Turning Point: The Vietnam War (2025) s01e05 Episode Script

1
[ominous, oppressive music playing]
This is my armband.
This is what I came over with.
This is the only thing I had
coming on the plane.
It just gives you my name.
I remember being held by a woman.
I believe she was a Vietnamese woman
'cause I remember I could see her hair.
I see people
with little babies in their arms.
I didn't feel scared. I wasn't crying.
I was just kinda observing.
And then I was placed on the airplane.
[plane engines whir]
[man] I was in the CIA's operation room
when the initial reports came in.
And I was dumbstruck.
[Kruse] I just remember
at one point we were up,
we were going down, and then I went dark.
[inaudible]
[crowd cheering]
[bold string music playing]
[insects chirping]
In 1971, it was a period of transition.
The war was changing.
American troops were leaving.
And we were moving
South Vietnamese units to the front.
But the reality was this,
how do we crawl
out of a country standing up
[explosion]
without betraying our allies,
and without getting our own boys
shot in the back on the way out?
And of course then we had
a presidential campaign going on,
effectively, while the talks
were happening in Paris.
[Ken Hughes] When Nixon thinks
about ending the war in '71,
Kissinger advises him not to do it
because ending the war in '71
could mean losing the war in 1972.
And that means
that Nixon won't get a second term.
It's very much to their advantage
to have a negotiation
to get us the hell out
and-- and give us those prisoners.
[Kissinger] That's right.
[Nixon] If they'll make that kind
of a deal, we'll make that
any time they're ready.
[Kissinger] Well, we've got to get
enough time to get out.
We can't have it knocked over brutal--
to put it brutally, before the election.
[Nixon] That's right.
[tense string music playing]
[Hughes] So Nixon kept on delaying
the withdrawal date
in negotiations with the North Vietnamese
so that it would fall
within this very limited period of time
when it could not hurt him politically.
And he secretly negotiated
a decent interval with the Communists.
The "decent interval" was a term
that Henry Kissinger used
to describe a face-saving period
of approximately 18 months
between Nixon's final withdrawal
of American troops from South Vietnam
and North Vietnam's final takeover
of South Vietnam.
On the tapes,
Nixon and Kissinger admit things
that neither of them
ever admitted in public.
[pensive string music playing]
If a year or two years from now,
North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam,
we can have a viable foreign policy
if it looks as if it's the result
of South Vietnamese incompetence
So we've got to find some formula
that holds the thing together
a year or two,
after which, after a year, Mr. President,
Vietnam will be a backwater.
If we settle it, say, this October,
by January '74, no one will give a damn.
[Winston Lord] The phrase
"decent interval" and others
have been misinterpreted.
Kissinger viewed it, and I viewed it,
as giving the South Vietnamese,
with our aid and with staying in power,
a decent chance
to be able to survive on its own.
[Fredrik Logevall] It is a great,
uh, or terrible, if you will, reminder
of the degree to which domestic politics
imbues the entire American
long involvement in Vietnam.
[Dan Rather] There was major cynicism
in the Nixon administration.
A lot of young men and women
were sent to die in Vietnam
by a leadership,
Richard Nixon at the peak of it,
that was saying behind the scenes,
"We don't care about Vietnam,
whatever happens in there."
[Ellis] We knew we were pawns,
we knew that,
but to use us as the bargaining chip,
if you will,
terrible.
Thousands of men died
from that time through the end of the war.
So to sacrifice so many men
for an election is disgusting.
It doesn't get any worse
as far as I'm concerned.
[somber music playing]
[gun fires repeatedly]
- [explosion]
- [rapid gunfire]
[newscaster] Hanoi's master strategist,
Võ Nguyên Giáp, struck first
where he was least expected,
straight across the demilitarized zone.
[reporter] American F-4 Phantoms
and South Vietnamese fighter bombers
take advantage
of any break in the overcast
to launch tactical airstrikes
against North Vietnamese troops and tanks
south of the DMZ.
In 1972, the military battles began
to slowly turn
against the North Vietnamese.
The American bombing began
to take a heavy toll.
[droning ethereal music plays]
And now the South Vietnamese Army
is starting to perform pretty darn well.
[Col. Phạm Bá Hoa, in Vietnamese]
Our spirit was high then.
We lost a lot of people,
but not as much as the other side.
[in English] North Vietnam now has
a choice. They can continue to fight,
but with dwindling supplies
and after taking heavy casualties,
or they can compromise
and sign a peace agreement
and get the Americans out.
[tense propulsive music playing]
The Paris Peace Talks took place
while fighting was still going on.
They were held between, uh, the US,
the Republic of South Vietnam,
the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,
and then the Provisional Revolutionary
Government of South Vietnam.
And, of course,
there were the secret talks
between Kissinger and Mr. Lê Đức Thọ.
[Negroponte] The "big breakthrough,"
in October,
was the first time
that the North Vietnamese put forward
a proposal that did not involve
the resignation of Nguyễn Văn Thiệu
as the first step.
[intriguing string music playing]
[Veith] There were two main things
that the Communists wanted.
Americans out and North Vietnamese troops
remaining in South Vietnam.
Those were Lê Duẩn's two main demands
that he would absolutely not change on.
And the Americans accepted.
Kissinger goes to Saigon
to present this to Thiệu.
And of course Thiệu went ballistic.
[Lord] Because this agreement meant,
yes, he was still in office,
but the North Vietnamese troops
were still in his country.
Kissinger was so confident
that he could shove down our throat
that draft agreement.
But, the big contention issue was
the North Vietnamese troops
still remain in Vietnam.
I was able to tell my boss,
"Hey, man, that guy, he's--"
"He's full of something, okay?"
I reaffirm again that the whole people
of South Vietnam will resist again
any peace which demands
rendition of South Vietnam
and which will give South Vietnam
to the Communist aggressors.
[Jackie Bong Wright] It was not fair.
This is why Kissinger and Nixon were known
by South Vietnamese people
as people who betrayed
and sold South Vietnam out.
[music intensifies sweepingly]
[Negroponte] Nixon said,
"I can't sign an agreement
over the head of our ally
just before the election."
"It'll look just totally cynical."
"I won't do it."
So Henry had to come home.
And on the 26th of October,
he had this famous press conference.
We believe that peace is at hand.
[clears throat] We believe that
a-- an agreement is within sight.
Many people, in retrospect,
have criticized him
for trying to help Nixon get reelected
by saying, "We almost have peace."
[wistful music playing]
[crowd cheering]
[Negroponte] Nixon was able to win
his second term by a landslide.
President Nixon has won re-election.
[crowd cheering]
The second-greatest electoral vote
landslide in our history.
[crowd chants] Four more years!
Four more years! Four more years!
Thanks for making our last campaign
the very best one of all.
- Thank you.
- [crowd cheers wildly]
[Veith] At this point, Nixon decides
that the only way we're going to get
the North Vietnamese to agree
is to bomb them,
to show them we're serious.
And so he launches the Christmas bombing.
[bombs explode]
This is Hanoi,
a little more than a week
after the heavy aerial attacks
carried out by B-52s and fighter bombers.
[Veith] We bombed them
into accepting our concessions.
[Lord] They returned
to the table within days.
And it produced what it was meant to do,
namely bring this war to an end.
[Veith] Nixon basically had told Thiệu
that, "Listen, sign the Peace Accords."
"We don't expect Hanoi to abide by them."
"But if they do what they typically do,
which is break a treaty,
we will bomb the hell out of 'em."
There was at some point that, you know,
we could not negotiate anymore.
Nixon at that time basically said,
"If you guys don't sign,
we're going to go alone."
That means the end of help
and assistance to South Vietnam.
So we said to ourselves,
"Okay, the Americans promised to help us."
"We believe that the US
will be on our side to execute it."
[reporters clamoring]
[in Vietnamese] They started bombing us
on December 18th,
and in January 1973,
the Paris Peace Accords were signed.
[in English] We today
have concluded an agreement
to end the war
and bring peace with honor in Vietnam.
A ceasefire, internationally supervised,
will begin at 7:00 p.m. this Saturday,
January 27, Washington time.
[moody music playing]
[Veith] The main terms
of the Paris Peace Accords were
that there would be a ceasefire in place
that the Americans withdraw
all of their troops
that North Vietnamese troops
would be allowed to remain in-country,
and that each side
would release its prisoners.
I think the Peace Accords, uh,
mostly solved the issue of the Americans.
And that was the--
the most important issue.
[Veith] President Thiệu has
zero confidence
that the Communists
will abide by the Accords.
He is highly suspicious
that the Americans will keep their word.
But everything depends on keeping
American military and economic aid
flowing for his country.
[reporter] The Vietnam War
officially ended today on paper.
[Veith] And Nixon views this
as the crowning diplomatic achievement
of his career.
[Everett Alvarez, Jr.] By this time, I've
been a prisoner eight and a half years.
Sometimes days without sleep,
food, and water.
One time, they put us in a shed
with our feet in leg irons
and handcuffed behind our back
[sighs] for a week.
That was our punishment.
And now they issued us clothing.
Those of us that were in the first group
were going to be released
and told we were going
to be leaving the next day.
The gates finally open up,
and we march out.
We go get on a bus.
And, uh, for the first time,
we're not blindfolded,
and we're not handcuffed.
And then this beautiful, big C-141
comes in and lands.
We march up.
[music intensifies]
And there's an American
and a Vietnamese guy.
And then they have a list of names on it.
And then they call my name.
[officer] Everett Alvarez, Jr.
And a fellow grabbed me by the arm,
and then he walks me to the C-141.
And as we came around here on the runway,
and then as it rolls down
and it breaks ground,
and we actually lift off
the whole plane erupts in cheers.
[cheering and applauding]
Just, uh
You know, it was just long overdue.
And I recall thinking,
"What kind of a world
am I going to find when I get back?"
The next biggest surprise
was getting off the plane,
you know, seeing thousands of people
turn out and cheering.
[crowd cheering]
[ethereal music playing]
We were getting out,
and so all of the fervor
of anti-war treatment was basically over.
It was something that the American public
wanted to put behind 'em and go on.
God bless the President,
and God bless you, Mr. and Mrs. America.
[crowd applauding]
You did not forget us.
[crowd cheering]
[ethereal music turns hopeful]
After POWs were released,
the last GIs got on a plane.
And we were gone.
[Col. Gregory A. Daddis]
But wars last longer
than we think they do.
Wars last long after
the war itself is over.
The American War in Vietnam did not end
in early 1973 with the signing
of the Paris Peace Accords.
Peace did not follow war.
[Veith] There was no longer
any US military combat units
left in South Vietnam.
The several hundred people left
were basically intelligence, logistics,
and things of that nature.
And the North Vietnamese
really think that at this point,
with the Americans out,
"We can take over South Vietnam."
[somber music playing]
[helicopter blades whirring]
[rapid gunfire]
[Veith] The Paris Peace Accords
called for a ceasefire.
There was no ceasefire.
[rocket launches]
The Paris Peace Accords
called for releasing all prisoners.
Thousands upon thousands
of South Vietnamese
that they knew were being held
were not released.
[Chung Tứ Bứu] I was shot down,
and I was captured by the Communists
and became the prisoner of war.
They put us in the remote area
and forced us to do the hard labor work.
They beat many people.
We knew that prisoner of war exchange
would never come to us.
So it was clear that Hanoi was not, um,
going to abide by the main provisions.
[Hoàng Dức Nhã]
And after the treaty was signed,
the whole, if you will, political climate
in the US has changed.
Nixon, at that time,
was consumed by Watergate.
[moody music playing]
[Walter Cronkite] At first,
it was called the "Watergate Caper."
But the episode grew
steadily more sinister.
No longer a caper,
but the "Watergate Affair."
[Thomas Bass] When Richard Nixon
was running for reelection in '72,
he has a group of operatives
and former CIA agents
called the "Plumbers,"
who will do dirty tricks
for Richard Nixon.
Five of the Plumbers,
five of the burglars from the White House,
are caught
breaking into the Watergate Hotel
where the Democratic National Committee
has its headquarters.
They are going to bug their telephones
to allow Nixon
to get a leg up in the election.
[newscaster] It was clear there were links
reaching into the White House
and into the Nixon campaign organization.
A large secret fund was assembled
in the Nixon campaign organization,
probably more than a million dollars.
[Marc J. Selverstone] And as a result
of the break-in and ensuing cover-up,
we learned that Nixon's illegal actions
between cover-ups and wiretaps,
and obstruction of justice,
and burglary,
and perjury,
and the list goes on and on,
that there were more of these activities
than we knew about.
It has created a crisis in the presidency,
the likes of which
this nation never before has seen.
[Chic Canfora] We almost missed that
but for a bungled burglary?
We might have missed
the level of corruption in government?
[spacey intriguing music plays]
You know, our tolerance
for that level of corruption
in the United States government
really has to stop.
Nixon was the evil incarnate
when it comes to government corruption.
I welcome this kind of examination
because people have got to know
whether or not their president's a crook.
Well, I'm not a crook.
I've earned everything I've got.
As a-- a student of American government,
I understood
the executive's totally powerless now.
After being embroiled in the Watergate,
Nixon had no power.
[intriguing music intensifies]
And then what happened?
Richard Nixon resigned.
I have never been a quitter.
To leave office
before my term is completed
is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.
But as president,
I must put the interests of America first.
Therefore, I shall resign the presidency
effective at noon tomorrow.
Vice President Ford will be sworn in
as president at that hour in this office.
[music further intensifies]
And that changed everything.
"I, Gerald R. Ford, do solemnly swear"
I, Gerald R. Ford, do solemnly swear
[Veith] Once Gerald Ford
becomes president,
his hands have been tied.
The US Congress
is cutting aid dramatically.
The North Vietnamese, they're seeing
that everything is blink and go for them.
[artillery fires]
[music swells chaotically]
[music fades]
[Snepp] At this point,
the United States had basically
declared itself out of the war forever.
There was no way, in an emergency,
that we could send forces
back into Vietnam.
[solemn percussive music playing]
Graham Martin arrived
in the first months of the ceasefire.
He would be the last ambassador
to South Vietnam.
Martin's adopted son, Glenn Mann,
was killed in Vietnam.
He was a helicopter pilot.
And when Martin found out
about the death of his adopted son,
something happened to him.
It solidified his hatred
of the Communists.
I was the senior
CIA intelligence analyst in Vietnam.
And I was
Martin's principal intelligence briefer.
He had one assignment,
to try to create an enduring entity
out of the South Vietnamese government.
But the problem was,
he couldn't level with them
that they wouldn't be supported
as they had expected.
You have, um, 17 million people.
You have an army which has been trained
and reasonably well-equipped,
fighting by us.
They have lost material,
as you do in any withdrawal.
If we replace that,
then I am quite confident
that they can hold.
Ambassador Martin thinks
that he can save South Vietnam,
in spite of all the odds.
I don't want to use the word "delusional,"
because he should have seen
the writing on the wall.
Then, the Communists decided
to mount an improvisatory offensive.
To punch here, punch there, push, shove.
See if the United States
would react to any provocation.
First, they attack in Phước Long province.
[tense music playing]
[reporter 1] Communist troops
have launched a major campaign
in the southern half of the country.
Government officials admit
their casualties in the region
are heavier than at any other time
since the 1972 Easter Offensive.
Did the United States react?
No.
[Veith] That set off a chain reaction.
The city of Huế fell.
[horns honking]
[Veith] There's horrific scenes
of trying to evacuate people by ships.
[reporter 2] Even as the refugees
swarmed ashore in Đà Nẵng,
the word was passed that Đà Nẵng itself
would be the next place to fall.
[passengers clamoring]
[Veith] Then the city of Đà Nẵng fell.
[suspenseful music playing]
[man] In Đà Nẵng, the airport
is just flooded with people.
They're on the runways.
They're all over.
They had to do a a rolling load
by taking everybody aboard
through the back hatch.
And people were just coming to the plane
as they were slowly moving,
and they were just dragging
'em up the stairwell.
And once they got
a good amount of people on board,
it's when they continued
to roll and take off.
It was just pandemonium.
That's how bad
the people feared the North.
[melancholic string music playing]
[Snepp] CIA headquarters and the Pentagon
were sending word to Saigon,
"Send the surplus people home."
But Martin wouldn't order
anybody out of the country
because that would send
the wrong signal to the enemy
and to the South Vietnamese population,
and might cause chaos.
[reporter] The situation now,
uh, seems to be, uh,
described in terms
such as "disaster" and so forth.
Would you say that South Vietnam
now is at the end of the road?
If you mean, "Is South Vietnam,
is it on the imminent verge of collapse?"
I think the answer
is that it's quite definitely "No."
[Snepp] However,
Martin approved of one operation,
because it would win
South Vietnam's sympathy
from the American people.
There was an adoption agency
in the United States,
the Holt Adoption Agency
and several others.
They proposed to Gerald Ford
that a baby lift be mounted
to evacuate
about 2,000 "children of the dust."
That's Vietnamese-American kids
who'd been sired in love affairs
between American GIs and Vietnamese.
[children crying]
I have no information on my parents.
I ha-- I don't have a name.
From what I was told, during that time,
a lot of the soldiers had relationships
with the women over there,
and some left.
So a lot of them may not have known
that they had kids there.
A lot of biracial babies were created,
and Northern was coming,
didn't want us here.
Anything American, they would kill us.
So a lot of women, mothers,
were dropping their biracial kids off
in the orphanage homes
because they couldn't keep 'em.
My mother, she gave me up.
She wanted me to have a better life.
She wanted to save my life.
[Snepp] The flights were
to be flown out on a C-5A,
one of the biggest transporter
aircraft available.
And on the afternoon of April 4th,
that C-5A was loaded up.
[Kruse] I was placed
in a seat closest to the aisle.
To my right was a little boy.
We kind of just stared at each other
for a few minutes, didn't say anything,
and he presented me with a red Life Saver.
I happily accepted.
At that point, a woman came by,
strapped us into our seats,
and then I remember ascending upwards.
[Snepp] About 300 people got
on that aircraft.
It took off around four o'clock
in the afternoon,
and about 12 minutes out
from Tân Sơn Nhứt,
the canopy covering the loading dock
underneath the plane blew off.
[metal clangs]
Somebody had forgotten
to latch a goddamn lock.
[dramatic music playing]
And the pilot of the plane
grabbed the controls
and tried to bring
that goddamned plane around,
come in for a landing
back at Tân Sơn Nhứt.
It lost altitude.
Kids were sucked out
of the plane right there.
There was instant decompression.
People were exploding in the plane.
It comes in for a crash landing
in a rice paddy
just off one of the main runways
at Tân Sơn Nhứt.
It hits ground
bounces up again,
bounces back down,
decapitates several fishermen
in the rice paddies.
[unsettling music playing]
[man] By the time I got out there,
the bird had been down
half an hour to an hour.
I remember checking
the, uh, C-5 cargo deck,
which had all the babies,
was wiped out.
[somber music playing]
[Snepp] It was one
of the worst aviation disasters
in history.
[man] I said, "Oh, my God."
So I had my driver
rush me over to the crash site.
They found a lot of babies
in their cradles floating there, alive.
[interviewer] Babies floating
in the rice paddy?
Yes.
In-- In cradles.
[Kruse] I don't have
any recollection of the impact.
It went dark.
I didn't hear. I didn't feel.
I didn't see anything.
I just remember opening my eyes
and seeing that I was
no longer on the plane.
I was floating in water
on some type of debris.
I happened to look to my left a little bit
and saw a woman behind me in water.
The little boy wasn't next to me.
In the distance, I saw smoke.
I didn't see a plane.
I didn't see anything
except for water and debris.
The last memory of Vietnam
is floating on that debris, looking out.
I kind of just blacked out.
I have no memory of my rescue.
My next memory would be in America.
[reporter] Two hours ago,
I watched this airplane take off
from Tân Sơn Nhứt Air Base.
It was a perfect takeoff,
carrying those orphans
to the United States.
What can one say except,
"When will the misery
in this country ever stop?"
[people clamoring and wailing]
That was devastating to me.
[Snepp] It underscored, as nothing had,
the hazards of trying to evacuate
under dangerous circumstances,
and how a lack of planning
could lead to disaster.
At this point, President Ford
was attempting to maintain
Nixon administration policy,
which was to support South Vietnam.
[Ford] The situation
in South Vietnam and Cambodia
has reached a critical phase.
I am therefore asking the Congress
to appropriate,
without delay, $722 million
for emergency military assistance
and an initial sum of $250 million
for economic and humanitarian aid
for South Vietnam.
[spacey music plays]
[Veith] But there were
so many anti-war congressmen in now
that President Ford, at this point,
had no chance to resurrect
any sorts of US aid to them.
We did not anticipate that the Congress
would cut off American military assistance
right in the midst
of a Communist offensive,
you know, kicking the struts out.
[Tuong Vu] President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu
and many others in his government
trusted the US to help South Vietnam
which, uh, turned out to be,
uh, a wrong assumption.
We don't have anything to fight with.
We did not have anything.
Airplanes sat idle on the tarmac,
and-- and helicopters could not take off.
While the other side received
massive reinforcement, modern weapons,
we were just sitting ducks.
So people knew.
We knew it was a lost cause.
[helicopter whirring]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Cronkite] The story from South Vietnam
grew increasingly grim today.
[reporter 1] The news
from nearly every corner
of the country is bad.
[Cronkite] Communist forces
in South Vietnam,
already solidly in control
of 11 provinces,
began working on yet another one today.
[Snepp] As of early April,
the North Vietnamese Army
was barreling towards Saigon.
[Ghilain] There was quite a few of us
that kept a map.
We had a map of South Vietnam,
and it had all the provinces.
And as each province fell,
we colored it in red.
That's when you knew that things
were going very bad real quick.
You could see on the map, here's Saigon,
and everything just started
to just be consumed around.
[reporter 2] Just now it seems
there are even more North Vietnamese
in the Saigon area
than there are South Vietnamese troops.
[in Vietnamese] We searched and destroyed.
We were strongly determined to kill them.
That's how our spirit of intense fighting
spread further south.
We killed them along the withdrawal route.
They withdrew in chaos.
[reporter in English] The South Vietnamese
Army began to disintegrate.
Even the crack airborne units
took off their uniforms
and threw away their weapons.
[Col. Tàu, in Vietnamese]
Our vehicles ran over them.
We drove ahead of them,
and no one shot anyone.
When they heard us honk, they scattered.
[dramatic percussive music plays]
[reporter in English]
Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese
frantically want out,
and there's apparently no way.
Is it difficult to get a passport
for your wife's Vietnamese relatives?
It's impossible today.
Uh, you can take a chance on buying them.
They sell anywhere from $10,000-$50,000.
Every day now I meet friends
who start talking about themselves
or members of their family
carrying poison.
And this is intended for,
if the other side takes over,
that they'll use it to commit suicide.
[Snepp] When the Communists seized
the northern part of the country,
they had picked up secret documents,
American documents,
identifying Vietnamese
who were working for us right now
in the most sensitive capacities.
They were in imminent danger.
I estimated that if we paid
our moral obligation to the Vietnamese,
we should evacuate
all the Vietnamese who worked
for American agencies
in the past ten years,
plus four or five family members.
Take all of those figures,
put 'em together,
one million Vietnamese,
if we were being moral, we would evacuate.
To me, it was one
of the most terrible realizations
I ever had in that war.
But Martin was still dragging his feet,
planning for an evacuation.
[interviewer] The President asked Congress
for authorization
to use American troops here
to evacuate Americans
and Vietnamese who work for Americans.
- If it were necessary.
- [interviewer] Do you have plans for that?
[Martin] Of course. Every embassy
in the world has plans for it.
- [interviewer] Think it will be necessary?
- [Martin] I have--
That again, you see, is a-- is a judgment
that-- that-- that I can't
possibly make at this time.
[man] It appears
that what really, uh, drove Martin
to the lengths that it did
was his mistaken
hope that there could still be
some kind of agreement
reached with the other side
that would allow a more orderly departure.
[droning gloomy music playing]
It became clear that the Americans
had lost the war in Vietnam.
And just about every journalist knew this.
Just about every military commander
knew this.
Certainly every CIA agent knew this.
But it was being denied by the embassy.
[Veith] In the last days,
Thiệu was trying to save
what he could of South Vietnam.
But the Communists were saying
that before there's
any sort of halt in the war,
Thiệu has to go.
That was always the bottom line.
"Thiệu has to resign,
and then we'll figure out
the government from there."
Ambassador Martin came to him
and said, "We're not getting more aid."
He believes that there's
maybe a very small sliver of hope
that if Thiệu resigns,
then there might be a chance
for a negotiated settlement.
And so Thiệu, basically believing
the Americans have betrayed him,
resigns in a last-ditch effort
to save what's left of his country.
[in Vietnamese] The Americans fought
a war here
without success and went home.
They promised
if the Communists invaded again,
there'd be action taken.
But there's been no reaction.
Therefore, the least they can do
is to send us more support,
but they have not sent it.
What does this amount to?
Breaching promises, unfairness,
a lack of righteousness,
inhumane treatment
towards an ally that is suffering,
the shirking of responsibility
of a superpower.
[in English] He denounced that
the Americans were p-- betraying Vietnam,
and I saw that it was the end.
[Vu] Gen. Dương Văn Minh was made
the President of South Vietnam
after Thiệu left.
As embodied in
[Snepp] About this time,
Kissinger finally ordered
major evacuation planning to begin.
And that was when Martin was forced
into pushing
the evacuation planning forward.
[ominous music playing]
[reporter 1] small arms fire around here,
50 caliber machine gun bullets
[reporter 2] Newport Bridge was the last
the Communists had to cross
to enter the capital.
[reporter 3] With Communist forces
only a few miles
from the center of Saigon,
the order to evacuate
American nationals is given.
[Ghilain] The options to evacuate
were A, by ship.
That wasn't going to happen
with the way things were going.
[people chatter nervously]
[Ghilain] The second option was by air
from the air base, Tân Sơn Nhứt.
They rocketed the airport on the 29th.
We heard that two Marines were killed.
That hit home.
[blows air despondently]
[voice breaks] It still does.
The evacuation of Saigon by helicopter
was the very last option.
And that was all that they were left with.
There was no other way to go.
[moody percussive music plays]
[Huỳnh] I was in the hospital.
I stayed with my soldiers,
who were wounded soldiers there.
And I meet my commander in chief!
He, uh, give me an order,
said, "Get out,
because the Việt Cộng about to come."
"They'll kill you."
Finally, we go to a place
where we find a platform for a helicopter.
I was a teenager, around 18.
My brother came and he said that,
"Hurry, I need to pick you up."
"So you need to get
out of the house soon."
The driver took us to the building.
And I said to my brother,
"We need to go home and pick up parents."
And he said,
"We don't have time, we don't have time."
[Huỳnh] And suddenly,
there is a helicopter coming.
And he landed.
He say, "Go, go, go, come in."
And we start going.
There's only enough
for ten or twelve people.
But we-- we were twenty-some already
on-- on that plane.
[Janet Bui] The people behind me
was a couple with a lot of kids.
They hold the baby,
and then maybe kids, two-three years old.
Then on the ladder,
there was a-- a kid, maybe 13 years old.
But that was a cut-off.
They cannot get the kids on anymore.
But then the parents on top tried to pull.
The American person slapped the guy
so then the helicopter can take off.
So at that time,
the parents of the kids cried so much.
[Huỳnh] And then he say, "Now, we go out."
"We go to the Seventh Fleet."
From there,
you know, everybody cry.
Because we know we will--
Probably, we'll never see
our country anymore.
The first thing
that I think was my parents.
[sighs heavily]
I asked myself
when I could see my parents again.
I knew for sure
that I wasn't able to come home.
I am penniless.
[percussive music playing intensely]
No money in my pocket.
I only have
one pair of clothes on my body.
That's it.
No friends, no relatives, no money.
No career. How can I survive?
[music turns droning]
[man] I was, uh, the chief engineer
on USS Kirk,
a Knox-class destroyer escort.
And our job, initially,
was simply to-- to protect.
We were never supposed
to take any kind of evacuees at all.
We could see the US Air Force
and US Marine Corps helicopters
cycling back and forth
in very orderly fashion.
What they didn't plan,
they didn't plan on so many
small Vietnamese Air Force helicopters
that came out on their own,
flown by Vietnamese pilots
with their families aboard,
with their wives, their children,
their neighbors, their uncles and aunts.
They just loaded them on.
So you had swarms of helicopters
coming out just helter-skelter.
Landing on anything
that they could get their skids onto.
[reporter] Hovering above the deck
to unload their passengers,
the pilots were unfamiliar with landing
their crafts on a moving ship.
One crashed into the side
of the USS Blue Ridge.
Others managed to crash-land
on the deck of the ship.
[Doyle] We weren't expecting
to take a helicopter.
And some of us on the bridge,
we went to the captain and we said,
"Captain, let's try to take one."
Because there were so many
of them coming out. So many of them.
And we finally did.
Of course, that starts a whole daisy chain
because as soon as one landed,
the others all started coming in
and lining up to do the same thing.
But we only had room for one.
And, uh, you're looking up and you see
there's three or four more
waiting to land,
all full of women and children, babies.
So this is the question for the captain.
What's he gonna do?
And the captain said,
"Throw it over the side."
[music intensifies]
Do you let these people die?
Or do you get rid
of the million-dollar helicopter?
There's no question.
So plop, plop, plop.
We just got rid of them all.
[reporter] Other South Vietnamese pilots
just hovered
long enough to unload their passengers,
and then headed for the side of the ship
and just jumped out with their life vests
to be picked up by US sailors,
their helicopters crashing into the sea.
Still other pilots headed out
to the side of the ship
after unloading their passengers,
and settled the crafts into the water,
and then jumped out,
again waiting to be picked up
by US sailors.
[Doyle] We had the expectation
of taking 7,000 people.
It ended up,
so sea lift and a helicopter lift,
147,000.
I was going to stay behind
after the evacuation.
But it was such a nasty situation
that we decided we'd go be evacuated.
And I was with a correspondent
named Ed Bradley.
The crowds of Americans
and other foreigners
lined up at installations
around Saigon waiting for buses.
We rode through the streets of Saigon
for more than four hours.
[suspenseful music playing rhythmically]
[Kay] We were told that the embassy
was surrounded by people
and we couldn't get in.
We were facing an avalanche of refugees
racing to stay ahead
of the first enemy units.
- [people clamoring]
- [horns honking]
We all decided to try
and reach the United States Embassy.
And once there,
we found it surrounded by Vietnamese
looking for a way in and a way out.
There were thousands
upon thousands of Vietnamese
outside the walls of the embassy,
screaming to get in.
- [people scream]
- [man speaks indistinctly on megaphone]
[unsettling music playing]
[Nho] I was one of them,
standing in front of the gates
of the US Embassy.
At that time, my wife had already left
two days before that.
I was so scared to death
that they would kill me.
They would kill me!
I was standing there just in despair.
Had I had a gun with me,
I would have pulled it out
and just shot myself dead.
At the time,
I believed that if I had stayed,
I would be killed.
We had to push and shove
our way through a crowd
of several hundred Vietnamese
trying to scale the wall,
only to be knocked back by US Marines.
And initially, we were told,
people that show paperwork,
that they were embassy employees,
bring them in.
But we had so many people,
you couldn't differentiate
the-- the paperwork.
We had an area where we staged them.
Before we staged them,
we had to shake them down.
We would find knives, guns,
you-- you name it.
We would just take the weapons
and throw them in the pool.
[tense percussive music plays]
Between the gate and the embassy building,
there was a 55-gallon drum
that had a fire in it.
And I was seeing people
coming out of one building
with packets of $100 and $20 bills.
[Ghilain] Our government
sent over a few million
to pay the Vietnamese that worked
for the consulates, the embassy,
and they still had money left.
And they were just emptying the cases
into the burn barrels, burning the money.
We were like,
"Are you kidding me right now?"
And that's what they did.
But we always questioned,
"Did they really burn it all?"
[laughs]
[Kay] I got into the embassy building,
and there's an American woman
taking files out
of a top-secret file cabinet
and shredding them.
And I said, "Well, it's a bit late
for this, isn't it?"
And she said,
"All this should have been done weeks ago,
but the ambassador wouldn't allow it."
[interviewer]
Shredding classified documents?
Yeah.
[Snepp] We took bags
of half-shredded stuff,
put 'em in the courtyard.
When the choppers began
coming in mid-afternoon,
the downdraft tore open all the bags,
and we had classified confetti
all over the damn parking lot.
Afterwards, when the Communists took over,
their guys came in with Scotch tape
and put the documents back together.
It was a major security breach!
I mean, there wasn't a secret
in that embassy that was safe.
[Ghilain] We were packing
50 Vietnamese on each helicopter.
As it got later in the day,
we just said, "No baggage."
"Just throw the people on,
get 'em out of here."
And then they were, you know,
brought to whatever respective ships.
[Nho] As I departed Saigon
for the US ship out in the ocean,
I felt that I lost.
I lost.
I lost every part of my soul.
[pensive music playing]
[Snepp] The embassy by nightfall
was a catacomb of panicked humanity.
Every stairwell was filled
with Vietnamese.
One Vietnamese had brought in a pig.
[Ghilain] We had
the final 400 people staged,
which was literally eight more lifts,
50 people apiece.
We were told,
"No more lifts. American personnel only,"
meaning the troops.
And the 400 people that we had staged,
you just saw the fear in-- in their eyes.
[Snepp] We were playing God.
How are you trained to do that?
How are you trained to do it?
The horror.
There was no words for it.
[people clamoring and screaming]
And the shame,
knowing you can't get these people
to whom you've made so many promises.
[intensely] And what was so crazy for me
is that I knew we had the intelligence
that should've enabled us to act sooner.
[in normal tone] I'm sorry to get so
The, uh-- I can't think about this.
[Ghilain] About four o'clock
in the morning,
a helicopter pilot landed and said,
"The President sends word that it is time
for the ambassador to leave."
And then finally they went downstairs
and they told him,
and he just picked up his stuff,
walked out the embassy door,
got on the helicopter, and off he went.
[music intensifies]
And finally,
we'd get on a helicopter and go out.
When we got off,
a friend of mine
from the Washington Post said,
"The ambassador got out
just before you landed."
And there's the ambassador,
just not coherent at all,
and just, you know,
to me a, you know, pitiful sight.
With the evacuation, I think,
as far as the, um, performance
of the, um, Navy
was absolutely, totally superb.
[reporter] The American airlift only took
a fraction of those who wanted to leave.
And for hours after the last departure,
scores of people still crowded
onto the embassy roof
in the vain hope of rescue.
[woman] I work for the American staff.
[reporter] And you have
your, uh, American ID card there.
It says, uh,
"United States, Mission Saigon."
But do you know
that all the Americans are gone?
Yes, I know that.
But I must come in case-- just in case.
But there's no way
because all the helicopters are gone.
Can you help, uh, us?
[speaks indistinctly]
There is no way I can help
because we are staying here.
We are staying in-- in Saigon.
[mournful music playing ethereally]
[Nancy Bui] I was standing in front
of the Presidential Palace in Saigon.
We saw the tanks from North Vietnam
moving into the palace.
It looked like a bad dream,
like a nightmare.
That palace is a symbol of freedom,
of the goodness
that we've been fighting for.
[melancholic music plays]
[Vietnamese] I photographed tanks
that entered the Independence Palace.
As it pertains to photography,
this image is now considered
a symbol of the 1975 victory.
[Trần Thị Yến Ngọc] When the tanks
bulldozed through the gates
of the Independence Palace,
my heart was filled with extreme joy
but also full of immense pain.
Happiness that there was peace again,
but remember my comrades and my brothers
who sacrificed their lives
all over Saigon.
I will never forget it for a second,
even a minute.
[tanks rumbling]
I replied, "The South is liberated,
the South is liberated!"
Everyone was baffled. No one believed it.
[people cheering, chatter excitedly]
The feeling was indescribable.
[Võ Thị Trong] How do you feel
if you win the match?
We rejoiced that day.
[people cheer]
When Saigon fell, I assessed
100% that the Americans lost.
And this was the last battle.
We said that,
"Now the liberation soldiers
have returned to Saigon,
'Hồ Chí Minh City.'"
The American newspaper Time published
a large cover photo of Hồ Chí Minh
and a mark for Saigon
declaring "Hồ Chí Minh City."
[pensive piano music playing]
[Frederic Whitehurst, in English]
I cried and I cried and I cried.
[clears throat]
It was all a waste.
[Eldson J. McGhee] I felt betrayed.
I felt like, "Why didn't they do it
when they first started?"
"Why did they have to let
so many people die?"
I can't help but shed-- shed a tear.
[Nancy Bui] Everything we hoped for,
everything we're fighting for,
disappeared in front of me.
[Bứu] When I heard Saigon fell,
everything fell apart.
No more hopes, nothing.
In Vietnamese, we have a proverb.
"When the nation is lost,
the family will be shattered."
[music swells]
[Bong Wright] It was in the Philippines
that someone had a radio
and we heard that the North Vietnamese
would take over the government.
And we cried, all of us.
Because it's our country.
And I thought that we would
go away for a while and come back.
I never thought that we'd go away forever
and lose our country.
[Viet Thanh Nguyen] Wars don't end
simply because we say they do.
[somber lilting music plays]
Where my memories really began
is a few weeks later
in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania
where we, along with about 20,000
other Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees,
had been placed.
The only way of leaving
that camp, uh, for any of us
was to have an American sponsor
take responsibility for us.
But there was no American willing
to take all four people in my family.
So one sponsor took my parents,
one sponsor took
my then ten-year-old brother,
one sponsor took four-year-old me.
And so my first narrative memories
are of being taken away from my parents.
We were eventually reunited.
But for me, the refugee experience
is inseparable from the experience of war.
More than 130,000 people
were able to leave South Vietnam.
When the Communists came in,
they went to live in the US.
There were many more
who wanted to leave but could not leave.
And now the victorious
Communist government
wanted to continue
their revolution in South Vietnam.
[news anchor] Some Vietnamese
who used to work for the US
are still in camps like these
at forced labor.
"Re-education camps" they're called,
holding tens of thousands of people,
former South Vietnamese generals,
politicians, businessmen, intellectuals,
so-called "enemies of the people."
My husband was a military officer.
The Việt Cộng asked anyone who had worked
for the South Vietnam government and army
to report to, uh, be re-educated.
"And please bring food
and your personal things for ten days."
And people assumed that, oh,
they will be just going for ten days.
I didn't hear from my husband
for about a year.
And I was with my two-month-old baby.
I live in despair.
[sad, sparse music plays]
They would come in,
and they would search my house.
And here I am with my baby.
It was It was
I really thought about committing suicide
during those days.
My husband escaped
from the re-education camp.
He was, um, hidden in a church
by the priest, by the pastor.
There was such an underground movement
of South Vietnamese people
who were willing to hide
escaped prisoners from Communist prison.
That's how we survive.
We didn't escape until 1979.
We try about 20 times, and we fail.
But finally, in October 1979,
we got on a boat.
[reporter] A boatload
of Vietnamese refugees
at the end of a 300-mile journey,
from Vietnam
to the eastern coast of Malaysia.
They come ashore
at the rate of 10,000 a month,
much faster than the United States
or any other nation
is willing to accept them.
[Doyle] During the next 20 years,
there were almost a million more
came to the United States in small groups.
A single boat with 12 people,
a single boat with 50 people.
[Veith] It scarred
the South Vietnamese people deeply,
uh, when you talk about the boat people,
the people held in re-education camps,
and the thousands who died afterwards.
[Viet] For many of the Vietnamese refugees
in the Vietnamese diaspora,
the re-education camps are a symbol
of everything that went wrong
in the post-war era.
[Bứu] I was a prisoner of war
for 13 years, eight months, and one week.
[gloomy music playing]
In 1976, they called me
"re-education detainee."
No more "prisoner of war."
When they said "re-education,"
they tried to brainwash
and force us to do hard labor work.
That is the purpose.
[Ninh] The re-education camps,
I think, with harsh conditions,
I do not hesitate to say that this was
one serious mistake that we made.
Because they were
more or less forgotten there.
Nobody says it officially,
uh, but here and there, when I am asked,
I-- I have spoken.
There will come a time
that we will have to acknowledge it.
We are not superheroes.
We are just humans.
We could have done it better,
but it was not a bloodbath.
Some things,
the Communist Party of Vietnam
did wonderfully.
[in Vietnamese] After the "War of Peace,"
the reconstruction,
the Communist Party paid attention
and took care of my family and me.
We were given a house
and were able to build a metal roof.
Before, we could never
afford a metal roof.
[Viet, in English] Human consequences
were tremendous,
because somewhere around
three million Vietnamese people died
during the years of the war.
That doesn't even account
for the death toll in Cambodia and Laos,
which during the years of the war
ran to the hundreds of thousands.
And if you count the Cambodian genocide
as a direct consequence of the war,
that adds
about another 1.7 million people.
[Lien-Hang T. Nguyen]
Under Nixon and Kissinger,
the bombing campaign
and the joint US-ARVN incursion
into Cambodia
begins what is the rise
of the Khmer Rouge.
[ominous music plays]
Led by Pol Pot
there's a vacuum of power
that allows the Khmer Rouge
to kill off rival Communist factions
within the Communist Party in Cambodia.
And it ignited a civil war.
No question.
[Lien-Hang] You had about a quarter
of the population killed off after 1975.
So there was not any peace after the war,
as many people hoped.
[birds chirping]
[Viet] If we look at Vietnam today,
I think I could say
that it is a unified country.
It is independent.
The country struggled greatly
in the years after the war
to achieve economic prosperity
for its people.
To a certain extent,
it's been able to achieve that.
And yet it is still a country in which
there is considerable economic inequality.
There are tensions within the country
over ethnic minorities
and their role in the country.
Uh, and there is a great degree
of political repression
that still takes place.
[gently propulsive music plays]
The United States and Vietnam,
we normalized relations in 1995.
So, roughly 20 years after, uh, the end
of the conflict in-- in 1975.
And part of that effort
was to work with Vietnam
on the search
for missing American service members.
Over 1,000 Americans do remain
still missing from the war.
Vietnam has upwards
200,000 to 300,000 missing.
In the case of the Vietnamese themselves,
reconciliation has been much harder.
It was a revolutionary war,
but in my opinion,
it was also a civil war.
And civil wars,
as Americans hopefully understand,
breed deep anger and resentment
for generations.
[Bứu] Between the people in the north
and people in the south,
there is still very deep division.
Most of the diaspora don't want
to come back home.
The older generation,
they hope that when they die,
their body will be buried
in their fatherland.
But if you ask them, "Do you want
to go back to Vietnam to live right now?"
They would say, "No."
[contemplative music playing]
[Thành in Vietnamese] We could not contain
the pain of millions of Vietnamese mothers
whose children died in Vietnam,
nor could America contain
the pain of 50,000 families.
So, we must understand the past
to build the future.
[Osnos, in English] The story of the US
in Vietnam was a story of ignorance,
hubris, and arrogance.
So much of what we see now
about the war in Vietnam is a function
of the individual personality
and characters of people
and their inability
to just get tough with themselves.
McNamara and Johnson,
the two men who ended up
being held most responsible for the war,
both knew, for all kinds of reasons,
that it was not going to end well.
They were inept.
[Hughes] Nixon and Kissinger were
both determined to keep the war going.
Keep people fighting and dying
until it was politically safe
for them to end the war,
after Nixon had secured his second term.
And, uh, in the end,
the human toll is enormous.
When the CIA station chief wrote
his final message from the Saigon station,
he said, "Let us learn
from the lessons of the past."
"Let us not have
another Vietnam experience."
Less than 40 years later,
the United States got into another war,
in Iraq,
based on political lies,
premised on false intelligence,
in this case, provided by the CIA.
I take the fact that he develops
weapons of mass destruction
very seriously.
We are the United States of amnesia.
We do not learn from history.
[Selverstone] I mean, it's hard to look
at, uh, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
and not think about Vietnam
when you hear words
like "counterinsurgency," or "attrition,"
or "credibility gap,"
or "hearts and minds,"
or "pacification."
[people chattering indistinctly]
[gun fires]
[Thùy] When Afghanistan was taken
by the Taliban,
I said, "Oh, my God,
they didn't learn it!"
"They didn't learn
from the Vietnam War at all."
The same thing happened
to the people they left behind.
[Rather] One of the major roles
of the press
is "hold power accountable."
And the press did its best
to hold both the Johnson administration
and the Nixon administrations accountable.
And our country's whole experience
with Vietnam and the war
drives home the point again and again
that a free and independent,
truly independent, press
is the red, beating heart
of freedom and democracy.
[Selverstone] Going into the war,
there was generally a sense
that Americans trusted their government
to do the right thing.
Right? People believed
in their elected officials.
They knew best,
they had the right information,
and they were going to act
in our best interests.
That changes as a result of Vietnam.
It undercut confidence
in Washington and political leadership
that we've never recovered from
and will be many years, if we ever can.
It drove us into partisanship
where we're locked today,
stupid division, not debate.
I came back from Vietnam
and I finally went back
to Macon, Georgia, my home,
and decided this time I would stay
and be the change that I wanted to see
because there were still
some things going on,
some remnants of racism.
[gentle hopeful music plays]
And I got involved in politics,
ran for office,
and became the first and only Black mayor
of my town in 1999.
I went back to Vietnam
during my term as mayor,
and I met the mayor of Huế.
[bombs explode]
During Tết of 68,
I fought in the city of Huế.
He was in the North Vietnamese Army
serving in Huế.
So we were trying to kill each other.
And here we are now,
he was the mayor of Huế,
I was the mayor of Macon,
and we're sitting in his office,
and he's telling his driver
to take care of me
and give me everything
that I needed while I was there, so
We can't forget about the effect
that it had on the Vietnamese people,
the young children.
We don't know
how many Vietnamese were killed.
That we dropped bombs on and napalm,
and fired artillery shells,
and burnt down their villages,
destroyed their whole way of life
for-- for so many years.
It's the human toll
that I think of when I think of that war,
both American soldiers
as well as the Vietnamese.
I'm very appreciative
that someone saw fit to memorialize
all the men who, uh, gave their lives.
It's like a living memorial.
Of course, I know so many names there.
My very best friend in-- in the war,
a Sergeant First Class
by the name of William C. Jennings.
A young Marine Sergeant
from my hometown, Rodney Davis,
who won the Medal of Honor.
A Sergeant, uh, First Class, Eddie Sands,
who died near me in Vietnam.
The last time you would see them,
they were in a body bag,
or they were being put on a helicopter.
Even though we hear that a lot,
"Thank you for your service,"
you can't say that to them.
I'd really like to say,
"I'm sorry."
We were so young, 20, 21 years of age.
And Vietnam veterans,
we're now in our mid, late 70s, early 80s.
But some of us still carry the burden
of that war with us to this day.
["Study War No More" by Mike Baytop plays]
Gonna lay down my sword and shield ♪
Down by the riverside ♪
Gonna lay down my sword and shield ♪
Down by the riverside ♪
And study war no more ♪
Ain't gonna study war no more ♪
Study war no more ♪
Ain't gonna study war no more ♪
Study war no more ♪
Gonna put on my starry crown ♪
Down by the riverside ♪
Gonna put on my starry crown ♪
Down by the riverside ♪
Study war no more ♪
I ain't gonna study war no more ♪
Ain't gonna study war no more ♪
Study war no more ♪
I ain't gonna study war no more ♪
Ain't gonna study war no more ♪
Gonna talk with the Prince of Peace ♪
Down by the riverside ♪
Gonna talk with the Prince of Peace ♪
Down by the riverside ♪
And study war no more ♪
Ain't gonna study war no more ♪
I ain't gonna study war no more ♪
Ain't gonna study war no more ♪
Ain't gonna study war no more ♪