All language subtitles for the.vietnam.war.2017.part01.bdrip.x264-wide

Coming home from Vietnam

was close to as traumatic
as the war itself.

For years, nobody talked
about Vietnam.

We were friends
with a young couple

and it was only after 12 years
that the two wives were talking.

Found out that we both had been
Marines in Vietnam.

Never said a word about it.

Never mentioned it.

And the whole country
was like that.

It was so divisive.

And it's like living in a family
with an alcoholic father.

"Shh, we don't talk about that."

Our country did that
with Vietnam.

It's only been very recently
that, I think,

that, you know, the baby boomers
are finally starting to say,

"What happened?

What happened?"

What we need now in this country

is to heal the wounds
and to put Vietnam behind us.

The killing

in this tragic war must stop.

General Westmoreland's strategy

is producing results.

The enemy is no longer
closer to victory.

No matter how you measure it,

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

You have been less than candid

as to how deeply we are
involved in Vietnam.

We have increased our assistance

to the government,
its logistics.

We have not sent
combat troops there.

You have
a row of dominoes set up

and you knock over the first one

and the last one,
certainly it will go over.

If aggression
is successful in Korea,

we can expect it to spread
throughout Asia and Europe

and to this hemisphere.

# Oh where have you been,
my blue-eyed son? #

# And where have you been,
my darling young one? #

Viktor Frankl, who survived
the death camps in World War II,

wrote a book called
Man's Search for Meaning.

# I've walked and
I've crawled on six... #

You know, "To live is to suffer.

To survive is to find meaning
in suffering.“

And for those of us who suffered
because of Vietnam,

that's been our quest
ever since.

# And it's a hard,
it's a hard, it's a hard #

# It's a hard #

# It's a hard rain's
a-gonna fall #

America's involvement
in Vietnam began in secrecy.

It ended, 30 years later,
in failure,

witnessed by the entire world.

# And what did you
see, my darling young one? #

It was begun in
good faith by decent people

out of fateful
misunderstandings,

American overconfidence,
and Cold War miscalculation.

And it was prolonged because it
seemed easier to muddle through

than admit that it had been
caused by tragic decisions,

made by five American
presidents,

belonging to both
political parties.

# I saw a room full of men
with their hammers a-bleeding #

Before the war was over,

more than 58,000 Americans
would be dead.

At least 250,000
South Vietnamese troops died

in the conflict, as well.

So did over a million
North Vietnamese soldiers

and Viet Cong guerrillas.

# Sharp swords in the
hands of young children #

# And it's a hard... #

Two million
civilians, north and south,

are thought to have perished,

as well as tens of thousands
more in the neighboring states

of Laos and Cambodia.

For many Vietnamese,
it was a brutal civil war;

for others, the bloody
climactic chapter

in a century-old struggle
for independence.

# And what'll you do
now, my blue-eyed son? #

For those
Americans who fought in it,

and for those who fought against
it back home,

as well as for those who merely
glimpsed it on the nightly news,

the Vietnam War
was a decade of agony,

the most divisive period
since the Civil War.

Vietnam seemed to call
everything into question-

the value of honor
and gallantry;

the qualities of cruelty
and mercy;

the candor of the
American government;

and what it means
to be a patriot.

# Where hunger is ugly,
where the souls are forgotten #

And those who lived through it

have never been able
to erase its memory,

have never stopped arguing
about what really happened,

why everything went so badly
wrong, who was to blame,

and whether it was all worth it.

# And it's a hard #

# It's a hard rain's
a-gonna fall #

The French conquest of
Indochina began with an attack

on the ancient Vietnamese port
of Danang in 1858.

It took 50 years to lay claim
to the whole region-

Laos and Cambodia, as well as
the 1,200-mile-long area

that would come to be called
Vietnam.

All of it was ruled
by a French governor-general

from his palace in Hanoi.

The French largely lived
on plantation estates,

and in cities, like Saigon,
made to look as much as possible

like those at home.

Most did not even bother
to learn the language

spoken by their subjects.

Instead they installed a series
of puppet emperors

and employed a network

of French-speaking Vietnamese
officials-mandarins-

willing to carry out
their wishes.

The French put their subjects to
work building roads and canals,

railroads and bridges.

The Vietnamese
people did not take easily

to French occupation,

just as they had fought
against earlier invasions

by the Chinese.

By the early 20th century,
nationalism was on the rise.

But anyone who dared resist
colonial rule risked exile,

prison, or the guillotine.

LAM QUANG THY.

My hatred for them was pure.

Pure.

I hated them so much.

And I was so scared of them.

Boy, I was terrified of them.

And the scareder I got,
the more I hated them.

I was an 18-year-old Marine
rifleman with the ink still wet

on my high school diploma.

I didn't want to shame myself
in front of my buddies.

But I was so scared.

I felt like I was hanging onto
my honor by my fingernails

the whole time I was there.

In the spring of 1919,

as the victorious Allied Powers
met in Paris

to rebuild a world shattered
by the Great War,

President Woodrow Wilson
headed the American delegation

housed in the Hotel Crillon.

One day, a tall, slender,
29-nine-year-old man

appeared with a petition
for the president

he and other Vietnamese
nationalists had written.

Inspired by Wilson's declaration

that the interests of colonial
peoples should be given

equal weight with those
of their European rulers,

the man was asking that this
principle be applied

to his homeland.

The president's secretary
promised to show it to Wilson,

but there is no
evidence that he ever did.

His name was Nguyen Tat Thanh,

but he was now living under
an alias, Nguyen Ai Quoc-

"Nguyen the Patriot."

During his long, shadowy career,

he would adopt some
70 different pseudonyms,

finally settling on
"the most enlightened one"-

Ho Chi Minh.

Ho Chi Minh was a man
who succeeded in projecting an image

of somebody who was totally
dedicated to freeing

his country and his people
from foreign domination

to the point that he
sacrificed his own well-being,

his own life, not having
a family of his own.

To Vietnamese,
that's a big sacrifice

because to us
everybody needs a family.

Ho Chi Minh was born in 1890,

the son of a minor official
in the French regime.

After taking part
in a demonstration

against the puppet emperor

and the Frenchmen
who pulled his strings,

Ho was expelled from school
and marked for arrest.

He left Vietnam in 1911 and
remained in exile for 30 years.

He served as a cook's helper
aboard a French liner,

and visited New York and Boston,

where he worked for a time as a
pastry chef at the Parker House.

He shoveled snow in London,
tinted photographs in Paris.

There, Ho Chi Minh joined
the French Socialist Party.

But when he discovered the
anti-colonial writings of Lenin,

he became a communist.

He was invited
to Moscow to study,

underwent training
as a Soviet agent,

was sometimes criticized
for being a nationalist first,

a communist second,

and then was dispatched to China

to organize a cell
of other Vietnamese exiles

and help establish
the Indochinese Communist Party.

Through it all,
"He was taut and quivering,"

a friend remembered,
"with only one thought-

his country, Vietnam."

By 1940, much of
the world was at war again.

Germany had seized most
of Western Europe,

including France.

Imperial Japan threatened

many of the European colonies
in Asia,

and occupied Vietnam, where
they permitted their allies,

the collaborationist French,

to continue to oversee
their colony.

To some Vietnamese,
the coming of the Japanese

seemed to signal a welcome end
to white colonial rule.

But Ho Chi Minh,
still in exile in China,

saw the Japanese
as alien invaders,

no more welcome than the French.

They were only interested in
exploiting his country

and seizing Vietnamese crops
to fill their own rice bowls.

The time had come, he said,

to rally "patriots of all ages
and all types,

peasants, workers, merchants
and soldiers"

to defeat the Japanese and
the collaborationist French.

In February of 1941, after three
decades away from his homeland,

Ho Chi Minh slipped back across
the Chinese border into Vietnam

and set up headquarters near
the remote village of Pac Bo

in a limestone cave
at the side of a mountain

he named for Karl Marx,

overlooking a jungle stream
he named for his hero, Lenin.

There, he founded
a revolutionary movement,

which he called the
Vietnam Independence League-

the Viet Minh.

To build and lead a
Fighting force for his revolution,

Ho called upon Vo Nguyen Giap,

a one-time teacher
of French history

who had instructed
the children of Hanoi's elite.

Giap was an early convert
to communism,

whose life-long hatred
for the French intensified

when they beat his wife to death
in prison.

Inspired by Napoleon,
Lawrence of Arabia,

and the communist Chinese
revolutionary Mao Zedong,

Giap had already begun
to develop

a distinctive theory of warfare
that relied on guerrilla tactics

until a full-scale conventional
attack could be mounted.

In the fight for independence
which he believed was coming,

his armies, Giap said, would be
"everywhere and nowhere."

The reason Vietnamese
had always resort to guerrilla warfare

was because we were
a small country.

And it was just a way of fight
the weak against the strong.

Don't fight unless you're
sure you can win,

and surprise is a big element.

Choose your own battle.

I had about 26
guys that clay out of 45.

We were always
somewhat understrength.

And this day we were
quite understrength.

My platoon's on point.

Go, 90, 90, 90, 90!

And all of a
sudden the very point man,

the first guy in the column,
said, “VC on the trail.

VC on the trail."

Before I had a chance
to digest this...

...he went down,
shot right through the chest.

And what was a very
well-laid ambush erupted.

I knew I'd lost a bunch of guys.

I said a prayer to God saying,
basically,

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

Don't take any more of my men."

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

"Holy shit.

Can I take that prayer back?"

By the spring of 1945,

more than three years after the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,

the United States government
was looking for allies

behind the lines in Vietnam.

The Americans were hoping
to find a way

to undermine Japanese forces
there

when they were contacted
by Ho Chi Minh.

And so it was decided to drop

an OSS team in to meet with
the Viet Minh leadership.

Paul Hoagland was
the medic on the team.

And the first thing he was told
was that he must attend

to their leader, who was
desperately sick.

So he was taken to a grass shack

where a bewhiskered, skinny man
lay on a bundle of straw,

desperately ill.

And that was Ho Chi Minh.

The OSS, the secret
wartime precursor of the CIA,

supplied Ho's ragtag guerrillas
with arms

and marveled at how quickly
they learned to handle them.

Ho Chi Minh began to call
his followers

the “Viet-American Army,"
and praised the United States

as a "champion of democracy"

that would surely help them end
colonial rule.

Meanwhile, Famine gripped
the northern part of the country.

Hundreds of thousands
of Vietnamese

were dying of starvation

while Japanese storehouses
were filled with rice.

In those
clays, garbage was collected

by people pushing carts.

And my mother remembers that
every morning she would see

these garbage carts going around

and people picking up dead
bodies and throwing them

on the cart.

It was incredible.

And people who lived through it
never, never forgot.

Duong Van Mai's
father was the deputy governor

of a province east of Hanoi,

the son and grandson
of mandarins

who had all served the French.

He and his wife had 17 children.

Parents who had
children who were, you know, plump,

were very afraid of their
children being stolen

and killed.

And it was really like
hell on earth.

The government didn't have
a clue on how to deal

with this calamity.

But Ho Chi Minh did.

He directed the Viet Minh

to break into the Japanese
storehouses wherever they could

and distribute the rice
to the people.

They were hailed as saviors.

When an atomic
bomb destroyed Hiroshima,

and three days later a second
one destroyed Nagasaki,

Japanese surrender
seemed imminent.

Ho Chi Minh called upon
all Vietnamese to rise up

and take over their own country

before the Free French
could reestablish

their old colonial regime.

They did, in cities and towns
across the country.

On September 2, 1945,

the same day the Japanese
formally surrendered,

hundreds of thousands
of Vietnamese

streamed into Ba Dinh Square in
Hanoi to see for the first time

the mysterious leader
of the Viet Minh

and hear him proclaim
Vietnam's independence.

With an OSS
officer standing nearby,

Ho Chi Minh began with the words
of Thomas Jefferson:

"All men are created equal.

"They are endowed
by their creator

"with certain
unalienable rights;

"that among these are life,
liberty

and the pursuit of happiness."

Ho Chi Minh had great hopes

that the U.S. would support the
Vietnam desire for independence,

not necessarily by intervening

but by doing what it could

to support an
independence movement.

Ho Chi Minh's hopes for
American support were calculated

but understandable.

President Franklin Roosevelt had
promised a postwar world

that would "respect the rights
of all peoples

to choose the form of government
under which they live."

But Roosevelt was dead now,
and his successor, Harry Truman,

had inherited
a very different world.

The alliance
with the Soviet Union

that had won the
Second World War had collapsed.

The Soviets now occupied
the Eastern European countries

they had overrun, and hoped to
spread their influence farther,

into Iran, Turkey,
and the Mediterranean.

A new cold war had begun.

French president
Charles De Gaulle warned

that if the United States
insisted on independence

for her colonies,
France might have no choice

but to "fall into
the Russian orbit."

The United States must do
nothing to undercut

the restoration of France's
empire, including Vietnam.

There were hardly any
Americans in Vietnam, you know...

State Department people,
consular officials,

a few businessmen.

Hardly anyone from this country

knew where Vietnam was located.

George Wickes was
part of a seven-man OSS mission

sent to Saigon,
the largest city in the south.

The United States
was officially neutral,

hoping the French
and Viet Minh could reach

some peaceful solution
on their own.

Allied leaders had agreed
temporarily to divide Vietnam

into two separate zones.

Nationalist Chinese troops were
to handle things in the north.

British colonial troops would
try to perform the same task

in the south,
where rival factions,

including the French and Viet
Minh, were already fighting

in the streets of Saigon.

No one was in charge.

On both sides, there was
brutality and atrocity

and violence.

It wasn't quite a civil war

but it was getting very
close to civil war

in the streets of Saigon.

Lieutenant Colonel Peter Dewey,

the 28-year-old commander
of the OSS in Saigon,

tried to make sense of it all.

Right from the start he
was in touch with everybody...

not only the French,
but very soon he established

a connection with various
Vietnamese groups.

The Viet Minh soon
established themselves

as the most successful.

Dewey, who spoke fluent French,

brokered talks between
a Viet Minh spokesman

and the senior French
representative in the city.

His efforts infuriated
British general Douglas Gracey,

who commanded
Allied forces in the south.

Gracey was convinced
that French control

should be reimposed
as soon as possible.

By conferring with
the Viet Minh, Gracey said,

Colonel Dewey had become
a "subversive" force.

The violence in and around
Saigon escalated.

Colonel Dewey urgently
cabled his superiors:

Vietnam "is burning," he wrote.

"The French and British
are finished here

and the United States,"
he concluded,

"ought to clear out
of Southeast Asia."

Two days later,
September 26, 1945,

he set out for the airport,

prepared to fly
to OSS headquarters.

At a roadblock, the Viet Minh
mistook Dewey for a Frenchman

and opened fire.

He was killed instantly.

Ho Chi Minh wrote
to the United States

lamenting the death of Dewey,
whom he recognized

as a person sympathetic
to his cause.

It seemed a terrible irony
that Dewey,

who was doing what he could
to help

the Vietnamese independence
movement should have been killed

by the Vietnamese by a mistake.

An elderly African-American
woman answered the door.

I think she knew the instant
she saw us why we were there.

And the padre said, uh,

"I'm... I'm terribly sorry
to inform you,

but your son was killed
in Vietnam."

And she just sat down.

Didn't say a word.

Then the... her husband says,
"No, there's a mistake."

He comes back with this letter.

And he said, "Look, see?

We got it yesterday, my... our
son was still alive yesterday."

And the chaplain looked
at the letter

and he said, "It's a week old.

I think your son was killed on
the day he wrote this letter."

In the fall of 1945, a
week after Colonel Dewey's death,

fresh French troops
began arriving in Saigon,

taking over from the British.

They quickly established

control of the city

and set out to reoccupy

the entire country.

Ho Chi Minh hoped somehow
to achieve independence

without a war with France,

and he still hoped the
United States would intervene.

"You never had an empire, never
exploited the Asian peoples,"

he would tell a visiting
American journalist.

"Do not be blinded by this issue
of communism."

He did not want to fight
the French as an enemy of America.

And, in fact, I saw the letters
he wrote to President Truman

saying, "We believe in the same
things you believe."

Those letters I saw
in the CIA files,

they had never been given
to President Truman.

In June of 1946, Ho
Chi Minh returned to Paris

in a fruitless attempt to get
the French to live up

to a promise they had made
of increased autonomy

for his country.

While Ho was away,

General Giap began consolidating
communist control

of the revolution.

He conducted a merciless purge

of members of rival
nationalist parties

and people he called
"reactionary saboteurs"-

landlords and moneylenders,
Trotskyites and Catholics,

men and women accused of
collaborating with the French.

Hundreds were shot,
drowned, buried alive.

LAM QUANG THY.

On December 19, 1946,
after months of building tension,

fighting broke out in Hanoi

between the Viet Minh
and the French.

The Viet Minh proved no match
for French firepower.

Ho, Giap, and their comrades
slipped out of the city

and returned to their mountain
stronghold far to the north.

"Those who have rifles will use
their rifles,"

Ho declared in a radio address

calling for a nationwide
guerrilla war.

"Those who have swords
will use swords;

those who have no swords
will use spades or sticks."

But the country
Ho Chi Minh hoped to unite

was itself bitterly divided.

Families were being torn apart.

Despite her father's position
in the French government,

Duong Van Mai's sister felt
compelled to answer Ho's call.

My older
sister Thang was married

to a man who had great sympathy
for the Viet Minh.

And by that time Ho Chi Minh
had evacuated his government

to the mountain base.

So my sister and her husband
trekked all the way

from Hanoi toward the base

in order to join the resistance
against the French.

So the Vietnam War
was really a civil war

down to the family level.

France poured
thousands of men into Vietnam...

French regulars, European
mercenaries, and colonial troops

from Morocco, Algeria,
Tunisia, and Senegal-

who fought alongside an army
of Cambodians, Laotians,

and anti-communist Vietnamese.

French forces managed to occupy
most of the large towns

and province capitals

and established hundreds
of isolated outposts.

The French also set out to try
to win over rural Vietnamese

through a program
they called pacification-

pacification-

building dikes, schools and
roads, and vaccinating children.

The French
would pacify a village

and during the daytime
they could control it.

But at night the Viet Minh
would come back.

And so it was never
completely secure.

My father would shake his head
and said, you know,

"Pacification is really futile

because it's like trying to hold
sand in your fingers."

The Viet Minh mined roads,
blew up bridges and railroads,

ambushed French patrols,
and then disappeared.

French soldiers sometimes took
revenge on the nearest village,

burning homes, raping women,

executing men suspected
of aiding the Viet Minh.

But the communists proved
every bit as ruthless as the French.

"It is better to kill even
those who might be innocent,"

one commander said, "than to let
a guilty person go."

And they specifically targeted

anyone who had links
to the French.

Once my father started
working for the French, then he was

a target, especially
the higher he rose,

the bigger target he became.

A Viet Minh agent actually came
in with a pistol to shoot him

but at the last moment
decided not to.

French casualties
continued to mount.

“There are days
when we are so discouraged

that we would like
to give it all up,"

a French soldier
wrote his mother.

"Convoys under attack,
roads cut,

"firing in all directions
every night,

the indifference at home."

While I was there I had
the opportunity to call my mother,

you know.

And I was telling my mother
what was happening over there,

and I was telling her how
she shouldn't believe

what she sees in the newspaper
and sees on television

because we're losing the war.

I said, "And you'll probably
never see me again

"because we're the most northern
outpost that the Marines have,

you know."

We could literally... could look
right into North Vietnam.

We could see the sparks
when the guns fired on us.

And I said, "And everybody
in my unit is dying.

I probably won't be
coming back."

And my mother said,
"No, you're coming back."

She said, "I talk to God
every day and you're special.

You're coming back."

And I said, "Ma, everybody's
mother thinks

"that they're special.

You know, I'm putting pieces
of special people in bags."

President Truman's
dramatic announcement

that Russia had the atom secret

caused state departments
all over the world

to stir uneasily.

We were very aware
that there was a Cold War

and that we had an enemy,

and that enemy was
the Soviet Union.

The United States stood
at one pole

and the Soviet Union stood
at the other pole.

It was kind of a
Manichean dynamic

that there was evil
and there was good.

And we were good,
and the other side was evil.

It wasn't morally ambiguous.

Just a few weeks after
Russia became a nuclear power,

there was more stunning news-

communist forces under
Mao Zedong seized control

of China.

Separate communist insurrections
were also underway

in the British colonies
of Burma and Malaya.

In January 1950,
Mao formally recognized

Ho Chi Minh's insurgency and
agreed to provide the arms,

equipment, and military training
he had been seeking.

The Soviets recognized
the Viet Minh as well,

and also offered help.

President Truman,
who was being blamed

by his political opponents
for having "lost" China,

and having failed to "contain"
communism,

approved a $23 million
aid program

for the French in Vietnam.

The United States
was no longer neutral.

We were caught
on the horns of a dilemma

of how can we maintain
our friendship

and our alliance with the French
and support them in Indochina

while we, as a former
colony ourselves,

sympathized with the Vietnamese
and their aspirations

for freedom and independence?

A highly trained and
well-equipped North Korean Army

swarmed across the 38th parallel

to attack unprepared
South Korean defenders.

In June of 1950, China's ally,

communist North Korea,
invaded South Korea.

President Truman ordered

tens of thousands
of American ground troops

onto the Korean Peninsula.

The United States and its allies

eventually pushed the invaders
back north.

Meanwhile in southern China,

Mao's military was beginning
to turn the Viet Minh

into a modern fighting force,

capable of inflicting a heavy
toll on the French occupiers.

In July, the Truman
administration

quietly dispatched
transport planes

and a shipload of jeeps
to Vietnam.

Thirty-five military advisors
went along to oversee their use.

None of them, and no one
in the American embassy,

spoke a word of Vietnamese.

But the United States was now
officially in Vietnam.

In October of 1950,

hundreds of thousands
of Chinese troops

began pouring into North Korea,

driving the allies
back down the peninsula.

As that fighting raged,

Truman continued to increase
military aid

for the French war in Vietnam.

If aggression
is successful in Korea,

we can expect it to spread
throughout Asia and Europe

and to this hemisphere.

We are fighting in Korea

for our own national security
and survival.

In the autumn of 1951,

a young Massachusetts
congressman

named John F. Kennedy dined
at the rooftop bar

of the Hotel Majestic
overlooking Saigon.

As he and his party ate,

they could hear the thunder of
guns across the Saigon River.

French commanders
assured Kennedy

that with more American support,

French rule would be
re-established.

But Kennedy spent two hours
with Seymour Topping,

a seasoned American reporter,

who gave him a very
different perspective:

the French were losing, he said,

and many Vietnamese, who had
once admired the Americans,

were beginning to despise them
for backing the French.

Kennedy believed the reporter.

Unless the United States could
persuade the Vietnamese

that it was as opposed to
"injustice and inequality"

as it was to communism,

he told his constituents
when he got home,

the current effort would result
in "foredoomed failure."

# Come on-a my house, my house,
I'm gonna give you candy #

In 1952,

General Dwight Eisenhower
was elected president,

in part because he promised
to take a tougher stance

on communism.

That year, American taxpayers

were footing more than
30% of the bill

for the French war in Vietnam.

Within two years,

that number would rise
to nearly 80%.

# Everything,
everything, everything #

And many
of you ask this question:

Why is the United States
spending

hundreds of millions of dollars

supporting the forces
of the French Union

in the fight against communism
in Indochina?

I think perhaps if we go over
to the map here,

I can indicate to you why
it is so vitally important.

Here's Indochina.

If Indochina falls,

Thailand is put in almost
impossible position.

The same is true of Malaya
with its rubber and tin.

Now may I say that as far as the
war in Indochina is concerned,

that I was there, right on the
battlefield, or close to it,

and it's a bloody war,
and it's a bitter one.

By 1953, the French had
been fighting for seven years.

They had suffered over
100,000 casualties

and failed to pacify
the countryside.

Six commanders had come
and gone.

Nevertheless,
the seventh commander,

General Henri Navarre,
assured his countrymen

that victory was near.

"Now we can see it clearly,"
he said,

"like the light at the end
of the tunnel."

Meanwhile, large parts of the
French population were horrified

by reports of French brutality

and the widespread
use of napalm-

gelatinized petroleum
that burned foliage,

homes, and human flesh.

When returning French troops
disembarked at Marseilles,

members of the longshoremen's
union pelted them with rocks.

Parisian leftists began to call
the conflict

"La Sale Guerra"-
"The Dirty War."

The camera was a close-up,

was over the shoulder
of this storm trooper

who had a kid by the scruff
of his shirt and he smacks him.

People screaming...

At that moment in time,

I realized that anybody who
really cared for America

was sent halfway
around the world

chasing some ghost in a jungle.

In the meantime,
my country's being torn apart.

So I saw somebody
who looked like my dad

hitting somebody
who looked like me.

Whose side would I be on?

In Korea,
three years of combat end

as United Nations and communist
negotiators at Panmunjom

sign a truce.

In July of 1953,

the Korean War ended
in a negotiated settlement

and a still-divided peninsula.

American policymakers
saw it as proof

that communism in Asia
could be contained.

And in Washington, a
dramatic evening press conference...

That fall, the French
indicated their willingness

to begin talks to end
the fighting in Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh agreed to meet.

But before the negotiators
were to convene in Geneva,

each side sought to improve
its position on the battlefield.

General Navarre set up
a fortified base

in a remote valley
in northwestern Vietnam

called Dien Bien Phu, where
he hoped to lure the Viet Minh

into a decisive battle.

Navarre was certain that
superior French firepower

and air support would crush
any attack by the Viet Minh.

He and his commanders
saw no need to worry

about the jungle-covered hills
that overlooked his 11,000 men,

dug in on the valley floor.

The artillery commander
was so confident of victory,

he complained, "I have more guns
than I need."

General Giap saw his chance.

"We decided to wipe out at all
costs the whole enemy force

at Dien Bien Phu,"
he remembered.

To do it, he pulled off one
of the greatest logistical feats

in military history...

a feat that would be restaged
in propaganda films

and celebrated for decades.

A quarter of a million
civilian porters-

nearly half of them women-

moved everything he needed
for a siege, from sacks of rice

to disassembled
artillery pieces,

on foot through the jungle.

Giap surrounded the valley
with 50,000 soldiers

and 200 big guns, dug-in
and camouflaged so well

they could not be spotted
from the air.

On March 13,1954,

Viet Minh artillery
on the hillsides

began raining down 50 shells
a minute

on the French troops
huddled below.

The airstrip was destroyed.

The besieged troops could only
be reinforced

and resupplied by airdrop.

The French artillery commander,

who had underestimated
his enemy, committed suicide.

The airlift
to Dien Bien Phu continues...

vital men and supplies
for the heroic garrison

that has defied the massed
Viet Minh onslaughts

for over six weeks.

Today, Dien Bien Phu
is a human dam

trying to stem the red tide

that threatens to engulf
Southeast Asia.

The French government
begged President Eisenhower

to intervene.

He refused to act without
Congressional approval

and support from
European allies.

Britain said no

and the Congress would not
support unilateral action.

The communists

under Ho Chi Minh are able
to claim that they are fighting

for independence and the French
appear to be fighting

for a maintain...
maintenance of colonial rule.

I therefore believe

that before the United States
moves in, in any degree,

that independence must be
granted to the people,

that the people must support
the struggle.

"I am convinced,"
Eisenhower confided to his diary,

"that no military victory is
possible in this theater."

Still, without
consulting Congress,

the president had secretly sent
more American transport planes,

their markings painted over and
flown by civilian contractors,

to help resupply the desperate
French troops at Dien Bien Phu.

Everyone understood
that in and of itself,

Vietnam didn't mean very much.

But they believed, I believed,
if we lost it,

that the rest of Asia
would tumble to communism.

You have broader
considerations that might follow

what you would call the
falling domino principle.

You have a row of dominoes
set up,

and you knock over
the first one,

and what will happen to the
last one is the certainty

that it will go over
very quickly.

On the afternoon of May
7, 1954, after 55 clays of siege,

the exhausted French forces
at Dien Bien Phu surrendered.

They had lost 8,000 men,
killed, wounded, or missing.

General Giap had lost
three times as many,

but he had won a great victory.

NGUYEN THOI BUNG'.

Even Duong Van Mai's parents
could not help but be impressed.

They were very proud

that the Viet Minh had defeated
the French,

this great Western power.

Admiration and respect
on the one hand,

but fear on the other hand.

And fear was the
stronger emotion.

"We have been caught
bluffing by our enemies,"

Senate Minority Leader
Lyndon Johnson said.

"Today it is Indochina,
tomorrow Asia may be in flames.

And the day after, the Western
Alliance will lie in ruins."

We should have seen
it as the end of the colonial era

in Southeast Asia,
which it really was.

But instead we saw it
in Cold War terms,

and we saw it as a defeat
for the free world

that was related to the rise
of China.

And it was a total misreading
of a pivotal event,

which cost us very dearly.

The former home
of the League of Nations,

Geneva, Switzerland,
where East is meeting West

in the international conference

that may decisively affect
the political future of Asia.

The day after the
fall of Dien Bien Phu,

diplomats from nine nations
gathered in Geneva

to settle the future of Vietnam.

The talks dragged on for nearly
two-and-a-half months.

Despite their victory,

Ho Chi Minh and General Giap
could not keep fighting

without more support from China
and the Soviet Union.

But China had lost a million men
in Korea

and did not want to become
involved in another war

along its border.

The Soviet Union was hoping
to ease tensions with the West.

Both of Ho Chi Minh's communist
patrons urged him to agree

to a negotiated settlement,

a partition like the one
that had ended the Korean War.

Ho had no option but to give in.

In the end,
no one was satisfied.

Vietnam was temporarily to be
divided at the 17th parallel.

The 130,000 French-led troops
stationed in the North

were to withdraw to the South,

and somewhere between
50,000 and 90,000 Viet Minh

were to "re-group" to the North.

The two halves
would be separated

by a demilitarized zone
until an election could be held

to reunify
North and South Vietnam,

an election everyone knew
Ho Chi Minn would win.

NGUYEN THOI BUNG'.

We had started walking up

and we had probably gotten about
a third of the way up the hill

and then they unleashed on us.

We were in the middle of this
horrible shit sandwich.

That's what we called it.

One of the things that I learned
in the war is that

we're not the top species on
the planet because we're nice.

People talk a lot about how well
the military turns, you know,

kids into, you know,
killing machines and stuff.

And I'll always argue that
it's just finishing school.

Braving the dangers
of the open sea in tiny, rickety craft,

thousands of Roman Catholic
and Buddhist faith

have found life impossible
under the communists.

For them, it's freedom
or nothing.

Under the Geneva Accords,

civilians living in either
half of Vietnam

who wanted to relocate
to the other

would have 300 days to do so.

My mother
and father wanted to stay

and meet my sister Thang again

because they knew
Thang would come back.

But on the other hand
they couldn't risk that.

They were convinced that when
Ho Chi Minh and his government

arrived in Hanoi,

my father would be the first one
to be killed

and all of us would be
persecuted.

And I remember the day we left.

I looked around and I thought,
"I never come back here again."

It was extremely traumatic.

It was like the ground was
suddenly cut from under you.

In the end,
some 900,000 refugees,

including more than half
of all the Catholics

living in the North,

fled to the South, many of them
aboard American ships.

The United States hoped somehow
to encourage the building

of a legitimate government
in the South.

That government was now headed
by Ngo Dinh Diem.

Both a Roman Catholic
and a Confucian

in a largely Buddhist country,

he was a celibate bachelor who
had once planned to be a priest.

The war for us really started
when we became the partner,

or I would say the victim,
of President Diem.

We were going to help him turn
South Vietnam into a democracy.

That's what he said
he wanted to do.

And we believed him.

Like Ho Chi Minh,

Diem had spent years abroad
seeking support

for his own brand
of Vietnamese nationalism.

He was a veteran politician
whose loathing for the French

was matched only by his hatred
for the communists,

who had imprisoned him and
buried alive his eldest brother

and his nephew.

Diem was aloof, autocratic,

mistrustful of anyone much
beyond his own family.

He also proved to be shrewd,
resourceful,

and skilled at exploiting
the weaknesses of his opponents.

But he faced a daunting task
in creating a new country.

The French, who still had
thousands of troops

stationed in the South,
detested Diem.

Several provinces were under
the sway of religious sects

with armies of their own.

Tens of thousands of Viet Minh
soldiers had gone north,

but several thousand cadre-

trained and dedicated Communist
Party workers...

had stayed behind to organize
resistance in the countryside.

And Saigon itself was ruled
by the Binh Xuyen,

a crime syndicate
backed by the French.

And the French
were behind the Binh Xuyen,

sort of supporting them

because they didn't want
Diem to succeed.

And that became
the central contest.

Some in the CIA believed
that Diem could be the savior

of South Vietnam.

Others were not so sure.

“He is a messiah
without a message,"

one diplomat reported
to Washington.

The U.S. ambassador agreed.

On April 27, 1955,

President Eisenhower decided
to end American support

for Diem's regime.

But then Diem made
an all-out assault

on the Binh Xuyen syndicate.

Suddenly
in the middle of the day

we heard gunfire
and then we saw flames

and the neighborhood
was burning.

There are hundreds
of dead and wounded on both sides

as the street fighting continues
for an entire week.

For the United States,
the situation presents

a grave problem.

Diem finally regains control
of Saigon.

In the end,
Diem's forces prevailed.

Eisenhower now saw no option
but to stick with Diem.

The French then announced their
intention to withdraw completely

from South Vietnam, ending
nearly a century of occupation.

Diem became wildly popular
because he seemed to embody

the nationalist cause
in the South.

He succeeded in getting
the French

out of Vietnam all the way.

And Ho Chi Minh had only got
them out of the northern half.

Flush with victory, Diem
called for a referendum in the South.

The CIA warned him not to meddle
too much with the returns.

But when the ballots
were counted,

Diem claimed to have won
98.2% of the vote.

On October 26, 1955,
Ngo Dinh Diem named himself

the first president of the
brand-new Republic of Vietnam.

The election to reunify
the North and South

that had been promised at Geneva
would never be held.

He became our ally,
or rather our master,

because the goal of preventing

the communists from taking
over the South

was so strong that we couldn't
afford for him to lose.

So Diem started
to boss us around.

And this was a typical
relationship.

You need any ally you believe

to be the centerpiece
of your foreign policy.

They understand that right away.

And the tail wags the dog.

From the Far East
comes a distinguished visitor.

President Ngo Dinh Diem
of Vietnam is accorded

one of President Eisenhower's
rare airport greetings,

as he arrives for a four-day
state visit.

President Diem, one of America's
staunchest allies

in Southeast Asia,

will seek an increase in aid
to shore up his country

against increasing
communist pressure,

a request to which the president
lends a sympathetic ear.

Most politicians,
Democrats as well as Republicans,

now seemed to share
the changing views

of Senator John F. Kennedy.

South Vietnam is
"our offspring," he said.

"We cannot abandon it."

If it fell, the United States
would be "held responsible

and our prestige in Asia
will sink to a new low."

There had never before been
a South Vietnamese nation,

but Americans, who had rebuilt
much of their own country

during the New Deal and had
helped rebuild Western Europe

through the Marshall Plan,

were convinced they
could build one nonetheless.

Eisenhower ordered scores
of American civilians

to South Vietnam, full of
plans for economic development

meant to win, he hoped,
the hearts and minds

of the Vietnamese people.

But those civilians would always
be outnumbered

by military advisors,

with orders to modernize, train,
and equip Diem's forces,

now called the Army of the
Republic of Vietnam-the ARVN.

Some ARVN officers found
American methods unsuited

to the guerrilla war they
expected to wage

against the communists.

Most American military advisors
were veterans

of the war in Korea,

determined to prepare
South Vietnamese forces

to slow a conventional invasion
from the North.

But no one in North Vietnam

was planning
a conventional invasion.

Ho Chi Minh was focused
on rebuilding his country,

devastated by more
than a decade of war.

The communists imposed
brutal land reforms

modeled on those underway
in China

with a ruthlessness that left
thousands of people dead,

including not only landlords
who had sided with the French,

but also many villagers who had
fought with the Viet Minh.

Ho Chi Minh was still determined
to reunite Vietnam.

But he worried that if he took
direct military action

against the South,

the United States would be drawn
more deeply into the struggle.

He cautioned his comrades
in the South to put their faith

in political agitation
and avoid violence.

But that message rang hollow

among embattled Southern
revolutionaries

struggling to survive

under Diem's increasingly
harsh regime.

In a campaign he called
"Denounce the Communists,"

Diem had imprisoned tens of
thousands of citizens

without trial and ordered
the executions of hundreds more.

Now, the communists took matters
into their own hands

and began attacking
South Vietnamese officials.

As violence in
South Vietnam intensified,

new leaders emerged in Hanoi.

Ho Chi Minh would remain
the face of the revolution

around the world,
but he now began to share power

with men who were growing
impatient with his caution,

men about whom Americans
knew almost nothing.

The most important proved to be
a carpenter's son

from Quang Tri province
in the South named Le Duan.

He had helped found the
Indochinese Communist Party,

survived nearly ten years
in a French prison,

and proved himself a shrewd
political infighter

as he rose to become
First Secretary of the party.

By 1959, Le Duan
and his hardline allies

were gaining influence within
the North Vietnamese Politburo

and beginning to
change its policy.

They now argued that Hanoi
should do everything

within its power to help
Southern revolutionaries

remove Diem by force.

Now, bands of
40 to 50 armed Viet Minh

began slipping back home
into South Vietnam,

following jungle paths hacked
through the Laotian mountains

that the Americans would soon
call the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Violence against the Diem regime
steadily accelerated.

On the evening of July 8, 1959,
at Bien Hoa,

20 miles northeast of Saigon,

six American military advisors
were watching a movie

in their mess hall.

Viet Minh guerrillas,
who had crept silently

into the compound,
opened fire through the windows.

Major Dale Buis
from Pender, Nebraska,

and Master Sergeant
Chester Ovnand

from Copper-as Cove, Texas,
were killed.

They were the first American
soldiers to die from enemy fire

in the Vietnam War.

We must prove all over again,

to a watching world, as we sit
on a most conspicuous stage,

whether this nation,

conceived as it is
with its freedom of choice,

its breadth of opportunity,
its range of alternatives,

can compete with the
single-minded advance

of the communist system.

On November 8, 1960, John
Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected

president of the United States.

His vice president
was Senator Lyndon Johnson.

They had narrowly beaten
Vice President Richard Nixon

and his running mate,
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

During the campaign,
both Kennedy and Nixon

had pledged to hold the line
against international communism

wherever it seemed to be
a threat.

But very few Americans knew
or cared about

what was going on in Vietnam.

Six weeks after
Kennedy's election,

at a remote jungle village
called Tan Lap

near the Cambodian border,

representatives of southern
revolutionary groups

met to form a new organization
to replace the Viet Minh,

dedicated to overthrowing
Ngo Dinh Diem

and ousting the
foreigners supporting him.

Behind the scenes, Le Duan and
his communist comrades in Hanoi

were orchestrating everything.

The new organization
would be called

the National Liberation Front-
the NLF.

The armed wing
of the NLF was called

the People's Liberation
Armed Forces,

but its enemies in Saigon
and Washington preferred

a more disparaging term.

In their eyes,
the revolutionaries were

Communist Traitors
to the Vietnamese Nation-

the Viet Cong.

Let every nation know,

whether it wishes us well
or ill,

that we shall pay any price,
bear any burden,

meet any hardship,
support any friend,

oppose any foe,
to assure the survival

and the success of liberty.

For me, I'd
always thought of courage

as charging enemy bunkers
or standing up under fire.

But just to walk, day after day
from village to village

and through the paddies
and up into the mountains,

just to get up in the morning
and look out at the land

and think, "In a few minutes
I'll be walking out there

"and will my corpse be there,
over there?

Will I lose a leg out there?"

Just to walk felt
incredibly brave.

I would sometimes look
at my legs as I walked,

thinking, how am I doing this?

# Oh, where have you been,
my blue-eyed son? #

# And where have you been,
my darling young one? #

# I've stumbled on the side
of 12 misty mountains #

# I've walked and I've crawled
on six crooked highways #

# I've stepped in the middle
of seven sad forests #

# I've been out in front
of a dozen dead oceans #

# I've been ten thousand miles
in the mouth of a graveyard #

# And it's a hard, it's a hard #

# It's a hard, it's a hard #

# It's a hard rain's
a-gonna fall #

# Oh, what did you see,
my blue-eyed son? #

# And what did you see,
my darling young one? #

# I saw a newborn baby
with wild wolves all around it #

# I saw a highway of diamonds
with nobody on it #

# I saw a black branch with
blood that kept drippin' #

# I saw a room full of men
with their hammers a-bleedin' #

# I saw a white ladder
all covered with water #

# I saw 10,000 talkers whose
tongues were all broken #

# I saw guns with sharp swords
in the hands of young children #

# And it's a hard, it's a hard #

# It's a hard, and it's a hard #

# It's a hard rain's
a-gonna fall #

# And it's a hard, it's a hard #

# It's a hard, and it's a hard #

# It's a hard rain's
a-gonna fall. #