Chi Minh and others
to ensure continuing a war

that he thinks they either are
winning or can win.

# They're masters of war #

# You build all the big guns #

# You build
the big planes. #

As they continued
to escalate the war,

Johnson and McNamara were
frustrated

that American commanders in
Vietnam, who had come of age

during World War II and Korea,

were having a hard time
making sense

of what was happening
on the ground.

In the months and years to come,
as the American presence grew,

Hanoi would escalate too,

sending more and more
soldiers south,

strengthening its own
air defenses,

and recruiting more fighters

from the alienated
South Vietnamese countryside.

The Johnson administration
was desperately trying

to prop up the government in
Saigon and, at the same time,

help that government to somehow
win the loyalty

of its own people.

Johnson had tried to forge
an international coalition

to defend South Vietnam.

But only five other countries
would ever send combat troops...

Australia and New Zealand,
Thailand, the Philippines,

and South Korea.

America's most important allies,
Britain, France and Canada,

refused to take part and were
calling instead for peace talks.

And more and more Americans,

including some of the country's
most respected

foreign policy experts,

were beginning to question the
way the war was being fought,

whether it could ever be won,

and if the United States
should be in Vietnam at all.

As 1966 began, 2,344 Americans
had died in Vietnam.

Nearly 200,000
were stationed there,

and more were on their way.

Those soldiers would quickly
discover

that the war they were being
asked to fight

was not their father's war.

We tend to fight the next war

in the same way
we fought the last one.

We are prisoners
of our own experience.

And many of the things
that we learned that worked

in World War II

were not applicable
to the war in Vietnam.

We simply thought we'd go
in with a sledgehammer

and knock things down,
clean them up,

and it would be all over.

It was a kind
of an oversimplification

of the problem

combined with our
overconfidence that caused us,

I think, to be arrogant.

And it's very, very difficult
to dispel ignorance

if you retain arrogance.

# I'll stand over your
body and make sure that you're dead. #

In early February of 1966,

President Johnson
got more bad news.

His old friend,
J. William Fulbright,

the powerful chairman

of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee,

planned to hold hearings
on the Vietnam War,

and the television networks
intended to cover the hearings

from gavel to gavel.

Fulbright, who had once
supported the war,

now opposed it.

LBJ was alarmed.

His own advisers had been giving
him conflicting advice

about Vietnam for years.

But a public debate about
how he was running the war

in front of millions of
Americans filled him with dread.

As the hearings got underway,

the president tried
to deflect attention

by suddenly announcing he was
going to a military conference

in Honolulu, to meet for the
first time the two generals

who now headed
the Saigon government.

It is a meeting
without precedent,

and is designed to strengthen
United States determination

to pursue to the end the drive
against communist domination

in South Vietnam.

General Nguyen Van
Thieu was the chief of state,

but real power lay
with Thieu's bitter rival,

the former head of the
South Vietnamese Air Force,

Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky.

Ky was "an unguided missile,"
according to one U.S. diplomat,

known for his
flamboyant uniforms,

his gaudy private life,
and his public pronouncements.

He once told a reporter that
what Vietnam really needed

was "five Hitlers."

How could we
allow and accept that to happen?

He was a charlatan.

The man not only
has no training,

has no education,
but doesn't seem to inter...

be interested in being educated,
and proud of his ignorance.

President Johnson spent
most of his time in Honolulu

urging Ky to focus
on pacification...

earning the support of the
South Vietnamese people

by undertaking economic
and social reforms

Americans had been calling for
for more than a decade.

Johnson wasn't interested
in "high-sounding words"

about progress, he said.

He wanted genuine achievements...

what they called in Texas,
"coonskins on the wall."

Well, nobody understood
what does it mean "coonskin."

And people the Vietnamese
at the delegation they ask me,

"You understand what it is?"

And myself I said,
"Well, I don't understand."

I have to ask some Americans
to explain to me.

And some American friends,
they explain to me later on

and only by then
the Vietnamese understood.

I happen to hold
the point of view

that it isn't going to be
too long

before the American people,
as a people,

will repudiate our war
in Southeast Asia.

That, of course, is good news

to Hanoi, Senator.

Oh, I know that

that's the smear artist that you
militarists give to those of us

that have honest differences
of opinion with you.

But I don't intend to get down
in the gutter with you

and engage in that
kind of debate, General.

Johnson's trip to
Honolulu had not distracted

the American public.

They were riveted
to the hearings.

And I also think
that great countries,

especially this country,

is quite strong enough
to engage in a compromise

without losing its standing
in the world,

without losing its prestige
as a great nation.

On the contrary,
I think it would be

one of the greatest victories
for us and our prestige

if we could-could be ingenious
enough and magnanimous enough

to bring about some kind
of a settlement

of this particular struggle.

Fulbright invited the
respected diplomat George Kennan

to testify.

For two decades,
his doctrine of containment...

stopping Soviet expansion...

had been the basis
of American foreign policy,

and had in some ways been
the justification

for leading the United States
into its proxy war in Vietnam.

The first point
I would like to make

is that if we were not already
involved as we are today

in Vietnam,

I would know of no reason

why we should wish
to become so involved,

and I could think
of several reasons

why we should wish not to.

You have referred
to containment here.

How... how can we contain
in Vietnam?

We would do better if we really
would show ourselves

a little more relaxed and
less terrified of what happens

in the...

certainly in the smaller
countries of Asia and Africa,

and not jump around like an
elephant frightened by a mouse

every time these things occur.

Johnson was relieved
when, at the last moment,

instead of airing Kennan's
testimony,

CBS showed reruns
of The Real McCoys,

The Andy Griffith Show
and I Love Lucy.

But NBC kept the cameras
running.

This is not only not
our business,

but I don't think we can
do it successfully.

And I take it
by this you mean that

this is simply not a
practicable objective,

as I understand it,
in this country.

We can't achieve it even
with the best of will.

This is correct,
and I have a fear

that our thinking about this
whole problem is still affected

by some sort of illusions about
invincibility on our part.

Just before the hearings began,

the president had decided
to resume the bombing of targets

in North Vietnam.

The 37-day pause that had
begun on Christmas Eve 1965

had yielded no hint
of Hanoi's willingness

to come
to the negotiating table.

In South Vietnam, Viet Cong
guerrillas were now believed

to control nearly three-quarters
of the country.

But General
William Westmoreland,

the American commander,
thought his most urgent task

was to destroy the North
Vietnamese regular army units

Hanoi was sending South.

Westmoreland's target
for the next two years

would be reaching what he
called the "crossover point"-

the point at which U.S.
and ARVN forces

were killing more enemy troops
than could be replaced.

It would be a war of attrition.

But that would require
still more American soldiers.

They came from every corner
of the country.

I was born at West Point
when my dad was on the faculty there.

From my earliest recollection,

West Point was what
I wanted to do,

not even particularly
because I had an inkling

or a strong desire
for a military career.

It's just...

West Point was kind of the
height of my ambition.

The son of a colonel
who had served in World War II,

Matt Harrison had grown up on
Army bases around the world.

For him and his four siblings,

the military was always
at the center of their lives.

You addressed
parents "sir" and "ma'am,"

and you said "yes"
and not "yeah."

And you answered the phone,
"Colonel Harrison's quarters."

We got up every Saturday
morning and we dusted the house.

My dad would put on the
West Point marching band

and my sister and I would dust
around the living room.

It seemed to Matt's parents

that he could do no wrong.

He was the embodiment of the
values they had hoped to instill

in all their children:
duty, honor, and country.

The strongest
impression I have from my class

and my classmates was they were
guys who just were idealists.

And I think guys drawn
from little towns

all across the United States
had that in common.

It was a time before
the questions

about American exceptionalism.

We didn't question.

We believed in what
this country stood for,

and we believed that people
who had the ability

to lead soldiers should do that.

# Mustang Sally #

# Huh! #

I wanted to
go with the gladiators.

I wanted to go
with the tough guys.

I was born in Boston, in
the Roxbury section of Boston.

There were those who would
recruit you for gangs

and try to entice you
to do things

that-that weren't in the
best interest of society.

Let's put it like that.

Roger Harris
dreamed of going to college

on a football scholarship,
but was not big enough

to play for his team
in high school.

And so I enlisted
in the Marine Corps.

And I felt that...
that it was a win-win

because, one, if I died,
then my mother would be able

to receive the $10,000
insurance policy.

I thought that was
a lot of money,

that my mother will be rich
if I die.

You know, she'll be rich.

If I live, then I'll be a hero,
you know,

and I can come back
and get a job.

Naive, dumb, you know?

John Musgrave was from
the Fair-mount neighborhood

of Independence, Missouri.

I was 17 and
my best friend and I

went down and enlisted
in the Marine Corps.

I had always dreamed
of being a Marine.

And...

Well, I knew I wasn't going
to be a man right away

but I was going to be a Marine,
and that was enough.

I'd be doing something mature.

And I'd be doing something
that was important.

And there was a war on
and I wanted a piece of it.

I grew up in
Perkasie, Pennsylvania.

And every Memorial Day

all that generation
of World War II would dress up

in their American Legion
uniforms and parade around.

And I'd put red, white, and blue
crepe paper on my bicycle.

And the kids could ride
behind the parade.

Bill Ehrhart would sign
up in part because his father,

a pastor, had not served.

Ehrhart was a gifted student

and in his senior year
in high school

was accepted by four colleges.

Had he attended any one of them,

he would have been
deferred from the draft.

It all came down to this notion

of I was going to serve
my country and be a hero

and have that gorgeous
Marine Corps uniform.

And the girls would just be
draped around my neck

and nobody would beat me up
again.

But at the same time

I would really be serving
my country.

It was my chance to be...

one doesn't want to trivialize
it, but it was my chance to be

the star of my own
John Wayne movie.

It was my chance to do what that
World War II generation had done

and seemed to be so proud of.

Now I had my turn.

Wherever they came from,

whatever their reasons for
joining the military,

training transformed them.

For about the first five weeks
at Parris Island,

I was convinced that I was going
to die there.

The drill instructors said
they were going to kill me.

And they certainly
sounded serious.

I grew up in segregated
neighborhoods all my life.

So, I'd never met a black person
till I arrived at boot camp.

Never stood next to a black
person or a Hispanic

or anyone who was Jewish.

I just... they didn't mix
where I grew up.

So that was just eye opening.

But when I got to talking to
everybody, we were all the same.

We were all working class
and poor.

And we all wanted to be Marines
real bad.

By the time I graduated,

I felt like I was
king of the world.

I was God.

I could do anything.

On that day I became a Marine.

You know, the Marine Corps
trains you to be a fighter.

They train you to fight,
they train you to kill.

They used to say that if you're
a Marine, you can't die

until you kill three Vietnamese.

And I said,
"Well, I'm from Roxbury.

If the expectation is three,
I'll do ten."

You know, craziness.

The tendency
for a great power is to use

what it's greatest at...

namely its firepower,
destructive power.

Dropping a lot of bombs
and shooting a lot of artillery

at a distance.

You save lives.

You kill a lot of them,
you don't lose a lot of us.

The central coastal
province of Binh Dinh

was home to more than
half a million people.

For decades, it had been
a guerrilla stronghold,

and in early 1966,

the Viet Cong had been augmented
by North Vietnamese regulars,

some 8,000 men in all.

General Westmoreland sent
20,000 American,

South Vietnamese
and South Korean troops

storming across the province
in pursuit of the enemy

and their sources of supply.

They first dropped leaflets
and broadcast from loudspeakers

to warn villagers
of the terrible fate

that awaited anyone who fired
on their helicopters,

urged them to leave their homes,

promised safe passage
to any Viet Cong

who wished to surrender.

Then they called in airstrikes
and artillery

and blew the hamlets to bits.

It was the first large-scale
search-and-destroy campaign

of the war.

The offensive lasted 42 days.

The Army reported
2,389 enemy soldiers killed.

Westmoreland was pleased.

But commanders on the scene
were concerned

that despite all the American
firepower brought against them,

most of the North Vietnamese
regulars had still managed

to escape back
into the Central Highlands.

The operation would drive
more than 100,000 civilians

from their homes.

Similar search-and-destroy
and bombing campaigns...

17 large-scale U.S. offensives
in 1966 alone...

would produce a total

of more than three million
homeless people

all across the country,

roughly one-fifth
of South Vietnam's population.

Since there was no front
in Vietnam,

as there had been in the first
and second World Wars,

since no ground was ever
permanently won or lost,

the American military command
in Vietnam... MACV...

fell back more and more
on a single grisly measure

of supposed success:

counting corpses.

Body count.

The problem with the war,

as it often is, are the metrics.

It is a situation where if you
can't count what's important,

you make what you can count
important.

So, in this particular case
what you could count

was dead enemy bodies.

You don't get
details with a body count.

You get numbers.

And the numbers are lies,
most of 'em.

If body count is
your success mark,

then you're pushing otherwise
honorable men, warriors,

to become liars.

If body count

is the measure of success,

then there's the tendency
to count every body

as an enemy soldier.

There's a tendency to want
to pile up dead bodies

and perhaps to use
less discriminate firepower

than you otherwise might

in order to achieve the result

that you're charged
with trying to obtain.

Just think about the
problem from the North's point of view.

They had to supply the South.

I'm talking about bringing in
people, equipment, supplies,

and so forth.

They started from nothing and
pushed a road through that...

through an area
the size of Massachusetts.

So this is not a trivial amount
of real estate

that they took over,
built a road on,

and then maintained it.

For years, Hanoi had
smuggled most of its arms and supplies

to the South aboard an
improvised fleet of junks,

trawlers and freighters.

But when the U.S. Navy
effectively blockaded

the Southern coastline,

the North Vietnamese would be
forced to move

almost all of their
supplies overland,

through Laos and Cambodia,

neutral countries
Hanoi considered

part of the greater battlefield.

Americans called it
the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The North Vietnamese called it
Route 559,

after the men and women
of the 559th Army Corps,

who were turning it from
a braided web of footpaths

into 12,000 tangled miles
of jungle roadways

down which men and materiel
streamed south.

When they had fought the French,

the Viet Minh had depended
on tens of thousands of porters,

then on legions of bicycles.

Now, to offset the growing
American presence,

the North Vietnamese
used more mechanized transport...

relays of six-wheeled
Russian-built trucks

traveling under cover
of darkness.

MACV reasoned that
if the Ho Chi Minh Trail

could somehow be
sufficiently damaged,

the enemy would be unable
to sustain itself.

Three million tons of explosives
would eventually be dropped

on the Laos portion
of the trail alone...

a million more tons than fell
on Germany and Japan

during all of World War II.

Some key choke-points were hit
so many times

the workers gave them
names... "the Gate of Death,"

"Fried Flesh Hill"
and "the Gorge of Lost Souls."

To expose enemy traffic,

other aircraft dropped
chemical defoliants,

including Agent Orange,

that destroyed thousands
of acres of jungle

and turned the earth into what
one American pilot called

"bony, lunar dust."

We'd punch a hole
in the road and say,

"Ha ha, they'll never get around
that one."

And the next day you'd come up,
and the hole wouldn't be there;

and there'd be dust on the trees
back, you know, 50 meters

in both directions, saying,
heavy traffic all night.

As many as 230,000
teenagers, many of them volunteers,

worked to keep the roads open
and the traffic moving.

More than half of them
were women.

Le Minh Khue, who had left
her home in the North

with a novel by Ernest Hemingway
in her backpack,

observed her 17th birthday
on the trail.

Thousands died on the trail
from starvation and accidents,

fevers and snakebite
and sheer exhaustion,

as well as from
the relentless bombing.

But
in this kind of war you never know.

You have to be constantly alert

because you can't tell friends
from enemies.

Relax for a moment and your
reward may be a grenade

or a hail of bullets.

I couldn't watch the news.

My parents would be sitting
in front of the television

and I would hide in the kitchen.

Of course you don't tell
anybody, but it was too much.

I really didn't want to know.

# Oh-oh, smokestack lightnin'. #

Mogie Crocker had
spent most of his boyhood

reading about war.

But nothing had prepared him
for what he would experience

in Quang Duc Province
on the Cambodian border.

He had deliberately fouled up
his work

at battalion headquarters
so badly

that he had finally been
reassigned

to what he wanted most...
a combat unit.

# Whoa-oh, tell me, baby #

# What's the matter with you? #

# Why don't you hear me cryin'?

# Oooh #

Not hearing
in those days was so difficult.

There'd be at least eight to ten
days usually between letters.

So knowing he was in action,
you just didn't know what,

you know, might be going on.

Mogie's battalion commander,

Lieutenant Colonel
Henry Emerson,

known as "The Gunfighter,"

was courageous,
implacable, relentless.

A few months before
Mogie got there,

he had offered a case of whiskey
to the first of his men

to bring him the hacked-off head
of an enemy soldier.

They did.

For nine days in early May
of 1966,

Mogie and his outfit battled
nothing but the terrain.

They struggled through
a labyrinth of elephant grass

and thorn bushes,

bamboo taller than three men

and triple-canopied jungle
so thick

it sometimes took an hour
to move 100 feet.

The monsoon had begun.

Sunlight rarely reached
the forest floor.

Finger-long black leeches

caused wounds that quickly
became infected.

When Colonel Emerson learned
that four companies

of North Vietnamese
were preparing an ambush,

he decided to ambush
the ambushers.

On May 11, he ordered
his men to attack,

backed by massive air
and artillery strikes.

Before the fighting ended,

some 2,000 shells had slammed
into the enemy positions.

Blood was everywhere,
pooled on the ground,

smeared on leaves and grass
and bamboo.

There were scores of corpses,

torn to pieces or blown into
the earth, hidden in thickets,

half-buried
in scooped-out graves.

The earth-shaking concussions

had blown the eyeballs of
some of them from their heads.

In the midst of the fighting,

Mogie's squad was moving along
a narrow path

when two enemy machine guns
opened up on them.

His closest friend
was fatally wounded.

Mogie crouched in front of him,
radioed for suppressive fire,

and then, as both machine guns
continued shooting,

he carried his dying friend
off the battlefield.

For his courage,

he would be awarded the
Army Commendation Medal.

In his letters home,
Mogie told his family

nothing of what he'd seen
or done.

One day when I was
at the post office mailing something,

I asked the clerk,
"How do they let you know

if your son is wounded?"

It was very hard for me
to form those words.

But I just felt
I've got to know.

I just felt so suspended
in space, in anxiety.

And the man said,
"Now, don't ask that.

Don't think about that."

I said, "Well, I have to know."

And he said, "Don't worry,
they'll tell you."

# Oh sergeant, I'm a draftee #

# And I've just arrived
in camp #

# I've come to wear the uniform
and join the martial tramp #

# And I want to do my duty,
but one thing I do implore #

# You must give me lessons,
sergeant #

# For I've never
killed before. #

I didn't like
the war protesters whatever.

I kind of felt that they were
privileged, spoiled kids

who may have been protesting
because they didn't want to go.

So they leave it to some guy

that maybe got through two years
of high school

to go do it for 'em.

The war by 1966

began to impact the middle class

because the draft calls
had to be enlarged.

They couldn't get enough
people to volunteer

or draft people out
of the working class.

They started drafting people
out of college.

And that's when the
antiwar movement shifted

from a moral movement
to a self-interest movement

driven by people who
didn't want to go to war

and their loved ones who didn't
want them to go to war.

# And I know
that it won't matter #

# That I've never
killed before. #

Bill Zimmerman
was a graduate student

at the University of
Chicago in May of 1966.

The son of Eastern European
refugees,

he'd worked for civil rights
in Mississippi

and had been opposed to American
involvement in Vietnam

since 1963.

The draft was a consuming issue

for young men of
Zimmerman's generation.

Since 1942, every male citizen
of the United States

had been required
to register at age 18.

But of the nearly 27 million
American men

who came of age during
the Vietnam War,

more than half avoided
military service

through exemptions
and deferments.

Nearly 500,000 Americans applied

for conscientious objector
status

on religious or moral grounds,

six times as many
as in World War II.

In all, 170,000 were allowed
to perform alternative service

in hospitals,
homeless shelters, and schools.

Some were trained as medics
and sent to Vietnam.

At least two were killed;

both received the Congressional
Medal of Honor.

A million young men served in
the Reserves or National Guard

with the expectation they would
never be sent into combat.

Reservists and Guardsmen
were almost always white,

generally better educated,
better connected,

and better paid than draftees.

Interrupting their lives,
President Johnson felt,

would have increased opposition
to the war.

"If you've got the dough," GIs
said, "you don't have to go."

The result was an
Army heavily skewed

toward minorities
and the underprivileged.

# Mr. Backlash, Mr. Backlash #

# Just who do you think I am? #

# You raise my taxes,
freeze my wages #

# And send my son to Vietnam. #

For a time, African Americans,

though they represented
only 12% of the population,

suffered a disproportionate
number of casualties.

Resentment began to grow.

We've got
to build so much strength

in building our community,

that if they come to get
one person,

they going to have to mess
with us all.

That's what we got to do!

That's what we go to do.

We've got to build so much
strength inside our community,

so that when LBJ says,
"Come here, boy, to my war,"

we say, "Hell no,
we ain't going."

# But the world is big. #

I'm not going to help nobody

get something
my Negroes don't have.

If I'm going to die,
I'll die now,

right here fighting you,
if I'm going to die.

You my enemy, my enemy is the
white people, not Viet Congs,

or Chinese, or Japanese.

You my opposer
when I want freedom.

You my opposer when
I want justice.

You my opposer
when I want equality.

And you want me to go
somewhere and fight,

but you won't even stand up
for me here at home.

At first, 10,000 draftees
were called up each month,

but in 1966, the growing demand
for fresh troops in Vietnam

raised that number to 30,000.

Now, thousands
of college students

could no longer expect
a deferment.

And if your rank
fell below a certain threshold,

you were yanked out of college.

And the worst that could happen
to you is you would be killed

in Vietnam.

So we protested at
the University of Chicago

that the university was
complicit with this war

by agreeing to supply those
rankings to the draft board.

We thought for the first time,
you know,

we're really having an impact.

But a majority of Americans,
old and young, supported the war.

The Young Americans for Freedom,

created by the conservative
writer William F. Buckley,

held counter-demonstrations
on campuses across the country.

# His truth is marching on. #

I was brought up to
believe that the communists were people

who destroy the family,
destroy religion,

and people who had no allegiance
to our country

but to international communism.

My mother would describe them
as,

which means that
these are people

with the head of a water buffalo
and the face of a horse,

meaning that they were
subhumans, and they were brutal.

But on the other hand I
thought they also include people

like my sister Thang
and a lot of my cousins.

I couldn't quite reconcile
the two images.

But of the two, I think the
other image was much stronger

because I was so scared of them.

I thought these people must be
really, really horrible people.

That was the frame of mind I had

when I started doing research
into the communist movement.

Duong Van Mai was
the daughter of an official

in the South Vietnamese
government and was now married

to an American, David Elliott.

Back in 1964, she had gone
to work

for the RAND Corporation
in Saigon.

The think tank had been
commissioned

by Robert McNamara to do
a study of enemy prisoners

to find out
"Who are the Viet Cong?

And what makes them tick?"

I remember my first interview.

I was by myself.

I was very young and I was going
to this pretty grim prison

to interview this high-ranking
cadre who had been captured.

I went in thinking I'm going
to meet this beast, you know,

this guy with the head
of a water buffalo

and the face of a horse.

He walked in and he was
very surprised to see me.

Just as surprised
as I was to see him.

Here was a man who had devoted
all his life to fight

for what he called a just cause

to free his country
of foreign domination,

to reunify the country
under just government.

So he really totally
believed in it

to the point that he sacrificed
his whole life to this cause.

So I left, I was very...
I was very impressed with him.

When the RAND
report was presented

to McNamara's top
deputies at the Pentagon,

describing the Viet Cong
as a dedicated enemy

that "could only be defeated
at enormous cost,"

one senior official said,
"If what you say is true,

"we're fighting
on the wrong side,

the side that's going to lose
this war."

# Sunshine came softly
through my a-window today #

# Could've tripped out easy
a-but I've a-changed my ways. #

The overall myth
of an American army running roughshod

by policy, by strategy, by
tactics to terrorize and murder

and victimize the innocent
population of South Vietnam,

that image is the...

it-it doesn't do justice
to the young men and women

who served over there.

It's certainly not
an accurate depiction

of what our army was about.

From the first, the
Johnson administration understood

that the war could not be won

without convincing poor farmers
living in the countryside

that the government in Saigon,
not the Viet Cong,

had their best interests
at heart.

In addition to the military,

many American aid organizations
were at work

in Vietnamese villages.

They dug wells
and built windmills,

started schools,
introduced improved rice,

provided medical care,

and electrified
much of the countryside.

Under pressure
from Robert McNamara,

MACV struggled to find ways
to measure the progress

of pacification in South
Vietnam's 44 provinces,

220 districts
and 13,000 hamlets,

and finally came up with
the Hamlet Evaluation System.

Soon some 220 U.S.
district advisers

were required to produce
some 90,000 pages

of data every month... a mountain
of information so daunting

no one could make sense of it.

Everything can be quantified.

So you can literally say,
"How pacified is this village?"

"It's 37.5% pacified."

Well, what does that mean?

An American would tell you,

"You know, we haven't had
an incident in this village

or this province," whatever.

"The incident rate's going down,
and therefore we're winning."

But we would point out
that certain troubled areas

in the provinces that we were
working in,

we would say simply
that it's not pacified

unless you want to consider it
pacified by the other side.

To the extent that
pacification was succeeding,

schools were being built,
wells were being cleaned.

And then one fine night

here comes 400 North Vietnamese
soldiers into the village,

executes the village chief,
kidnaps 12 of the young people

for, you know, service in the
revolutionary armed forces,

and the people look
at the government and say,

"You promised us you'd protect
us, but you didn't stay."

I was over there early.

I was with a really good unit,
who believed in Army traditions,

they believed in honor,

they believed even in treating
your enemy humanely

once he was a POW.

Lieutenant Mike Heaney
from Basking Ridge, New Jersey,

was a platoon leader
in the 1st Cavalry Division.

He'd arrived late in 1965

and was assigned to a densely
populated section

of central Vietnam,

where he found himself
surrounded

by North Vietnamese infiltrators

and villagers whose loyalties
were unclear.

We never really figured out

how to determine
who the enemy was.

Being normal, decent
American boys,

you don't just put your rifle up
and take a shot at a guy

and try to kill him

unless you're pretty sure
this is an enemy.

And if he wasn't armed,

or wasn't menacing you in any
way, we wouldn't shoot him.

We'd go through a village

in which there would be no
people we could identify

as enemy soldiers, and we'd find
a big cache of rice.

So the standing instructions
were blow that up, burn it,

destroy it, poison it, whatever.

We really didn't want to do that
because it...

You didn't have to be a
rocket scientist to look around

and see these people are
depending on this.

This is their food.

We were told sometimes
to burn thatched dwellings.

And guys would
unenthusiastically

try to light a roof.

And as soon as the flame
burned out,

they weren't going to try again.

Our hearts really weren't
in trying to destroy

civilian food, civilian homes.

It gave us an uneasy feeling
about,

"What is this war is about?"

Most of the fighting in Vietnam

was the kind Mike Heaney
was about to see...

small-scale, close-up, and
initiated by the elusive enemy.

The military called it
"contact."

"War is hell," grunts liked to
say, "but contact is a mother."

The job of an infantry platoon
usually is to try to scare up

enemy infantry and take it down.

Really, the tactic was
we were acting as bait.

And at some level we knew that.

You know, go walk
in the woods and draw fire.

Six months into his tour,

Heaney undertook what
he and his men thought

would be an easy assignment:

climb a slope not far
from their base at An Khe

and drive a small enemy mortar
unit off a ridge line.

As soon as we started out,
we started to get some bad vibes.

We found some boot prints
in the mud

at the edge of this
landing zone,

and a nice trail, a well-used
trail going up the ridge.

I remember talking to one of
my squad leaders about this.

And we were both sitting there,
"Well, shit, this sucks."

And all of a sudden
the very point man,

the first guy in the column,
Sergeant Mays,

without saying anything just put
his M16 up to his shoulder

and fired off a round.

And he turned around
and he said, "VC on the trail.

VC on the trail."

Before I had a chance
to digest this, he went down,

shot right through the chest.

Boom!

And all of a sudden

what was a very well-laid
ambush erupted.

And it was so loud
and so unexpected

I was stunned for...
for a little bit, you know.

"What the fuck is going on?"

Heaney's radio operator,
Private Terry Carpenter,

got the company commander
on the line.

"We've run into something bad,"
Heaney said.

At that moment, a bullet hit
Carpenter in the head.

I knew Terry was down.

I knew Sergeant Mays was down.

I had asked the first machine
gun crew to come up

and start laying down
machine gun fire.

They got blown away
pretty quickly.

They never really had a chance
to lay down much fire.

At that point there
wasn't anybody left

in my forward unit.

Every one of them had
been taken down except me.

Every one.

Every one had been killed

or mortally wounded
at that point.

Night fell.

What was left
of Heaney's company braced

for the assault they assumed
would come at dawn.

I was lying there
on the perimeter.

I was right next
to a dead enemy soldier.

It was kind of my face
and his feet

and I kept looking back at him,

because I couldn't see
any wounds on him.

And, you know, the strange
things you think,

"This guy's going to kill me.

"He's faking it.

"He's waiting until the assault,

then he's going to jump up
and kill me."

And I almost shot him again.

Just to make sure he was dead.

Then the enemy
began to lob mortar shells

among Heaney's men.

I felt like
somebody had taken a bat

and hit me on my calf, my right
calf, as hard as he could.

I was so stunned by the shock
of being hit,

and I just drew in a deep breath
of air in terrible pain.

I couldn't speak.

Right after the ambush happened,

and I knew I'd lost
a bunch of guys,

I said a prayer to God saying,
basically,

"If you need any more guys
from my platoon, take me.

Don't take any more of my men."

As soon as I said it,
I freaked myself out and said,

"Holy shit, can I take
that prayer back?"

But it was too late.

I'd-I'd said it.

And as it turns out,

not one more man in my platoon
died after that prayer.

American artillery
finally zeroed in on the enemy.

The survivors of Heaney's
company stumbled down the hill

to safety.

He was carried to a hospital.

I was lying on my bed sobbing.

And this nurse came over.

She bent over and said,
"Lieutenant...

"You... the-the your men
are all over the place.

You've gotta stop crying."

And at that point
my platoon sergeant,

huge black guy from Detroit
whom I loved dearly,

Sergeant Sam Hunt, he came over
and he sat down next to me

and he took my hand

and he said to this nurse,

"Ma'am, this here lieutenant

don't have to stop doing
anything."

The students are angry now.

And the word is passed

to gather at Saigon's main
Buddhist pagoda after dark.

After all these years,

the Vietnamese have learned
to live with crises and war.

But they haven't learned yet
to live as a nation.

Now, Dean, what
are we going to do?

Are we moving to the point where
it would be difficult for us

to ask people to continue
to die out there,

this kind of stuff going on
every two or three months?

I think not
yet, sir, by any means.

I think that this is still
a minority problem.

But political talk is not going
to be able to get anywhere

if they don't maintain
the elements of order.

On May 15, 1966,

the government of South Vietnam,
the country for which

so many Americans were
risking their lives,

again seemed
on the brink of collapse.

The ascendancy of Prime Minister
Ky had dealt a severe blow

to activist Buddhists,
who had been demanding

representative government and
a negotiated end to the war

since 1963.

When Ky suddenly fired
a rival general,

a popular Buddhist commander,

demonstrators poured into
the streets of Hue and Danang.

They shut down the port

through which U.S. supplies
had been flowing.

Some South Vietnamese soldiers,
loyal to the dismissed general,

abandoned the struggle
against the communists

and headed for the city.

Angry crowds burned
American jeeps.

Signs reading "Peace!"
and "Americans Go Home!"

appeared everywhere.

President Johnson
was so concerned,

he asked his advisors to ready
a fallback position

if the Ky government fell.

If necessary, he said,
the U.S. should be prepared

to get out of Vietnam
and perhaps

make a stand against communism
in Thailand instead.

Ky ordered South Vietnamese
soldiers

to surround and subdue Danang,

where they exchanged fire
with their former comrades.

As Ky's forces stormed
Buddhist pagodas in Danang,

his warplanes strafed
dissident troops

occupying the central market.

The rebellion was crushed.

Washington was relieved.

Ky seemed to be back in control.

But from his command post
on a hilltop outside the city,

an American Marine lieutenant
had watched in disbelief

as two battles unfolded
simultaneously:

in the west, his fellow Marines
were fighting the Viet Cong;

in the east,
the South Vietnamese army

seemed to be at war with itself.

# Hello darkness,
my old friend. #

May 16, 1966.

Dear Mom and Dad...

Our operation here
on the Cambodian border

has been quite a success.

No doubt you will hear about it
on the news.

We keep getting more and more
operations thrown at us

so that nothing is very sure.

# ...that was
planted in my brain still remains. #

Whether I will go
out again soon I don't know,

but don't plan on steady mail.

Tell Randy I'm looking forward
to seeing his new dog.

I may take a 15-day leave
to Tokyo

to keep from cracking up.

# 'Neath
the halo of a street lamp. #

It was a lovely spring day,

and I opened the letter
that said that.

And I was just really devastated

because by that time
Vietnam was in total chaos.

There was
a continuing changeover

of people in authority at the
government in South Vietnam.

And there were protests of
the Buddhist monks and others

that...

there were anti-American
demonstrations.

I just thought,
"Why? Why are we there?"

I think that
letter when my brother

showed a kind of despair

is probably the first time
he'd expressed that openly

to the whole family.

It echoed back to the day
he'd said to me,

"I don't want to go back."

To an old high school friend,

Mogie was even more forthcoming.

Dear Duff,

Since I last wrote,
which is several months,

a number of exciting but
terribly unpleasant events

have occurred, the worst of
which was being pinned down

by two Chinese
light machine guns

firing 900 rounds per minute

and having my best friend
killed more or less beside me.

Someday I may tell you
the whole story

if my nerves aren't
completely gone by then.

Actually the latter
is just wishful thinking,

in false hope
they will take me off the line.

I was fantastically religious
for a while,

sending up various and sundry
prayers mainly concerned

with trying to stay alive,

but I am once again an atheist
until the shooting starts.

I really believed

that we had to stop
the communist expansion.

I also believed that we were
on the side of the angels.

Just as France had provided
us with support

during our revolution, we were
providing the South Vietnamese

with support during
their revolution.

Matthew Harrison
was among the 300 graduates

of the class of 1966 who
volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Rangers!

Rangers!

- All the way!
- All the way!

But first, he went
to Florida to become a Ranger

and endured nine weeks of
the most demanding training

the Army had to offer.

Airborne daddy gonna
take a little trip!

Airborne daddy gonna
take a little trip!

The man in charge was
Major Charles A. Beckwith-

Chargin' Charlie...

hero of the siege of Plei Me
the year before.

"If a man is bloody stupid," he
told each group of newcomers,

"his mother will receive
a telegram and it will say,

"'Your son is dead
because he's stupid.'

"Let's hope your telegram only
reads, 'Your son is dead.'

"With the training we're going
to give you here,

"maybe your mother won't receive
any telegram at all.

So pay attention."

To make it through,

Harrison and his fellow trainees
had to survive

days without sleep;
were deprived of food and water,

forced to march up mountains
until their feet bled

and patrol through swamps
that harbored copperheads

and cottonmouths;

had to learn how to detect
booby traps

and outmaneuver veterans
masquerading as Viet Cong.

"Expect the unexpected,"
Beckwith told his trainees

again and again.

"Life is unfair."

Once he'd become a Ranger,
Harrison was eager

to get to Vietnam and put
into action

the survival and leadership
skills he'd been absorbing

for five years.

I remember
discussing with my classmates

how horrible it would be
to serve in the Army

if everybody just a year ahead
of us had served in combat

and we didn't have the
opportunity to do that.

I was afraid we were going
to win the war too quickly

and I wouldn't have a chance
to experience it.

June 3, 1966, was
Mogie Crocker's 19th birthday.

His company was involved
in yet another campaign,

aimed at finding and killing
North Vietnamese troops

filtering into the
Central Highlands from Laos.

As night fell, Mogie and
his squad were ordered

to move up toward
the crest of a hill

overlooking a besieged
ARVN outpost

so that artillery could be
brought up

and positioned to shell
the enemy in the morning.

They moved slowly,
warily up the slope.

Mogie was the point man.

Out of the darkness,
a machine gun opened up.

Denton Crocker, Jr. never made
it to the top of the hill.

# Down the street
the dogs are barkin' #

# And the day is
a-gettin' dark. #

It was just a
lovely day to be out in our garden.

Candy, our little girl,
went to a birthday party.

And the other children were
just around the house, I guess.

But shortly after lunchtime,
I stepped out on the porch.

I saw two men in uniform
coming to the house.

And I knew something terrible
had happened.

And I ran down the steps.

And I just grabbed hold
of one of them and said,

"Don't tell me.
Don't say it.

Not my beautiful boy."

And he just said, "Yes."

# From the
crossroads of my doorstep #

# My eyes start to fade. #

I was sitting on
the couch in the living room.

I suddenly heard my mother
screaming for my father.

Like in a movie, here came
the priest up the stairs

with a soldier,
and she's going, "Oh no."

And she's calling my dad.

My reaction was to leap up
off the couch,

race out the back door

and I grabbed my little
brother's hand

and I just started walking.

I said, "You have to come
with me."

I said, "I have something
to show you."

I have no idea
where I was going.

I just said to myself, "No.

This isn't going to happen."

And something made me
turn around

and I walked up to the back
of the house from the alley.

And my dad was standing there.

And I fell into his arms
and I said,

"Don't let it be true, Dad.

Is it true?"

And he said, "Yes.".

I somehow knew that
things had changed forever.

That my mom as my mom
and my dad as my dad,

it was never going to be
quite the same again.

I just, I remember sitting
on the couch

and I put my arms around them
and I said,

"We'll love each other
and we'll be all right."

But I don't know
how far it carried.

You know?

We all tried.

# We're both just
one too many mornings #

# And a thousand miles behind. #

Carol said to me one day

very shortly after Denton
was killed,

probably that very clay,
"How can you believe in God?"

And I said,
"Because we had Mogie."

And I think that his life
was a real gift.

It was a privilege to have him.

A friend wrote to me,

"Our children are really
only on loan to us,"

which I guess is true.

Ten clays later, an Army
captain escorted Mogie's body

to Dick Stone's funeral home.

The family priest had suggested

that Mogie be buried
in Saratoga Springs

so that his parents could easily
visit his grave.

But they chose Arlington
National Cemetery instead.

"A corner of my heart knew,"
his mother remembered,

"that if he were buried near us,

I would want to claw the ground
to retrieve the warmth of him."

I hear my friends say,

"I am troubled,"
and "I am confused,"

and "I am frustrated,"

and all of us can understand
those people.

Sometimes I almost develop
a stomach ulcer myself,

just listening to them.

And we all wish
the war would end.

We all wish the troops
would come home.

There is no human being
in all this world

who wishes these things
to happen,

for peace to come to the world,

more than your president
of the United States.

The military
claimed to have killed

some 57,000 enemy soldiers in
the first six months of 1966.

But privately the administration
worried

that General Westmoreland's
"crossover point"...

the moment when more enemy
soldiers had been killed

than could be replaced...
seemed no nearer.

From the first, the Joint Chiefs
had urged the president

to be more aggressive...

to permit troops to pursue
the enemy into Laos and Cambodia

and to expand the target list
for bombing in North Vietnam.

Johnson still would not allow
borders to be crossed

by regular ground troops
for fear of bringing China

or even the Soviet Union
into the war.

And he was wary
of heavier bombing,

fearful of hitting
more civilians.

But despite his concern,

the president now agreed to
intensify the bombing campaign

called Operation
Rolling Thunder.

He approved attacks
on oil facilities

all over North Vietnam,

including some sites adjacent
to the cities

of Haiphong and Hanoi.

His commanders assured him

that this would be
a mortal blow to the enemy,

sure to force
the North Vietnamese

to the bargaining table.

Tens of thousands
of sorties were flown.

Many bombs hit
their intended targets.

But many missed

and fell on residential
neighborhoods instead,

just as the president
had feared.

Things are going reasonably
well in the South, aren't they?

Yes, I think so.

Because we think we're taking
a heavy toll of them,

but it just scares me to see
what we're doing there

with God knows how many
airplanes and helicopters

and firepower and going after
a bunch of half-starved beggars.

This is what's going
on in the South.

And the great danger is that,

that they can keep that up
almost indefinitely.

The only thing that'll prevent
it, Mr. President,

is their morale breaking.

There's no question but what
the troops in the South,

the VC and North Vietnamese,

they know that we're bombing
in the North.

And we just have a free rein.

And when they see they're
getting killed

in such high rates in the South,

and they see that the supplies
are less likely to come down

from the North, I think it will
just hurt their morale

a little bit more.

And to me that's
the only way to win

because we're not killing
enough of them

to make it impossible for
the North to continue to fight.

But we are killing enough
to destroy the morale

of those people down there

if they think this is going
to have to go on forever.

All right.

Go ahead, Bob.

People talk about collateral
damage, but it means something.

You don't want to do
collateral damage.

You want to do the damage
you want to do.

That's the winning way
to do this.

Even though
I was in a cell by myself

and others were in by
themselves, we weren't alone.

We were together
in this old French prison

halfway around the world
from the United States.

Gradually I began to realize
this could go on a long time.

A long time to me
was like maybe a year or two.

I never dreamed it would be
eight-and-a-half years.

By the summer of 1966,
Lieutenant Everett Alvarez,

the first American pilot
to have been shot down

over North Vietnam, had been
a captive for nearly two years

and had been joined
in and around Hanoi

by more than 100
other downed airmen.

Even though the North Vietnamese
considered them all

"aggressors," "criminals,"
and "air pirates"

rather than prisoners of war
deserving of humane treatment,

Alvarez and the others had
been treated relatively well

at first.

But that hadn't lasted long.

The men were soon forbidden to
communicate with one another,

forced to bow to their jailers,

and told that their country
had forgotten them.

They were subjected
to isolation, beatings,

and hour upon hour of torture,

all aimed at forcing them
to admit their guilt

and record statements
denouncing the war.

When that cell door
would open, when they would say,

"You, your turn," you know,
the bottom just fell out of you,

and you knew
that you may not come back.

The manacles, the ropes,
the beatings, they broke bones.

They... they did everything.

My arms turned black

from the cuffs that cut off
all circulation.

And they didn't let me die.

They just kept the pain.

That's when I realized
that I was not a superhuman.

The first time I broke and gave
them something, I felt so low.

I felt so little.

Some of the men who
were forced to record statements

did their best to make their
true feelings known back home.

Commander Jeremiah Denton
blinked his eyes to spell out

"torture" in Morse code.

On July 6, just one week
after American bombs

had first fallen on Hanoi
and Haiphong,

jailers rounded up Alvarez
and 51 other prisoners,

and, while cameras rolled,

marched them through
downtown Hanoi,

past the angry citizens
of the city.

I could hear the
crowd being whipped up.

And as I passed this one fellow
with the megaphone,

he looked at me
and he yelled to the crowd.

"Alvarez, Alvarez, son of
a bitch, son of a bitch!"

People started pressing in,
throwing things...

bottles, shoes.

But the guards by this time
were having a hard time

keeping the people away.

The North
Vietnamese had hoped to rally

international support for trying
the prisoners as war criminals.

It backfired.

People everywhere, even many of
those who opposed the war,

sympathized with the stumbling,
helpless men.

Plans for public trials
were canceled.

The bombing continued, and more
American planes were shot down.

The North Vietnamese took pride
in capturing American airmen.

Even children were
expected to do their part.

Hands up! Hand up!

Hands LIP!

Hands LIP!

The bombing
around Hanoi and Haiphong

that resulted in so many
of our people being POWs

for a long period of time

was fought out
of the White House basement,

with the president himself
picking targets,

and deciding that we're going
to attack now,

and then we're going to pause
for awhile.

Airpower was being misused,
big time.

Operation Rolling
Thunder did destroy

most of North Vietnam's
oil storage facilities.

But the North Vietnamese shifted

most of their oil
to underground tanks,

and more arrived every day
from China and the Soviet Union.

The bombing was stepped up
anyway.

Throughout the North,

enough crude air shelters
were fashioned

from concrete pipe buried
five feet beneath the ground

to accommodate some
18 million people-

virtually the entire population.

Over a million people were said
to be working around the clock

to undo what American bombs
had done.

When key bridges were destroyed,

they fashioned pontoon bridges
overnight

to keep traffic moving.

Crews waited along the roads
with heaps of gravel and stone

and stacks of wood
to fill bomb craters.

They worked under the slogan
"The enemy destroys, we repair.

The enemy destroys,
we repair again."

Rolling Thunder
was the dumbest campaign

ever devised by a human being.

The normal human thing to do

is to think that your enemy
thinks like you.

There's the old story,
apocryphal,

that when McNamara wants to know

what Ho Chi Minh is thinking,
he interviews himself.

What the problem then becomes is

that you keep trying to send
messages that are rational

based upon your judgment
of rationality,

but have nothing to do with
the definition of rationality

on the other side.

So what's irrational to us

is totally rational
to the other side

if you've decided that you are
going to reunify the Vietnams

no matter what it takes,
no matter how many casualties.

Hanoi did all it
could to publicize the damage

American bombs were doing
to civilians.

Most Americans dismissed the
reports as communist propaganda.

But when Harrison Salisbury
of the New York Times

traveled to North Vietnam and
reported on Christmas Day, 1966,

what he had seen,

public doubts about
the morality of the war grew.

A lot of the
military we talked to

shared our concerns about
how the war was being fought,

and whether or not
it could be won.

But when it came
to an official position,

it was what we know well,

namely, "We can win this war
and we're doing it right.

We just need more...
more troops, more bombing."

I recall on one instance
after I had returned from Vietnam,

I went by to see McNamara.

He was saying, "Well, how is our
strategic bombing program

affecting the course
of the war?"

I said, "It is not gaining us
anything.

Indeed, it is
counterproductive."

He said, "What do you mean?"

"Mr. Secretary, the sledgehammer
approach is not working.

"These people know
that at some point

"we're going to get tired
of killing them.

And they think they can
outlast us."

And he said, "Why don't people
tell me these things?"

I said, "Mr. Secretary,
you don't ask."

I think every father and son

struggles in the course
of their lives together.

# In a deep and dark December #

And I don't think
my dad and I were exempt from that.

The interesting thing for me is

the space to talk about Vietnam
was never created.

And that was clearly a decision
on my father's part.

# I am a rock. #

Craig McNamara, the son
of the Secretary of Defense,

was a student at
St. Paul's School

in Concord, New Hampshire,

where a teach-in about
the war was to be held.

I remember calling my father
from a phone booth and saying,

"Dad, we're going to have
this experience

"and if there's any
support materials

that you think I should present,
please let me know."

The support materials
didn't come.

I think my father really wanted
lovingly to protect me

from the Vietnam experience
to the best of his ability.

Well, we know you can't do that.

Things bleed through and it just
doesn't happen that way.

Probably, he realized
at that time

that the support materials...
weren't there.

Today I can
tell you that military progress

in the past 12 months has
exceeded our expectations.

The Viet Cong have
been unable to mount

the offensive
that they had planned

designed to cut the country
in half at its narrow waist.

The military pressure,

which forces have brought
against them,

have prevented them from
mounting that offensive

and have inflicted
very heavy casualties on them.

No matter how you measure it,

we're better off than we thought
we would be at this time.

# I know you want
to leave me... #

Certainly when
I arrived, I'm thinking

I'm involved in
a winning enterprise.

I mean, America doesn't lose.

We never lose.

I had sort of not really known
much about the War of 1812,

which was...
pretty much of a draw,

or the Civil War in which
half of America lost,

and the Korean War
where we won the first half

and lost the second half.

But I'd been taught
America never loses.

The Marines had been
the first American combat troops

to fight in Vietnam.

And they were expected
to fight longer

than their Army counterparts...
13 months instead of 12.

Marine privates Bill Ehrhart,

John Musgrave, and Roger Harris
all arrived at Danang

in early 1967.

The first thing that assaulted
my nose was the foreign smells.

And watching people relieve
themselves

by the side of the road

and seeing animals
I'd never seen before...

the big water buffaloes.

You know, it was like
being on Mars,

because it was
totally foreign to me.

But I honestly, in my dumb
Missouri kid kind of way,

I thought, "Look at
all those foreigners."

And it didn't dawn on me
for a little while

that the only foreigner
in that area was me.

The feeling was that we
were going over to rescue folks.

And that the communists were
taking over this country

and they needed help.

But then when we got there
we realized that...

that it wasn't exactly
like that, you know.

Many of the Vietnamese,
they would spit at our trucks

and they'd tell us
to go back to America.

And then, you know, we began
questioning ourselves,

you know, why are we here?

These people don't want us here.

Roger Harris was assigned
to G Company, 2nd Battalion,

9th Regiment of the 3rd Marine
Division at Phu Bai,

outside of Hue.

John Musgrave was
first stationed

with the 1st Marine Division
at the Danang Airbase.

And Bill Ehrhart joined
the 1st Regiment

of the 1st Marine Division
near the city of Hoi An.

Private Ehrhart was given
a desk job,

collating snippets
of information

for the daily intelligence
summary.

Three days after he got
to Hoi An,

a group of civilian detainees
was brought into the compound.

These two amtracs
come in the back gate.

The Marines up top start
pushing them off.

Their hands are tied,
their feet are tied,

they have no way
to break their fall.

You literally can hear bones
snapping, shoulders dislocate.

And I grab Corporal Sal,

and he says in the absolute
flattest, hollowest voice

I've ever heard,

"Ehrhart, you better keep your
mouth shut and your eyes open

"till you understand
what's going on around here.

"Those trackers, they're
hitting mines out there

"on the sand flats every day.

"They're getting killed;
they're getting maimed.

"And these people know where
those mines are.

"You treat these people nice
in front of the trackers

"and those trackers

"will rearrange your head
and ass for you

and walk away laughing."

Well, at that point,
three days into Vietnam,

I'm thinking, "Whoa.

What the hell
is going on here?"

I think it is destroying
the good name

and the leadership
of the United States.

Furthermore, I believe that the
war is militarily unwinnable.

I believe that thousands
of American young men

are being asked to die to save
Lyndon Johnson's face.

He must know by now
that this war is unwinnable,

but he does not know
how to give up.

Therefore, I believe that young
men are not only justified

but to be thanked
if they point this out

by refusing to take part in such
an outrageous war any longer.

Dr. Benjamin Spock was
the best-loved pediatrician

of his time;

millions of American parents
had consulted his bestseller,

Baby and Child Care.

In early 1967, he wrote
the preface to an article

in the leftist magazine Ramparts

on the impact of American napalm
on South Vietnamese children.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
was among those who had read it.

He had been agonizing
about the war for months.

But he had been reluctant
to break openly

with Lyndon Johnson, who had
done so much for civil rights.

Now he could no longer
stay silent.

I come to this
magnificent house of worship tonight

because my conscience
leaves me no other choice.

A time comes when silence
is betrayal.

That time has come for us
in relation to Vietnam.

Eleven days later,
King joined Dr. Spock

and perhaps half a million
other protestors

at a massive demonstration
in Central Park

organized by a new coalition,

the National Mobilization
to End the War in Vietnam.

# Some time ago a crazy dream
came to me #

# I dreamt I was walkin' into
World War III. #

That was the biggest
crowd any of us had ever been in

in our lives.

And when the front of the march
got down to the United Nations,

the back of the march had not
yet left Central Park.

That's how many people we were.

Not all of the people
on that march were students.

And as a result, we all felt
we have a chance now.

You know, there's a path that
we could see to ending the war.

Stop the bombing.

Let us save our national honor.

Stop the bombing,
and stop the war.

Let us save American lives
and Vietnamese lives.

Let us take a single
instantaneous step

to the peace table.

Stop the bombing.

The antiwar movement was growing

in numbers and militancy.

"We are no longer interested
in merely protesting the war,"

one organizer said,
"we are out to stop it."

Meanwhile, some in the Johnson
administration became convinced

the antiwar movement was
a communist conspiracy

directed by Moscow.

The FBI and the CIA,
which was barred by statute

from operating within
the United States,

began infiltrating the movement,
wiretapping its leaders,

even inciting violence in order
to undercut their appeal.

At that time,
people who supported the war

were fond of saying
"My country right or wrong";

"America,
love it or leave it."

Or "Better dead than Red."

Those sentiments seemed
insane to us.

We don't want to live
in a country

that we're going to support
whether it's right or wrong.

We want to live in a country

that acts rightly
and doesn't act wrongly.

And if our country isn't doing
that, it needs to be corrected.

So we had a very different idea
of patriotism.

So we began an era in which
two groups of Americans,

both thinking that
they were acting patriotically,

went to war with each other.

Over 200,000 communist
sympathizers

in that park this morning
tried to burn this flag,

but they didn't succeed.

I would put it this way...

there's a monstrous myth abroad,

a myth which Hanoi creates
and which it believes,

and that is that the United
States is so divided

that if they just hang on that
they will win in Washington,

and in the United States the
victory that our fighting men

are denying them in field.

As I have said before,

in evaluating the enemy strategy
it is evident to me

that he believes our
Achilles' heel is our resolve.

Two weeks after
the Manhattan protest,

General Westmoreland addressed
a joint session of Congress,

the first general ever to be
called home from a battlefield

by his president to do so.

Backed at home by resolve,
confidence, patience,

determination,
and continued support,

we will prevail in Vietnam
over the communist aggressor.

Behind the scenes,

neither Westmoreland
nor the administration he served

was confident the United States
would prevail.

Westmoreland reported
to the president

that according
to the latest statistics,

the crossover point had finally
been reached that spring,

except in the military sector
just south of the DMZ.

But, he warned, the United
States was doing little better

than holding its own.

If he were given
200,000 additional troops

and allowed to go into Laos
and Cambodia,

he could cut off
the Ho Chi Minh Trail

and end the war in two years.

But "When we add divisions,"
Johnson asked,

"can't the enemy add divisions?

Where does it all end?"

Westmoreland had no answer.

Instead, he and the Joint Chiefs
asked the president

to permit them to bomb sites
just below the Chinese border,

and to mine the harbors
of North Vietnam

to keep Hanoi's Soviet ally
from resupplying her by sea.

Meanwhile, Robert McNamara,
the chief architect

of American strategy in Vietnam,

had grown less and less
confident

in its ultimate success

and in the repeated calls
for more men and more bombing

made by the military he oversaw.

Robert McNamara was the
giant of Washington, D.C.

He was the embodiment of
intellect and self-confidence.

If there was a problem,
there had to be an answer.

And that was his fatal flaw.

The startling thing is

that this man who never seemed
to doubt anything he said,

actually began to doubt
profoundly what he was doing

in Vietnam.

But we didn't know about it.

In a private
memorandum to the president,

McNamara told Johnson that

"the picture of the world's
greatest superpower

"killing or seriously injuring
1,000 non-combatants a week,

"while trying to pound a tiny,
backward nation into submission

"on an issue whose merits are
hotly disputed

is not a pretty one."

He urged the president to limit
troop levels, not raise them,

and to declare an unconditional
end to all bombing

north of the 20th parallel.

"The war in Vietnam is acquiring
a momentum of its own

that must be stopped,"
McNamara wrote.

"Dramatic increases
in U.S. troop deployments

"and attacks on the North
are not necessary

"and are not the answer.

"The enemy can absorb them
or counter them,

"bogging us down further

and risking even more serious
escalation of the war."

In the end, Johnson tried
to find a middle ground.

He expanded the list
of bombing targets,

but he refused to mine
the harbors

and he agreed to send
Westmoreland

only 47,000 more troops,

which would bring the total
of U.S. forces in the country

to more than half a million men.

On June 17, 1967,
Robert McNamara placed a call

to his military assistant,
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gard.

My phone rang and
the little light showed

it was the secretary
on the line.

And I picked it up and said,
"Yes, Mr. Secretary?"

And Mr. McNamara said,

"Bob, I want a thorough study
done of the background

of our involvement in Vietnam,"
and hung up the phone.

Leslie Gelb,
a 30-year-old member

of the International Security
Affairs staff,

was named to oversee
the top-secret analysis

of how key decisions had been
made, going all the way back

to the Truman administration.

McNamara gave us
full access to his closet,

in his office,
which was like a room.

But all his private papers
were there.

And I was picking out the memos,

a lot of which
I helped to write.

But there were others in there
that I had never seen.

In these memos you began to see
Robert McNamara communicating

with the president, alone,
his doubts.

It stunned me.

I had thought that we were
mostly fighting a guerrilla war.

I didn't know that we were going
to be fighting guys like us,

that I had a doppelganger
out there

who was leading a rifle platoon,
who knew what he was doing,

who was as fully prepared to
kill me as I was to kill him.

That June, First
Lieutenant Matthew Harrison

finally got his orders
to join the 173rd Airborne,

an elite unit ready to rush
anywhere they were needed.

They called themselves General
Westmoreland's Fire Brigade.

Harrison's arrival at Bien Hoa
was a reunion of sorts.

He and seven others from
the West Point class of 1966

all found themselves serving
in the 2nd Battalion,

including two especially
close friends:

Donald Judd and Richard Hood.

As young
lieutenants, as 22-year-olds,

we really were idealists
and we really were Boy Scouts.

I really felt as though
I was uniquely qualified

to lead American soldiers

and that there was nothing
more important

than what I was going
to be doing.

But when I joined the 173rd,

I think the first day I was
there some guy showed me

what looked like a bunch of
apricots on a leather thong.

Turns out they were ears,
dried, desiccated.

I understood theoretically
what it meant to be in a war.

But, of course, no one can
really understand it

until they've done it.

Harrison was a platoon
leader in Charlie Company.

His West Point classmates
served with Alpha Company.

Within a few days,

they were helicoptered into the
heart of the Central Highlands

near Dak To,
where North Vietnamese regulars

were said to be threatening
a Special Forces camp.

They were all airlifted
into landing zones

hacked out of the steep,
jungle-blanketed slope

of a mountain the Americans
called Hill 1338

for its height in meters, with
orders to hunt down the enemy.

They walked for two days,

following a well-worn
enemy trail,

constantly on the lookout
for booby traps or ambushes.

On the evening of June 21,

Harrison's Charlie Company
settled in for the night

while his friends in Alpha
Company set up camp

a little less than
two miles to the south,

along the same
slippery jungle path.

No one knew that an entire
North Vietnamese battalion...

perhaps 500 men...

was encamped on the other side
of a ridgeline,

just a few hundred yards away.

At 6:58 the next morning,

a patrol from Alpha Company
stumbled into a squad

of North Vietnamese.

The Americans withdrew

and struggled to establish
a perimeter.

Within minutes,
they were under attack

from relentless AK-47
automatic fire.

The enemy mounted
attack after attack,

drawing closer each time.

Alpha Company radioed for air
and artillery support,

but the triple-canopy jungle
blocked the spotter's view.

At around noon, Harrison's
unit was ordered to rescue

the trapped men
of Alpha Company.

It was mountainous terrain.

We were carrying two bodies

along with a bunch
of engineer equipment.

And we could not push down
the couple of hundred meters

to where the most of the
fighting had taken place.

The going was
steep and slippery.

North Vietnamese troops,

now entrenched along both sides
of the trail,

prevented Matt Harrison and his
men from reaching Alpha Company.

At dusk, the shooting died down,

and they dug in
at the top of a ridge

and did their best to sleep.

So we lay there
on the night of June 22

and we could hear the screams
of the wounded down the hill

as the North Vietnamese
went around and shot them.

By dawn, the
enemy had melted away.

Harrison and his platoon
crept down the hillside

and reached what was left
of Alpha Company.

Out of 137 men,
76 lay dead along the path.

Forty-three had been shot
in the head at close range.

Ears had been cut from some;
eyes gouged out;

ring fingers missing.

Twenty-three more men
were wounded.

Harrison found his classmates,
Donald Judd and Richard Hood,

among the dead.

This was my introduction to war.

This was my welcome to Vietnam.

We spent the rest of the day
putting those bodies

into body bags
and getting them out of there.

Getting-getting killed
is forever.

And, um, that was something
that I had known theoretically

but I now understood
particularly

when I put my two classmates
in body bags,

guys that I had gone
to school with for four years

and were good friends
and who just the week before

we had been drinking beer
and ribbing each other

and these guys were now gone.

Charlie Company found

just nine or ten
North Vietnamese bodies.

Harrison and his men were
ordered to search

the nearby hillsides
for more enemy dead,

who commanders assumed had been
killed by U.S. artillery.

MACV needed its body count.

We never located
them and I believe today

that we didn't locate them
because they weren't there.

I think we just
took a terrible loss on June 22.

To admit that a rifle company
in the 173rd had been wiped out

by the North Vietnamese
was not something

our leaders were prepared to do.

So we had to sell ourselves
and we had to sell the public

on the idea that we had
inflicted casualties

on the North Vietnamese
as severe

as they had inflicted on us.

An officer told a reporter
that the shattered rifle company

had killed 475 enemy soldiers.

When another officer suggested
to General Westmoreland

that the figure seemed too high
to be believable,

he replied, "Too late.

It's already gone out."

Within a few
days after the battle,

Westmoreland came up to speak

to what we thought of ourselves
as his brigade.

And he hopped up on a hood of
a jeep in very crisp fatigues

looking every inch
the battle commander

and gave us a pep talk and told
us how proud he was

and what a magnificent job
we had done.

But by then I had more
than just a suspicion

that this was a fairy tale,
that Westmoreland was wrong

and I didn't know whether
he knew he was wrong

or whether he believed
what he was being told

and wanted to believe.

But this was the first time
that I had to come to grips

with the fact
that the leadership

was either out of touch
or was lying.

# Down the street
the dogs are barkin' #

# And the day
is a-gettin' dark. #

I remember a very
difficult conversation I had

with a girl who had really been
a best friend of mine.

And the talk turned to Vietnam.

And I remember her looking
at me and saying,

"My father says that you can't
listen to people

"who've lost someone in the war

"because they're going
to support it

to justify that person's death."

I felt like she'd hit me
in the stomach.

But I knew at that moment there
were some factions developing

and this wasn't going to be
an easy path to walk;

that people were going
to have opinions

about my brother's death

that in some ways had nothing
to do with his death for me.

# Hello darkness,
my old friend #

# I've come to talk
with you again #

# Because a vision
softly creeping #

# Left its seeds
while I was sleeping #

# And the vision that
was planted in my brain #

# Still remains #

# Within the sound of silence #

# In restless dreams
I walked alone #

# Narrow streets
of cobblestone #

# 'Neath the halo
of a street lamp #

# I turned my collar
to the cold and damp #

# When my eyes were stabbed
by the flash of a neon light #

# That split the night #

# And touched
the sound of silence #

# And in the naked light I saw #

# Ten thousand people,
maybe more #

# People talking
without speaking #

# People hearing
without listening #

# People writing songs
that voices never share #

# And no one dared #

# Disturb the sound of silence #

# And the people
bowed and prayed #

# To the neon god they made #

# And the sign flashed out
its warning #

# In the words
that it was forming #

# And the signs said #

# The words of the prophets are
written on the subway walls #

# And tenement halls #

# And whisper'd in the sounds
of silence. #