Original subtitles

On one side the United States of America,

the largest military industrial power of all time.

Since 1965, start of the escalation,

the Americans have thrown over a million tons of bombs on North Vietnam,

more than those launched on Germany during all of World War II.

A country whose 200 million people spend more on wrapping paper

than 500 million Indians spend on food

has many resources to offer its army.

Every morning in the Gulf of Tonkin

the aircraft carriers of the 7th Fleet are filled with bombs.

1,000 tons a day.

It's a war of the rich.

On the other side, a war of the poor.

That of 17 million North Vietnamese

and their compatriots in the South who fight for independence.

They are the poorest, but not the weakest.

They are the least in number, but not the most alone.

Because if the daily war puts Vietnam in a solitude

which Che Guevara compares to gladiators in the arena,

much of the Third World has become in solidarity with Vietnam

and Vietnam is where the fundamental question of our time arises:

the right of the poor to create, for progress,

a society based on something besides the interests of the rich.

In Cuba, Fidel Castro proclaimed 1967 the year of Vietnam.

He knows whereof he speaks.

And because the USA didn't manage to stop the Cuban revolution

in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs,

they will not allow the emergence of a revolutionary movement anywhere.

From here in Santo Domingo, the anti- guerrilla struggle in Latin America

and the enormous war effort in Vietnam.

America wants to show the world that revolutionary struggle is a dead end.

It chose Vietnam to prove a point.

Perhaps it was a bad choice.

and many other technicians, assistants and friends made this film in 1967

to affirm solidarity with the Vietnamese people struggling against aggression.

They are called guavas.

They are cluster bombs.

The unexploded ones are collected and defused.

A mother bomb scatters 300 of them in a kilometer radius

and each in turn flings 600 steel balls at human height.

These balls produce no effect on cement and metal.

Their logical destination is human skin.

Hanoi is less than an hour's flight from the 7th Fleet's aircraft carriers.

The bombings have created a new craft in the city:

the fabrication of individual shelters.

Cement tubes fitted with covers cast in wooden molds,

subjected to a whole series of consolidation operations

then buried along the roads to hold one or two people during air raids.

Poor materials against rich materials, poor technique against rich technique,

one always finds the same balance of power

and, on the American side, the same ignorance of the adversary.

American society has a principle: the poorest is always the least equipped.

Poverty can be the basis of moral strength superior to the rich aggressor

and America doesn't understand this.

It was decided to bomb Vietnam because at the American command

no one imagined that a small country could resist material destruction.

It was another demonstration, and it was twofold.

True, the Americans demonstrated they could, being strongest militarily,

penetrate airspace without declaration of war

and bomb a sovereign nation like Switzerland or England,

attracting only diplomatic reprimand.

But on the essential point,

to weaken North Vietnam's morale and dictate conditions of an American peace,

the experiment failed.

Joris Ivens wrote from Hanoi shooting these scenes:

"By living with them, one becomes calm like them.

And certain of victory."

All the travelers, even the American journalists,

testify to this calm, this certainty.

The Vietnamese do not bend.

They suffer a daily crime, but it's a useless crime.

Vietnamese newsreels Bombing of Hanoi, Dec. 13 & 14, 1966

In April of 1967, Vice President Humphrey goes to get an idea of Europe

and the view of Europeans on American policy.

They declare themselves very satisfied.

Humphrey go home!

Humphrey assassin!

Johnson weeps

In North Vietnam, in a bombed region,

the loudspeaker announces a popular theater performance

also giving instructions in case of alarm.

The characters with traditional costumes represent President Johnson

and a counselor who could be MacNamara.

In case you hadn't realized, the woman is portraying Johnson.

Oh, my F4H aircraft!

We call you Phantom

and you become ghosts.

And you, powerful Thunderchief!

God of lightning, you were yourself struck.

Oh Crusader, oh flying sabers! Oh Skyraider, runners of the sky!

You are returned to heaven.

Oh US Air Force, if the gods like you

find the way back to America!

So weeps our poor Johnson,

and we say to him:

"Pirates always receive

their deserved punishment.

Full of anger, you still bite

like a blinded player who persists.

If you still have any wisdom,

go back home!

Return to your home!"

And now the latest news from Radio Luxembourg

presented by Alain Quintrie.

"We must make life hard for the North Vietnamese.

Too bad for civilian casualties," is what you said...

I'm looking for a book by Herman Kahn.

Claude Ridder, a writer appointed by a film producer

to write an analysis of Herman Kahn's book "On Escalation".

He is torn and confesses, he is an imaginary character

and though no one risks seeing themselves in him,

we felt it necessary to listen for a moment,

contradictory, pathetic and honest in its way,

to the voice of bad conscience, that is to say, bad faith.

You really look like an owl.

You know something?

It's the first war in history that everyone can see live.

No one has ever seen a war so close, as it happens.

No one can say "if I'd known." Now they know and see.

"This war is an obscenity," not only the Pope says so,

but also Desgraupes, Zitrone. Everyone knows and sees.

The bombs make real deaths and the bullets real holes.

Poor lost orphans in a world that bewilders them!

And then what? Pity? Fear?

But this takes place on a piece of furniture.

Not in Vietnam, not in the head, not on the street, on a piece of furniture.

We can't be afraid of a piece of furniture.

We have the war in Vietnam in our living room

like grandfather has the map of a battle.

You know what this kind of information brings?

Vietnam again!

During the war in the Pacific there was a shocking image:

a Japanese burnt by a flamethrower extending his hand. In Manila.

A true symbol, all the horrors of war. After, we couldn't help but see it.

The editors knew him so well they nicknamed him Gustave.

He served all the causes, was in all the documentaries.

He represented Japanese imperialism the victim of its folly,

the Asian peoples the victim of white imperialism,

the eternal man the victim of eternal war.

He's nude and in flames and when he appears we say:

"Gustave again!"

They show massacres to try and cure people of war,

but they show them continually!

We end up confusing them, always the same scene for 20 years

and it doesn't stop a thing!

It's easy to start a war, you don't know how easy.

It only takes a little attention at the beginning.

Just mobilize the young until the first death, everything follows from that.

No more fighting for ideas, there's a friend to avenge.

Why don't you just say those hogs killed him, right?

No more shifting sands, now it's serious. It's not war anymore, it's revenge.

10 million brothers armed to avenge brothers killed, sisters raped.

It's not politics,

it's revenge, it's a crime of passion, it's assured absolution.

Take you or me.

Imagine you're in danger somewhere

and risk being hurt or dying.

There's someone who knows where you are and could say,

but for some reason he doesn't want to and keeps his mouth shut.

He has your life, your freedom locked between his jaws,

closed in his thick head,

and I'm there before him, with all my respect for people

and all my principles,

and I know that beating on his thick head

could force out your liberty or your life.

However odious torture is, and I've signed petitions against it,

I know doing this evil could stop the evil being done to you.

Well?

What do I do?

Can you tell me what to do?

I've never found myself in a similar situation.

The opposite yes,

and I followed my principles.

But it was luck, nothing more.

I judge others in the name of luck.

I became a partisan with no problem.

The Germans were monsters, no visceral problems.

I still feel a kind of animal panic when I hear German spoken.

Then I remember the last days

when suddenly, near a small village,

we ran into an American armored division.

The Jeeps, the heavy artillery,

the tanks, chewing gum, 1944.

We were rather happy to see them arrive.

After all we had no ammunition, I owe the Americans my life.

I will always love them.

Until the end of time I'll continue to kill Germans and love Americans.

Except the Americans are the Germans of the Vietnamese.

Everything gets complicated.

And even if you could stop a war somewhere,

it's like a permanent fire: it bursts out from somewhere,

millions of firefighters rush to extinguish it,

most of them die,

the fire goes out, no time for a breath and it starts up elsewhere.

Again millions of firefighters rush, die, put out the fire, and so on.

I swore to no longer support the firefighters.

I didn't think you could support the fire.

But what fire?

We must choose.

Vietnam is perfect, everyone is for Vietnam.

I know a place where they give "Vietnam meals":

for 1000 francs you get a bowl of rice, the proceeds go to the Red Cross,

like in 1914 with baguettes!

But there are no bowls of dates for the Yemenis,

yet they suffer! And the Kurds?

We're neglecting the Kurds. And the Sudanese?

50,000 dead in less than a year. And who worries about them?

It's like the stock exchange: Vietnam has the highest price,

the Sudanese the lowest, and the Kurds are a bit weak.

You say you're on the victim's side, but it's not true.

You choose victims. You have fashionable victims, convenient to you.

No one could bear all the unjust deaths, it's not human.

But if you look at why this and not that, yearly income, skin color,

you discover strange things within yourself:

a segregation of the dead, a class struggle of the dead.

But Vietnam is unanimity,

it's good conscience regained, it's joy, right, liberty.

Because Vietnam is the Americans

and the Americans are bad,

they're different from us, ignorant, tyrants, colonialists.

40 million anti- colonialists in France.

They hadn't realized it during the war in Algeria,

but we've made gigantic progress!

With the Americans, we don't hesitate to say what we think.

And in the meantime

American investment in France reaches two million dollars,

but there's no relation.

Here it is:

"Paris opens its doors to let the military leave

and capital enter."

So we can be anti-American

and in solidarity with the Third World in all tranquility.

You know what's worst? I'm comfortable like this.

It's perfect.

It gives me the right to drag it all in the mud

and to be the only good, sensible and generous one.

The right-wing bastards, the left-wing assholes. See?

There's no danger, they won't move.

The Russians in 1917 were real men.

Here everyone stays in their place. That's how it is in good families.

See the Americans in Vietnam: they send blacks and farmers, students deferred.

Result: the students take the luxury of protesting

and the "Great Society" the luxury of having students who protest.

It's a concerto where everyone plays their part.

You know why I detest these Americans?

Because they do too much.

They do so much that things start to change.

They made the rules and everyone played their game.

But the idiots didn't realize it

and now they're changing the rules of the game.

Prosperity, coexistence could last indefinitely,

but it's them that keep us from playing.

I was happy in my confusion.

And now the others come to upset me.

That pig Johnson! Bobby was more cunning.

He knew well the old shed had resources to continue like that.

There were pro and cons, yin and yang,

but it was still better than 100 years ago.

And then with technical progress, problems arise differently.

Old shed perhaps, but new generation of leaders, free from prejudice,

who treat the workers not as slaves, nor as pals,

but as associates

who cooperate at various levels in the common quest for prosperity.

You discuss, you negotiate, you associate. And then crack,

now grandpa goes crazy and opens fire on the strikers.

Consternation! Escalation! Suddenly everything is clearer.

If I were revolutionary instead of leftist, I suppose I'd rejoice, say "Bravo!"

He removes the mask, shows his ugly face and erases Budapest.

A generation was terrorized with revolutionary massacres,

but now we've seen the counter- revolutionaries aren't joking either.

We've forgotten a little after Mr. Thiers.

The Germans were fascists, that wasn't surprising.

We said they were like that by nature.

But look at the Americans,

respectable people, convinced democrats.

All the workers have cars, they're peaceful.

Violence is the others, war is the others.

They were forced to do it to help others,

but now it's over.

Some trouble with the Russians, but even that gets comfortable.

Interlude. Detente. Idyll.

Not at all, there's still action somewhere, even violence.

Then the gods awake, their peace was just war on hold, damn the idyll.

They land, they bomb, throw napalm, torture, corrupt.

And everyone sickens: military, women, children,

trees, livestock, the North, the South.

Borders are crossed, villages are deported.

And the world watches and begins to understand.

Reason to rejoice, I tell you!

But I don't rejoice.

I only have one life

and I should be willing to give mine

for the right to applaud when they give theirs.

Otherwise it looks like idiots on Sunday in the stadium.

"Go Vietnam!"

I'm blocked.

I don't want to understand.

It's like Vietnam became something besides a country,

something besides a symbol.

An experience.

Between those who expect success and those who expect failure

a kind of monstrous, persistent complicity has set in.

And faced with all this, I plug my eyes and my ears

because if it means anything, it's the fact that everything persists

and there's no end to anything, neither war,

nor cruelty, nor violence, nothing.

What did the assholes want who gave me this book?

Everyone explains, but I don't read or listen. I have no ears for this,

all I hear is a cry.

I don't know how to negotiate with a cry.

You can't help but crawl like a beast in search of the place

and time when you stop hearing it, even for a minute.

I won't write their text, I have nothing to say.

I'll come near you and speak of a country that isn't Vietnam,

a country that doesn't exist.

I won't write, I don't know anything. I don't want anything.

I'll tell them I'm afraid, I'm cold,

I love them all, I hate them,

we'll all die, we love to live.

I don't know anymore.

I don't know anything, I won't write anything.

The interventionist policy of the USA in South Vietnam

is sabotaging the Geneva Accords as well as peace.

On July 20, 1954

a French general and a Vietminh commissioner sign the Geneva accords.

The Indochina War, the French war is over.

But the Vietnam War, the American war has already started.

Since the end of 1949, to better tie Paris to the Atlantic coalition,

Washington began helping France to remain in Indochina.

In February 1951, three years before Geneva,

Ho Chi Minh denounces the Americans as the true enemies of Vietnamese revolution.

It's true that now the war is financed by Washington.

April 1954. Dien Bien Phu is about to fall.

The Laniel government begs Washington

to intervene directly, launching massive air raids

against the besiegers.

The American government refuses to take this risk.

Dulles elaborates another strategy:

neglect the compromised French ally, let them sign a bad peace,

freezing at least the Communist wave.

Then, from a protected springboard,

prepare the anti- communist counterattack.

The word is given on June 3 by Dulles, six weeks before the accords.

The USA didn't want to fight,

but they also didn't want a peace that in their eyes was only a truce.

The final declaration of the Geneva Conference guarantees the Vietnamese

that their country, provisionally divided for international detente,

will be reunified within two years.

The Americans reject this document.

They say only that they will not annul the accords by force.

Strangely everyone is satisfied by this meager assurance.

Thus at the end of July 1954

the Americans, without fighting and without making any commitment,

have obtained that the victors of Dien Bien Phu

abandon a third of the territory that Giap conquered by force.

Taking no account of the Geneva promises

transforms this negotiation into a fraud.

The Vietnamese will remember this in the future

when negotiations are mentioned.

Now the American counterattack begins.

Washington exploits the clauses of the Geneva Accords

that permit the survival of a loyal regime and ignores the others.

First operation: the transfer of responsibility,

military and political, from France to the United States.

From July 1954 to April 1956,

Washington obtains the withdrawal, to its advantage,

of what remains of the French presence.

The Vietminh signed with the French who made promises

and find themselves faced by the Americans, who accept none of them.

Second American operation:

establishment of a regime of Catholic mandarins.

In two years, thanks to big checks, witch hunts and exceptional laws,

an anti-communist bulwark of the South Korean type is created in Saigon.

As for the elections for reunification of the country, scheduled for 1956,

they're out of the question.

General Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that elections at that time

would have given 80% of the votes to the communists.

At the end of 1956, the leaders of Hanoi must contend with

two painful facts:

peaceful reunification of Vietnam will not happen.

Saigon opposes it, supported by Washington,

and neither Moscow nor Peking are ready to take serious risks

to ensure the treaty's application.

Secondly, the tired French have been replaced in Saigon,

always in violation of the accords of '54,

by vengeful Americans.

The victors of Dien Bien Phu see themselves cheated,

by a series of skillful deceptions, of the victory reported on the ground.

They are driven back and enclosed in the ghetto of the North,

which scarcity of agricultural resources condemns to poverty

and thus, in the long term, to dependence on China.

In the South there is police repression.

Could the government of the North accept this situation for long?

In 1958 the myth of peaceful coexistence is still too new

to endanger the fragile international detente.

The politics of Khrushchev pressure Hanoi to patience.

But the order to fight will come from the South.

South of the 17th parallel, in fact,

everything built by the left is doomed to destruction.

The Diem government has its Gestapo and its concentration camps.

Its rejection of the elections in 1956

convinces the revolutionary Vietnamese they have only one choice:

armed struggle.

From 1958 American observers report the appearance of an organization called

National Liberation Front.

In September 1960, during the Third Party Congress,

Hanoi agrees to give its support to the partisans of the South.

Three months later, on December 20, 1960,

the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam

makes its existence officially known.

From then, insurrection becomes revolution against the Diem regime

that oppresses the South and divides Vietnam.

The North will be ever more involved in the struggle.

In February 1962,

Washington announces the creation of an American command in Vietnam

making public its direct military intervention in the civil war.

At the State Department they speak of "resisting aggression,"

they recall the precedent of Munich.

But the real precedent is the Spanish Civil War

and the true role of the USA in this war

is to defend an extreme-right clique against the will of the people.

November 1, 1963, the assassination of Diem,

with the complicity of American special services,

makes the nature of the conflict still more evident.

It's no longer a question of civil war between the Vietnamese right and left,

but of American intervention

against the self-determination of the Vietnamese people.

After 18 months of gimmicks, a succession of puppet characters

and a last attempt to disguise the nature of their action,

the Americans remove the mask on February 5, 1965.

Unable to win the war on the ground,

in the jungles and rice patties of South Vietnam,

they bring it to the North, bombing it systematically.

It's escalation.

From then the escalation increases.

The bombings whose images you've seen

are not war operations,

they are exactly sessions of torture.

The aim is to subdue the victim, to break his resistance

and the aggressors make no mystery of it.

But this time the tortured is no longer at the mercy of the torturer.

He fights and keeps fighting until victory,

whose terms are already defined:

territorial integrity,

reunification, self-determination, end of foreign interference.

The Americans are mistaken

to believe that by bombing the North

they can win the war in the South.

They will never, ever win this war.

And we will never, ever submit

because ours is a patriotic war, a just war,

and we are determined to fight.

Even if it takes 5, 10, 20 years or more, we will win.

This idea of victory, which is not conquest but recognition of a right,

it's useless to oppose it with the idea of peace.

For a Vietnamese,

peace remains the only goal

but victory remains the only path.

End of the first part

With a hoarse voice

he pronounced the charges against the woman.

He was a little man

with a gray-sleeved uniform. He paced before her.

Shortly after,

two Thunderchiefs made a turn around us.

We heard the rumble as they passed close to the ground

and we heard explode the bombs they launched.

When he got up

in his hand he had a knife

with a handle similar to

those used by farmers to open coconuts.

The fighter-bombers are equipped with 20 mm machine guns

that can shoot 6000 rounds per minute

producing a truly astonishing series of explosions.

The farmers were always immobile

and contemplated the spectacle.

There was an F 105 rocket

that passed with a hiss

one meter above our heads.

All this was very strange.

And the farmers were always immobile

and watched the spectacle.

All this was very strange.

I think that

if I had been a cameraman for the news,

a television cameraman

from the ABC network in New York or San Francisco,

or if I had been a cameraman for the Soviet news,

that is what I would have filmed.

But I live in Paris

and I was not in Vietnam.

A year and a half ago I wanted to go to North Vietnam.

I remember I wrote to the delegation

from North Vietnam here and asked them for authorization

to come and film in their country.

After eight months I found out

that Hanoi had refused,

I guess because for them I was not

a trustworthy guy, with foundations

or an ideology that was

a bit vague, on whom

they couldn't rely.

In the end, I think

it was a very good reason.

They weren't wrong.

At the time, I wanted to go.

Since it was difficult to make films

in France, I told myself that I must go

to Cuba, to Algeria,

or as usual,

to Yugoslavia. But then this refusal from Hanoi

showed me that since

I'm Parisian, there was no reason not to make films in Paris.

So I made the decision in every film

to speak about Vietnam. At random, if you like.

Let's say rather randomly.

When my colleagues asked me

to participate in this film,

I said: "Yes, I'm full of ideas."

But then I realized these ideas

weren't good. It wasn't just that Hanoi refused I go there.

I believe they were right because I could have

done things which would have done more harm than good.

The fact is, I think all these ideas were

falsely generous.

Besides it seemed difficult to address certain topics,

to speak of bombs

when they don't fall on your head and you speak in the abstract.

I thought for example to take the naked body of a woman

which is one of the warmest and most alive things there is,

and to simply describe,

like Robbe-Grillet, or like Flaubert since I don't like Robbe-Grillet,

to show the effects of a cluster bomb on a woman's body.

I wanted to put it simply,

but at the same time

there was a certain aesthetic pursuit

and I couldn't,

or rather I separated, I couldn't make them coincide,

to express the form and content

at the same time.

So it was bad because this idea, this form,

was not inside the content, was not a natural expression

like the skin which covers the body

and is as much a part of it as the heart.

I also wanted to speak of defoliation, of rivers poisoned,

to show all this

and not just the people.

From the moment we don't fight with weapons in hand

we are far from all that,

and it's all very well that our heart bleeds,

but in fact this blood

has no relation with the blood of any wounded.

I would say for this reason

there was a certain shame, they were shameful ideas,

like when you sign appeals for peace.

In the end

there is one thing we can do.

After all we make films

and as a director

the best thing I can do for Vietnam,

rather than trying to invade it with a type

of generosity that necessarily forces things,

is on the contrary to let Vietnam invade us

and make us realize the place it occupies

in our daily lives, everywhere.

Then we realize

that after all Vietnam

is not alone, there is all of Africa

and all of South America,

and so we must start to create. The motto of Che Guevara:

"Create two, three, many Vietnams"

we can apply it to ourselves, creating a Vietnam within us.

If you're in Guinea you'll be against the Portuguese,

if you're in Chicago you'll be in favor of the blacks,

if you're in South America you'll be in favor of Latin America

which is an entirely colonized country,

first colonized by Spanish and French culture

and today colonized by the American economy.

We must create a Vietnam in ourselves.

For example in France last summer

the major strikes that were held at Rhodiaceta

in Besan�on or Saint-Nazaire

were episodes profoundly tied to Vietnam.

A worker at Rhodiaceta must draw lessons

from the struggle of North Vietnam

when he fights with his union.

He must learn ideas of principle

because if he finds the pace of work at Rhodiaceta too heavy,

and he can no longer live, or sleep, neither think

nor read,

he is truly a subhuman, a byproduct

and he feels exploited.

I, for example,

being a director who works in France,

am completely separated from most

of the population

and from the working class in particular.

And my personal struggle, which is against American cinema,

against its economic and aesthetic imperialism,

which has now corrupted the world cinema,

in the end is a similar struggle. Yet we don't speak,

the public worker doesn't see my films. Between me and him

is the same fracture

that exists between me and Vietnam, or rather between him and Vietnam.

We are little interested in each other

and only by a sense of generosity,

which doesn't truly correspond to reality.

We don't know each other in that I am trapped

in a type of cultural prison

and the worker at Rhodiaceta in a type

of economic prison.

Vietnam today is a symbol

of resistance more general than the others

and so we must speak of it incessantly.

In this regard there's a text by Breton

in his first manifestos which says:

"I believe in the absolute virtue of anything that takes place,

spontaneously or not, in the sense of non-acceptance,

and no reasons of general efficacy,

from which long, revolutionary patience draws its inspiration,

reasons to which I defer,

will make me deaf to the cry which can be wrenched from us at every moment

by the frightful disproportion between what is gained and what is lost,

between what is granted and what is suffered."

The two phrases to underline in this text are: "long revolutionary patience"

and the other is "the cry".

Well, we who are not in a revolutionary situation

in France

must instead cry louder.

Perhaps the others can do it less.

People like Regis Debray don't cry, nor Che Guevara,

they are the true revolutionaries.

But we who are not, we must

listen and retransmit this cry as often as possible.

Cut!

The American singer Tom Paxton explains the purpose of the war for the USA:

protect Vietnam from the Vietnamese.

Michele Ray, who was reporting from the American side,

lived for three weeks with those who the press call "Vietcong",

the Americans "Victor Charlie" and the Vietnamese "National Liberation Front".

On her return, she no longer saw the war the same way.

Every day 100 tons of napalm, 200 tons of bombs of all types

flow into the one South Vietnam

and by the contribution of the one Air Force.

After three weeks elsewhere, with Victor Charlie as the GIs say,

I was brought back to a zone occupied by United States troops.

Officially, I suppose I should be happy.

And yet I suffocate. I feel crushed by their implacable force.

I no longer want to see them, or hear their jokes,

and above all this incessant noise of helicopters

that transport with the same indifference men going to war,

supplies of food and ammunition,

or the rockets that fire on everything that moves on the ground.

Three weeks during which I winced at the least motor or reactor noise

and when the bombings got too close,

like the NLF soldiers, the simple farmers,

the women and children,

I hid myself in hideouts excavated to a meter deep

with a bamboo cane to breathe

while above us the apocalypse was unleashed.

The fear, the lack of air, the ground that shakes.

We hold hands.

We need to feel that human warmth exists.

Calm returned, the danger receded, life got back to normal

and their laughter touched the depths of my heart.

But Joe, Jack, Mike don't want to believe this enemy

has the calm security of one who knows that he will triumph one day.

They prefer to think of the official propaganda statistics

affirming: "the Vietcong has bad morale."

They'd like to win over this population that they bomb.

So the health operations multiply.

The GIs turn into nurses and their eyes clearly say:

"See? We're not monsters."

Their conscience is clean

and the American journalist can write a beautiful article.

The river patrols work 24 hours day.

Every load, every junk is inspected.

Three American officials for one Vietnamese police official.

Only he has the right to check the papers, written in Vietnamese,

and to board the boats.

Despite these strict, incessant controls,

every day junks loaded with war material and supplies

pass to the other side.

In other zones, particularly in Binh Dinh province,

because of the continuous bombings

the population has been evacuated to refugee camps.

But the fields are remote and bicycles are rare.

So every morning the Koreans of the Tiger Division

accompany them under armed escort to the harvest.

In the evening, on the return, with arms fully loaded,

it is chaos.

The soldiers are always there, omnipresent.

The Vietnamese do not like these Koreans who frighten them.

They don't forget either that during the Japanese occupation

the Koreans were guarding the camps.

Every week the number of refugees increases.

Watching them I can only think

of what one of my Vietcong friends told me:

"The land conquered by the Americans means:

good people moved to refugee camps

which we call concentration camps instead.

Perhaps the imperialists define them as refugees,

but they are on our side and act as informants.

Their heart is not with the other side.

For them the enemy is the Americans who bomb them,

who force them to leave villages, abandoning everything.

Not all are armed guerrillas, but they are all on our side."

Vietcong or only a suspect?

They look at me, size me up.

I would like to wink at them,

tell them that if I were Vietnamese I'd fight with them,

because I can't manage to believe in the Ky government and its puppets.

An American army of 465,000 men waiting for reinforcements

and a South Vietnamese army in which desertions increase every month.

The South Vietnamese believe this war is not theirs,

that it is an American war.

Thus they are treated as "lousy little dirty bugouts"

by the American advisors who despise them and who they despise.

The American officials say this surprising thing:

"Why aren't we advisors to the Vietcong? They're the soldiers!"

Reinforcements brought by helicopters. Searches of deserted villages.

Surroundings of houses inspected closely.

Buried containers are brought to light

and Victor Charlie's treasures, some medicines, are thrown down and crushed.

The inhabitants have fled or hidden.

Perhaps they've hunkered down here somewhere,

but you can't see anything.

Some suspects. But in South Vietnam, who isn't?

Even women and children must be followed.

They too will be questioned.

It's always difficult to be a witness, especially the powerless witness of a war.

Being behind the camera does not mean being neutral.

I film one aspect, but my heart is there

with these suspects, with this child.

The bullets hiss in the ears of those who refuse to speak.

And the long march resumes in search of an enemy who hides without rest

and who, ultimately, keeps the initiative of the operations.

Michele Ray filmed these images of war. Then the camera went crazy

and tore the film.

What emerged resembled more than all the rest the cry she wanted to hurl.

General Westmoreland, commander in chief of the American forces in Vietnam,

presents the official view of the USA.

The lesson of Victor Charlie

is that the response to an atom bomb is not another atom bomb,

but the oldest form of human resistance: guerrilla warfare.

We asked Fidel Castro, an expert on the matter,

to tell us how and why the guerrilla must win.

With regard to the question

whether armed struggle is the only path to liberation,

all I can say

is that, at least in the case of our country,

we have no other choice.

And in our opinion,

in the case of most of the countries of Latin America

there is no other way besides armed struggle.

It also seems to be this way for many other countries in Asia

and in Africa.

In general, imperialism always intervenes

with every means, joining forces with the oligarchy

of every country, to prevent

the democratic triumph of the revolution

and keeps the people chained with a kind of Gordian knot

that can only be broken through armed struggle.

The path of armed struggle is not a path chosen by the revolutionaries,

but is the path imposed on the people by the oppressors.

The people have only two alternatives:

to bend or to fight.

And to fight in the only way in which they can beat an enemy

who possesses greater economic resources,

infinitely superior, and many more technological resources.

Guerrilla warfare means

using the resources of the territory

and above all using the social resources of a people

to overcome the advantages open to the enemy

in terms of technical resources

and economic resources.

The guerrilla, through astute and very flexible tactics,

through maximum exploitation of all the advantages of the territory,

through mobilization of social resources, that is,

of the widest strata of the population,

which are the exploited strata, the worker and farmer ones,

and drawing inspiration from a just cause,

from a very strong moral principle

which makes him able to support privations,

to adapt to the most difficult conditions of life,

enters into the only way

to try to achieve a revolutionary objective.

This is what we have done

to achieve all the objectives we are making in our country.

In order to cover these mountains with roads,

to create decent living conditions for the people,

to eradicate ignorance,

to advance in every field our people have had to fight.

We did and now we are progressing,

but at the same time we prepare to defend what we have realized.

We know that

no country in the situation created by imperialism in the world today

can feel secure. Therefore we must work on two fronts:

on a creative front to realize the objectives of the revolution

and also on a defensive front, preparing

to face any situation of danger

or aggression against the country.

Vietnam has demonstrated definitively to the world,

to all the revolutionaries

and to all the people confronted with imperialism,

that not even with the most modern technology,

with the largest and most powerful army,

and not even with a coalition of forces

well-armed like those deployed by the USA in Vietnam,

is it possible to break down the revolutionary guerrilla movement

supported by the people.

I believe today no one doubts

that the American army has lost its war against

the heroic people of Vietnam

and we believe that is one of the greatest services

that the people of Vietnam have done for the world.

For the Vietnamese people it's formidable to think that an American

would demonstrate in this manner, sacrificing himself

and also sacrificing his family's happiness

for a just cause. I think that

one must be infinitely true to oneself,

and courageous, of course, to perform a similar gesture.

For us the character of Morrison,

the very moving gesture that he made,

has attracted not only esteem

and a deep respect, a deep admiration,

but I think that it has further increased

the goodwill of the Vietnamese people towards the American people.

America attacked a nation that had done it no harm.

We defend ourselves from bombings,

from the massacres and all the atrocities,

but we also think that in America there is another war,

a war of the people against all that is unjust.

We trust the American people very much

and this gesture has increased this trust in us

and this hope that indeed one day the two peoples

rather than fighting,

will unite to combat the wrong.

I imagine she must have been so in agreement with her husband

to not find his gesture so shocking. I mean that

she must truly approve of this gesture to preserve such serenity

and self-control.

I truly admire her very much.

Those who until then were still hesitant,

after this gesture could better take a position.

In this sense he shows the way

for those who truly want to see the truth, who truly seek it.

I believe that everything right and true will triumph in the end.

These anti-patriotic demonstrations blamed by General Westmoreland

culminated on April 15, 1967.

From Central Park to the United Nations and in the streets of American cities

more than half a million people demonstrate.

There's the National Council of Churches, the SNCC, the American Indians,

the Communist Party, the non- affiliated unions and many others.

It's the largest mass demonstration in the history of the USA.

It's also the end of an era.

American society disintegrates at full speed

and the monolithic State is not enough to consolidate it.

The right-wing militarist forces, official or not, mobilize as they can,

but those who pass from protest to resistance are already appearing.

Waving the flag of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam

they openly identify with the

revolutionaries who attack American imperialism on three continents.

The draft cards which will be burned during the demonstration

testify to the movement against mobilization

that already involves thousands of young Americans.

There are also representatives of "Black Power".

The others stayed at home. They prepare for the coming summer.

In a few minutes, this film will end.

Leaving the theater, many of you will return to a world without war.

It's ours as well, and we know how easy it is to forget certain realities.

We are far from Vietnam.

And the Vietnam of our emotions and indignation

is sometimes as far from the real Vietnam as indifference.

We live in a society that has made an art of hiding its own ends,

its own vertigo, and above all its own violence.

This war isn't a historical accident, or the late settling of a colonial problem.

It is there, all around us, within us.

It begins when we start to understand the Vietnamese are fighting for us

and to measure our debt to them.

When the Vietnamese say stop the war, but not at any price,

we say they are unreasonable.

It's true these Vietnamese are unreasonable and crazy,

and their intransigence violates habits tied to our privileges.

But the Vietnamese madness is perhaps the political wisdom of our time

and the first honest step we can take with them

is to try to look their challenge in the face.

Faced with this challenge, the choice of the rich society is simple:

they must implement the physical destruction of all that resists them,

a task which risks going beyond their means of destruction,

or they must make a total transformation in themselves.

Perhaps that's asking too much of a society at the height of its power.

If they reject this choice,

they must sacrifice their reassuring illusions,

accept this war of the poor against the rich as inevitable.

And lose it.