Original subtitles

This is the story of America's war with

Vietnam and how it began.

The history of Vietnam is one of

conflict and great dynastic struggles,

which have led to fragmentation of the

country over the centuries, as well as

inheriting the influence of many

cultures. The idea that there's been one

people called the Vietnamese throughout

the last 2,000 years is a bit of a

modern invention.

After centuries of war in Vietnam, the

one that began in 1955 would be

internationally reported news and last

for 20 years. America say that they're

fighting an army of peasants, so how

could they possibly lose?

However, these people culturally know

about war much better than any American

as

A war that America deemed necessary in

the fight against communism. These very

intelligent men really thought that it

was the beginning of the communist

takeover of the world. There was a

genuine basic misinterpretation of what

the threat the communism held for the

United States and the rest of the free

world.

That's one of the really astounding

things about the war, that such

intelligent men could have been so

wrong.

The Tet Offensive, the fact that the

Viet Cong had entered the American

Embassy in Saigon caused a great deal of

damage. It did turn the American public

opinion totally against the war. The

protests were not even so much the

soldiers as their mothers.

Because what the hell is my boy doing in

Vietnam?

The devastation of this war continues to

resonate today.

Vietnam is the story of two major river

deltas, the Red River Delta in the north

and the Mekong Delta in the south.

The three geographic areas of Vietnam

were

first settled as far as we know from the

archaeology by three different ethnic

groups.

The Vietnamese in the north, the Cham

people in that central coastal strip who

belonged to various kingdoms known as

Champa, and then the Mekong Delta was

settled earliest by Cambodians.

The Cham people came actually from

across the sea, probably from the north

coast of Borneo, and they are great

sailors and seafarers and traders, and

they speak a language that's related to

Malay,

and they developed their own

civilization in central Vietnam, largely

influenced by Hinduism and to some

extent Buddhism as well from India. They

used to be the dominant kingdom

or the dominant political society on on

the South China Sea for,

you know, five or six centuries it was

the Cham that controlled trade on on the

South China Sea.

Trade then expanded from Europe to

China, seeing the arrival of Western

traders as well as Muslim traders from

India and the Middle East. Slowly,

Champa became mostly converted to Islam,

while Christianity became very important

in the central and northern regions.

Full-scale war broke out between the

northern and the southern Vietnamese

kingdoms. Part of their weaponry came

from trading with the Westerners, so

that the

Dutch would supply weapons to the Trinh

in the north, and their ships would

cross over the Portuguese ships

supplying weapons from Macau near Hong

Kong to the Nguyen family in the

southern kingdom. Those are the first

European contacts, but they were rapidly

followed by the Dutch and then the

British and the French. Before the

Europeans arrived and throughout this

period, there were flourishing local,

quite sophisticated, communities and

societies, often with cultures that had

borrowed elements of from religion to

the way that kings ruled to political

organization from India more than from

China.

Vietnam's interaction with Europe

brought the arrival of Catholic

missionaries, particularly the

Portuguese. It was not until the arrival

of French missionaries from the mid-17th

century that their influence across

Vietnam was really felt.

The most significant of these

missionaries was Alexandre de Rhodes. He

studied the Vietnamese language and

compiled a dictionary into French. This

opened up the language to foreign

influence.

The French converted an increasing

number of Vietnamese from Confucianism

to Roman Catholicism.

The emperor became angry and ordered the

execution of many missionaries. This was

a turning point from friendly trading

relations to aggressive behavior.

The French almost seemed to use the

execution of their missionaries as a

reason to invade.

They were without any territories,

unlike the British in India, the

Portuguese in the Philippines, the Dutch

in Indonesia. They decided to take over

Vietnam and establish a colony.

There was this constant tension between

different regions of Vietnam, and the

French arrived in that context and

indeed conquered Vietnam piecemeal.

Around 1860, the French seized the area

near Saigon. In the next two decades,

they moved through central and northern

Vietnam with French troops expanding

their control over all six provinces on

the Mekong Delta and formed a colony

known as Cochin China. They divided the

country into those three regions,

which it had never been divided into

before.

France assumed control over the whole of

Vietnam. French Indochina was formed in

October 1887. Cambodia and Laos were

added in 1893.

In the following years, the French

influence would play a significant role

in shaping Vietnam.

Throughout its history, the country had

been invaded by a stream of dynasties,

and by the late 19th century, Vietnam

had become vulnerable to French

ambition.

Years of civil war had led to a split

between the north and the south.

It was into this environment that

resentment to French occupation gave a

space for nationalism and then communism

to rise.

The influence of Russia and China

alarmed the USA. South Vietnam is

already under attack.

But how did events lead to such a

catastrophic loss of life? And how

necessary was America's involvement in a

war so far from home?

By 1884, France had taken control over

Vietnam, forming the territories of

Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China. The

French were keen to bring Vietnam under

French law, and it wasn't long before

French culture grew across the country.

The French conquest was in fact

supported by some Vietnamese,

including Catholics, but also some

others who thought that the French could

bring modernization to Vietnam. So,

there were some Vietnamese who sided

with the French, and including some who

benefited economically.

They were distributed lands in the

south, particularly in the Mekong Delta.

So,

a new landlord class developed.

As French influence expanded, they soon

established the bureaucracy and

architecture of their towns, building

town halls, law courts, and schools. The

education system evolved for the

expatriates, but soon became a fashion

for the wealthy local residents as well.

In Hue, capital of the Annam section of

Indochina, the Japanese, always so

polite, do not disturb the semblance of

ancient rule. Likewise, carefully

preserved by the French colonial

administration.

In a modern home built for her by the

French at Dalat, the Empress of Annam

brings up her three attractive children

in truly royal atmosphere. She accepts

with oriental resignation the obvious

facts of the situation.

It was clear to parents that if they

wanted their children to rise in the

bureaucracy and get positions,

they needed to know the new, newly

adopted Latin alphabet.

which came to be known as Quoc Ngu or

the national script. And so the

Vietnamese culture became

internationalized in a way it hadn't

been before. And at the same time a

familiarity a new familiarity with

Western political ideologies and

including communism.

It was into this climate of French

education that Ho Chi Minh was brought

up. The man who would change Vietnam's

history forever.

As a young man he was keen to see the

world and took employment on ships as a

deckhand. He traveled to America, lived

in London for a while where he was

rumored to have spent time as a cook and

also lived in Paris.

Whilst in Paris he petitioned for the

independence and civil rights of the

Vietnamese people from French rule.

When this failed in the US under

President Woodrow Wilson, Ho Chi Minh

became disillusioned which furthered his

communist zeal.

He spent time in Russia and China before

being imprisoned by Chiang Kai-shek.

His reputation at home was developing

and when he returned in 1941 he had

almost a hero status.

He was a very much a man of the world

he'd been educated and by the French. He

had traveled around the world as a as a

sailor and worked as a chef in in in in

London. In the Paris peace talks of 1919

he turned up at Versailles and demanded

freedom from French colonialism for the

Vietnamese people and was thrown out.

Ho Chi Minh was a a member of the French

Socialist Party which split in 1919 and

he joined the Communist faction which

founded the the

French Communist Party.

During the Second World War France had

fallen to Nazi Germany in June 1940.

The Vichy government in Paris

immediately ceded control of Saigon and

Hanoi to Japan.

Japan enforced the right to land forces

in Vietnam. They needed to block the

transportation of war materials through

Vietnam to the allies.

When Ho Chi Minh was released from

prison in China he returned to Vietnam

to lead the Viet Minh independence

movement. They fought against the Vichy

French and Japanese forces.

During World War II Ho Chi Minh would

return to China and with General Giap

and and others

set up a communist resistance who fought

the Japanese.

In 1945 they'd taken over the north part

of of of Vietnam. The south was

liberated by by the British who to

justify taking back their own colonies

in in in the in the Far East

rearmed the Japanese to hold the the

country until the French turned up to

reoccupy South Vietnam.

The Japanese and the French were very

anti-communist

and the Vietnamese Communist Party had

been founded in 1930 by Ho Chi Minh. He

and the other Vietnamese Communists

rejected both the Japanese and the

French and they were the only large

political party in Vietnam which did

oppose both the French and the Japanese.

But at the end of the war when both of

those groups lost

the Communists led by Ho Chi Minh were

in a stronger position

to take over.

I remember

that many people at that time talked a

lot about

Ho Chi Minh

who they called Uncle Ho.

At that time everyone

thought he was somewhere

like up there going down to help.

But

obviously he also human being

with some kind of ambition of his own.

People respected Ho Chi Minh as a great

patriot and were willing to support him.

They were tired of being dominated by

the French and now the Japanese and

fought for their freedom. He oversaw

many successful military actions against

the French and then against Japanese

occupation of Vietnam during World War

II supported secretly by the United

States Office of Strategic Services.

Ho Chi Minh had meanwhile formed

a alliance with the United States and

was rescuing French and American pilots

who were shot down by the Japanese and

delivering them to the American forces

in the south of China.

And so Ho Chi Minh was able to build an

army with some support from the United

States

and was in a position to take over

once the Japanese were defeated.

Over the years Ho Chi Minh had developed

a significant army. The country was in

the midst of a huge famine. The Vietnam

peasants blamed the French and Japanese

who were keeping the rice to feed their

troops even exporting it to Japan.

After the Japanese had handed Vietnam to

the Viet Minh in 1945 an estimated 2

million Vietnamese people had died.

One of the problems at the end of the

Second World War is it led into a

variety of other wars particularly in

Indochina.

And the Vietnam War which the United

States inherited from the French which

they had lost

was in fact inherited

from Ho Chi Minh himself when he had

been an ally

of the United States. And I think that

the basic problem was Ho Chi Minh was a

nationalist

first and foremost not a communist.

Since 1945 the American foreign policy

was the containment of communism. There

was the famous domino theory that if

South Vietnam fell to the communists

that would allow us Cambodia, Thailand

it would it would spread down the Malay

Peninsula until

eventually Australia would become

communist and one senator famously said

we don't want to start fighting them

when they land on Waikiki Beach.

There's no question in my mind that

these very intelligent men

McNamara and Rusk really thought that

it was the beginning of the communist

takeover of the world. I mean that

famous domino theory and they all

believed it and it was dead wrong.

The French finally built up to a point

where Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh in

north decided to resist and they started

to attack the French in Hanoi in

December of 1946

and the

war which lasted until 1954

began then. Meanwhile the situation in

French Indochina grows graver as bitter

fighting sweeps through Hanoi leaving

misery and destruction in its wake.

French troops move up country to engage

the well-equipped forces of the Vietnam

Republic who made a desperate but

unsuccessful bid to massacre the entire

French population of the city.

The French not let Vietnam

independent

and that

just

pushed

the country into the communist

hand because everyone wanted to be

independent and only communist was

organized well organized.

The only intention as far as I can tell

that Ho Chi Minh had with any other

country was South Vietnam. President

Eisenhower's refusal to help the French

with the air strikes

at the time of Dien Bien Phu Ho Chi Minh

was so able

to to to marshal his forces, get Soviet

aid in

and at the same time

keep the Chinese from getting frantic

about it and getting help from them as

well.

And then that was his determination of

the extraordinarily brilliant general.

Over to the French fighting communism in

Indochina as JU 52 planes lend their

weight in an all-out offensive against

the red jungle strongholds of the Viet

Minh forces.

Particularly after the fall of China to

the Mao's Communist regime and the start

of the Korean War in 1949 and 1950

respectively

the United States began to give massive

military

support and political support to the

French effort in Indochina from 1950.

The Americans were initially very

reluctant to support them but partly in

exchange for support for France and NATO

in Europe the Americans decided to

support France in Indochina

which led to American financial support

and advisors and that sort of thing.

The fight for Indochina goes on. French

pilots flying American planes take up

where the big guns left off blasting

communist divisions which had

infiltrated French positions in the

Hanoi Delta.

For the next four years of that war the

United States paid for about 80% of the

French military budget and at the same

time the Chinese were supporting the

Vietnamese independence movement led

mostly by Communists and fought mostly

in the north. Many many people from the

south like everyone in Vietnam at that

time joined Viet Minh

because their relationship their

involvement with

resistance

they have

the heart for it.

War comes to peaceful rice paddies rich

prize the reds were hoping to seize

until the French aided by the loyal

Vietnamese drove them into the sea.

But from the backwaters of war come the

helpless victims of aggression the

women, the children, the old and infirm.

Communism passed their way. They have

little left now but a spark of life that

drives them on toward escape and

sanctuary behind the French lines. It's

clear that

people on all sides were fighting for

different reasons. The Americans were

fighting to stop this tide of communism

that would sweep down from China through

Vietnam into the rest of Indochina, the

rest of Southeast Asia.

The Vietnamese, some of them may have

thought they were part of an

international movement, but many of them

were just fighting for their own

personal

reasons, you know, to liberate the

country against foreign occupiers or

to get rid of the power of landlords and

that kind of thing. The war that broke

out in 1946 dragged on for eight years

and has its culmination at the Battle of

Dien Bien Phu in 1954,

where a very bold move by the French

military goes completely wrong and

they're outfought and out-thought by the

guerrillas under General Giap.

The First Indochina War came to an end

with the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in

1954, culminating in a comprehensive

defeat for the French.

France agreed to withdraw its forces

from all its colonies and a conference

at Geneva decided on the division of

Vietnam with control of the north given

to the Viet Minh as the Democratic

Republic of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh

and the south becoming the state of

Vietnam nominally under Emperor Bao Dai.

This prevented Ho Chi Minh from gaining

control of the entire country.

After the division of Vietnam into north

and south, the north is seen as a

communist threat by the United States.

South Vietnam's Prime Minister Ngo Dinh

Diem faced a two-year deadline for a

nationwide reunification vote. However,

the US feared that Diem might not win.

In the north, the Viet Minh had formed

the National Liberation Front under Ho

Chi Minh, known as the Viet Cong, and

started guerrilla warfare in the south

of the country in an attempt to gain

control.

President Ngo Dinh Diem came

back to Vietnam

with the acceptance from the last

emperor Bao Dai in a referendum.

He ousted Bao Dai, sent him into exile

in France, and he became

president.

The The south was still administered

from Saigon until there was going to be

an election, which would then, you know,

unite the country. When the Americans

realized that they wouldn't win any

election against the communists, they

backed Prime Minister Diem in South

Vietnam to set up an independent state,

state, which so it would be analogous to

North and South Korea. Because of the

influence of the Korean War upon

American thinking,

when the French lost at Dien Bien Phu,

and Eisenhower had to decide what to do

about the country, he decided to support

the South Vietnamese government in place

and they supported that dreadful man

Diem.

Diem was like a South American dictator

about whom some American general, I

think, once said, "He's a son of a

but he's our son of a bitch."

And that strain of thought ran through

the American government when they were

looking at their allies around the

world, and it was a mistake. Half of the

villages were under communist rule in

1954 and it wasn't clear who was going

to come out on top.

And indeed, the United States and the

other political groups also expected

that the communists would win.

It wasn't anything like American

conspiracy to rule the world or

anything, they just didn't want the

Russians to take over and when they

realized that Soviet communism, as they

saw it,

was a menace, which it was,

it would influence other parts of the

world that they thought they could reach

and uh

and as a consequence, Vietnam, after the

French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu,

was

was a prime candidate for American help.

And so, the Diem regime immediately

turned its attention to the religious or

the political religious sects uh in the

Mekong Delta and attacked them first.

And so, there was fighting in the

streets of Saigon in 1954 and 1955

and much of it spread to the Mekong

Delta. There was a sort of civil war in

the early days of the South Vietnamese

regime.

The divisions and unrest in Vietnam

continued. The rioting intensified and

the Vietnamese people continued to see

Ho Chi Minh and the National Liberation

Front as a way to gain back their

independence. America continued to

closely monitor the situation, uneasy at

the rapid rise of communism in Vietnam,

which they deemed to be a direct threat

to them. This mood prompted President

Kennedy to send in aid, ultimately

ending in over half a million US troops

and a bloody war that would last for 20

years.

In the 20th century, Vietnam had endured

invasion from France and China. It had

seen the creation of Indochina under

French rule and the development of

French culture and influence in the

coming years.

After the defeat of the French at the

Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Geneva

Peace Conference divided the country

with control of the south now led by

Diem, supported by America.

North Vietnam was given to the

Democratic Republic of Vietnam led by Ho

Chi Minh. He formed the National

Liberation Front, also known as the Viet

Cong, and began an uprising against the

south.

The National Liberation Front were

gaining significant strength in Vietnam.

To many Vietnamese, the Viet Minh were

heroes. To America's leaders, Ho Chi

Minh represented communism and a

significant threat.

For man holds in his mortal hands

the power to abolish

all forms of human poverty

and all forms of human life.

And yet, the same revolutionary beliefs

for which our forebears fought

are still at issue around the globe.

The Viet Minh were able to recruit in

the south, center, and north. The

religious groups in the south were not

able to recruit in the center and north.

The Vietnamese Nationalist Party was

more northern based

and Ngo Dinh Diem's following was

largely among Vietnamese Catholics and

particularly in his home base of central

Vietnam.

Uh and so, the Viet Minh built the

biggest political organization. The Viet

Minh were able to recruit the peasants

uh whereas most of the other political

groups didn't uh show much interest.

It's a communist party that they are.

It's disciplined, there are lots of

people, has the ability to take power

from the top right down into the

villages and mobilize large numbers of

people.

By the early 1960s, Hanoi's policy

shifted further again uh towards

supporting the guerrilla war that was

already developing fast in the south.

Uh meanwhile, the United States had

built up its own forces. They had

surpassed the Geneva limit on foreign

forces in South Vietnam.

The position of this administration

has been carefully considered

and we have sought to make it just as

clear as we know how

to the governments concerned. President

Kennedy pledged aid to Diem. It hadn't

been long since America had not been

able to defeat the communists in North

Korea and they were intent on not losing

to them again in Vietnam.

In 1961, 400 American Green Beret

special advisers are sent to train

soldiers in the fight against the Viet

Cong guerrillas under Ho Chi Minh.

In October that year, General Maxwell

Taylor reports to the president and

advises Kennedy to expand the number of

US military advisers and to send 8,000

combat soldiers. The number of troops

sent by Kennedy will eventually surpass

16,000 by 1963.

It was a serious mistake for Kennedy to

get involved as he did

with American force in that part of the

world

thinking that this great monolithic

Soviet-style communism

would rule the roost

when he could have played it

differently, I believe, and fought it

more subtly. The great word of the

Vietnam War gave us was escalation.

Because it starts off with Kennedy

sending

in just 400 military advisers who are

actually special forces

organizing and and controlling the

action and then more go in and then more

go in.

He should have fought it with the

limited aid he gave it initially with

the development of the special forces,

the Green Berets as they're called, and

and other small tactical units and not

created this great uh surge of North

Vietnamese resentment. South Vietnam is

already under attack.

Sometimes by a single assassin.

Sometimes by a band of guerrillas.

Recently by full battalions.

The peaceful borders of Burma,

Cambodia,

and India

have been repeatedly violated

and the peaceful people of Laos

are in danger of losing the independence

they gained not so long ago.

The eventual result was that uh, United

States decided that the South would lose

very quickly if it didn't change policy

and that the United States needed to

move in with regular forces on a large

scale.

The Chinese, whether communist or

nationalist, were age-old enemies of the

Vietnamese.

It was the Soviet the threat of Soviet

communism and the fact that China had

fallen with Mao in a way that was

assisted by the Soviets.

Was

to the Americans they they

created this monster in their

imaginations and they had to go and

fight it.

There's something happening here,

but what it is ain't exactly clear.

In the final analysis, it's their war.

They're the ones who have to win it or

lose it. We can help them.

We can give them equipment. We can send

our men out there as advisers, but they

have to win it, the people of Vietnam

against the communists. So, all we can

do is help and we're making it very

clear. But I don't agree with those who

say we should withdraw. That'd be a

great mistake.

President Kennedy was conflicted about

Vietnam. He realized that he couldn't

give up the territory, but faced a

crisis by July. Despite increased US

support, the South Vietnamese military

was not making any ground against the

Viet Cong forces.

The regime of South Vietnam's president,

Ngo Dinh Diem, comes to an end in a wave

of violence. A few days before the army

revolt, these last pictures showed a man

who seemed to have no premonition of the

horrible death he was to meet. The

situation in Saigon was intensifying as

the Viet Cong fought against Diem,

ultimately leading to his death. Mortar

fire concentrates on tanks and armored

carriers blocking the way to the palace.

For 2 and 1/2 hours, the palace comes

under heavy bombardment before the white

flag is raised. Meanwhile, Diem and his

brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had fled the

palace in disguise. They were later

captured only to die in an armored car

that was taking them to prison.

3 weeks later in the US, the nation was

to be shocked by the tragic

assassination of President Kennedy on

November 22nd, 1963.

At 1:25, the motorcade moves into the

downtown area. Death is 6 minutes away.

In a warehouse, a sniper with a rifle

poised waits.

The cheers of the crowd almost muffle

the three shots. The assassin's aim is

deadly.

From Dallas, Texas, the flash,

apparently official, President Kennedy

died at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time,

2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38

minutes ago.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson has left

the hospital

in, uh, Dallas, but we do not know, uh,

to where he has proceeded. Uh,

presumably, he will be taking the oath

of office shortly and become, uh, the

36th President of the United States.

Lyndon Johnson was thrust into the

presidency after the assassination. The

country was in disarray. The worsening

situation in Vietnam had been Kennedy's

most pressing problem and Johnson

inherited America's commitment to

Vietnam and to defeating communism.

President Johnson, for all his great

virtues, wasn't very strong on foreign

policy. Uh, he was had been in the Navy

during the Pacific war and he believed,

one, that overwhelming force worked

militarily and number two, he was a

great Texan wheeler-dealer. He figured

if he waved a big stick, he could

negotiate with Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh

didn't want to negotiate with anyone.

He knew eventually he would win. They

could control how many people

they were losing and all they were doing

was keeping their casualties down to

below their birth rate.

In August 1964, an incident off the Gulf

of Tonkin triggered a reaction from

President Johnson. The determination of

all Americans to carry out our full

commitment to the people and to the

government of South Vietnam

will be redoubled by this outrage.

Ultimately, this reaction would lead to

the beginning of a war in Vietnam, a war

that still resonates. The justification

remains a question to this day.

Lyndon Johnson became the 36th President

of the United States after the

assassination of John F. Kennedy in

November 1963.

He inherited an economic crisis in

America that saw him proclaim a war on

poverty.

He had inherited another conflict, a war

on communism and America's commitment to

Vietnam.

The increased strength of the Viet Cong

and the rise of communism demanded more

resources from Johnson, but until now,

he had resisted the need to escalate the

situation.

However, in August 1964, President

Johnson decided to act after events at

the Gulf of Tonkin. Destroyers of the

United States Navy are assigned routine

patrols from time to time.

Sunday, August the 2nd, 1964, the

destroyer Maddox was on such a patrol.

Shortly after noon, the calm of the day

is broken as general quarters sound.

When they had Gulf of Tonkin in vertical

instant comes along

and that there's a a a

a spurious report that that, uh,

American, uh, warships have been

attacked by by Vietnamese, uh, patrol

boats. They use this an excuse. The Gulf

of Tonkin incident illustrates this

capability for instant retaliation

against unprovoked attack. The USS

Maddox's captain sent a report that

three North Vietnamese torpedo boats

supposedly fired on them, but then sent

a retraction that it had been foul

weather and not an attack. However,

President Johnson ignored the retraction

and ordered the bombing of torpedo boat

bases and an oil depot.

President Lyndon Johnson obtained a

almost unanimous approval from the US

Congress to,

uh, escalate the war in Vietnam and

bombing aircraft was sent north.

He knew everyone on Capitol Hill he

could get anything through that he

wanted. They gave him this Gulf of

Tonkin resolution which he said it was

like grandmother's nightshirt, it

covered everything.

And it just gave him, um, carte blanche

to to to to to fight how he wished.

It is my duty to the American people

to report

that renewed hostile actions

against United States ships on the high

seas in the Gulf

of Tonkin

have today required me

to order the military forces of the

United States

take action in reply.

But repeated acts of a violence

against the armed forces of the United

States

must be met

not only with alert defense,

but with positive reply. That reply is

being given

as I speak to you tonight.

Full-scale military reaction on Vietnam

had begun. The Viet Cong retaliate with

a bombing onslaught on a US air base.

One of the major impacts of the United

States build-up of ground troops in

South Vietnam was that the communist

guerrillas in the South started

recruiting, uh, at a increased level

themselves and in fact, from 1964 to

1965,

the communist guerrillas quadrupled

their recruitment. Meanwhile, the United

States was building up and its forces at

an even faster rate, uh, to hundreds of

thousands. The American commitment on

the ground in South Vietnam rises from

12,000 to 200,000.

And suddenly, everyone in America is is

is is affected.

Despite a campaign for de-escalation of

US involvement, Johnson's attack on

Vietnam is greeted with much support in

the USA and his popularity rises. He

wins a landslide victory to be US

President. Within a year, he had given

the command for Operation Rolling

Thunder to begin.

Forces on both sides built up with the

contribution made from North Vietnam of

regular troops coming into the fighting

as well. Uh, And the destruction that

was being conducted and carried out in

the villages of South Vietnam,

particularly the populated areas where

the impact was greatest, but also in the

forested areas, the level of destruction

escalated enormously from the mid-60s

onwards. And had an enormous impact on

the Vietnamese people's livelihood, on

the way people tried to survive in the

cities fleeing from the countryside

where the war was strongest into the

cities.

The cities began to fill up with rural

refugees.

Protest movements developed in the

cities.

The continuous arrival of US troops and

a large build-up of the South Vietnamese

Army meant that America could inflict

large casualties, not just on the

northern regulars who had moved south,

but also on the guerrillas and the South

Vietnamese communist regular troops as

well.

Large-scale rioting in Saigon continues.

We have made a national pledge

to help South Vietnam

defend its independence.

And I intend

to keep that promise.

America could not politically invade

the north cuz they had declared war.

This This was a police action

so that they couldn't invade the north.

But they did feel they were able to bomb

it.

This was called Operation Rolling

Thunder.

And they just tried to pulverize all the

industry, all the supply lines,

everything in the north. And in a month

they would drop as much ordnance on

North Vietnam as had been dropped in the

whole of World War II.

This bombardment of air raids would last

3 years together with the deployment of

Agent Orange.

This was just the start of a war that

would rage for many years. A war that

would affect Vietnam and America for

decades to come.

The fear of encroaching communism drew

America into the conflict of the Vietnam

War.

Fear scares the hell out of everybody.

And who pays for it?

People were so gung-ho about attacking

the North Vietnamese that they made some

serious mistakes.

At first, the 400 special forces were

just sent as advisers to the Vietnamese,

but these numbers were soon to escalate.

The word advisers needs to be taken with

a grain of salt. Pilots were flying

missions, helicopters, and large amounts

of military equipment were being

supplied by the United States.

We did the only anti-war coverage in

America going on then. You couldn't come

out against the war. Kids were beaten up

by cops in every town and city in

America for coming out against the war.

Public opinion, which had supported the

war at first, turned when endless

battles were shown nightly on television

without any sign of success.

Because of the exposure,

the American public became suddenly

aware of how self-destructive this war

was. I was aghast at the number of

people who really had no concept at all

of what the war was about in a fighting

sense.

The Age of Aquarius brings civil

dissent, peace marches, the death of a

president, and a North Vietnamese leader

who is playing a patient game. When you

put young men in harm's way, they do bad

things.

Were there any Americans who thought the

Americans were going to win the war? So,

what are you doing in the jungle?

From Dallas, Texas, the flash,

apparently official, President Kennedy

died at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time.

Vice President Johnson has left the

hospital

in Dallas, but we do not know to where

he has proceeded. Presumably, he will be

taking the oath of office shortly and

become

the 36th president of the United States.

Lyndon Johnson has made his way to the

presidential plane. There he takes the

oath of office ensuring that

presidential power is unbroken.

The first milestone of his presidency

was the signing of the new Civil Rights

Act of 1964 into law.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident is used by

Johnson to launch into the war. He has

kept things low-key till now in order to

be reelected.

As an ex-Navy man, he is keen to take up

the challenge to finish the war and

retaliates with air attacks.

The determination of all Americans to

carry out our full commitment to the

people and to the government of South

Vietnam

will be redoubled by this outrage.

America has misinterpreted Ho Chi Minh's

intentions and instead of supporting him

earlier against the French, they opposed

him. Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, but

with no other support, he had to turn to

the Russians into the arms of the

communists. He wasn't a a screaming

nationalist fanatic. Didn't come across

as fanatic at all. He wasn't a

communist, he was a nationalist. I mean,

he was a great hero to his country, you

know. I mean, they called him Uncle Ho.

And he looked like your uncle and it was

He was smiling and uh

he looked like a lovely guy.

The vast Mekong River can provide food

and water and power on a scale to dwarf

even our own TVA.

Johnson was in the mindset that if he

went in with force, Ho Chi Minh would

capitulate. Johnson offers Ho Chi Minh a

vast development program for Vietnam if

they pull back.

And we remain ready with this purpose

for unconditional

discussions.

Ho Chi Minh calculates that he and

General Giap will eventually rid Vietnam

of this American influence in the south.

President Johnson, for all his great

virtues, wasn't very strong on foreign

policy. He believed that overwhelming

force worked. He was a great Texan

wheeler-dealer. He figured that that

that if he waved the big stick, he could

negotiate with Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh

didn't want to negotiate with anyone. In

my view, on reflection, of course, is

that we may have picked the wrong side

when it came to Ho Chi Minh in

particular

and General Giap.

We were stuck with it. And then all

these murderous bombing runs began.

Johnson retaliates with Operation

Rolling Thunder.

The Americans, not being able

politically to invade North Vietnam,

tried to bomb it into a carpet.

President Johnson is advised that the US

airfield at Da Nang is vulnerable to

attack from the North Vietnamese and the

South Vietnamese Army lacks the strength

to defend it.

I have asked the

commanding general, General

Westmoreland,

what more he needs

to meet this mounting aggression.

General Westmoreland requests a few

battalions to protect the airfield. This

is the first of many requests for

further troops and by the end of the

year, numbers of US troops would rise to

200,000.

It escalated and escalated. I mean, LBJ

escalated and then then then suddenly

everybody was escalating it, you know.

Suddenly, everyone in America is is is

affected.

The bombing campaign and increasing

troops does little to stop the North

Vietnamese Army moving personnel and

supplies through Laos and into South

Vietnam.

American B-52 planes are sent in to bomb

North Vietnam for the first time. These

continuous devastating air raids would

last for 3 years and include with heavy

deployment of Agent Orange.

Agent Orange was actually used on

American highways to keep the weeds down

off the side of expressways.

It But, it was used in massive amounts

in Vietnam. And there's dioxin, which

causes the cancer birth defects.

As more and more US troops are sent to

Vietnam, the stark reality of the war

hits home in America.

Anti-war demonstrators protest US

involvement

Vietnam War. Public support for the war

begins to slide as anti-war

demonstrations increase in the US.

125,000 Manhattan marchers include

students, housewives, beatnik poets,

doctors, businessmen, teachers, priests,

and nuns. Makeup and costumes were

bizarre.

In a major war effort, the ground

offensive Operation Cedar Falls begins.

30,000 US and South Vietnamese troops

are sent to destroy Viet Cong operations

and supply sites near Saigon.

Protest rallies and marches against the

war in Vietnam continue to increase.

Veterans from World War

World War and Korea stage a protest in

New York City.

Muhammad Ali was world champion from

1964 until 1967, when he was stripped of

his titles. He caused a sensation when

he refused to be inducted into the army.

You my enemies? My name is the white

people, not Viet Cong or Chinese or

Japanese. Yes, I'll just no comment on

boxing, religion, induction. No comments

on the weather or nothing. for the

press.

He refused to step forward. He was

sentenced to 5 years in jail.

They took They stripped his title.

While he was waiting for the Supreme

Court to decide his case, he spent his

time going to colleges, talked all over

the country. He gave young people the

guts to come out against the war.

Other artist activists, such as Joan

Baez, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan had

joined what was to become an

international movement against the

Vietnam War.

In April 1967,

Martin Luther King Jr. makes a powerful

speech. Previously, he had not been

vocal about Vietnam in order not to

upset President Johnson as the civil

rights legislation was going through

during his presidency.

He speaks out against US policy in

Vietnam, calling America the greatest

purveyor of violence in the world. He

publicly denounces their military

presence in Vietnam and proposes a

merger of the anti-war and civil rights

movement. The promises of the Great

Society

have been shot down on the battlefield

of Vietnam.

The pursuit of this widening war

has narrowed the promised dimensions of

the domestic welfare programs, making

the poor,

white and negro, bear the heaviest

burdens both at the front and at home.

In June 1967, the first Monterey Pop

Festival takes place, showcasing many

artists who've been expressing their

anti-Vietnam feelings. When Jimi Hendrix

takes to the stage, many young men in

the audience already have their draft

papers.

You had Ravi Shankar on one side, and

then you had The Who smashing up guitars

on the other, and Jimi Hendrix somewhere

in the middle.

And that would certainly have been a

kind of rallying cry for

uh you know, increasing anti-Vietnam

sentiment.

There have been various incidents of

burning draft cards, but this was

brought into intense focus when it was

acted out in the musical Hair in New

York in October 1967.

People in colleges were pretty well

organized by this time, because they'd

been fighting for civil rights.

So, they knew how to protest. And and

this

essentially divided the country, that

the younger generation know how to cause

trouble, know how to, if necessary,

avoid the draft and and and flee to

Canada. Whereas, the older people

remember World War and remember being

right.

1967,

the Summer of Love had a bloody

underbelly.

Young American boys are sent to fight

their counterparts in Vietnam. This will

be brought to a terrifying conflagration

with the shock of the Tet Offensive.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara

visits General Westmoreland to assess

the situation on the ground. Their

advice to President Johnson is taken up,

and troop numbers are eventually

increased to more than 500,000.

As more and more US troops enter

Vietnam, the siege of Khe San begins,

and the Marines are cut off.

The United States had begun to suspect

that the North Vietnamese strategy was

to lure

the Americans into a remote outpost. The

Americans thought that they could win

that if they built up enough forces and

win a conventional battle against the

North Vietnamese. And so, they built up

the large base of Khe San.

They expected that the attack would come

there. And indeed, it built up all

through December and January.

However, this was a distraction from the

main event. On the night of January

30th, the Vietnamese New Year, some

80,000 Viet Cong attack 36 capitals, 64

towns, and four American bases. Around

4,000 Viet Cong attack Saigon, occupy

the grounds of the US Embassy, and hit

General Westmoreland's headquarters.

This was known as the Tet Offensive.

Americans have to engage intense force

to recover from the sudden onslaught.

THE AMERICANS THINK THEY'RE IN CONTROL

of the the country. Then comes the Tet

Offensive.

Tet is is the Vietnamese Lunar New Year.

The Americans say that there's no chance

that the Viet Cong are going to attack

them during Tet. It would be like a

starting an offensive on Christmas Day.

It wouldn't happen.

However, again, nobody read the

Vietnamese history books.

The Vietnamese won one of their greatest

victories against the Chinese

attacking on Tet. The Tet Offensive was

essentially led by the Southern

Vietnamese Communists, Viet Cong, backed

by the North Vietnamese. Um but, it was

a Viet Cong inspired uprising. Dozens

and dozens of cities

came under near simultaneous attack by

mostly NLF Southern guerrillas who had

been moved into position largely unknown

to the US forces.

Suddenly, every town and city in South

Vietnam, there were explosions going

off. There's there's gunfire. The Viet

Cong even send a suicide squad into the

American Embassy, and they hold it for

hours.

This is on American television.

The Americans see their own embassy

occupied by the enemy. The fact that the

Viet Cong had entered the American

Embassy in Saigon and

caused a great deal of damage shattered

public opinion and American faith in

winning the war, if the war was ever

winnable. They can't believe what

they're saying. They're being told that

they're winning this war, and it doesn't

seem that they are.

The Battle for Hue was the response to

Tet to endeavor to take back the

territory that had been lost to the Viet

Cong. It's regarded as one of the

bloodiest and longest battles of the

Vietnam War, ending in March 1968.

Fighting is violence, and if ever a

Marine had to rely on his own quickness

and toughness, this was it.

House to house,

street to street

for 3 long weeks.

Massive retaliation was taken, and the

Viet Cong was swept out out of the

cities, and and largely annihilated.

And this is again was part of Ho Chi

Minh's strategy,

because he realized that eventually he

was going to win the war, and he didn't

want these

annoying Southerners, many of whom were

in the Viet Cong weren't necessarily

Communists, they were just nationalists.

He wanted to get rid of them, and this

was a wonderful way

uh to do it. This meant that the North

Vietnamese forces, which had not even

appeared in many parts of the South, for

instance, the Mekong Delta by that time,

now began to play a much bigger role in

the war. And it became necessary for the

Communist forces to have North

Vietnamese reinforcements to keep up

their level of activity.

After the first day, Marines owned just

two blocks of the city.

Two blocks.

And the price is dear.

Militarily, it was a defeat for them.

But, in political and public relations

terms, it was a huge success and uh

badly damaged American morale um

particularly at home.

Um and the tide of the war changed. On

the north side of the river, the enemy's

position begins to crumble.

Marines, along with the South Vietnamese

Army Marine and Ranger units, move into

the Imperial Palace.

This great strategist was Ho Chi Minh

because he realized fighting the

Americans it wasn't about what actually

happened in Vietnam, was what happened

on the television set in the United

States. So, if he could get

the war on the news every night he knew

that America would tire of it sooner or

later and he'd get his way.

Finally, the job is finished.

25 days of heavy fighting.

Enemy losses in the thousands.

And each Marine knows he's been a part

of a historic battle.

Knows he rates the traditional well

done.

Although America did win back their

territory, this was a huge turning point

in the war as America loses its

appearance of invincibility.

Vietnam was the first television war. It

was on the nightly news in America and

it was on the news here in the UK. Um

and so had a phenomenal impact. It was

in American living rooms every evening.

It's getting near dawn.

Now, CIA men and MPs have gone into the

embassy and are trying to get the

snipers out. This is the main Vietnamese

language radio station in Saigon.

And it went on and on and on. And of

course, the people in America knew that

their sons were going and there were

shots of the body bags coming home.

And it's totally demoralizing. America

has this great sort of culture of

winning and they

believe that with their wealth, that

their technical expertise and their

manpower, that they could do anything.

The smoke turned on us again and out of

it in the briefest lull in the

crossfire, soldiers came running out

carrying children.

Every time you went around a corner, you

see a a palm leaf move and you think,

Christ, it's an ambush. Every time you

see a junk, you think, ah, it's full of

explosives. I mean, this is how American

television had weaned me into Vietnam.

So, I went out there convinced I was

either going to be killed

or I was going to fail in the story. My

very first story of Vietnam, Apocalypse

Now, the scene where they're on that uh

little boat big machine gun up there.

Well, that was my first story.

River Marine Patrol, it was called.

And I was absolutely terrified. I mean,

really quite terrifying.

Patrols like these in the Mekong Delta

are convinced that they're winning their

war against the VC.

They put a success there

as evidence of their success, the number

of VC dead and the number of VC

defectors.

But they have nevertheless the

substantial backing of thousands of

well-armed and well-trained troops plus

barracks ships, helicopters and gunships

and the River Marine Force.

The problem about TV is that when there

were big things happening in Vietnam

your bosses wanted daily news.

Television journalists would go to a

battlefield, but they would have to

leave the battlefield by a certain time

to get back to Saigon Airport and ship

their film to Hong Kong. There were no

satellites, of course.

We were shooting film. Usually, if

you're doing a a feature story we just

get to New York then they would

develop it and edit it with your

narration. Now, it's sort of hard, I

think, for journalists, TV journalists

today

to relate to the fact that we were

writing our narrations

without ever having seen

the film that we were narrating. You

just watched what you were covering. You

watched what your cameraman was filming.

And you wrote to what you thought he had

filmed. And then you lay down the

narration.

And often win.

The fire spreads, the people leave and

in no time at all, that area is charred

and ruined and destroyed. You couldn't

go too far. So, my area of operations

tended to be done in the Mekong, which

as it turns out, was a pretty dangerous

place to be anyway.

For one moment, they

they panicked and practically said the

mortar hit right in the middle of them

down there on the right of After 6:00 in

the evening, there was nothing to do.

That's when we all got into trouble.

Um and now, I mean, there was nothing

like 24-hour news.

And I remember the when when the

satellite first came up, it was Charles

Collingwood who said to me

our glory days are over.

We're going to have to work for a living

now.

The journalists working out of Saigon

all seem to have a huge affection for

the city. It is their retreat from the

war, a short helicopter ride away.

Nothing could be more of a contrast to

the war than their cocktail hour back at

the hotels. We stayed at a hotel in Lam

Son Square, which is bang next to the

Congress building. The safest part of

town. That little center seemed to be

protected. Saigon was a fantastic place

to be.

It had a very exciting atmosphere.

Didn't seem to be in great danger at

that time. There were French

restaurants, there were um there's an

old

French residual community there who were

very attached to Vietnam. They had Viet

Nam Vietnamese wives, a lot of them. It

was French. You know, the wide streets,

the plazas, the squares, the trees

the flowers

and the restaurants. You could go to war

in the most horrific circumstances and

see some rather dreadful things

and then you'd come back and go out into

Saigon

cross the road and have the most superb

French meal with quite excellent French

wine.

The American public has no escape from

the war. General Westmoreland's request

for more troops had required students to

be drafted. This results in an increase

in demonstrations as the public feel

helpless against this distant struggle.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail was developed from

earlier footpaths used for trading.

It started just south of Hanoi and due

to the mountain range Truong Son, the

trail dropped into Laos and Cambodia and

then into South Vietnam west of Da Lat.

At first, it took several months to

reach the south. However, the volume of

traffic expanded gradually from carrying

loads on soldiers' backs or in carts to

improvements being made to accommodate

heavy trucks.

Dotted along the route were fuel storage

tanks and field hospitals. The trail was

covered by the heavy jungle canopy and

therefore hidden from US bombing raids

until the bombing became so intense,

destroying the jungle and using Agent

Orange to defoliate.

Even so, the determination of the North

Vietnamese would just make another path

around to join the trail again. This

trail was supplying several hundred

thousand troops in the south against the

US.

My unit was trying to achieve a workable

uh

interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail

where it came into

South Vietnam north of Saigon.

They bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail with a

supply trail that ran down through uh

Laos and latterly through Cambodia. The

Ho Chi Minh Trail was in fact a series

of trails.

Some of them big enough to take vehicles

down as they carried the stuff.

It was weapons, food, medicine, that

sort of thing for the fighters in the

south who were either North Vietnamese

or Viet Cong.

So, the the bulk of the people we fought

in firefights were either North

Vietnamese coming down the trail or Viet

Cong. The great story of the war, the

best story of the war, was never told.

Because the best story of the war was

the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

How the guys got from North Vietnam,

from Hanoi to a large extent into South

Vietnam and when they got to South

Vietnam, managed to fight

is superhuman.

A year of my life was spent either

ambushing people or trying to avoid

being ambushed by them.

That was it. It was ambush warfare and

that's what the nature of the firefights

were. The fantasy, the journalistic

fantasy, was to go down the trail

with the North Vietnamese.

But it it never happened.

For years now, the Viet Cong have been

strong in the Delta.

It's where they've always raised taxes,

food and recruits. And recently, they've

even been enrolling boys of 14 and 15.

But the Americans say that since the Tet

Offensive, Viet Cong tactics have become

much more aggressive.

Pressure came down from the top levels

to inflate the body count and

sometimes this was done with false

reporting of the number of communists

killed in particular actions, but also

including civilian casualties in the

body count.

The Americans thought they'd succeeded

in keeping at least the main waterways

of the Delta clear of Viet Cong, but now

they find that they're not safe even

there.

The person who first realized Ho Chi

Minh's strategy was Robert McNamara,

that the communists were controlling the

action in the battlefield. They could

attack

and run away

at will.

So, they could control how many people

they were losing, or their casualties

were. And all they were doing was

keeping their casualties down to below

their birth rate, which meant

essentially they could fight forever.

And of course, the Americans weren't

going to fight forever. Eventually,

they'd go home. The NLF also were able

to keep recruiting amongst people who

were disillusioned or disgusted by

the destruction and the casualties

inflicted on the Vietnamese rural

population. It was a kind of place where

you had

you know,

brothers fighting for the ARVN, the

South Vietnamese Army run by the South

Vietnamese

American puppets, and then you had his

brother in the Viet Cong.

And the Americans could never understand

what was going on. They didn't

understand the language, they didn't

understand the culture.

They didn't understand how that was

possible. I mean, there weren't any Can

you imagine in the Second World War you

have one

GI and his brother is with the Nazis?

Unimaginable.

But this is what was going on through

the whole war.

President Johnson continues this huge US

bombing campaign of Rolling Thunder,

targeting the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the

main. The tonnage of ordnance would

surpass all that was dropped in World

War II.

Make no mistake about it.

I don't want a man in here to go back

home thinking otherwise.

We are going to win.

There's another aspect to the war in

Vietnam, which is race. This was the

first time there was a major commitment

of mixed race units. Um

a lot of young black Americans wanted to

prove their status in in in American

society, their manhood, if if you will.

He wanted to get young black men into

the army, so he could supply proper

medical assistance to them, give them

education, and get them out of the

ghettos, and improve their lot. As the

war started to go badly, the black guys

said, "Well, hold hold on. Why are we

dying dying over here when the the enemy

is

back home in America?"

In the early years of the war, the black

and Latino soldiers were professionals

in mostly mixed race units. By the end

of 1968, draftees account for over 30%

of American troops. Amongst these are

many black soldiers who are growing more

and more disaffected in what they called

a white man's war, when there were so

many racial issues to deal with back

home.

As the casualty rate increased,

conscription was now to include college

students who had previously been exempt.

This meant that although the majority of

US soldiers were still volunteers, their

numbers now included middle class white

Americans who were forced to defer their

university education.

When I first went out there in '68, the

majority of the infantrymen were all

working class Americans.

But when the Americans abandoned this

avoidance of the draft, and suddenly in

in Vietnam, we saw the arrival not of

the officer class, but of white middle

class kids in the ranks. These are young

men who have to go and fight, and we had

the draft comes in, and so you may have

to fight against your will. And then the

whole idea of the draft dodger comes in.

Well, it wasn't the fact so much that

they were university students,

it was the middle class.

The middle class was getting drafted.

Not a chance. Forget it, which is why

there hasn't been a draft since then.

World War II draft brewers, I mean,

everybody believed in the war.

You suddenly had middle class kids being

drafted in to do the same job.

And they were writing letters home.

Their parents were appealing to their

congressman.

And that's when it all started to

change.

Giant protests

were

not only not even so much the soldiers

as their mothers.

Because what the hell is my boy doing in

Vietnam? Hey, he should be

doing his graduate work now. Well, you

could get a student deferment for a

while, but the middle class was getting

drafted, which you can

make a coherent theory

saying that that's why we lost the war.

They're only going there for a year

tour,

whereas the Vietnamese fighters are

there all the time. So, every time you

send a fresh young guy who's just come

out of college, they have to start again

with a with a new guy who who who knows

nothing.

All the challenges have been met. The

enemy is not beaten, but he knows that

he has met his master in the field.

President Johnson was under tremendous

pressure over the lack of victory in

Vietnam.

The Battle of Hue had been the response

to the Tet Offensive, as US forces

managed to regain the territories that

had been lost. But all their claims of

victory were like dust in the hand,

because this amounted to only a

stalemate.

In addition, at home, despite all his

efforts to pass a Civil Rights Act

through Congress to become law, the lack

of improvement for the black situation

caused the Black Power Movement to be

active against him.

The Democratic Party splits into many

factions. Johnson does badly in the New

Hampshire primary, and ends his bid for

re-election. The nation is stunned.

With American sons in the field far

away,

with America's future under challenge

right here at home,

with our hopes and the world's hopes for

peace in the balance every day,

I do not believe

that I should devote an hour or a day of

my time

to any personal partisan causes,

or to any duties other

than the awesome duties

of this office,

the presidency

of your country.

Accordingly,

I shall not seek

and I will not accept

the nomination of my party for another

term as your president.

The famous CBS anchor, Walter Cronkite,

hadn't been in in Vietnam since 1965.

He went back, saw what he had to see,

and said on American television, "We're

not winning.

Can't win."

And at this point,

President Johnson said,

"If I've lost Walter, I've lost the

American public."

And he resigned.

A strike in Memphis causes Martin Luther

King Jr. to return to his hometown.

After his march had been interrupted

with civil unrest, he gave his I Came to

the Mountaintop speech. And I've looked

over

and I've seen

the promised land.

I MAY NOT GET THERE WITH YOU,

BUT I WANT YOU TO KNOW TONIGHT

THAT WE AS A PEOPLE WILL GET TO THE

PROMISED LAND.

SO, I'M HAPPY TONIGHT. I'M NOT WORRIED

ABOUT ANYTHING. I'M NOT FEARING ANY MAN.

MY

EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY OF THE COMING

OF THE LORD.

At his motel the next day, preparing to

leave for another meeting, Martin Luther

King Jr. is shot in the head and dies.

That April sees the beginning of riots

in many US cities.

For Ho Chi Minh and General Giap,

unification of Vietnam was

non-negotiable. Peace talks were just

another tactic to slow down the war.

In 1966, Ho Chi Minh stated that North

Vietnam was willing to make war for the

next 20 years. But if the Americans want

to make peace, we shall make peace and

invite them to afternoon tea.

In May 1968, the first peace talks begin

in Paris, but end in stalemate. This

process of meeting peace talks would

continue for more than 4 years. Now that

President Johnson's not in the running

for re-election, Robert Kennedy is the

most promising candidate for the

Democratic presidential nomination.

On June 5th, Robert Kennedy wins the

California primary at the Ambassador

Hotel, Los Angeles. My thanks to all of

you and now it's on to Chicago and let's

win there.

Leaving the hotel through the kitchen,

he is shot three times and dies later in

hospital.

Robert Kennedy was the great white

liberal hope and he turned against the

war in Vietnam and as his brother had

got them in there in the first place, it

only seemed apt.

He was a threat to Lyndon Johnson.

But Lyndon Johnson about that time

decided that he would not run in

November.

And Hubert Humphrey then had to run for

president in the Democratic Party and of

course Nixon was against him.

Let me tell you what those four years

have done to America.

The longest war that America's ever had

in this history. The worst crime wave

we've ever had in our history. The

highest taxes we've ever had in our

history. The highest rate in the cost of

living that we've had in a generation.

And the lowest respect for the United

States of America in our history.

As the squabbling for the presidential

election continues, violent conflict

breaks out, particularly in Newark and

Detroit. In Chicago, a huge anti-war

protest outside the Democratic National

Convention leads to ugly clashes with

police.

Hubert Humphrey gains the Democratic

nomination but loses to Nixon by a

majority vote of less than 1%.

Along comes President Nixon who promises

peace with honor.

To get the boys out of there and

everything's going to be all right. I

decided in my mind, I was in Vietnam at

the time,

that I would vote for Nixon because he,

rather than Hubert Humphrey, would end

the war and he would some find some way

to extricate the United States out of

that mess.

Unfortunately, that's not what he gave

America.

He pulled some of the people out but he

expanded the war in it into Cambodia and

Laos.

However, less than two months into

office, President Nixon orders the

secret bombing of Cambodia, ostensibly

to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the

supply enclaves just over the border.

This covert bombing of over half a

million tons of ordnance would actually

stretch across the whole of Cambodia and

was carried out without the knowledge of

Congress or the US public.

We will aid Cambodia. Cambodia is the

Nixon doctrine in its purest form. In

Cambodia, what we are doing is helping

the Cambodians TO HELP THEMSELVES.

AS PART OF NIXON'S strategy of reducing

soldiers on the ground and attacking the

Vietnamese

communists while trying to negotiate

peace in Paris,

he launched

an illegal bombing against the Viet Cong

camps in

Cambodia.

And he even followed up that with an

illegal invasion. Richard Nixon gave the

order for the strategic bombing of

Cambodia using US B-52 high altitude

bombing aircraft and the escalation of

the bombing of Cambodia occurred from

March 1969.

The war had then spilled over from South

Vietnam. We We learned later that had

been secret American bombing going on.

Um

the South Vietnamese forces and the

Americans moved into Cambodia to try and

wipe out the Vietnamese communist

sanctuary areas in the eastern part of

Cambodia which bordered on South

Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh dies.

General Giap carries on the strategy of

the war. The Age of Aquarius ends with

students being shot down by the Ohio

National Guard. South Vietnam has lost

its US support and fights a desperate

war alone against the north. Nixon's

secret war crimes are brought to light

in the Pentagon Papers in the Washington

Post with the New York Times.

General Giap still stands strong for the

north as the war in Vietnam rages on.

The Vietnam War had already lasted for

13 years.

May 1968 saw the beginning of the Paris

Peace Talks. The intention was to stop

the fighting between North and South

Vietnam, establish peace and remove the

enormous American military presence.

America had supported the South

Vietnamese since 1955.

Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon

Johnson had escalated America's

involvement in the war, resulting in

more than 500,000 troops in Vietnam.

In January 1969, Richard Nixon became

president and faced extreme hostility to

a war that had raged for so long. He

assured the American public that he

would withdraw the number of US troops

considerably.

However, he initiated a secret plan and

within two months was bombing Cambodia.

On September 2nd, 1969, President Ho Chi

Minh, hero of the revolution, dies.

He had been the father figure of the

National Liberation Front and had played

an amazing game of bringing support from

the Soviet Union whilst keeping China at

bay in his quest to rid Vietnam of the

French and then the Americans.

In 1969,

Ho Chi Minh had died but the policy of

Hanoi stayed the same.

They were happy to sit around the table

in Paris but would essentially agree

nothing.

Nixon had campaigned under his banner of

peace with honor, which was the plan to

build up the South Vietnamese forces so

that they could defend the south against

the communist north or Vietnamization.

US troops would be gradually removed.

The American life the last few years of

the war was building up

Vietnamization. They called it

Vietnamization and

creating a South Vietnamese army which

was going to salvage South Vietnam from

the North Vietnamese evil communists.

Nixon comes to office. He's pulling

Americans out and they're training up

the South Vietnamese to to fight their

own battle. But a lot of these guys,

they considered the Americans the real

deadly enemy as much as the communist

Vietnamese do and they don't want to die

fighting their brothers.

So they're pretty incompetent. No, the

South Vietnamese army.

I thought the South Vietnamese had

behaved disgracefully during the war and

then were treated disgracefully by the

United States between the peace treaty.

I think the South Vietnamese were

exceptionally badly led from the time of

Diem onwards.

News broke out in November 1969 that

there had been a massacre at the village

of My Lai where more than 400 villagers

had been slaughtered by Lieutenant

Calley and his troops.

This village was not a stronghold of of

guerrillas. It was just an ordinary

village.

There was a village nearby that was a

stronghold of the Viet Cong

but Lieutenant Calley, who was in charge

of the platoon, couldn't read a map.

They went into this village,

essentially shot everybody and they

raped a lot of the young women and then

killed them. They threw one old man down

a well and dropped a grenade in after

him.

Eventually, the survivors were herded up

into a drainage ditch

and everyone just emptied their guns

into the pile of bodies there.

When you put young men in harm's way,

they lose control. They shoot everything

anything that moves, you know.

Um

and then you run into guys like

Lieutenant Calley who were psychopaths.

I'd venture to say there were 50 My Lais

that we never heard about.

Calley was sentenced to life.

He served, I think, 18 months under

house arrest before being discharged.

You know, the Americans can't be doing

this.

Land of the free and trying to free the

South Viet. They can't be killing the

people they're coming here to defend.

But I have to say that after a few years

of being out there back and forth,

it was pretty commonplace. One of the

most astonishing things that I can

remember, we met a a colonel.

A very well-educated American. He spoke

ancient Greek.

Uh he had got a business degree from

Harvard. Everywhere he went, he took his

Thai chef. And he took French wine

everywhere he went. It was just like a

movie. I mean, so much of Vietnam is

like A MOVIE.

WE INTERVIEWED HIM AND THEN HE SAID,

"WELL, GENTLEMEN, thank you very much.

I'm now off to kill Cong." I said,

"You're going on a a mission, sir?" He

said, "No, no. Every afternoon when

there's nothing happening, I get in my

Bell helicopter and I take my hunting

rifle with me

and I go and search for Kong. And if I

see somebody in the fields, I give them

a little bit of a run and then I kill

them.

There you go, Sarge.

And I said, "You identify them?" He

said, "No, no.

I just kill them."

So,

we said goodbye and on the way back to

Saigon, I said to the PIO, the press

information man, a young young kid, I

said, "He was pulling my plonker, wasn't

he? I mean, uh

he was pulling my leg.

He goes out and shoots Kong in the

afternoon? Oh, yes, sir, he says. He

just

takes his hunting rifle and

I said, "But the man's mad." He said,

"Oh, no, sir, not mad. Uh

but uh you know, when you live down

there, you've got to do something like

that in your spare time or why is a man

could go crazy."

Thousands of demonstrators opposed to

the Vietnam War assembled in the

nation's capital for a mass protest. The

Paris peace talks are not moving forward

with any sense of resolution. The

American public are disgusted at the

cover-up of the My Lai massacre.

Military police contain the crowd, but

clashes soon break out. Huge anti-war

demonstrations converge on Washington

and outside American embassies in

European cities. The intense secret

bombing of Cambodia continues. President

Nixon will soon be under even more

pressure to end the war.

A small group of Vietnamese seeking a

confrontation marched at night on the

South Vietnamese Embassy.

Washington police used tear gas to drive

them away. Arrests were made.

Mr. President, some Americans believe

this country is heading for revolution.

And others believe that crime and

dissent and violent demonstrations are

leading us to an era of repression.

This country is not headed for

revolution.

Uh the very fact that we do have the

safety valves of the right to dissent.

The very fact that the President of the

United States asked the district

commissioners to waive their rule for 30

days notice for a demonstration.

That fact is an indication that

when you have that kind of safety valve,

you're not going to have revolution

which comes from repression.

As the hostilities in America continue,

soldiers in Vietnam now have draftees

amongst them, many of whom are voicing

their distrust of the war, causing

unrest in the ranks.

For my entire tour of duty and I think,

by and large, all of my soldier

colleagues felt

we were wasting our time.

But

we've been told to do it and we were

soldiers and we were good soldiers and

so we did it. It's a very very very very

desperate terrain there. And once you

started to move north, you became

different. Of course, you had mountains,

you had uh

Pleiku, the Central Highlands. But

certainly in the south, you had vast

areas of of

paddy fields that you had to go through.

Yeah, well, that's that's when you know

a war is lost. And you're still there,

you're sort of the the the left behinds.

You have no enthusiasm or any verve

because you know that the cause might

have seemed appealing

5 years ago, but it's it's gone. So,

what what are you doing in the jungle?

Which is why so many Americans

got hooked on drugs cuz

there was no mental way out.

It just didn't make any sense.

The secrets of atrocities in Vietnam and

bombing in Cambodia break in the press.

The US public is shocked and outrage

takes hold.

When Senate transcripts were made

public, news of increased US involvement

in Cambodia and Laos surfaces. This

leads to more demonstrations across

America.

When Richard Nixon announced that his

troops were being committed to Cambodia,

the

anti-war movement was revived in

America. Huge moratorium marches

protesting against the war in Cambodia

spread to all parts of America and to

other places such as Australia. In some

cases, the National Guard fired on

protesters.

Tragedy strikes at Kent University, Ohio

in May 1970. Several anti-war protesters

hurl rocks at the National Guard who

open fire on the crowd, killing four

students.

Now, parents of America

are shocked. These are nice middle-class

kids who were shot down by their own

people. Congress gets up in arms and

essentially stops funding the war.

They'll stop increasing the return of US

troops from South Vietnam.

The Vietnam War suffers decreasing

support in the US. President Nixon is

forced into eliminating the use of the

draft. With ongoing peace talks in Paris

stalling, he introduces another peace

plan.

With a continuing legacy of

de-escalation, there were fears this was

leading to a wider conflict in

Indochina.

The new president of North Vietnam, Le

Duc Tho, and Henry Kissinger begin

secret talks in an attempt to resolve

the situation. The peace talks were not

very successful, especially under Nixon.

However, it was clear that the war could

not be ended finally without an

agreement. And during 1971,

uh the US conceded it would not oppose a

continuation of the North Vietnamese

troop presence in the south.

In 1971, The New York Times publishes

the Pentagon Papers.

This shows an incredible legacy of

deception concerning US policy in

Vietnam.

President Nixon appeals to the Supreme

Court in an attempt to stop the

publication of sensitive material.

However, the court rules in favor of The

New York Times and allows continued

publication.

Under pressure from the Democrats, Nixon

changes his policy and orders the

gradual reduction of 540,000

troops in Vietnam.

What you had was a South Vietnamese army

essentially fighting backed by American

air power and with some American

advisers still there.

The next step was the 1972 North

Vietnamese offensive which led to a

revival in some parts of South Vietnam

of the NLF guerrilla war.

Vietnamese communists mobilized and used

tanks in a much in a conventional war

style which they hadn't used before.

They drove across the demilitarized zone

um in into South Vietnam from North

Vietnam. They

uh captured

various towns in the Saigon region,

particularly place called An Loc.

And the United States bombing of North

Vietnam indeed escalated through the

year 1972 while the peace talks were

going ahead.

We have adopted a plan

which we have worked out in cooperation

with the South Vietnamese for the

complete withdrawal of all US combat

ground forces.

President Nixon addresses the American

public about withdrawing all US troops

and therefore all involvement with the

war in Vietnam.

Ongoing secret peace talks are revealed.

However, Nixon cannot stop himself from

making more onslaughts in Cambodia.

He also wants to force the hand of the

North Vietnamese to make concessions in

these talks. So, he orders the bombing

of fuel storage areas near Hanoi and Hai

Phong. The administration makes it clear

to the North Vietnamese that no area of

Vietnam is off-limits to bombing raids.

Nixon

every so often stopped the bombing of

the north to try and encourage them to

say something. When they didn't, he

started bombing them even more and

attacked Hanoi and Hai Phong and they

even mined the harbor at Hai Phong to

prevent supplies getting in.

The famous incident of Kim Phuc, the

little girl whose picture of her back

burning with napalm running naked down

the street, that was

that was about 45 minutes out of Saigon.

You you felt the war. You could you

could hear the bombing. There were

rockets coming into Saigon from time to

time. You'd wake up in the middle of the

night and there'd be a

from a shuddering blast.

Napalming a a village, I mean, to see a

village suddenly destroyed in front of

you by a simple napalm bomb,

it's a pretty devastating thing to to

watch. But a few weeks after I got into

the country, into my unit, up in the

side of a mountain, we got bushwhacked.

And the ambush came from above.

By the time everything was sorted out, a

Super Sabre, an F-100, came clambering

up the valley

and dropped its payload up above us.

And it was napalm.

And it was

you know, red fire and black smoke, just

like in the various war films you see.

It was far away not to get singed by it,

but you could certainly feel

the atmosphere change.

Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reach an

agreement in principle on various key

measures leading to a ceasefire in

Vietnam. However, the South Vietnamese

President Thieu refuses to agree saying

the war in the South is still ongoing.

President Nixon has a bit of a problem

because he's coming up to face a new

election and he'd promised peace with

honor

and hadn't delivered it. Um,

so there's great pressure on him and his

national security advisor there, Henry

Kissinger, to

get some peace agreement.

At this point, the communist government

in Hanoi,

probably seeing the possibility of an

agreement before the election, dropped

its demand that the Thieu government be

replaced. And this meant that an

agreement was possible and this was

announced in October of 1972.

Its people have suffered much and they

will remain there

after we leave.

We believe

that peace is at hand.

The Americans just wanted to be out of

the war and they were finding any any

way of doing it and peace with honor as

they called it.

They want to get the American army out

of South Vietnam

and then the South Vietnamese government

would fall and then the communists would

take over. They knew it was it was going

to happen. It was just they didn't want

it to happen the day after they left.

The deal that President Thieu wanted

when it was clear that the Americans

were going to cut a deal with the

North Vietnamese which would bring the

American prisoners back home as well

which was a huge issue in America was

that President Thieu see that it was

very bad deal for South Vietnam because

he wanted a deal whereby the North

Vietnamese troops would withdraw and

that was the deal that the Americans

couldn't make the North Vietnamese agree

to. So, they put pressure on President

Thieu to sign up to this peace agreement

which he did very reluctantly. We have

ended the longest and most difficult war

in our history in a way that maintained

the trust of our allies

and the respect of our adversaries.

President Thieu is finally forced into

signing with promises of aid against any

further aggression from the north. The

ceasefire is signed on January 28th,

1973.

Then the US troops withdrew, the North

Vietnamese handed over the 500 or more

prisoners of war who had been held in

the north, mostly pilots shot down

there, and the agreement went ahead

between Hanoi and the United States. For

the Americans, the war was over. They

got their prisoners home. They had lost

55,000 Americans. Out of that 55,000,

half of them were 17 or 18-year-olds in

which it had been a traumatic experience

for America. So, they just wanted to get

out.

When the war ended in 1973,

591 prisoners were returned. This was

only about 12% of those requested by the

US. What happened to the other 3,109

that were asked for? Henry Kissinger

sent a secret letter to the North

Vietnamese Prime Minister that the US

was willing to pay 3.2 billion dollars

for the return of the remaining

prisoners of war. The US Senate voted

against it.

America, I felt, just wanted to forget

in a way Vietnam existed. After the

signing of the Paris Peace Agreement,

the fighting continued for South

Vietnamese

in the South Vietnam and a thousand

Vietnamese were dying a week. So, in a

year the casualties were more than

the Americans suffered in the entire

war.

The last American combat soldiers leave

South Vietnam. Though the military

advisors and marines protecting US

installations remain,

the US draft program is closed.

The Nobel Peace Prize is given to

Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. However, the

North Vietnamese President does not

accept it as peace has not arrived in

Vietnam. The North is still attacking

the South.

In America, President Nixon faces his

own crisis. In June 1972, a story in the

Washington Post had reported that

burglars had been arrested inside the

office of the Democratic National

Committee in the Watergate complex in

Washington. The reporters, Woodward and

Bernstein, would investigate the story

until they found evidence that a $25,000

check from Nixon's re-election campaign

had been given to one of the burglars.

I believe that most anyone who worked at

the White House

during the past four years can attest to

the concern that prevailed regarding any

and all leaks.

The full story of Nixon's aides became a

huge political scandal. They had been

running an election campaign employing

spying and sabotage. I think it is time

in this country to quit making national

heroes out of those who steal secrets

and publish them in the newspapers.

However, more secrets are revealed which

will make Nixon's presidency untenable.

In 1974,

President Thieu announces resumption of

war against the North Vietnamese who

have been encroaching on the South in

violation of the peace treaty. Weakened

by wave after wave of air attacks from

America since 1969,

neighboring Cambodia is vulnerable to

its own rising threat, the Khmer Rouge.

Cambodia is a case completely apart. I

mean, it's never been equal in modern

times because it was an attempt by a

small coterie of Cambodian communist

leaders to turn it into a utopian

agrarian society and destroying all of

its connections with the outside world.

Once the Americans pulled out, the

communists took over in Laos and then

the Khmer Rouge, who were only a handful

of communist guerrillas, and they

managed to force out the compromised and

weakened Cambodian government

ending in what, 2 million dead?

The fallout from the Watergate scandal

ultimately forces Nixon to resign from

the presidency before being impeached.

In leaving it, I do so with this prayer.

May God's grace

be with you

in all the days ahead.

In August 1974, Gerald Ford Jr. becomes

the 38th president.

With American troops out of Vietnam, the

press report events there less and less.

The public has lost interest in the war.

The Vietnam War didn't concern

Americans, particularly after all the

coverage it had gotten for 10 years.

Um, it wasn't that big a story.

I was on the telex with the foreign

editor in New York.

And I said, "I'm catching a flight into

Saigon tomorrow."

And he said, uh,

"Are you volunteering to go to Vietnam?"

I didn't quite understand

what was going on.

I said, "I'm I'm

booked. I'm going in tomorrow."

He said, "You're you're volunteering to

go."

And this kind of I finally caught on.

What he was doing was

establishing on paper

that I was volunteering

to go to Vietnam, that I was not being

assigned

to go to Vietnam.

So, that whatever happened,

"Hey, he volunteered. We didn't make him

go. We didn't even ask him to go. We

didn't even suggest that he should go."

"You know how dangerous it is? Do you,

uh,

really want to go?

Are you volunteering?"

So, it just went on like that. So, I

kept And eventually I said, "Yeah, I'm

volunteering. I'm going tomorrow."

In Vietnam, President Thieu makes a

mistake and withdraws all his troops

from the north causing mass panic. It's

not long before the Viet Cong communists

lay siege to the province just north of

Saigon.

There is no response from America.

The Viet Cong move in on Hue and take

the city.

Just a few minutes ago we had

confirmation that the city of Hue had

fallen to the communists. It looks very

much as if the North Vietnamese up there

allowed these troops and these people to

leave the beaches without firing on

them, giving them a chance to get away

before entering the city.

The North Vietnamese gradually built up

strength and decided that they would,

uh, go for broke, that the Americans

were not going to intervene. So, they

launched, uh, a lightning offensive and

swept up the country taking over

provincial towns north of Saigon. Early

Monday morning, a Viet Cong sapper unit,

probably no more than 20 or 30 men and

women, attacked and set fire to an

American USAID installation, closing the

bridge and Highway 1.

The South Vietnamese army simply cannot

hold the line against the North

Vietnamese, who are professional and

dedicated, well-trained soldiers.

Congress is now trying to wash its hands

of the whole thing and is cutting back

budget for aid to to to the South

Vietnamese, so they're being restricted

with their armaments. They're getting

nothing at all. President Thieu made a

huge strategic blunder in withdrawing

the remnants of the South Vietnamese

army from these threatened northern

areas and to bring them around to Saigon

to protect Saigon, which the result was

that the rest of the country fell

completely into the communist hands,

and then it was just a matter of time,

really.

President Thieu resigns reluctantly,

stating that in the end, the South

Vietnamese had been let down by the

Americans. The North Vietnamese army

seized the opportunity and close in on

Saigon.

America needed to get as many of its

remaining people out from the embassy,

sending in all available helicopters.

The Vietnamese also sensed the communist

advance was close and were desperate to

flee. Panic engulfed Saigon.

I'll tell you one thing which was really

interesting, which I don't think it's

been reported that much.

In the big

parking lot of the embassy, there was a

beautiful tree, and the ambassador

Graham Martin refused to cut down the

tree.

The CIA was going to him and saying,

"Cut down that tree, because this is

where the helicopters are going to land.

We'll have to land."

And Martin refused.

The docks on Tuesday morning were

crammed with thousands of Vietnamese

desperate to escape from Saigon by any

means possible.

I remember filming in Saigon where

mothers were throwing their babies to

strangers on the ship, literally

throwing them like a bit of like a

parcel. "Save Save my baby." They

throwing their babies on board. You saw

soldiers stripping off their uniforms

and fighting almost naked to get on

boats.

Many people died because their flimsy

craft had sunk. They were often

overloaded. They were attacked by

pirates who who raped and killed, and it

was a general disaster.

The Americans actually sent some

aircraft in to airlift their own

Vietnamese employees out of their

embassies. Uh we had been told by the

CIA, "We expect to evacuate

uh within the next 24 hours, 36 hours.

What we don't want is for you guys to

panic. So, we've arranged there'll be a

signal broadcast by AFN, American Forces

Network." They said it'll be Bing Crosby

singing White Christmas.

You imagine it's 150° outside. Could you

think of anything

so

incredible

that Bing Crosby singing I'm Dreaming of

a White Christmas would be the signal

that the evacuation had begun?

And when they told us in advance, a

couple of days in advance, that this

would be it, we thought they were

joking.

By that time, the embassy is surrounded

by thousands of Vietnamese all trying to

get into the compound.

And we really had to fight and claw our

way through this crowd to get to the the

wall.

People, lorries, and cars all chasing

one American evacuation convoy after the

other.

Jams that the Vietnamese police tried to

clear with their rifles, but people were

no longer afraid of them. There was now

so much more to be afraid of.

When we finally got to the wall,

Marines had to really reach down

and pull us up. And then, you know, we

see we're being pulled up, but all the

people around us, including

lovely kids,

were not being pulled up. But then,

suddenly, we, too, the 40 or 50 of us in

the safety of the coaches, had to get

out and fight our way to the American

compound where the helicopters were

landing to fly us and the thousands more

out of the country.

And you had

pictures, movie pictures,

of the Americans on the plane punching

actually punching people off, and you

had helicopters flying off

with people hanging on the skids

and then dropping off. They were so

desperate to escape. We did fight, we

did claw.

I remember saying in my commentary that

when I wasn't proud of what I did that

day.

But we got to the wall and the Marines

were pulling us up, they punching the

Vietnamese and pulling us up over the

the top.

He hauled us up, kicking and punching

Vietnamese who were clamoring over our

bodies.

Ashamed and exhausted, we took our turn

in the long crowd of refugees inside the

embassy compound and waited for the

helicopters to come down for us.

I've been doing this for 48 years,

and I think that's number one on my

list.

The last day of Saigon.

The Americans losing their first war.

Leaving

from the American embassy to go to

a ship in the South China Sea that was

an admission of defeat.

And the helicopter that took us out,

it was open in the rear, and I was just

lying down on my stomach, looking out

the uh

back of the helicopter,

saying goodbye to Saigon.

And for me, I think for all of us who

were there,

and not meaning any disrespect, it'll

never be Ho Chi Minh City, it's Saigon.

20 years since America first began

financing the South Vietnamese, it was

finally out of Vietnam. In the

desperation to get as many people to

safety, the carriers at sea struggled to

cope with the mass of fleeing people.

The carriers were were so full of

helicopters, they were then having to

push helicopters that were very

expensive over the side so so others

could land.

In the general chaos of the situation,

the Americans did not burn the files,

secret files in the their embassy. So,

when when the North Vietnamese army

turned up, the communists knew exactly

who had been working for the Americans,

and of course, these people, if they

weren't killed, were sent to reeducation

camps.

A former general called Big Minh became

president, and the communists knew that

there was nothing stopping them. They

were militarily superior. The Americans

weren't going to intervene to stop them

taking Saigon, and they just rolled on

relentlessly.

When a tank turns up at the government

house in in Saigon, it's all over. The

new interim president is told, "You

can't surrender

what you don't have." He didn't have any

power, he didn't have any troops, so

it's it's just all over. The communist

side wins, it's a victory for them.

North Vietnam, the Democratic Republic,

along with its fighters in the south. Um

and for a year or so, you have the two

countries continue to exist side by

side. In 1976, the countries emerged

into formed the Socialist Republic, one

country.

The culmination, really, of what Ho Chi

Minh and the other nationalists had been

calling for, fighting for, ever since

1945. The new Socialist Republic of

Vietnam is declared with its new capital

in Hanoi, and Saigon is renamed Ho Chi

Minh City.

A very harsh period then happened in

South Vietnam.

Soldiers ended up in reeducation camps

all over the country and taken up to

North Vietnam and put into camps. Many

of them died. They tried to impose

hardline

socialist Stalinist economic methods on

the south, and the result is almost

starvation.

When

the Khmer Rouges attacked our provinces

in the west, my heart is with my

country.

And I wrote article.

They found that in that article, there

was some kind of

fighting there.

Some kind of

love in there.

And they took me, the communists took me

a

their side.

And they asked me

to spy on my colleagues, and I cannot do

with that.

And I started to think of

running away.

In America, Jimmy Carter is elected

president and issues a pardon to all the

draft dodgers.

In 1978, the Socialist Republic of

Vietnam invades Cambodia and defeats the

Khmer Rouge, forcing them back into

their jungle refuges on the Laos border.

The outside world, whether it be the

United States and Europe, is fearful of

what Vietnam intends to do in Southeast

Asia, and so they actually condemn and

impose sanctions on the Vietnamese for

getting rid of the Khmer Rouge. with

people China decides to invade Vietnam

and takes border cities, giving the

warning, "The gate to Hanoi is open."

The Vietnamese put up a very stirring

defense and gave the Chinese

a bit of a bloody nose. And so Vietnam

is almost completely isolated

internationally. It's only friends with

the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc

from 1979 right the way through the

1980s. This is a very very tough time in

Vietnam.

The ravages of war have destroyed the

agricultural base of these societies.

Entire villages have been decimated.

People forced to abandon their lands.

From being net exporters of rice, many

regions of Southeast Asia have become

net importers.

The pride of self-sufficiency is gone.

What is left for millions of people is

dependency on aid from the outside and

the long search for a new life.

Many were desperate to escape the

communist government and the terrible

conditions they were forced to endure.

Many Vietnamese tried to flee en masse

in heavily overcrowded boats.

I pretend to be a Chinese.

I pay

the gold

to Chinese boat master.

So,

we three,

myself, my wife, and my baby, we went

out to the Mekong River Delta.

Our wooden boat is about 25 m long. It

got 650

something

people. So, even when it was still not

moving yet,

people in the boat started suffer

already because we did not have enough

air to breathe.

We were in the sea

for

just 2 days when the engine got into

trouble.

Every light gone out and in the dark,

you can hear everyone

pray.

I put my

wife and my daughter

in the very dangerous situation, but

it's too late.

And I

I cursed myself. The British commercial

ship

passed by. The wife of the captain asked

to return to pick us because she saw

people from our ship. We were lucky.

And then the ship took all of us to Hong

Kong. All of us were put into the

prison.

We were there for 4 weeks.

At the end, we signed a paper

of

with the IOCM

um to

borrow from them the money to get

tickets, one-way tickets from Hong Kong

to England.

For those Vietnamese who didn't get out

of Vietnam, the extremely difficult

times continued. The report on the

devastating effects of Agent Orange is

revealed both in Vietnam and to the US

veterans involved in the deployment of

the toxic mix.

Some of the most beautiful countryside

in the world was just a desert.

There were bomb craters where there

should have been fields. Agent Orange

was causing all sorts of birth defects

in children.

I don't think that when the Americans

were defoliating areas of Vietnam, they

were intending to leave a long-lasting

injuries in terms of future generations

were going to

be malformed as a result of these

dioxins, these chemicals which have been

dropped on them. That really wasn't the

intention, but that in certain parts of

Vietnam, that's what has happened.

Paul Reutershan had been in contact with

Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. Shortly

before his death from abdominal cancer

in December 1978,

he founded Agent Orange Victims

International, which fought for

compensation for US soldiers, filing

multiple lawsuits against the six

chemical companies in the US that

produced the Agent Orange, most

significantly Dow and Monsanto.

The class action case was settled in

1984 for $180 million.

Of the 105,000

claims, approximately 52,000 Vietnam

veterans or their survivors received

cash payments, which averaged only

$3,800

each.

In 1982, as a tribute to the thousands

of US soldiers who died in Vietnam, a

veterans memorial opened in Washington.

However, the Vietnam veterans who

survived have never been given the

support they deserve. After the takeover

of the communists, Vietnam was left with

a legacy of extreme war damage,

unexploded bombs, and an impoverished

economy. America dropped 7.8 million

tons of bombs on Vietnam, more than it

unleashed on Germany and Japan combined.

We were back there for one of their

Independence Days. They had this

communist parade down the main street of

Saigon up to the presidential palace.

Giap and the others were there, the old

soldiers, the old liberators.

And when you were on a tight shot, you

were on them. When you widened up behind

them on the roofs of buildings were

advertisements for Sony and Sanyo and

Toyota.

So, communism?

Who won the war?

There always were coffee plantations in

South Vietnam. In the central highlands,

the French had them, but the Vietnamese

did clear a lot of land and build up

these coffee plantations. Vietnam has

become the world's second largest coffee

producer. It took most of the 1980s for

the Vietnamese to extricate themselves

from Cambodia, renegotiating

their relations with the outside world.

By gradually allowing more and more

freedom at the local economic level, the

country was able to to feed itself again

and get to the position where Vietnam is

the second largest rice exporter in the

world.

In recent years, Vietnam has become one

of the fastest-growing global economies.

It is a significant agricultural

exporter, the third largest oil producer

in Asia, and an important manufacturer

of textiles, clothing, and computer and

mobile phone components.

Estimates of its population exceed 92

million.

Even now, Vietnam remains a communist

country despite all the trappings of

motorbikes and advertising and all that

sort of thing that you see. The

Communist Party is still in charge of

the organization of the economy and it

still sees a big role for the state and

it has big agricultural enterprises.

Vietnam has become actually quite

successful, but there is still a lot of

pressure censorship, quite a lot of

oppression if you get out of line. But

it's also the the economy of South

Vietnam has been helped by a return of

South Vietnamese boat people who've gone

to America, for example. So many of the

Vietnamese who've come to the States

have done so well.

And it was predictable and these weren't

the rich Vietnamese who

who managed to get out 6 months before

the end of the war. These were boat

people

who are now

doing so well in this country and have

been doing so well in this country for a

couple of decades now. And they've gone

back home

to South Vietnam and set up businesses

there. So, the country is quite

dependent on an enormous amount of money

that comes in from the Vietnamese

diaspora.

The Vietnam we knew during the war

had a lot more um

reality to it.

Saigon itself has changed enormously. A

lot of the old French buildings have

been torn down and buildings, the

high-rises with marble and glass and

Louis Vuitton shops and Prada shops. If

I asked myself, I said, you know,

um is this really what

these Vietnamese communists were

fighting for?

There's no question that as soon as the

war was over,

they began building an economy.

And look at Vietnam today.

Mhm.