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(somber music)

(guns firing)

- So we entered this room.

Around the table were perhaps a dozen visitors,

most of them military,

mentioning that I had recently been

an advisor at the province level in South Vietnam.

People stopped and looked at me

and one said I've always wondered

what happens at the province level?

(low music)

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

remind me of the issues we faced back then.

We just didn't know who to trust among the Vietnamese.

Who were the sympathizers and who were the enemy?

Who could you believe?

US military saw this as an organizational problem.

They thought it could be solved

by reorganizing the way the Vietnamese fought the war.

The US had developed a system

for coordinating intelligence collection,

but America didn't wanna be viewed as a colonial ruler

forcing its policies on Vietnam.

Our orders were to persuade our Vietnamese counterparts

to implement this system at the province level.

As if that would overcome the lack of motivation,

lack of will, and lack of honesty

in the Vietnamese military.

We couldn't get them to do anything.

We weren't trained to deal with the Vietnamese people

and their traditions.

Our military leaders didn't seem interested.

But we had unlimited faith in organization

and bureaucracy as tools of war.

That lead to a breakdown of communication

between those of us at the province level

and those planning the war from higher up.

(low rock music)

How does the typical American in the early 1960s

wind up in Vietnam?

I agreed to go into the Army in May of 1966.

And I was commissioned and went to Fort Benning, Georgia

for infantry school training.

The culmination of the infantry training

was escape and evasion:

what to do if we were captured by the enemy.

At a predetermined point, you were allowed to escape.

Your job was to find your way back to safe haven,

and to do that you were supposed to not get captured again.

Well I think I was the only one

who got captured twice on the way trying to get back.

Next was combat intelligence training.

How to identify the enemy, how to classify them,

how to collect intelligence about them,

and put them into some kind of analysis

of what was going on.

(low electronic music)

In August or so of 1966, this was still based

upon the Korean War and so we had maps

with information about large units moving here and there,

and it really had very little relevance

to what we were going to find in South Vietnam.

And my own view on the Vietnam War

was that the worst I thought it might've been misguided,

but I couldn't conclude that it was immoral.

That there was some justification

for assisting a nation that was resisting a takeover

even if it were kind of a civil war.

(low electronic music)

Midway through the training, we got our orders.

(ominous music)

The Army had designated for South Vietnam the Four Corps.

I Corps ran along the DMZ.

II Corps was central highlands to the west

and then the coast on the east.

III Corps was the area around Saigon.

And then IV Corps was the Mekong Delta area.

II Corps was where I wound up being sent,

in the province of Ninh Thuan and in the town of Phan Rang.

And there I was assigned to be part

of Advisory Team Number 39,

Military Assistance Command Vietnam, the MACV.

(low music)

We were there as advisors who worked in parallel

with the Vietnamese officers

who were in charge of that province, the ARVN.

A kind of parallel military structure

to that of the South Vietnamese military.

So you had a commanding officer at the corps level

who advised the commanding general of the ARVN unit.

And then on down the line with various officers,

including what we would be

which were the staff intelligence officers, the S2.

So that you really had no true civilian leadership anymore,

it was all based on a military structure.

(camera shutter closing)

(soft drum music)

One of our tasks in the intelligence business

was to observe the province that we were in.

(soft drum music)

The guerrilla warfare primarily consisted

of Viet Cong units, often in the mountain areas.

They would come down from wherever they were hiding

and enter hamlets.

(soft drum music)

We would get reports overnight about these episodes

and then set up ambushes.

(low music)

I was part of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion.

(low music)

The intelligence corps was not part

of the regular army unit,

and we were assigned to these advisory teams.

We had dual loyalties, one was through the American stream

of intelligence collection,

and the other was working with the Vietnamese military.

We would spend part of the day doing our own analysis,

writing our own reports for the US military,

and then meeting with our Vietnamese counterparts.

We were supposed to help the Vietnamese

understand the information that they were collecting.

Here I was, a 23-year-old

with about six weeks of intelligence training.

My counterpart, the senior Vietnamese intelligence officer,

had been in the business for at least 10 years.

The idea that we could teach them much (laughs)

was a bit presumptuous.

(somber music)

I used to go into these hamlets

and I would hear sometimes the children

sometimes the women saying (speaking foreign language).

My interpreter told me (speaking foreign language)

stood for lieutenant.

(speaking foreign language) meant very big,

maybe very fat, it wasn't too clear

what exactly that meant.

That was what I was worried about,

and so I said to him well, I said, I've gotta do something,

but I said what's the word for handsome?

(laughs) And he said well (speaking foreign language).

So after that, whenever I'd hear somebody say

(speaking foreign language) I'd say,

(speaking foreign language) which would,

they thought was hilarious of course.

There was a great deal of friendliness on the part

of most of the Vietnamese people for the Americans.

Even by people who might otherwise

have been under the threat of Viet Cong retaliation.

(somber music)

But even with the Vietnamese military forces,

there was a dichotomy between the true believers

in the cause for resisting

what they saw as Communist takeover,

and others who were willing to deal

with the Viet Cong or with their sympathizers.

(somber music)

The Regional Forces and the Popular Forces

effectively, well they weren't very effective,

but they were a National Guard kind of unit,

very little training, some of them with no training at all,

often with very old, inadequate weapons.

There would be a small group of men,

sometimes elderly men, who would take turns at night

and guard the hamlet from intruders.

Sometimes they were successful, oftentimes they were not.

A small group of these Popular Force people,

they had seen an ARVN, an army truck, headed towards an area

that we considered Viet Cong controlled.

They stopped the truck and were holding it and the driver.

And in the truck was a load of American medical supplies.

(somber music)

These Popular Force people were offered

more money than they would ever see in their lives

by the driver to just forget about this and let him go on.

And they refused and they held them until we arrived.

Tracing back the origins of this truck

we found that it had been under the command

of the operations officer in the Vietnamese army

who was part of the province structure.

The man that it was generally agreed

was the most effective officer in their whole organization.

He was considered to be the kind of person

we could really work with.

What all this meant was that he was,

at the very least, willing to sell

these medical supplies to the Viet Cong.

Now here were these Popular Forces folks

who took this great risk to their own lives

and at the cost of a very lucrative pay off

in support of the cause,

and here is this army officer who is highly admired

and aggressive, who may be the one betraying it.

(triumphant music)

- [Announcer] The Central Highlands,

the Trường Sơn cordillera, are a mountainous,

largely jungle-covered region military strategists

on both sides of this struggle are agreed

that he who gains the highlands

will have won the fight for Vietnam.

Villages of the highlands are inhabited

by many races known to the outside world

by the French term Montagnards, or mountain people.

They are known to themselves

by such tribal names as Rade and M'nong.

Are vastly different from the light-skinned lowlanders

whom the world knows as Vietnamese.

Through these mountain villages

for more than a decade have passed

increasing numbers of Communist guerrillas.

The Montagnard on his own ground is a formidable ally.

A man of great personal courage,

the Montagnard holds the key

to a strategically vital area of Southeast Asia.

If he can be won to the government's cause,

the guerrillas' jungle sanctuary

in the Vietnamese highlands will disappear.

(bombs exploding)

- You know what is corruption under these circumstances?

Well the district that was in the northern part of Ninh Chu

was dominated by Montagnards

who had a very difficult time with most of the Vietnamese,

who treated them as second class citizens.

They had a district chief there that we were working with

who was ethnically Vietnamese.

When we went up to these hamlets in that area,

we'd be asking the Popular Force people

how they were getting along, what they needed, et cetera,

and they kept complaining that they were hungry,

that they weren't getting enough rice.

Well one of the ways that they were rewarded

for their service was the rice

which the United States provided.

It would eventually go to the district chief,

and the district chief would distribute it

to the Popular Forces.

We realized that the district chief

had to be siphoning off rice,

selling it on the black market,

and cutting back on what he gave to the Popular Forces.

This kind of corruption, we thought, was truly outrageous.

And so we began what turned out to be a long campaign

to get rid of him.

One day my colleagues and I noticed

that there were literally hundreds of Montagnards

walking along the road or coming down out of the mountains,

some of them crying.

They said he was the best district chief they'd ever had.

That he was the first one

who had treated the Montagnards fairly,

and that all in all he was the best guy they'd ever known

among the Vietnamese.

And here we were, the proud Americans,

and we made sure he got out of there.

As I said, I think I said to the colonel,

we should've just paid him directly

in order to keep doing what he was doing.

(bombs falling)

- [Dispatcher] Control one, control two.

Control one, control two.

(radio chatter)

- With Phan Rang Air Base right nearby,

we would often get calls from the Air Force pilots

coming back to the air base who

for some reason or another had not dropped their ordinance

on the original targets.

(somber music)

And since you didn't wanna land with ordinance on board,

they would ask us for any targets of opportunity

that they could drop their bombs on.

(radio chatter)

You wound up sometimes not much more

than picking a dot on the map

where there might be some VC somewhere.

(somber music)

There was a darker side to the colonel,

often related to his desires

to become a higher grade officer.

One that I remember vividly involved

a decision that he made about defoliating

part of a mountainside.

Because the technology or the weapons system was available,

the colonel thought he oughta use it.

Where he decided to use it was in an area

that we had only rarely been able

to even see from our aircraft.

The mountains were covered with clouds

and the aircraft could not safely get into them.

The Montagnards lived high in the mountains.

Often they would burn off a section of the mountainside

and then plant, and then move on to a different section.

Now we'd had a number of reports,

and it probably was true,

that there was some infiltration

of Viet Cong down through that area.

But it tended to be an area in which

both sides sort of left alone.

Some of us argued that, you know,

we'd never had any hostile fire at our aircraft

while we were traveling in that area.

But the colonel was insistent

and one day we saw come into the offices

a crew of kind of older Air Force pilots

with fluorescent scarves around their neck

who announced themselves as the people

who effectively delivered Agent Orange.

A few weeks later, our Air Force observers

went up into the area to see what the result was.

For the first time in our experience there

they heard rifle shots.

Shots at the aircraft.

They reported that to the colonel

at the briefing that night,

and of course the colonel turned to me and said,

see I told you there were VC up there.

And I think I held my tongue,

but later pointed out that they didn't shoot at us before

but who wouldn't shoot at an aircraft now

after we dumped all of this shit on them?

And we're killing their plants?

(somber music)

The American advisors lived in a compound

that was located along a main highway

that ran between Phan Rang and the air base.

And along the highway there was a pipeline

to carry jet fuel.

One Sunday afternoon, we were relaxing in our rooms

when we heard screaming and a loud explosion.

We saw the small huts that people lived in

across the way in flames.

And then dozens of people either on fire

or running away from the fire.

The pipeline had developed a leak.

Either that or the native Vietnamese

had been using some of the jet fuel

for their own cooking purposes.

We ran back to the compound to get blankets

or anything we could to help put out the flames.

I noticed one of our surgeons

who was standing nearby but not reacting.

I said to him, why aren't you helping?

He showed me his hands and said

these are hands that have been trained as a surgeon.

I can't afford to risk them and risk my future

in order to help these people.

(radio chatter)

The work of intelligence.

There really are two components to it.

One is to record incidents of contact with the enemy.

We'd get reports of three VC having entered a hamlet

and conducted an indoctrination lecture,

and so with the help of my interpreter,

we would interview people.

(low music)

There was a civilian component.

Representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency

that was the advisor to the National Police.

There was the information received through American sources

to pinpoint areas where Viet Cong

or NVA units might be located.

(electronic music)

The second part was collecting information

reported by agents.

These created the greatest problem in terms of evaluation.

(electronic music)

Without knowing the agents,

many of them would have to be classified as F, unknown.

Most often, the information itself would be unknown.

(electronic music)

We'd get a report, for example,

that an NVA battalion had moved

through this mountainous area on its way south.

Possible, but there was no other evidence of it.

It was either unlikely or it was at least unknown.

We didn't know who the agent was.

And part of the reason we didn't know who the agent was

was because of the Vietnamese system

of not sharing much information about their agents.

One of the other problems associated with this was

that the various Vietnamese intelligence agencies

refused to share information

about their agent with one another.

This really complicated our lives,

because one of the things that you would like to have

is to get the same or similar information

from two different sources.

(electronic music)

So now we've got this NVA battalion moves

through this area reported by one agent,

perhaps coming through the Vietnamese military.

And we get a report from the National Police

that their agent had seen an NVA battalion

coming through the area in a similar fashion.

One would like to conclude

that that was accurate information.

The problem was we were never sure

that it wasn't the same agent selling the same information

to both of the different services.

(ominous music)

(bombs exploding)

A building had been blown up in the downtown Phan Rang area.

Two construction workers had been killed,

Vietnamese construction workers these were.

It evidently had been a Viet Cong operation.

None of us could understand why

this particular building or these people

might have been targeted by the VC.

(eerie music)

We were informed that the advisors to the National Police

would be arriving in country on Air America.

The people who were coming were obviously CIA people.

The Viet Cong knew that these two individuals

were agents working for the Central Intelligence Agency,

but we didn't.

(ominous music)

There had been an uproar in Washington by President Johnson,

and he had told the CIA to send people

and get them out there to get more information.

My image of the CIA functionary in our province.

I'd never seen him come out of his house,

nevermind do anything even a little more risky.

It did not surprise me at all that he was not calling in.

He was notoriously a man who liked his alcohol,

liked some of the young women from the area.

A lot of the people who'd been assigned

to these provincial roles

had never been out of the office in Langley, Virginia.

They were desk people, analytic people,

something like that had happened to me

in terms of being sent out into the field.

(car horns honking) (somber music)

We were as intelligence officers

brought to Saigon to be briefed on the Phoenix program.

The Phoenix program was an effort

to try to improve, on one level,

intelligence collection coordination.

(electronic music)

It also aimed at the identification of the individuals

within the normal hamlet village operations,

but who were secretly part of the Viet Cong apparatus.

And the point of that identification

was to then conduct assassinations against them.

The program was really aimed at identification

of individuals, ostensibly civilians,

who would be taken out as potential leaders

of a Viet Cong government.

The program as it was to operate at the province level

was with the establishment

of an intelligence tactical operation center.

Wherever intelligence was being collected

from all sources would be brought together and shared.

When we asked what the Vietnamese knew about this,

they said that they had asked the Vietnamese commanders

to institute these things but they had decided against it.

And so we were supposed to persuade our colleagues

and counterparts at the local level to do this,

so that it would be in place and then

the ambassador could simply tell the president

that it now already existed.

Well there was no way that the Vietnamese lieutenant

was going to institute a system for sharing information

unless he got direct orders from higher authorities,

and so our ability to really do this was very limited.

But the controversy about whether or not

either an individual or that the United States military

is justified in assassinating people

who have not quote done anything that we know of yet

as participants in a plot to do something

is obviously a very difficult moral question.

(eerie music)

We had problems associated with the use of force

and extracting confessions out of prisoners.

One technique involved the use

of the American military field telephone.

We called it ringing somebody up.

This field phone,

that you generated a electrical shock by winding up,

would be used by attaching the bare wires to,

perhaps, a finger on one hand and a toe,

or in some cases to genitalia,

that depended on the mood of the operatives.

One day I walked into an interrogation

of a Viet Cong prisoner.

The Vietnamese, our counterparts,

were using this telephone as a way

to encourage him to speak.

We asked them not to do that,

told them they should not do that,

and then basically had to leave.

They did stop for awhile while we were there,

but I'm sure it probably continued afterwards.

This goes along with things like

threatening to throw people out of helicopters

if somebody didn't talk.

Clearly that kind of psychological threat was used.

(ominous music)

South Korea had sent a couple of battalions of forces.

We didn't have much contact until one day

we got a call that three Vietnamese woodcutters

had been killed in an ambush

that had been set up by the ROKs,

the Republic of Korean soldiers.

These were innocent people, although they were near areas

that we considered free fire zones.

The problem for the woodcutters was

that was where the wood was.

And even though they weren't supposed to go in there,

for their livelihoods that's where they went.

Well, early one morning,

the Koreans had set up an ambush along a trail,

and evidently had cut down these three woodcutters.

Already, there had been an offer made to compensate

the families of the woodcutters with great apologies,

but the Vietnamese were looking

for some other kind of compensation.

We agreed to meet with the ROK commander.

We approached him with the question

of was there some other gesture

that they thought the Koreans could make.

The commander talked with a few of his aids

and he came back and he said,

would it help if we returned their ears?

(intense music)

This would've been in the middle part of 1967.

The US Army sources were doing a reanalysis

of the numbers of Viet Cong and NVA troops

that we were confronting.

At the same time, coming down through

the Vietnamese chain of command,

they were getting the same requirement.

They were to do their analysis

of the size of the enemy force.

Basically an attempt to finally figure out

not only how many Viet Cong military there were,

but also this infrastructure,

this parallel governmental universe that existed.

Maybe even going down to sympathizers

who would be part of the Viet Cong effort.

(intense music)

And it resulted in what came to be known

as the corral reports.

We were gonna round up all of the enemy

in a corral kind of situation.

(intense music)

The Viet Cong had a political military structure

that was parallel to that of the ARVN.

They had a province chief and they had various levels

of command that would be like the shadow government

if and when they took over the province.

(pulsing music)

(intense music)

Only a few weeks before, 101st Airborne Division

had conducted an operation in the province

on an area identified as the location

of the Viet Cong's province chief.

(bombs exploding) (guns firing)

(dramatic music)

We had a pile of documents that appeared to be lists

of people and gave us some ideas about troop strength.

The measure that was being used was body counts.

The commanding general of the 101st Airborne

was very disappointed in the number of bodies

identified as Viet Cong.

And so he questioned us, why they didn't find more VC there.

We said something to the effect of

what did you expect to find there?

You found the province capital.

And they said well we had these reports

about NVA battalions and we said, you know,

I think, sir, if you look at those reports

you'll see that we consider those reports

either doubtful or F-6 unknown, unable to classify.

Well obviously they'd never looked at the classification.

They never looked at that, they just read

whatever the report was and so you learn

that it wasn't working.

That up the chain they were simply interested

in the numbers and weren't paying any attention

to the evaluation.

Coming back to this Corral Report.

We developed some numbers about the size

of the Viet Cong force that operated in the province.

(intense music)

(pulsing music)

A few weeks later, the colonel called us in

and said that Saigon was not happy

because our estimates of Viet Cong strength

and those of the Vietnamese did not match.

And that we should reconcile them.

We asked what the Vietnamese had offered,

and they had said some much lower figure

than what we had come up with.

He says what do you think this means.

And I said Colonel, I don't think they want

our higher numbers (laughs).

I think they want the Vietnamese lower numbers.

(electronic music)

He finally decided to send them the Vietnamese numbers,

afraid that he was going to alienate his superiors

if he continued to argue the case for the higher numbers.

A few weeks later, I met with some of my friends

who were still at Tan Son Nhut,

a major base known as Pentagon East,

and they were operating there as intelligence officers:

looking at the big map of South Vietnam

and receiving reports from around the country,

and making the Order of Battle,

what units were where and how many were, et cetera.

And they said you've gotta come over

and see the new Order of Battle map that we've created.

We've gotten all these corral reports

and we now have numbers for people.

We think we have a picture of the whole countryside.

I had to say to them, you know,

I think that's a wonderful map,

you've got a nice diagram, nice set up here.

I said there's only one problem with the map,

we sent you those numbers and we know

those aren't the right numbers.

(electronic music)

The numbers that we were talking about

tried to be inclusive of everybody

who might be a part of the enemy force.

The Vietnamese were willing, perhaps,

only to look at the numbers of people

in the kind of official military position.

There were different levels of commitment

to the Viet Cong cause and it was very important

to know whether or not there were people

in the hamlets who were sympathetic,

even if they weren't the military people.

And so that was part of the disagreement

about how to count the enemy force.

Our position was that there were many more

than the Vietnamese were willing to admit.

(electronic music)

One of our colleagues responsible

for briefing General Westmoreland,

the commander in the entire area,

and Ellsworth Bunker, who was the ambassador at the time,

he had been concerned about the fact

that they were going to have to justify

these much larger numbers than had been used before

by the American military to assess

the nature of the problem.

Instead, he said, there was no reaction from them

except for a discussion between the two of them

about how they were gonna present

these numbers to Washington.

It was probably less the case that Westmoreland

was fudging the numbers than it was

that the whole bureaucratic system

was designed to fudge the numbers

before they got to Westmoreland.

(electronic music)

By telling us they didn't want the higher numbers

that we were getting and giving them,

they were telling us to keep them lower.

The political atmosphere and the political leadership

are obviously vested in a certain policy

and they don't like the bad news being brought to them.

So we contributed to that, we made the compromise

of changing our numbers to meet the expectations

of those people above us.

(somber music)

Virtually everybody that you saw

could tell you what day they were on

in terms of the 365 days that they were scheduled

to be in country.

You had to worry for people who were very new

to being in country,

but also then when you got short,

when you were only a month or so away from leaving.

One of our observer pilots,

who also was getting ready to return home,

was on a reconnaissance mission and saw a truck

driving up into Viet Cong controlled area.

He fired off his M60 machine gun,

planning to strafe alongside of the road

as a warning to frighten the driver.

The rounds strafe the truck itself.

The driver fell out of the truck

and turned out to be killed.

Something that he didn't mean to do.

In this war zone, you felt you ought to be doing something

that would make a mark as part of that war effort,

and it was a dangerous kind of psychology that took over.

And I felt that this guy in some ways had had that.

He hadn't had any real confrontation with the enemy.

There would've been the possibility of an investigation.

As it was, we were able to construct a reasonable case

that this individual had to be either

dealing with the Viet Cong, paying the Viet Cong,

or in some way cooperating with them

in order to be in that area.

And as far as I know that's as far as that went.

Well, you know, had some moral twinges about it,

especially in retrospect.

The government of Vietnam and of the United States

offered its apologies, there was compensation paid,

and I often wonder how that individual feels

about the episode, whether that continues to be a thought.

But I know at the time it was something

that had really bothered him a great deal.

(somber music)

(helicopter flying)

(somber music)

The American military went through a very elaborate

set of codes for identifying people,

you know, that it would be a mistake to use real names.

I was known as Silver Lightning Alpha Two.

So we're out in this little operation in this hamlet,

and I get a radio call to Silver Lightning Two Alpha

that your son, John Jay Murphy, has been born (laughs).

Which of course broke all code violations and the like,

but I remember spending the rest of that day

taking pictures of children just trying to imagine,

you know, what my new son looked like.

(light guitar music)

(acoustic guitar music)

Each month there would be a junior officer

from one of the teams who would be assigned

to go to Saigon to pick up a satchel full of money,

both military payment certificates

which was the American currency,

and a thick book of official papers.

I wound up having to do what we call the pay run.

We had to fly out to an advisory team

that was experiencing attacks

by a North Vietnamese battalion virtually every night.

Needless to say, I was particularly interested

in getting to them early in the day

and leaving before nightfall.

(acoustic guitar music)

It took us awhile to figure out

where their landing area was.

And it turned out to be on the side of a hill.

Landing was no real problem.

I paid the people that were there,

and we got ready to take off.

The pilot was not as big or as heavy as me,

but heavier than some of the others.

So together we had quite a bit of weight

with the machine guns, the rockets, the lead,

and this little single engine.

We sat at the top of the hill and he said,

I don't think we've got enough engine power

to go up the hill and get enough air speed.

So we're gonna have to go downhill.

And we came down the hill, building up airspeed,

I felt us leave the ground.

We started to hear pop, pop, pop.

(guns firing) The pilot noticed

that he was losing fuel.

We had taken a couple of rounds in the fuel tank.

And then we began to come down again.

We come back down right at the foot of the hill,

bounced up in the air,

bounced back down on the other side of the hill,

and go plowing into this grassy area.

The pilot shouts to get out and as I do,

I look over and I notice

that the fuel in the wing is dripping.

I try to climb out, I'm in the back seat

of a two seat plane here,

but got suck between the front seat and the doorway.

Had to back out and then literally dove

over the front seat out the door,

rolled on the ground away from the plane,

and as we stood there looking at the plane

waiting to see if it's gonna go up in flames,

I remember that I probably have about

20,000 dollars in military payment certificates

and pee-as-toos still in the plane

and the army is awful if you lose the money

on these pay runs.

We've been warned over and over again.

I can just see it burning up and having

to try to explain that this money burned away.

I was able to go back and retrieve the bag

and then it occurs to me,

I may have to stay in this place this night

because that NVA battalion is still out there.

How am I gonna get out of here now

that our plane is unable to fly?

So we immediately begin calling for help,

but now they have to fly another plane out

with another pilot to get me,

and I have to complete the pay run.

I complete the pay run and I go back to Saigon.

(guitar music)

One of the buildings that's been taken over

in downtown Saigon is the headquarters

of the finance branch of the Army.

I go to turn in the money that I have left

and the signed slips for people who've collected it.

I get to the office in the morning,

we get the bag, the money is in it,

take it to the sergeant who's responsible

for checking the signatures,

and he stops at one point, oh, he says, we've got a problem.

I said what's the problem?

He said you see here, the official signature

for this sergeant is John J Jones.

He signed it J James Jones.

That's an incorrect signature, I can't accept it.

Can't accept it.

He says you can't turn in the money,

you can't turn in the pay slips,

you've gotta go back and get the right signature.

That would've been bad enough except

when I look at JJ Jones or whatever his name was

he's at this outpost where we crashed the plane (laughs).

And so theoretically I'm supposed to go back

and get a new signature from this guy.

I said you gotta be kidding me.

I said this is ridiculous.

I said I'm gonna just, no, he says you can't do that.

You can't just sign it yourself you know (laughs)

we'd really be in trouble.

So, so I have to take everything back.

I get together with my pilot.

I'll tell you one thing he said, that's gonna happen

is no way am I going back in there with you

(laughs) in the plane.

He says give me the stuff, I'll go.

I'll fly in there, I'll get the signature,

and that was fine with me (laughs).

(rock music)

So we entered this room.

Around the table were perhaps a dozen visitors,

most of them military,

mentioning that I had recently

been an advisor at the province level in South Vietnam.

People stopped and looked at me

and one said I've always wondered

what happens at the province level.

(guns firing)

In walked the man we had evidently been waiting for

who was disheveled, although he wore

a very preppy, blue, pinstriped suit.

(rock music) (guns firing)

He sat down at the table, put his head in his hands,

rubbed his eyes a bit and said,

you'll have to excuse me I've been up

in the war room all night.

The president wants to know what's going on.

Somebody said to him well what's the latest news.

And he looked at him and he said, we don't know.

We just don't know.

None of our people are reporting in.

This news that not even the CIA knew what was happening,

we had probably gotten more reports

through the military channels than they were getting.

(ominous music)

There's no doubt in my mind that in the short run

the United States could've won quote

the war in Vietnam by taking it over and running it.

To do that, however, they would've had

to have become the colonial rulers,

and in the long run we could never win at that.

We had in many ways a connection

with some of the population,

which saw us as a useful and positive force,

but who also had to deal

with this kinda corrupt, or inefficient, leadership.

Someone once asked me is what we hear about Vietnam true.

And my answer used to be everything you ever heard

about Vietnam is true in some way.

None of us had the same experience,

none of us went through exactly the same kinds of learning,

but that's been the Vietnam that I knew

and the stories that I tell.

(somber music)