Original subtitles

(helicopter blades chuffing)

♪ Logic and proportion ♪

♪ Have fallen sloppy dead ♪

♪ And the White Knight is talking backwards ♪

♪ And the Red Queen's off with her head ♪

♪ Remember ♪

♪ What the dormouse said ♪

♪ Feed your head ♪

♪ Feed your head ♪

(helicopter blades chuffing)

(tense music) (airplane engine roaring)

- [Narrator] The Vietnam War

had already lasted for 13 years.

(explosions booming)

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.

(dramatic music) (woman vocalizing)

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.

(bombs blasting) (woman vocalizing)

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 died,

but the policy of Hanoi stayed the same.

They were happy to sit around the table in Paris,

but would essentially agree nothing.

♪ When the truth is found ♪

- [Narrator] 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.

♪ Don't you need somebody to love ♪

- The American lie the last few years of the war

was building up.

Vietnamization they called it.

Vietnamization meant creating a South Vietnamese Army

which was going to salvage South Vietnam

from the North Vietnamese evil communists.

(gun blasting)

- Nixon comes to office.

He's pulling Americans out,

and they're training up the South Vietnamese

to fight their own battle.

But a lot of these guys,

they considered the Americans to be the enemy,

as much as the communist Vietnamese do,

and they don't wanna die fighting their brothers.

So they're a pretty incompetent lot,

the South Vietnamese Army.

- I thought the South Vietnamese

had behaved disgracefully during the war

and then were treated disgracefully by the United States

during the peace treaty.

I think the South Vietnamese were exceptionally badly led,

from the time of Dien onwards.

(mellow rock music)

- [Narrator] 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 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.

♪ This is the end ♪

- When you put young men in harm's way, they lose control.

They shoot anything that moves.

And then you run into guys like Lieutenant Calley,

who were psychopaths.

I'd venture to say there 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 colonel, a very well-educated American,

he spoke ancient Greek,

he'd 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.

(explosions blasting)

(soldier yelling)

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 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 Cong,

"and if I see somebody in the fields

"I give 'em a little bit of a run

"and then I kill 'em."

- [Soldier] There he goes, Sarge!

(gun blasting)

- And I said, "You identify them?"

He said, "No, no, I just kill 'em."

So, we said goodbye, and on the way back to Saigon

I said to the PI there, the Press Information man,

a young kid, I said, "He was pulling my plonker, wasn't he?"

"I mean, he was pulling my leg?

"He goes out and shoots Cong in the afternoon?"

"Oh, yes, sir," he says,

"he just takes his hunting rifle, and..."

I said, "Well, the man's mad."

He said, "Oh, no, sir, not mad.

"But when you live down there

"you've gotta do something like that in your spare time

"otherwise a man could go crazy."

(rousing music)

- [News Reporter] Thousands of demonstrators

opposed to the Vietnam War

assembled in the nation's capital for a mass protest.

- [Narrator] 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.

- [News Reporter] Military police contain the crowd,

but clashes soon break out.

- [Narrator] 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.

- [News Reporter] A small group of Yippies,

seeking a confrontation,

marched at night on the South Vietnamese embassy.

Washington police used tear gas to drive them away.

Arrests were made. (siren wails)

- 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's not headed for revolution.

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 gonna have revolution

which comes from repression.

♪ It's the time of the season ♪

- [Narrator] 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'd 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.

Once you started to move north it became different.

Of course, you had mountains,

you had Pleiku and the Central Highlands.

But, certainly, in the South, you had vast areas

of paddy fields which you had to go through.

- Yeah, look, that's when you know a war is lost.

And you're still there, you're sort of the left-behinds.

You have no enthusiasm or any verve

because you know that the cause might have seemed appealing

five years ago, but it's gone.

So what are you doing in the jungle?

Which is why so many Americans got hooked on drugs,

'cause, there was no mental way out.

It just didn't make any sense.

♪ Has he taken ♪ ♪ Has he taken ♪

♪ Any time ♪ (explosions booming)

♪ To show ♪ ♪ To show you ♪

- [Narrator] The secrets of atrocities in Vietnam

and bombing in Cambodia break in the press.

The US public is shocked and outrage takes hold.

♪ It's the time of the season ♪

(upbeat rock music) (helicopter rotor chuffing)

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 protestors.

- [Narrator] Tragedy strikes at Kent University, Ohio,

in May 1970.

Several anti-war protestors hurl rocks at the National Guard

who open fire on the crowd, killing four students.

♪ Gotta get down to it ♪

♪ Soldiers are cutting us down ♪

- Now the 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 start increasing the return of US troops

from South Vietnam.

(crowd chanting)

- [Narrator] 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 the US conceded

it would not oppose a continuation

of the North Vietnamese troop presence in the South.

- [Narrator] 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 airpower,

and with some American advisors still there.

(rockets roaring)

- The next step was the 1972 North Vietnamese offensive,

which led to a revival in some parts of South Vietnam

of the LNF guerrilla war.

(tank rumbling)

- Vietnamese communists mobilized and used tanks

in a conventional war style which they hadn't used before.

They drive across the demilitarized zone

into South Vietnam from North Vietnam.

They captured various towns in the Saigon region,

particularly a place called An Loc.

- And the United States bombing of North Vietnam

indeed escalated through 1972,

while the peace talks were going ahead.

- [President Nixon] 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.

(upbeat rock music)

- [Narrator] President Nixon addresses the American public

about withdrawing all US troops

and therefore all involvement with the war in Vietnam.

Ongoing secrete peace talks are revealed.

However, Nixon cannot stop himself

from making more onslaughts in Cambodia.

(bombs blasting)

- [President Nixon] I still think we ought to

take the dikes out now.

Will that drown people?

- [Henry] That would drown about 200,000 people.

- [President Nixon] Well, no, no, no.

I'd rather use a nuclear weapon. Have you got that ready?

- [Henry] That, I think, would just be too much.

- [President Nixon] The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?

(Henry speaking faintly)

I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ's sakes.

(bombs blasting)

- [Narrator] 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 Haiphong.

The administration makes it clear to the North Vietnamese

that no area of Vietnam is off-limits to bombing raids.

(bombs blasting)

- Nixon, every so often stopped the bombing of the North,

to try and encourage them to say something,

and when they didn't, he started bombing them even more.

And he attacked Hanoi and Haiphong.

And they even mined the harbor at Haiphong

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 streets,

that was about 45 minutes out of Saigon.

You felt the war, you could hear the bombing,

there were rockets coming into Saigon from time to time,

and you'd wake up in the middle of the night

and there'd be a shuddering blast.

(bombs blasting)

- Napalming a village.

I mean, to see a village suddenly destroyed in front of you

by a single napalm bomb,

a pretty devastating thing to watch.

- Well, 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.

And by the time everything was sorted out,

a Super Sabre, an F-100, came clamoring up the valley

and dropped its payload up above us,

and it was napalm, ka-boom.

And it was red fire and black smoke,

just like in the various war films you see.

And it was far away, not to get singed by it,

but you could certainly feel the atmosphere change.

♪ I was born ♪

- [Narrator] Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho

reach an agreement in principle on various key measures

leading to a cease-fire 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.

So there's great pressure on him

and his national security advisor, 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.

♪ Change has gotta come ♪

- It's people have suffered much,

and they will remain there after we leave.

We believe that peace is at hand.

(gentle R&B music)

- The Americans just wanted to be out of the war,

and they were finding any way of doing it.

And peace with honor, as they called it.

- They wanna get the American army out of South Vietnam,

and then the South Vietnamese government will fall

and the communists will take over.

They knew it was gonna happen,

they were 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 could 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 American's 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 maintains the trust of our allies,

and the respect of our adversaries.

(gentle guitar music)

- [Narrator] President Thieu is finally forced into signing

with promises of aid

against any further aggression from the North.

The cease-fire 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.

And it had been a traumatic experience for America.

So they just wanted to get out.

- [Narrator] 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

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 the South Vietnamese,

in South Vietnam, and 1,000 Vietnamese were dying a week.

So in a year, casualties were more

than the Americans suffered in the entire war.

(artillery blasting)

(crowd cheering)

- [Narrator] The last American combat soldiers

leave South Vietnam, though the military advisors

and Marines protecting US installations remain.

The US draft program is closed.

(crowd applauding)

The Nobel Peace Prize is given to Kissinger

and Le Duc Thieu,

however, the North Vietnamese president does not accept it,

as peace has not arrived in Vietnam.

The North is still attacking the South.

(artillery blasting)

In America, President Nixon faces his own crises.

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 prevail regarding any and all leaks.

- [Narrator] 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 newspaper.

(audience applauding)

- [Narrator] 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,

(guns blasting)

(soldier shouts in foreign language)

(explosions booming)

- Khmer was a case completely apart,

I mean it's never been equaled 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 in there,

managed to force out the compromised and weakened

Cambodian government, ending in what, two million dead?

(gentle somber music)

- [Narrator] 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.

- [Narrator] In August 1974,

Gerald Ford Jr. becomes the 38th president.

With American troops out of Vietnam,

the press reports events there less and less.

The public has lost interest in the war.

- The Vietnam War, it didn't concern Americans,

particularly after all the coverage it had gotten

for 10 years.

It wasn't that big a story.

I was on the telex with a foreign editor in New York,

and I said, "I'm catching a flight into Saigon tomorrow."

And he said, "Are you volunteering to go to Vietnam?"

I didn't quite understand what was going on.

I said, "I'm booked. I'm going in tomorrow."

He said, "You're volunteering to go?"

And 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,

"Pfft, 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.

(explosion booming)

"You know how dangerous it is?

"Do you really wanna go?

"Are you volunteering?"

So it just went on like that.

And eventually, I said, "Yeah, I'm volunteering.

"I'm going tomorrow."

- [Narrator] 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.

(crowd chattering)

- 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.

(dramatic music)

- The North Vietnamese gradually built up strength

and decided that they would go for broke,

that the Americans were not going to intervene.

So they launched a lightning offensive

and swept up the country,

taking over provincial towns north of Saigon.

(gun blasting) - 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 can not hold

the line against the North Vietnamese,

who are professional and dedicated, well-trained soldiers.

Congress has now tried to wash its hands of the whole thing

and is cutting back budget for aid 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 communists' hands.

And then it was just a matter of time really.

- [Narrator] President Thieu resigns reluctantly,

stating that, in the end, the South Vietnamese

had been let down by the Americans.

The North Vietnamese Army seize 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.

(dramatic music continues)

- 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,

"will have to land."

And Martin refused.

- [News Reporter] 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 parcel.

Saying, "Save my baby!" 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 raped and killed.

It was a general disaster.

- The Americans actually sent some aircraft in,

to airlift their own Vietnamese employees

out of their embassies.

Now, we had been told, by the CIA,

"We expect to evacuate within the next 24 hours, 36 hours.

"What we don't want is for you guys to panic,

"so we've arranged there will be a signal,

"broadcast by AFN, the American Forces Network."

They said, "It'll be Bing Crosby singing 'White Christmas.'"

Can you imagine, it's 115 degrees 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.

(helicopter rotors whirring)

- 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 wall.

- [News Reporter] People, lorries, and cars,

all chasing one American evacuation convoy after another.

Jams that the Vietnamese police

try 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 we see we're being pulled up

but all the people around us, including lovely kids,

were not being pulled up.

- [News Reporter] 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.

(man yelling)

- 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 and we did claw.

I remember saying in my commentary

that I wasn't proud of what I did that day.

But we got to the wall and the Marines were pulling us up,

punching the Vietnamese and pulling us up over the top.

- [News Reporter] 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.

(helicopter rotor chuffing)

- 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 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.

(helicopter rotor chuffing) (tense music)

- [Narrator] 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 so full of helicopters

they were then having to push the helicopters

that were very expensive over the side so others could land.

In the general chaos of the situation,

the Americans did not burn the secret files in the embassy,

so 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 re-education 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.

(tank rumbling)

- When a tank turns up at the Government House in Saigon,

it's all over.

The new interim present

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 just all over.

- The communist side wins,

it's a victory for North Vietnam,

the Democratic Republic,

along with its fighters in the South.

And for a year or so,

the two countries continue to exist side by side.

1976 the countries had merged

to 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 re-education camps

all over the country and taken up to North Vietnam

and put into camps.

Many of them died.

- They tried to impose a hard-line, socialist,

Stalinist economic methods on the South,

and the result is almost starvation.

(dramatic music) (woman vocalizing)

- When the Khmer Rouge

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 fire in there,

some kind of love in there,

and they took me, the communists, took me,

their side.

And they asked me to spy on my colleagues.

And I can not live with that.

And I started to think of running away.

(audience cheering)

- [Narrator] In America, Jimmy Carter is elected president

and issues a pardon to all the draft dodgers.

♪ I seen the earthquakes and lightning ♪

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.

(guns blasting) ♪ Bound to take your life ♪

♪ There's a bad moon on the right ♪

- The outside world,

whether it would be 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.

- [Narrator] China decides to invade Vietnam

and takes border cities,

giving the warning the gates 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,

its only friends were the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc,

from 1979 right the way through the 1980s.

This is a very very tough time in Vietnam.

- [News Reporter] 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.

- [Narrator] 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 down to the Mekong River Delta.

Our wooden boat, it about 25-meter long,

it got 650-something people.

So even when it was still not moving yet,

people in the boat started to suffer already

because we did not have enough air to breathe.

We were in the sea for just two days

when the engine got into trouble.

Every light gone out.

And in the dark, you can hear everyone prayer.

I put my wife and my daughter

in that very dangerous situation, but it was too late.

And 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 four weeks.

At the end we signed a paper,

with the IOCM,

to borrow from them the money to get tickets,

one-way tickets from Hong Kong to England.

- [Narrator] For those Vietnamese

who didn't get out of Vietnam,

the extremely difficult times continued.

The reports 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.

♪ Old man lying by the side of the road ♪

♪ With the lorries rolling by ♪

♪ Blue moon sinking from the weight of the load ♪

♪ And the buildings scrape the sky ♪

- 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 long-lasting injuries

in terms of future generations were going to

be malformed as a result of these dioxins,

these chemicals which had been dropped on them,

that really wasn't the intention.

But that in certain parts of Vietnam is what has happened.

♪ And you will come around ♪

- [Narrator] 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 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 average only $3,800 each.

In 1982, as a tribute to the thousands of US soldiers

who died in Vietnam,

a veteran's 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.

Jap 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 built 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 feed itself again

and get to the position where Vietnam

is the second-largest rice exporter in the world.

(gentle upbeat acoustic music)

- [Narrator] 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 stuff 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 press censorship,

quite a lot of repression if you get out of line.

But, also, 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.

I mean, these weren't the rich Vietnamese

who managed to get out six 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's 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

reality to it.

- Saigon itself has changed enormously.

A lot of the old French buildings have been torn down

and buildings are high rises with marble and glass,

and Louis Vuitton shops and Prada shops.

So I ask myself, I said, "You know,

"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.

♪ Knowing that you lied ♪

♪ Straight-faced while I cried ♪

♪ Still I look to find a reason to believe ♪

(sinister rock music)