Turning Point: The Vietnam War (2025) s01e02 Episode Script

1
[groovy brooding music plays]
[woman in Vietnamese]
In 1965, when I joined the guerrillas,
it was when the Americans invaded
Southern Vietnam in large numbers.
They searched for soldiers.
They took people,
and they beat them for no reason.
They murdered people, burned down houses.
There was this hatred,
but I didn't know then it was hatred.
But I wanted to join the revolution
to stop it,
to stop those cruelties,
those inhumanities.
[guns firing]
I have to say that the first time I shot
and I saw that I had killed an American,
made me thrilled.
I destroyed one tank,
and then about 15 American soldiers.
In all the battles that I participated in,
I was given the name "Tank Killer Hero."
We all longed for a tranquil life,
a peaceful life.
No one wants war.
But now that we had guns in hand,
we had an obligation to join the fight.
[ominous percussive music plays]
[inaudible]
[Viet Thanh Nguyen, in English]
What happened in Vietnam
was enormously important
for 20th century history.
For many decades afterwards,
the word "Vietnam" symbolized
so many things
to so many different countries.
For Americans, obviously,
the word "Vietnam" meant the war.
Whereas, for many other countries,
the word "Vietnam" meant revolution
and independence and freedom.
Because the history of Vietnam
is a history of revolution
against foreign occupiers.
[tense ethereal music plays]
[Viet] Long before the American War
in Vietnam started,
there had already been a great tradition
of Vietnamese resistance
to French colonization.
[bold classical music plays]
[distant explosions]
[Lien-Hang T. Nguyen] Since 1858,
Vietnam had been colonized by France.
The French Empire was very exploitative.
Colonial rubber plantations
were basically hell on earth.
They would make Vietnamese
as young as, you know, ten years old,
uh, work under horrible conditions.
Toiling away day and night.
It was basically slave labor.
And if you weren't going to work
in the manner
that your French colonial overseer wanted,
there was torture, there were executions.
And all of this benefit and profit
flowed back to France.
[Fredrik Logevall] Enter Hồ Chí Minh.
[tense ethereal music plays]
He is one of the extraordinary political
figures of the 20th century, no question.
Hồ Chí Minh is a revolutionary
unlike any other.
So when I talk to people, I say,
"Now, did Fidel Castro travel the world?"
"No."
"Did Mao Zedong travel the world?"
"No."
[Lien-Hang] As a young adult,
Hồ Chí Minh had to leave Vietnam
to make his fortunes elsewhere.
He makes it to the United States,
and eventually back to Europe,
starting in London as a sous-chef
for a well-known pastry chef.
And from there,
he makes it to Paris in 1919.
[horns blaring]
When Hồ Chí Minh lands in Europe,
he meets other revolutionary,
anti-colonial Vietnamese
who are hoping to overthrow the French
and liberate their country.
It's the political awakening
of Hồ Chí Minh.
And in the 1920s,
he really advances global communism.
[reporter] A communist,
although many of his followers are not,
Ho, trained in Moscow, educated in Paris,
follows a pure nationalist line.
To the simple peasants,
he is their leader and benefactor,
and they revere him.
"Uncle Hồ," they call him.
[woman in Vietnamese]
Uncle Hồ is our common father.
We listen to Uncle Hồ's teachings,
that we must love our country,
protect our country,
and keep it from division.
[Lien-Hang] Hồ Chí Minh believed
that he had to return
to the borders within Vietnam,
and this took place in 1941.
[Marc J. Selverstone] During World War II,
there was an opportunity
for Vietnam to assert its independence.
There was a nationalist organization
that included a lot of communists.
[unsettling lilting music plays]
[Selverstone] And at the tail end
of World War II,
they declare themselves
the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,
led by Hồ Chí Minh.
They decide to break free
from the French colonial masters
that had been running the show
for the past 80 years.
And in December of 1946,
we see the first major shots fired
to eject the French.
[reporter] The situation
in French Indochina grows graver
as bitter fighting sweeps through Hanoi,
leaving misery and destruction
in its wake.
[Logevall] What's interesting
about Hồ Chí Minh is how much he believes
that the Americans, the United States,
are going to be there for him.
He fixated on the reality
that the United States itself was born
out of an anti-colonial reaction,
in its case to Great Britain.
"So, of course, the Americans
will support me for this in my endeavor."
I think he believed that very strongly,
and he sent letters to Harry Truman,
a series of letters
that all go unanswered,
but in which he, Hồ,
asks for American support.
But the French are very clever
in playing up the Cold War dimension,
that Indochina
is part of the larger struggle
between East and West.
And "You, the United States,
need to support us
because we are contributing
to this larger Cold War effort."
In Indochina,
we are fighting against communism.
We are fighting for democracy
and for the freedom of the world.
They understand
that this matters in Washington,
and so Washington commits itself
more and more to the French war effort,
in large part
because of Cold War concerns.
[birds chirping]
[Logevall] Hồ Chí Minh has
an understanding from early on
that he can't really compete
with the French
when it comes to military strength.
[plane engines whir]
But Hồ Chí Minh understood
something important,
which was that they were fighting
on their own turf,
and they would outlast the French.
[tense pulsing music plays]
And of course this culminates
in one of the great military encounters
of the 20th century,
the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ.
[bomb explodes]
[reporter 1] It was the end
of the garrison.
It was the end
of the French adventure in Indochina.
[reporter 2] As the last French soldiers
cross the bridge leading from Hanoi,
Việt Minh guards take over.
Communism has won
a far-reaching victory in Asia.
[Lien-Hang] The French defeat
at Điện Biên Phủ
would actually kick off
the Geneva Conference.
[reporter 2] The victory at Điện Biên Phủ
gives the Việt Minh bargaining power
at a peace conference in Geneva.
[Logevall] It is at this conference
that the great powers agree
to a political settlement in Indochina.
And there are really
two agreements reached,
one of which is a ceasefire
at the 17th parallel
and a regrouping of forces,
so that the French
will be below the 17th parallel.
The Việt Minh will be
above the 17th parallel.
[reporter 3] It divides Vietnam
into North and South,
turns over the North to the Communists.
They get all of Vietnam
north of the 17th parallel
with Hanoi, their capital.
[Logevall] There's also an agreement
that there will be an election
for reunification of Vietnam
to take place by mid-1956,
so two years hence.
[reporter 4] The United States
bitterly opposed the settlement,
and Secretary of State John Dulles
actually described it
as a defeat for American foreign policy.
[Lien-Hang] The Americans were
very frustrated with the French
for being unable to defeat
this weak, inferior army.
The Geneva Conference officially ended
the French military role in Indochina.
By 1955, Eisenhower looked to assume
the burden that the French had undertaken.
What that meant was keeping Vietnam
away from communism
and preserving
a non-communist South Vietnam.
[intriguing music plays]
[Selverstone] What you see emerge
are these two states,
a South Vietnam and a North Vietnam.
Above the 17th parallel,
Hồ Chí Minh would be in charge,
with the People's Republic of China
supplying aid matériel
to the North Vietnamese.
Below the 17th parallel
would be Ngô Đình Diệm
as prime minister of South Vietnam,
and then later on, president.
[Tuong Vu] After the Geneva agreements,
Hồ Chí Minh and his government was able
to receive Communist Chinese support
to build an army
and also to launch
the so-called "land reform"
in North Vietnam.
They believed property
must be publicly owned,
because a privately-owned property
is the source of exploitation.
They sent teams of cadres
into every village under their control
to incite the poorest farmers
to rise up against the landlords.
They took over all the people
who owned properties,
who owned land,
and they had, uh,
what they called "people's court."
And all the peasants
and other people around
who had worked for the landowners,
they were the people who became judge.
They said
that these landowners exploited them,
so they were the people
who had to be killed,
and the Communist Vietnamese
beheaded them.
[Nho] My grand-uncle was a rich farmer
in a village next to mine.
When the Communists asked the people
to give their gold, their money
to the movement
to buy guns for the soldiers,
he gave everything he had.
But when the land reform program began,
the local committee picked him,
put him out in a tribunal.
People hurled insults at him,
calling him names,
"enemy of the people,"
"enemy of the revolution."
Killed him.
They shot him to death.
[Vu] Somewhere around 20,000 or 50,000
were executed in this campaign.
[Nhu] One day, a Communist guy came
to tell my father and my mo-- my mother,
"You should go, fast.
They're going to take you."
So we went south in 1954.
[reporter] More than one million
Vietnamese desert their homes
and flee southward
rather than live under a Communist regime.
[Selverstone] Over time,
there's a question
of what's going to happen
with those two states,
South Vietnam and North Vietnam?
[gloomy music plays]
[Selverstone] There were supposed to be
elections held in the summer of 1956
so that North and South could be unified.
[Ken Hughes] The North Vietnamese leader
Hồ Chí Minh
was supposed to be on the ballot,
and the President of South Vietnam,
Ngô Đình Diệm,
could also be on the ballot.
[Logevall] But there will be
no election in 1956,
even though this had been called for
in the Geneva Accords of 1954.
Diệm had no interest in those elections.
He recognized that Hồ Chí Minh
likely would have won those elections.
Ngô Đình Diệm would claim that an election
in a Communist-controlled area
would be impossible.
[Hughes] Once the North Vietnamese
realized that there was going to be
no elections to reunify the country,
they felt they had to do something.
[Vu] They were not happy with just having
a communist system in North Vietnam.
They wanted to have it all over Vietnam.
So that was the ultimate reason
for them to wage the war.
[music intensifies]
[in Vietnamese] Every young man
and the entire nation marched to battle
with the spirit of determination
to fight and win.
Chairman Hồ's goal was
independence and freedom.
We had to liberate South Vietnam
and unify the Fatherland.
The act of a country attacking
another country is an "invasion."
And entirely at the time,
even though it was a single people,
it was two different regimes.
[Nho, in English] This is horrible.
We want just to live in peace
in the South.
But we must fight
because we want to preserve the nature,
the way of-- of life in the South.
It's civil war.
[Viet] Both sides believed
in their vision of a nation,
but they just had
extremely different visions
of how to achieve that.
[automatic weapons firing]
This was a crucial moment
when history could have taken
a very, very different direction.
The United States could have just taken
a neutral approach to what was happening.
And, obviously,
the United States did not do that.
And in 1965, we start to see
a really huge buildup
of the American presence there.
[Nho] That changed the nature of the war.
Before the-- the Americans came in,
it's a war
between the North and the South.
And we were fighting against them.
When Americans came in,
now the Communists tell their soldiers,
"You have to die for your country."
We kicked the French out,
but now the Americans came in.
[jet engine roaring]
[Vu] The Communists call it
"anti-American war,"
to defeat the Americans
and their Vietnamese puppets.
It was primarily framed as a patriotic war
against a foreign invader.
Even though the US
did not invade South Vietnam.
[eerie music plays]
[Lien-Hang] In North Vietnam,
at this point,
everyone held up Hồ Chí Minh
as a symbolic leader.
But if you were forced to come up
and-- and pinpoint
who was the actual leader,
it was Lê Duẩn.
[man in Vietnamese] My father was born
in Hau Tien village, Quảng Trị,
on the outer bank of the Thạch Hãn river.
He joined the Communist Party.
During his political activities
from 1930 to 1945,
he spent ten years
in French colonial prison.
So in 1957,
Uncle Hồ asked him to go to the North
to become the First Secretary
of the Central Party Committee.
[Lien-Hang in English]
Lê Duẩn was the General Secretary,
was the head honcho,
was the number one leader
of the Vietnamese Communist Party.
And he saw no other path
to liberation of Southern Vietnam,
and no path towards reunification
of the entire country,
other than through war.
[George J. Veith] Because Lê Duẩn had
decided to expand the war in the South,
that required a lot more weapons
and a lot more people.
And to do that, you had to expand
the Hồ Chí Minh Trail dramatically.
[Lien-Hang] The Hồ Chí Minh Trail is
the major supply route of men and arms
from North Vietnam into South Vietnam.
Vietnam is divided at the 17th parallel.
You had South Vietnamese soldiers
and then American soldiers
guarding the DMZ.
So the infiltration route would
have to run through Laos and Cambodia
into South Vietnam.
[pulsing, anxious music plays]
The Hồ Chí Minh Trail began
as a series of small dirt paths.
If you were a North Vietnamese soldier
bringing supplies down South,
it would take months of arduous trekking
to go from North Vietnam to South Vietnam,
carrying things by bicycle or on back.
[man in Vietnamese] My unit had
some people who cleared the forest
wherever we needed to go.
Actually, there were
a lot of roads back then.
But now, they call it
the Hồ Chí Minh Trail.
Back then, our march was very grueling.
There were hundreds of ways to die,
not just a few.
From bombs and bullets
[water rushing]
Crossing streams,
you could be swept away by the current.
There were people
who got sick, got malaria.
There was such hunger
and starving to death.
From the starting point
to our destination,
we lost six full months.
[reporter in English] The undeclared war
raging today in South Vietnam
is not being fought
in the streets of cities,
but the central highlands.
Into this remote, mountainous,
largely jungle-covered region,
the Communists of North Vietnam
have infiltrated a steady stream
of agitators, terrorists,
and professional guerrillas.
- [guns firing]
- [men yell]
[Veith] The Communist philosophy
was to take over the countryside,
surround the cities, and eventually,
you can take over the government.
And so the Communists
were basically in control
of large chunks of the countryside,
perhaps 70% of it.
Now they're controlling manpower,
now they're controlling the rice crop.
Now they're controlling a large part
of the economics of the country.
[wistful music plays]
[Hayslip] We don't know the Communists.
We just only know the Việt Cộng fight
against American invaders.
But we don't know why they're there,
and we didn't really know the Communists
and what they believe.
We farmers.
We don't know which side are we on,
but we know that we love our Motherland.
[guns firing heavily in distance]
[Lien-Hang]
"Việt Cộng" is a derogatory term
for the Communist enemy,
this guerrilla army.
They would become known officially
as the National Liberation Front.
[Hayslip] We don't call them "Việt Cộng."
We call them Chú giải phóng quân.
So it's "Uncles of Liberation."
They are the villagers.
They know us. They live with us.
So we're comfortable with them.
We supported them.
[Viet] The problem is that Americans
had a very hard time distinguishing
South Vietnamese guerrillas
and North Vietnamese forces
from the civilian population.
And part of insurgent strategy
is to blur the boundaries
between combatants and non-combatants.
[Veith] Both the Americans
and the South Vietnamese understand
if we're going to win the war,
we're gonna have to push
the Communists out of the villages,
regain control of the countryside.
The question always was,
what was the strategy that would work
to push the Communists out?
[reporter] Pacification is what the war
in South Vietnam is supposed to be about.
That is, the effort to bring
all the country's 12,000 hamlets
under government control.
[Daddis] The Strategic Hamlet Program
is actually an idea
from the South Vietnamese.
And the idea is that you would create
these fortified settlements
that would be purged of insurgent forces.
[droning music plays]
[reporter] An area, a town, a hamlet
may have given hospitality
or been held hostage by the enemy.
We move in
and compel the people to move out.
[Viet] They would take peasants away
from where they would live traditionally
and concentrate them in places
where they could theoretically
start their lives over again as farmers
behind barricades.
And the guerrillas
would be left in the countryside.
Over time, more and more Americans start
taking over the pacification effort.
They call these refugee communities
"New Life Hamlets."
In one way, it's a better life.
For here, for the moment at least,
they are removed from the war.
But in many other ways,
it's not better at all. It's worse.
[anxious music plays]
[Hayslip] Americans show up
in our village.
They say, "Everybody have to go.
Your village's gonna be leveled."
[soldier] Mama-san
Hey, Bill, tell her she's got to leave.
[child speaks indistinctly]
Tell this Mama-san
to get that stuff and get out of here.
Come on, let's go.
[Hayslip] Go? Go where? Go where?
You thinking about here you have house,
you have everything.
Overnight, you become a refugee.
[soldier] Okay, burn it!
[Hayslip] All the people put
in one refugee camp
with a little bamboo hut
or shack for them to live there.
No rice paddy.
How can people survive?
We starving.
That is what I see. That's what I saw.
[Viet] This idea did not
work out very well.
Vietnamese guerrillas continued
to infiltrate the hamlets.
And many of the people wanted to go back
to their ancestral farms and villages,
and many of them did.
[Logevall] "Pacification" was
a sort of precursor, in a sense,
to "counterinsurgency,"
which is the phrase
that the Americans come to use,
including the American commander,
William Westmoreland.
I-- I think, in essence, uh,
a victory
in a counterinsurgency environment
is to win the hearts and minds
of the people.
[Peter Arnett]
General William C. Westmoreland
was chosen by President Johnson
to take command in Vietnam in mid-1964.
[reporter] The commander
of the United States Army in Vietnam,
William Childs Westmoreland,
51, four-star general,
controls and coordinates
the vast and growing assembly
of American power in Vietnam.
By the time Westmoreland got there,
the South Vietnamese military were losing
over 100 men a week, at least.
- Morning, General.
- Morning.
[tense ethereal music plays]
Westmoreland says
that the offensive
that he has anticipated,
that he'd been fearful of, is now on.
And he wants people
as quickly as he can get them.
[Logevall] Over a period of months,
in 1965,
Westmoreland asks for, and gets,
a steady increase
in the American troop commitment.
[man] I was born
and raised in Macon, Georgia.
My father was a sharecropper.
And I'm one of 13 children.
I was number nine.
Macon, Georgia was
a very racially-oppressed town.
Everything was still segregated.
You know, the white and colored restrooms,
sitting on the back of the bus.
You know, it was just very,
not only oppressive, but depressing to me.
You know, I just knew
there was a bigger world
and there was something better to do
rather than to be
in this very, very racist town.
And so I joined the Army
at a very early age,
at-- at 17.
Little did I know
that Vietnam would be on the horizon.
And of course, it was a stalemate
from the very beginning,
as far as we were concerned.
[Shimabukuro] My parents were always
more on the Democratic,
leftist side of the coin.
So they were obviously
against the war from the beginning.
I was against the war.
But at that age,
you know, I don't think a lot of people
think those things through clearly.
And I obviously didn't.
So I said, "Well,
I'm going to quit high school
and join the Marine Corps."
My parents had a heart attack
when they heard I was going.
They were not, uh, thrilled
with that decision.
When I went to Vietnam,
we flew into Đà Nẵng.
And they said, "Well, we're not going
to stop this plane when we land."
[guns firing heavily]
"They're taking incoming at the airport."
The C-130 has a back ramp
that they lower down.
And they throw you out the plane,
and there's incoming coming around.
And you just run
to the side of the-- the airstrip
and jump into a foxhole until it stops.
That's when I said,
"Now I stepped into some shit."
"This is not a good place."
The first day.
[gentle dramatic classical music plays]
[Scott Camil] When I first got to Vietnam,
assigned to my unit,
I met Jake Main.
And he became my first friend.
As a new guy in the unit,
you get what's called "shit detail,"
either guard duty or mess duty.
And I picked up guard duty.
[droning music plays]
I got outpost nine.
And then one night, I'm on guard duty,
and about, um, 1:30 in the morning,
a trip flare went off.
It pops up in the air and it lights up,
and you see what's going on.
And there were all these Việt Cộng,
and they were already
past the wire into the compound.
And as soon as I saw them, I opened fire.
[automatic weapons firing heavily]
Everything started blowing up.
They blew up the artillery pieces
and the fuel dump and the ammo dump.
We had 28 men wounded and five men killed.
One of them was
[voice catches]
my friend Jake Main.
[somber music plays]
[Camil] I thought,
"Wow, I'm in this place,
and the people who live here,
it's their job to kill me."
"This is really serious."
"And if I don't pay attention,
I'm not going home."
[forlorn music plays]
And I made a decision that day
that I'd have no empathy
for the Vietnamese.
And I was going to kill
every one of them that I could.
I'm gonna get them back
for what they did to us.
[man] In the beginning,
when I first arrived there,
we went into villages and that,
we'd be friendly.
We'd pass out candy to the kids.
And it was just a friendly-type situation.
[children speak Vietnamese excitedly]
I'll have to go get more.
I'll have to go get more.
Okay, I'll be right back.
[Haeberle] But as time went on
and we started taking some casualties,
the attitude changed.
- [insects chirp]
- [birds squawk]
[man] We would be out
in the bush for 30 to 60 days.
Going through villages every day.
And almost always,
we would receive one or two gunshots
from a rifle, sniper.
[rifle fires]
[automatic weapons firing]
[Nakayama] That was guerrilla warfare.
You can get killed any moment.
There are people
getting hit by stray rounds.
Just stepping on booby traps.
My squad leader, on my third week,
stepped on a booby trap
and blew his legs off.
Had to run up
and try to stop the bleeding.
His legs were gone.
His fingers were gone.
And he died on the helicopter.
[melancholic music plays]
[Haeberle] With the loss
of the soldiers in the company,
troops very much started
to change their position
against the Vietnamese people.
They're losing some of their friends.
And it just, uh, worsened as it went on.
[Westmoreland] This war is not
going to be won by any single battle
or series of battles
or even series of campaigns.
We should develop a hard-hitting,
well-balanced, highly mobile force
here in Vietnam,
that we can sustain indefinitely,
if required.
[ominous music plays]
[Thomas Bass] Westmoreland comes up
with what becomes known
as "search and destroy" missions.
[officer] The search and destroy tactic
developed by our forces in Vietnam
means just what it says.
To search out the enemy,
no matter how difficult the terrain,
to engage him in battle,
and, in the end, to destroy him.
[Bass] Also, you have in Vietnam
these things called "free-fire zones."
That's an entire region
that would be declared
a zone that was open for attack.
[man] We would, uh, tell civilians
to move out of a zone.
And then we would assume
they all did what we told them.
And that it contained
nothing but enemy troops.
And then it was a free-fire zone
in that you could shoot anywhere in it
without pre-clearance.
[guns firing heavily]
[soldier 1 on radio]
Zero, zero, seven, zero.
[soldier 2] Roger, I am now firing.
Copy, over.
[soldiers continue on radio indistinctly]
[Gard] But, of course,
it wasn't clear of civilians.
[Viet] It became extremely messy
because a lot of civilians didn't agree
to the idea of free-fire zones.
These were simply imposed on them.
And so a lot of civilians ended up
being killed in these free-fire zones,
either deliberately or accidentally.
[Camil] We were taught
that the Vietnamese were warned to leave.
And all the Vietnamese that stayed
were part of the infrastructure
for the Việt Cộng.
I was told I'm in a free-fire zone,
I can kill everybody I find.
And our method of operation
was called "search and destroy."
You just hunt for people,
and you kill them.
And you can kill them however you want.
[sinister music plays]
[Hayslip] Everybody killing everybody.
The people who had
nothing to do with the politics,
who had nothing to do with how the war
turned into such killing zones.
It's just so sad and suffering.
So this is what built up hatred
and built up
why did the villagers join the Việt Cộng.
[Trong in Vietnamese] They say,
"When the enemy comes to the house,
even the women fight."
We fought with whatever we had.
It didn't matter
that we didn't have modern weapons.
I'm the prime example.
On my first day, I received
I received a World War II-era rifle.
If you got to use modern weapons,
that meant that you got them yourself
by killing the enemies
and taking their guns.
And I really like that.
And in my gut,
all I wanted to do was fight head-on.
[Bass, in English] The North Vietnamese
relied very heavily on women soldiers.
I think there were 1.5 million women
fighting on the Communist side.
[gentle music plays]
And among young people
who volunteered for the war,
up to 70% of the volunteers were women.
[woman] They called us the "Việt Cộng,"
but we were the Liberation Army.
We were all comrades
and considered ourselves one family.
When one person fell,
five to seven others stepped forward.
At that time,
it was a hot-blooded atmosphere.
If there was a gun and someone came,
I would fight right away.
I would shoot immediately,
because I would never use the excuse,
"My emotions got in the way."
This was for the love of the people.
[Bass, in English]
This is a war with free-fire zones,
with death, murder, and mayhem
taking place in the countryside.
If, uh, North Vietnam would, uh, stop,
uh, sending infiltrators and arms
into the South,
that this matter could be resolved
very quickly.
[Bass] But every night
on the nightly news,
the war is reported
from the side of the United States
and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
[somber droning music plays]
[reporter] Here is the United States
Information Service building,
where every day at 5:00 p.m.
occurs the oddest ritual in Saigon,
the military briefing for the world press.
Đức Cơ, "D-U-C, C-O,"
Special Forces camp in Pleiku,
it was mortared again
at eleven o'clock this morning.
[Bass] Every day, there is
an official US government report
on the military actions that took place.
This brings the total
from January 1 through April 1 to 10,746.
[Bass] And they're called
"The Five O'Clock Follies"
because they were absolutely idiotic,
just straight-up propaganda.
[reporter] These were the targets
of the United States Air Force
in North Vietnam today.
[Bass] There were something
like 600 reporters
in Vietnam at its height.
Many of them were "on the team,"
as the expression was.
You're either on the team
or not on the team.
Westmoreland would often summon
US journalists into his presence
and tell them to straighten up.
"We want some more
positive reporting out of you."
"We're winning this war."
But the best reporters are those reporters
who are actually on the ground,
traveling around.
[somber music plays]
We're on the outskirts
of the village of Cẩm Nê
with elements
of the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines.
[Bass] One of those great Vietnam
war reporters was Morley Safer,
working for CBS.
He accompanies
a group of Marines into the field.
We were walking into this village when--
- [mortars firing]
- You can hear what happened.
[Bass] There's some sniper fire.
And he notices that the US military
with their Zippo lighters
are actually igniting the thatch roofs
of the Vietnamese houses
of an entire village.
And Morley Safer captures this on film,
and he reports it.
[Safer] The day's operation
burned down 150 houses,
wounded three women, killed one baby,
wounded one Marine,
and netted these four prisoners.
Today's operation is
the frustration of Vietnam in miniature.
There is little doubt
that American firepower
can win a military victory here.
But to a Vietnamese peasant
whose home is a--
means a lifetime of backbreaking labor,
it will take more
than presidential promises
to convince him that we are on his side.
Morley Safer
[Dan Rather] This got
a tremendous amount of attention.
It's one thing to battle for a village
or battle in the village.
It's another thing
to start setting fire to homes.
Nobody thought
American troops would do that.
[fretful, angry music plays]
[Rather] I would say
it was the first real shock
that Americans got
of what the reality of war is.
At the White House,
President Johnson was appalled
and also furious.
He didn't think
that CBS should have run the footage.
And he got busy on the telephone.
He called Dr. Frank Stanton,
who was President of CBS Corporate.
He went to the very top.
[Bass] Johnson says,
"Frank, are you trying to fuck me?"
And then demanded
that Morley Safer be fired by CBS.
And Frank Stanton refused
to fire Morley Safer.
[helicopter whirring]
[Rather] Not long after that,
late November of 1965,
I arrived in Vietnam.
[groovy brooding music plays]
Dan Rather, CBS News
I came enthusiastic,
but not very smart about wars.
But for whatever shortcomings I had,
I went to Vietnam determined
to see what was happening in combat,
not just hang around
some headquarters in Saigon.
And when I said, "Where's the action?"
I was told it's in the northern part
of the country in a place called Tam Kỳ.
[suspenseful music plays]
When I got there,
it looked like a Hollywood movie.
There was tremendous gunfire
on both sides.
Could you tell us what's happening here?
Fill us in on what the situation is?
[present day] There were a lot of people
falling and dying or wounded.
And there was a Marine who'd been hit.
One of his companions asked
if we could help him.
- [man] We need some help over here.
- [young Rather] I'll give you a hand.
[gun fires distantly]
[Rather] You know if you're a Marine,
you never sound retreat.
But as the battle developed,
the situation seemed to be
that the Marines were vastly outnumbered.
It had been underestimated,
the strength of the Việt Cộng forces
who were there.
That was typical
of much of the fighting in Vietnam.
[guns firing]
This is the 25th Infantry Division,
the newest troops in South Vietnam
for the United States.
Everything in the modern Army's book
is thrown into clearing
this one half-mile sector.
Included is the new
flame-throwing armored personnel carrier.
Dan Rather, CBS News.
- Fire!
- With the 25th Division, South Vietnam.
[present day] I was in Vietnam
for almost a year.
Time and time again,
there'd be a battle
or even a small firefight,
and we did not prevail.
[young Rather] For those who read
the figures on American dead
week after week, 95 one week, 116 another
For those who read
those figures and wonder
how so many Americans die
in what is supposed to be a small war,
many of them die like proud Rudolph Nuñes,
on a patrol point, in the jungle, alone.
Dan Rather, CBS News
[present day] The longer I stayed,
the more obvious it became
that what the leaders
of the country in Washington,
and for that matter
the top military leaders in Vietnam,
were saying was in direct contrast
to what reporters, including myself,
were finding on the ground.
[gentle wistful music plays]
[Bass] There was a credibility gap.
The majority
of the United States population
supported the war in Vietnam.
And why is that?
Because night after night,
they got,
"Successful US military engagement."
Night after night,
they got the body count.
[reporter] The enemy again suffered
far greater casualties.
Fifty bodies were found
right around the perimeter,
and at least 170 others
were counted in the jungle nearby.
[Viet] The daily body count,
how many tens or hundreds
of Vietnamese guerrillas were killed
versus the amount
of American soldiers being killed,
became enormously important
to the United States.
In the past four and a half years,
the Việt Cộng, the Communists
have lost 89,000 men,
killed in South Vietnam.
Robert McNamara, he had a mind
that worked with data, numbers, and so on.
And ultimately, in the Vietnam years,
was not a plus.
One of the great controversies
was the kill ratio.
Their goal was to kill enough of the enemy
that the enemy couldn't replace
the troops it had lost
and eventually would have to give up
because they didn't have the troops.
It's just so typical, Mr. President.
It's a relatively small enemy force.
We think we're--
we're, uh, taking a heavy toll on them.
And if we-- we hurt them enough,
it isn't so much
that they don't have more men
as it is that they can't
get the men to fight.
[melancholic music plays]
[woman] Any unit that was engaged
had to send back a body count.
It sounds like it oughta be easy.
You open up with your artillery
or machine guns or whatever,
and then you go out
and pick up the bodies.
It doesn't work that way.
[guns firing]
[reporter] If there are
any enemy dead or wounded,
the enemy has hauled them out.
None are seen.
[King-Johnson] It's not like the Việt Cộng
left their bodies out there
so that we could go out and count them.
They had whole units
that did nothing but clear the battlefield
because they didn't particularly want us
to know how many of theirs
that we'd managed to kill.
[Bass] Any commander in the field
had to come back with a high body count.
So anyone who was killed,
men, women, children, everybody,
they were all counted as dead Communists.
These numbers were completely faked up.
The historians estimate
that one-third of the body count
actually was just civilians
who were killed.
[Camil] We were taught
if we killed ten Vietnamese
for every American that died,
we're going to win.
It's like if you're playing baseball,
you want to get home runs.
You know, if you're playing football,
you want to get touchdowns.
If you're in war, you want to get bodies.
And what you're thinking about
is the body count.
"I got another.
I got another. I got another."
You want to have a high body count.
[Nakayama] When we would move
through a village, it was really bad.
Our lieutenant would call in artillery,
and they would shoot in,
maybe, 20 artillery rounds
and hit the village.
And then they would call in an airstrike.
And then we'd get up
and start to walk through the village,
and it was nothing but dead bodies.
Old women, old men, children, and babies.
All dead, and all just mutilated.
Their body parts
are spread all over the place.
[sighs heavily]
Those are the, uh, kinds of memories
that, uh, stay with me.
[tender music plays]
[Rather] There's no such thing
as a clean war.
War is terribly chaotic.
And the people who suffer most
are women and children, and old people.
It was certainly true in Vietnam.
This should be seen
in the context, by the way,
that the other side,
that is the combined forces
of North Vietnam and the Việt Cộng,
destroyed many more villages
than American troops destroyed.
It was not unusual for them to string up
a leader, hung by the neck, in a village.
Terrible atrocities happened
on a regular basis,
with both sides and all sides
fighting the war.
[Bass] Over time,
there's a growing sense
that the war is a stalemate,
and though the enemy
is not appreciably closer to victory,
neither are we.
But Westmoreland preaches
that progress is being made.
He says, "What I need from you
in Washington is more troops."
[musical arrangement turns bold]
Johnson will continue to accede
to Westmoreland's requests
for more troops in the field.
[Daddis] In 1964,
there are about 112,000 Americans
that are being inducted
into the Armed Forces.
By 1965, that-- that number
more than doubles.
When you get to 1966,
there are over 380,000 inductees
into the US Armed Forces.
And this is where the increases
in the draft become incredibly important.
[Selverstone] The draft for Vietnam
had been pulling in American men
since the early 1960s.
But at the point
where Johnson Americanizes the war,
it expands massively.
[reporter] These are draftees,
young Americans,
selected as being qualified
to fulfill a military obligation
established by Congress.
The minimum of two years
must be spent on active duty.
Repeat your full name.
There are ways to get out of the draft,
though, through a variety of deferments,
whether you were married,
what occupation you had,
what level of schooling you had.
During World War II or Korea,
the draft was almost universal,
but nowadays, fewer people are called.
Graduate school or marriage
offer routine deferments,
despite the American involvement
in Vietnam.
But there is a real sense
that this was unfair,
because if you had resources,
if you had connections,
you could figure out a way
to get out of the draft.
People from working-class backgrounds,
minorities, were far more likely
to be drafted because of deferments.
[lonesome music plays]
[man] I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia.
I'm an only son.
Was very close to my mom.
And And me and my dad was close as well,
but I was really a mama's boy.
When I got the draft notice, I had a job.
I was working at a railroad.
My mom took it out the mailbox.
She said, "Listen now, you ain't going."
[ship's horn blows]
[McGhee] But all of my friends was going.
Everybody in my little crew was drafted.
[reporter] Selective Service tells
each state how many men they have to send.
While the state, in turn,
tells each city and town.
[McGhee] I'm actually 19 years old
when I get the notice,
but I was 20 when I actually went in.
I didn't have a clue
what was actually going on in Vietnam.
You know, we was children.
And we wound up
in the military being drafted.
So we had a disproportionate number
of Black soldiers in the Vietnam War,
especially in the combat units,
where I served,
and-- and the front line units.
[musical arrangement turns
swirling and melancholic]
[Ellis] You know, our percentage
of the population was
about 11-12% at the time.
And sometimes you would see
25% of the front line units
consisted of Black soldiers.
And you think
about the country at that time
Sir, can we pray together, you and I?
[man] You do your praying,
I do mine, big boy. You don't pray for me.
- I don't want you to pray for me.
- Will you pray for us?
Because I don't think your prayers
get above your head.
- Well, will you pray for us?
- No, I'm not gonna pray for you.
I'll tend to my business,
you tend to yours.
Now, you better move these people out.
[Ellis] In '65, '66, we still had
discrimination going on in the South.
John Lewis, my hero, was beaten
on that Edmund Pettus Bridge
in Selma, Alabama,
struggling for the right to vote.
All of these men
were being sent to Vietnam,
a lot of them Black soldiers.
But yet their families
still were struggling
for the right to vote.
[reporter] The Reverend
Dr. Martin Luther King,
a Baptist minister,
has become a symbol of the struggle
to end racial segregation
here in the United States.
Black and white together! ♪
[Ellis] At the time that I received
my orders to go to Vietnam,
it was the same time,
in April of '67,
when Dr. King gave
this major speech in New York
against the Vietnam War.
A time comes when silence is betrayal.
And that time has come for us
in relation to Vietnam.
[driving moody music plays]
He says US is the main purveyor
of violence in the world today.
Pretty radical statement for somebody
who had been meeting regularly
with the President of the United States
in the White House
just a year or two before.
[King Jr.] It became clear to me
that the war was doing far more
than devastating
the hopes of the poor at home.
It was sending their sons
and their brothers
and their husbands to fight
and to die
in extraordinarily high proportions
relative to the rest of the population.
[Viet] He said
the war in Vietnam is racist,
and what's happening
in the United States is racist
and also a result
of great class inequality
and the failures of American capitalism.
He connected the domestic and the foreign.
This was a radical move
that unsettled many of his allies
and many other Americans at the time.
[King Jr.] We were taking
the Black young men,
who had been crippled by our society,
and sending them 8,000 miles away
to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia
which they had not found
in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem.
And that dawned on me
that I was-- He was talking about me.
He was speaking
about why young Black soldiers
shouldn't be fighting
in Vietnam in that era
because of what was happening
in our own country.
From Louisville, Kentucky,
the Heavyweight Champion of the World,
Muhammad Ali.
[crowd cheers and boos]
[Ellis] Muhammad Ali got drafted.
[crowd cheers]
[announcer] Knockdown,
ladies and gentlemen!
A right-hand shot.
A right-hand shot on the chin!
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Muhammad Ali
has just refused to be inducted
into the United States Armed Forces.
[tense ethereal music plays]
[Ali] My conscience won't let me
go shoot my brother,
or some darker people,
or some poor, hungry people in the mud
for big, powerful America.
And shoot them for what?
They never called me "nigger."
They never lynched me.
[Ellis] We identified with him
and what he was saying.
He said, "No Vietnamese
ever called me a nigger."
And we agreed with him that we don't
have a beef with the Vietnamese.
We have a beef
with some of our fellow American soldiers.
We have some beef with those communities
that we had come from.
[Viet] Are we a country
founded on freedom and democracy?
We are.
But are we also
a country founded on genocide,
enslavement, colonization, and warfare?
We are.
That contradiction exists
at the very origins of the country.
And that fracture has always existed,
ready to break
at certain moments of intense crisis,
which is what the war in Vietnam
brought forth.
[people chatter excitedly]
- [man 1] Are you going?
- [crowd] Hell no!
- For Uncle Sam?
- [crowd] Hell no!
- Vietnam?
- Hell no!
- Are you going?
- Hell no!
[Viet] I like to think
of the war in Vietnam's domestic impact
in the United States as being manifest
via civil war in the American soul.
[man 2] You should be ashamed!
All of you! What do you want?
Communism right on your front door?
Go ahead and fight!
- We won't fight!
- Kill them!
We won't fight!
[Viet] I don't think it's a coincidence
that the anti-war movement
grew in scale and in ferocity
along with the rise
of other social movements of liberation.
Black power make us proud! ♪
[crowd] Hey, hey, LBJ!
How many kids did you kill today?
- [man] Vietnam?
- [crowd] Hell no!
- [man] Are you going?
- [crowd] Hell no!
[tense music continues playing]
[Tim Weiner] Meanwhile,
the military insisted
in its briefings
to the press and the public
that there was light
at the end of the tunnel.
What can we look forward to?
Is it going to be
much the same, better, or worse?
Do you see a light
at the end of the tunnel?
Well, I do indeed see light
at the end of this long tunnel.
I think the year 1967 will be
a good one.
[Daddis] Westmoreland will come back
in 1967 three times to the United States.
President Johnson will call him back
for what becomes known
as "a salesmanship campaign."
We will prevail in Vietnam
over the Communist aggressor.
[people applaud]
[automatic weapons fire]
[Westmoreland] It is conceivable to me
that within two years or less,
it will be possible for us to phase down
our level of commitment.
[Daddis] Yet behind closed doors,
he's telling a slightly different story
to the President.
Westmoreland came in last night to me.
He's very distressed.
He has concentrated
more firepower and bombing
in the last week on the DMZ,
and they've concentrated more on us,
than has ever been concentrated
in any equivalent period
in the history of warfare.
Much more than was ever poured
on Berlin or Tokyo.
[Daddis] He's saying that this war
is still stalemated.
Every time that we inflict
higher casualties upon the enemy,
they put more forces into the field.
[Weiner] The CIA's best analysts wrote
a book-length study
called "The Vietnamese Communists'
Will to Persist."
And it concluded that the United States
was not going to win the war in Vietnam
because no matter
how many of them we killed,
there were more of them.
Their ranks did not fall in number.
The enemy had the will to persist.
Secretary of Defense McNamara
read the study,
and that is when he ordered up
the Pentagon Papers,
as we know them,
which was a massive study,
an encyclopedia of the history
of American involvement in Vietnam.
They knew then
that they could not win the war.
And when I say "they,"
I mean the Secretary of Defense,
the best analysts at the CIA,
and the President of the United States,
to some extent.
Johnson didn't want to believe that.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen
[Weiner] Did they tell
the American people?
No, they did not.
[ominous percussive music plays]
[Osnos] McNamara seemed
so sure of himself,
but privately, and I saw it,
when he'd get on certain subjects,
he just would tear up.
[Logevall] McNamara had a growing sense
that the United States needed
to find a way out of Vietnam,
that this thing was a loser,
this thing is not going to work.
[man] And McNamara sent
a memo to the President,
basically saying it's time
to stop the bombing,
it's time to stop troop increases,
it's time to accept the fact
that we can't win the war,
and we need to find a way to get out.
And Johnson thought,
"This guy got me in,
now he wants to get out,
and I'm going to pay, politically,
for getting out."
It was a problem
of him getting re-elected.
Well, I know goddamn well I'm unpopular.
You don't have to tell me I'm unpopular.
I know that.
I've been in politics 40 years.
And when a man's carrying a war
and carrying a tax bill
and carrying all the problems I've got,
of course you're not gonna be popular.
[Osnos] Johnson found a way, basically,
to maneuver McNamara out of the Pentagon.
I've greatly valued the opportunity
to serve my country
as Secretary of Defense,
and I'm profoundly grateful
to the President
for his unfailing support
and for his personal friendship.
[applause]
[suspenseful music plays]
The enemy has been defeated
in battle after battle.
[applause]
[Halperin] But the situation was
far worse than we imagined.
[Daddis] In 1968,
all those progress reports
just burst into flames.
[Arnett] About 3:30 in the morning,
I heard the rattle of machine gun fire
and the noise of explosions.
The VC are attacking the city.
They're shelling it.
[Keith Kay] All of a sudden,
the whole country was under attack.
They had already infiltrated.
[reporter] This and 34 other
South Vietnamese cities
were rudely awakened
to the Việt Cộng's most audacious attack,
the Tet Offensive.
[ominous percussive music plays]