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00:00:00So just adapt. You go over there with one mindset, you know, and then you adapt. You
00:00:23adapt to the atrocities of war. You adapt to killing, dying, you know. Left the wall doesn't
00:00:34bother you. I should say it doesn't bother you as much. When I first arrived in Vietnam,
00:00:44there were some interesting things that happened and I questioned some of the Marines. I was
00:00:52made to realize that this is war and this is what we do. And I stuck in my head. This
00:00:59is war. This is what we do. And after a while, you embrace that. This is war. This is what
00:01:10we do.
00:01:22This evening, I came here to speak to you about Vietnam. There is progress in the war
00:01:31itself. Rather dramatic progress considering the situation that actually prevailed when
00:01:37we sent our troops there in 1965. The grip of the Viet Cong on the people is being broken.
00:01:45And if you can just get your mind together, then come on across to me.
00:01:57In the summer of 1967, the men overseeing the war in Vietnam remained outwardly optimistic,
00:02:04whatever private doubts they may have held. The American military command in Vietnam,
00:02:23MACV, claimed to have killed 200,000 enemy troops and had told the president that the all-important
00:02:31crossover point, the moment when US and ARVN forces were killing more Viet Cong and North Vietnamese
00:02:38troops than the enemy could replace, appeared to have been reached in almost all of South Vietnam.
00:02:46But the United States had suffered nearly 75,000 casualties. By July 4th, 14,624 Americans had died.
00:02:58And off the record, many officers were much less sanguine than their commanders.
00:03:05From Saigon, R. W. Apple of the New York Times summarized their views.
00:03:12Victory is not close at hand, he wrote. In fact, it may be beyond reach.
00:03:26It was true that the enemy rarely won a battle in the traditional military sense that they drove the
00:03:34Americans from the field. But it was also true that no American victory seemed to matter.
00:03:42Battered enemy units were quickly reinforced and rearmed.
00:03:46Battered enemy units were quickly controlled.
00:03:48Pacification, winning the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people, was not working.
00:03:55Saigon still controlled only a fraction of a country roughly the size of Florida.
00:04:01And its government remained unpopular and riddled with corruption.
00:04:06President Johnson had been forced to raise taxes to meet the war's ever-climbing cost.
00:04:15His ambitious social program, his war on poverty, was in retreat.
00:04:20That summer, racial unrest would grip American cities.
00:04:33Maybe now you can't hear them, but you will.
00:04:36The president would have to send the army into Detroit to end five days of rioting that left 43 dead
00:04:45and hundreds of buildings razed. 26 more died in Newark, New Jersey, demonstrating yet again how
00:04:55wide a gap remained between black and white Americans.
00:04:59Only a third of the country saw any sign of progress in Vietnam. And half of the country
00:05:08now disapproved of the president's handling of the war.
00:05:14Meanwhile, Lei Xuân and his comrades, who ran things in Hanoi, were secretly planning a new offensive
00:05:22that they believed would destroy what they called the puppet government in Saigon.
00:05:28And convinced the United States the war could never be won on the battlefield.
00:05:36There's the old apocryphal story that in 1967, they went to the basement of the Pentagon when
00:05:42the mainframe computers took up the whole basement. And they put on the old punch cards, everything you
00:05:46could quantify, and numbers of ships, numbers of airplanes, numbers of tanks, numbers of helicopters,
00:05:50artillery, machine gun, ammo, everything you could quantify. Put it in the hopper and said,
00:05:56one war would win in Vietnam. Went away on Friday, the thing ground away all weekend,
00:06:01came back on Monday, and there was one card in the output tray. And it said, you won in 1965.
00:06:07The only problem is the enemy gets a vote, and they weren't on the punch cards.
00:06:11There were nearly half a million American soldiers in Vietnam by the middle of 1967,
00:06:26with thousands more on the way. Only 20% would ever be in combat. The rest served in support units. None of
00:06:37them had been taught very much about the people against whom and for whom they had been asked to
00:06:43fight. Troops called the Vietnamese guks, a term first used by U.S. Marines to refer to the people of
00:06:52Haiti and Nicaragua during the American occupation of those countries, and then applied to the Asian
00:06:59enemy in Korea. Or slopes, an epithet for the Japanese during the Pacific War. Or dinks, an Australian
00:07:09term for the Chinese. And so in basic training, they taught you that you were going to be fighting
00:07:15guks. It was part of the songs that you sang as you jogged down the road. As you went through bayonet
00:07:23training, you were not talking about Vietnamese. You were always talking about guks. Vietnamese might be
00:07:31people, but guks are close to being animals. GIs called Vietnamese homes hoochies, a corruption of the
00:07:40Japanese word for dwelling places that they had learned during the battle for Okinawa in the Second
00:07:46World War. Soldiers referred to older Vietnamese women as mamasans, the term they used for women who
00:07:55ran whorehouses in occupied Japan. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese called GIs, invaders, imperialists,
00:08:06and Zoc Mi, American bandits.
00:08:15South Vietnam had been divided into four tactical zones. By the summer of 1967, American troops were
00:08:24fighting in all four of them. In IV Corps, the Brownwater Navy patrolled the rivers and canals and marshes
00:08:34of the densely populated Mekong Delta, searching for the enemy. In III Corps, the army continued to sweep
00:08:44the thick jungles of the Iron Triangle, the Viet Cong sanctuary near Saigon that was supposed to have
00:08:51been permanently denied to the enemy by big American operations earlier in the year. In II Corps, a series
00:09:01of bloody battles in the central highlands around Dac Tho temporarily drove North Vietnamese troops back
00:09:08into Cambodia and Laos. But some of the most intense combat would take place in I Corps,
00:09:18made up of the five northernmost provinces of South Vietnam, where the marines would bear the brunt of the
00:09:25fighting. More than two and a half million people lived there, all but two percent of them within the
00:09:32narrow rice-growing river valleys along the South China Sea. The marines wanted to eradicate the Viet Cong there,
00:09:41and provide security to the people village by village, hamlet by hamlet. The vast, largely empty highlands
00:09:49that stretched westward all the way to Laos, the marines argued, could be left to the enemy.
00:09:56The real war is among the people, said Marine Lieutenant General Victor Krulak, and not among the mountains.
00:10:04But General William Westmoreland, the American commander, feared that thousands of North Vietnamese
00:10:11Army regulars, the NVA, were planning to seize the two northernmost provinces. Finding and destroying
00:10:20them remained his first goal. He insisted the 3rd Marine Division move North to meet that challenge,
00:10:31establish a base at Dong Ha, and man strong points at Zhou Lin, Kantian, Cam Lo, Camp Carroll,
00:10:40the Rock Pile, and Khaisan. Khaisan overlooked Route 9, the east-west highway that Westmoreland hoped
00:10:49would one day carry American troops across the border into Laos, where North Vietnamese men and supplies
00:10:56were streaming south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But the thousands of marines monitoring the border
00:11:06would find themselves within range of highly accurate North Vietnamese artillery and rocket launchers,
00:11:12hidden within the DMZ.
00:11:23Tell me, you came here at full strength?
00:11:25I had 13 here when I came. And it's four days later now, and how many are still here? Six.
00:11:30The rifles have been jamming. The mud's been, uh, has slowed everything down. And the artillery comes in
00:11:42everywhere. And, uh, it just gets pretty futile and frustrating sometimes.
00:11:47I can't say that I'm scared stiff, but I'm scared. I mean, after a while, you know it's gonna come.
00:11:57You can't do nothing about it. And you just look to God.
00:12:04Private First Class John Musgrave of Fairmount, Missouri, who had volunteered to join the 3rd
00:12:10Marine Division, was sent to the battle-scarred countryside around Kantian, a few kilometers south
00:12:17of the DMZ. For the Marines in Northern I Corps and the 3rd Marine Division, in the spring and summer
00:12:26of 1967, we called the DMZ the Dead Marine Zone. Musgrave's 1st Battalion had already suffered so many
00:12:35casualties in a series of bloody sweeps that it was believed to be a hard luck outfit.
00:12:41They were called the Walking Dead.
00:12:48I joined the Marine Corps to be in the varsity. And I felt like I wasn't varsity unless I was up north
00:12:56fighting the NBA. I have never regretted that decision. There were times when we were under
00:13:03artillery fire, where I thought, you know, what, what were you thinking? Here it is in a nutshell.
00:13:12If I lived to be 63 years old, I didn't want to look in the mirror some morning and have a guy
00:13:17looking back at me that hadn't done everything for what he believed. That let somebody else do the
00:13:22harder part. Every major contact I remember with the NBA was initiated by them ambushing us.
00:13:35They wouldn't hit us unless they outnumbered us and we were fighting in their yard.
00:13:39They knew the ground we didn't.
00:13:47They were just really good.
00:13:52The North Vietnamese carried Soviet-made, seemingly indestructible AK-47s. The Marines had to fight
00:14:17with newly issued M16 rifles that had for a time a potentially fatal design flaw.
00:14:25They needed constant cleaning and often jammed in the middle of firefights.
00:14:32Their rifles worked, ours didn't. The M16 was a piece of shit.
00:14:37You can't throw your bullets at the enemy and have them be effective.
00:14:41And that rifle malfunctioned on us repeatedly.
00:14:47My hatred for them was pure.
00:15:13here I hated them so much and I was so scared of them boy I was terrified of them
00:15:23and the scarier I got the more I hated them
00:15:43I only killed one human being in Vietnam and that was the first man that I ever killed
00:15:59I was sick with guilt about killing that guy and thinking I'm gonna have to do this for the next 13
00:16:07months I'm gonna go crazy and I saw a Marine step on a bouncing betty mine and that's when I made my
00:16:15deal with the devil in that I said I will never kill another human being as long as I'm in Vietnam
00:16:21however I will waste as many gooks as I can find I'll wax as many dinks as I can find I'll smoke
00:16:32as many zips as I can find but I ain't gonna kill anybody you know turn a subject into an object
00:16:40it's racism 101 it turns out to be a very necessary tool when you have children fighting your wars
00:16:47for them to stay sane doing their work
00:16:50on one early patrol Musgrave watched an American fighter swoop down to drop napalm on enemy troops
00:17:04hidden behind a hedgerow he could hear their AK-47s firing at the plane until the instant they were
00:17:12engulfed in flames if the enemy is willing to die like that he thought this is going to be one very
00:17:20long war they knew they would pop the ambush close and then get amongst you we couldn't or would
00:17:29hesitate to call an air on ourselves so that would firefights like that we call brawls they were very
00:17:39intimate and they were very deadly and they were absolutely terrifying the Marines were spread too
00:17:51thin to hold any of the territory they fought so hard to take again and again they were sent out from
00:17:59one stronghold or another along the DMZ looking for enemy soldiers the disillusionment for me began
00:18:07when I was going back to fight at places we'd already fought before we had fought captured and
00:18:14then left and the envy came right back you don't like getting wounded in places you've already been
00:18:21before war is a real estate business we're supposed to take real estate away from the enemy and then
00:18:29deny the enemy access to that real estate on the morning of July 2nd 1967 the 1st battalion launched
00:18:39yet another sweep of the area northeast of Contien when they reached a crossroads called the marketplace
00:18:47barely a mile and a quarter from their base they were ambushed one company was virtually annihilated
00:18:55John Musgrave's company rushed to rescue the survivors only to be pinned down there as well
00:19:06it was one of the worst days the Marine Corps endured in Vietnam 53 dead and 190 wounded were carried off the
00:19:19battlefield 34 more dead had to be left behind and when Marines fought their way back two days later to retrieve their bodies
00:19:31they found that a number had died because their M16s had jammed as the enemy closed in many had been executed shot in the
00:19:41face or back of the head at close range some bodies had been booby trapped others mutilated
00:19:52Marine Amphibious Force Headquarters was so desperate to get North Vietnamese prisoners that they offered us
00:19:59three-day in country R&R if we bring a prisoner in good luck you know don't you know who what we're doing up here do you know who we're fighting
00:20:10I want to make this clear we did not torture prisoners and we did not mutilate them
00:20:17but to be a prisoner you had to make it to the rear you know if he was with
00:20:28fell into our hands he was just one sorry fucker
00:20:31I don't know how to explain it that it would make sense
00:20:45Roxbury where I grew up was the African-American neighborhood and South Boston was the Irish Catholic bastion
00:21:00you know there's a lot of hate South Boston folks hated us we hated them and ironically
00:21:07you know you end up in war and the Vietnamese didn't care whether you're from Roxbury or South Boston they saw you as American and they wanted to kill you because you're American
00:21:22Private Roger Harris had joined the Marines in part he said because he wanted to be a gladiator a killer of his country's enemies
00:21:34on July 28th two weeks after John Musgrave's badly mangled first battalion was pulled back to rest and recover
00:21:42Roger Harris and the second battalion moved out of Contien and into the southern half of the demilitarized zone itself
00:21:51we wanted to expose themselves so basically put the bait out there and then we could call in and rain hell on them
00:22:04Roger Harris's battalion advanced into the DMZ along a rough cart track that led to the Ben High River
00:22:12but planners had failed to see that a concrete bridge over an impassable stream was too narrow and too weak to carry armored vehicles
00:22:23now the Marines had no choice but to violate a cardinal rule of infantry tactics turn around and try to go back the way they had come
00:22:34the enemy was waiting
00:22:41massive ambushes
00:22:47and a lot of death
00:22:53and uh
00:22:55craziness
00:22:59the Marines were forced to run a bloody gauntlet of mortars machine gun fire and rocket propelled grenades
00:23:08I have the utmost respect for the Nazi enemies army soldiers
00:23:12when you see someone jump out and confront a tank
00:23:17you know with a big 50 caliber machine gun on it and a 90 millimeter cannon on it
00:23:23and an individual takes on the tank
00:23:26I think that says something
00:23:30Roger Harris's company held up the rear
00:23:34hounded by enemy soldiers on all sides
00:23:38the Marines staggered back out of the DMZ
00:23:44alongside the battered armored vehicles
00:23:47heaped with dead and wounded Americans
00:23:50the battalion suffered 214 casualties
00:23:57it wasn't a good day for Marines at all
00:24:00a lot of people died
00:24:02people got their legs shot off
00:24:03people got run over by tanks
00:24:05I don't want to talk about it because it's
00:24:10it's not a good day
00:24:15it wasn't a good day
00:24:17I was a grandiose
00:24:19someruction
00:24:20withusted
00:24:21people
00:24:23who knew
00:24:24they came 6
00:24:24with somebody
00:24:25we knew
00:24:28HOWEVER
00:24:28they came 6
00:24:29captain
00:24:30what
00:24:31the
00:24:32answer
00:24:32they were
00:24:34they played
00:24:35in Spain
00:24:36SLOW
00:24:37their
00:24:38a
00:24:39the
00:24:40at
00:24:41war
00:24:44the
00:24:45the
00:24:46But I had to do it with my blood.
00:24:51I had 90 people who were hurt about 60-70 people.
00:24:56They were hurt and they were hurt.
00:24:59So all the people who were hurt,
00:25:03was not a day to die.
00:25:08But I couldn't sleep, I couldn't sleep.
00:25:11I cried.
00:25:14and I also have the meaning of the United States.
00:25:19But I have to change the color of the United States.
00:25:23This is Bao Khoo, the day of voting in Vietnam.
00:25:29And it's a solemn day in the village of Hung Thao Phu
00:25:32and in other villages throughout the country.
00:25:34And these people have dressed up in their Sunday best for it.
00:25:40South Vietnamese Prime Minister, Nguyễn Cao Khi,
00:25:43had crushed his Buddhist opponents in 1966.
00:25:47But he had been forced by the Americans and his political rivals
00:25:51to make at least tentative moves toward democracy,
00:25:54election of a national assembly, a new constitution,
00:25:58and a promise of elections for president and vice president.
00:26:04But when Khi's old adversary, Win Von Thieu,
00:26:07declared he wanted to challenge Khi for the top spot,
00:26:11things in Saigon had threatened to come apart again.
00:26:16We were watching the rivalry between Thieu and Khi,
00:26:19and that was a game.
00:26:22In Vietnam, the country was watching like we were watching a movie.
00:26:27And Thieu and Khi was watching as to,
00:26:30not whoever had the support of the people,
00:26:32but who had the support of the Americans and the White House.
00:26:38Ellsworth Bunker, the American ambassador,
00:26:40called both men to his residence
00:26:42and warned that the United States would not tolerate another power struggle.
00:26:48Thieu and Khi needed to meet with their fellow generals
00:26:51and decide who would run for president
00:26:54and who would be his running mate.
00:26:57Thieu emerged on top.
00:26:59He was unassuming and unflappable,
00:27:02interested largely in accumulating power and personal wealth,
00:27:06and was thought unlikely ever to embarrass Washington.
00:27:11Khi would be his vice president.
00:27:15Together, they won with only 35% of the vote.
00:27:20No one who had called for an end to the war had been allowed to run.
00:27:25Many Buddhists had boycotted the election,
00:27:27and Viet Cong intimidation had kept many more from the polls.
00:27:34But the State Department immediately declared the election
00:27:37an important step forward.
00:27:42Some South Vietnamese did believe
00:27:44that a measure of stability had finally been achieved.
00:27:48Others were not so sure.
00:27:53In terms of corruption, yes, they will corrupt.
00:27:56Most Thieu and Khi, they abused their position.
00:28:02We pay a very high price for having leaders like Khi and Thieu,
00:28:08and we continue to pay the price.
00:28:17My father was in the United States Army,
00:28:19and then when the Air Force came about,
00:28:21he switched over to the Air Force.
00:28:23I grew up out of the country in desegregated settings.
00:28:29I was usually the only little black girl in the class.
00:28:32If you look at my class pictures,
00:28:34I look like the little chocolate chip in the vanilla ice cream.
00:28:38I was always a good student.
00:28:41I remember people saying,
00:28:42Oh, you speak so well.
00:28:43And the unstated part is for a black girl,
00:28:46probably a Negro girl or colored girl at that point.
00:28:49Eva Jefferson's father had served a year on air bases in Vietnam
00:28:54and returned home convinced the United States had no business being there.
00:28:59But when his daughter entered Northwestern University in the Chicago suburb of Evanston in September 1967,
00:29:08the war was not uppermost in students' minds.
00:29:12The war was not really an issue.
00:29:15It's like, well, no, the president has our best interests at heart.
00:29:20He, of course, would only prosecute a war that made sense.
00:29:23And I think most of America felt that way.
00:29:27At the University of Nebraska, Jack Todd also supported the war.
00:29:33He had felt so strongly about it in 1966 that he had signed up for Marine officer training.
00:29:41I went into the Marine Corps thinking this was all I wanted to do.
00:29:46I mean, my goal was to be commander, a platoon commander in Vietnam.
00:29:51But as time went by and the war went on,
00:29:55Todd and many of his fellow students began to change their minds.
00:29:59All young people go through changes.
00:30:03But we were going through astronomical changes at such a rapid rate.
00:30:10All the music, the culture, everything that we'd listened to,
00:30:13everything that we thought was transforming.
00:30:16And the core of it all was Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam.
00:30:19It just kept going in the background.
00:30:21First it was kind of like a background noise,
00:30:23and then it got to be the elephant in the room,
00:30:25and then it was the elephant sitting on your head.
00:30:27And we couldn't escape this.
00:30:30Todd attended officer training school at Camp Upshur in Quantico, Virginia.
00:30:36But doubts about the war followed him there, too.
00:30:41I guess the emotional things that were happening on the ground,
00:30:44the photographs that we saw, the news images,
00:30:46and the fact that there was no discernible progress
00:30:49that really started to eat away at what we thought.
00:30:51In the summer of 67, I was at Camp Upshur, you know,
00:30:55wanting to go kill Vietnamese people.
00:30:59And in October, I was completely against the war.
00:31:02Westmoreland came in last night to me, and he says that he has concentrated more firepower in bombing in the last week on the DMZ.
00:31:15And they have concentrated more on us than has ever been concentrated in any equivalent period in the history of warfare.
00:31:21Yeah.
00:31:22Much more than was ever poured on Berlin or Tokyo.
00:31:27And that his only defense of the DMZ to stop this aggression up there,
00:31:34with the North Vietnamese trying to come in, is bombing their gun positions.
00:31:38Yeah.
00:31:39And it would just be suicide if we stopped the bombing, as these idiots talking about.
00:31:45Yeah.
00:31:46When you say, stop the bombing, you say, kill more American Marines.
00:31:50That's all it means.
00:31:51Yeah.
00:31:52Now, if we stop bombing without their talking and without any reciprocity on their part,
00:31:58it just means we kill more Americans.
00:32:00That's all.
00:32:01Yeah.
00:32:02Neither the ongoing bombing of the North, nor the concentrated bombing around the DMZ,
00:32:16nor the behind-the-scenes offers made by President Johnson to stop it,
00:32:21had any discernible effect on Lei Xuan and the other men who ran North Vietnam.
00:32:27But Lei Xuan, like Lyndon Johnson, was in trouble that summer.
00:32:32The war with the Americans had produced little more than a bloody stalemate.
00:32:38Some Viet Cong commanders in the south resented Hanoi's insistence on directing their tactics.
00:32:45Many North Vietnamese civilians were weary of the war
00:32:49and of the bombing that had disrupted their lives and destroyed so much of their infrastructure.
00:32:55The country's most revered figures, Ho Chi Minh and Vo Wenzap, were urging patience,
00:33:02continuing to wage a war of attrition they still believed would pay off in the end.
00:33:10Hanoi's Soviet and Chinese patrons offered conflicting advice as well.
00:33:16To silence his critics and break the stalemate,
00:33:21Lei Xuan began to devise and promote a new and riskier version of the plan for victory he had tried in 1964.
00:33:31He called it the General Offensive, General Uprising.
00:33:35North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units would launch scores of coordinated attacks on South Vietnamese cities and towns and military bases.
00:33:48That offensive, Lei Xuan believed, would ignite a mass civilian uprising.
00:33:53These simultaneous blows would destroy the Saigon regime and leave Washington with no choice but to withdraw.
00:34:02He said that in the 조ist's Austria, that it would stand up for a�ntical order.
00:34:03He was sure he came to the war.
00:34:04He believed that we would have sold out to the war in the pandemic.
00:34:05He was prepared to deliver the home of the entire government.
00:34:08They agreed to deliver the legal trade.
00:34:10We've been given the rights to the city in the northern 70s.
00:34:14When Hanoi's
00:34:30That is, there is an alliance of the United States and the United States.
00:34:35So, they are ready to protect the United States.
00:34:39He is responsible for working in the city.
00:34:41He told the city of the city is like a fish,
00:34:44a fish is full of fish in the area.
00:34:48Now, we only need to make sure that it will be released.
00:34:53We talk about our own hubris.
00:34:55There are some hubris on their side as well.
00:34:57And once they had convinced themselves that this was going to be a great success,
00:35:02it is what some WAGs have called drinking their own bathwater.
00:35:06They decided it's going to be a victory,
00:35:08even though there are people in the South saying,
00:35:10hey, this is not a great idea.
00:35:12But these people are charged with subjectivism
00:35:15and basically are told to shut up and keep rolling.
00:35:18Lays One neutralized those who opposed his plan.
00:35:22Members of General Zopp's staff were arrested.
00:35:26So was Ho Chi Minh's secretary.
00:35:29.
00:35:33Hundreds of less prominent figures, journalists, students,
00:35:49even highly decorated heroes of the French war were also rounded up.
00:35:56Many were locked up in the old French prison
00:35:58that the American POWs also confined there called the Hanoi Hilton.
00:36:04The date eventually chosen for the attack would be January 31st, 1968,
00:36:12the first day of the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration known as Tet.
00:36:17Hundreds, then thousands of North Vietnamese regulars in civilian clothes
00:36:24began slipping southward to join tens of thousands of Viet Cong already in place.
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00:37:49.
00:37:50.
00:37:51and big military bases.
00:37:54To do that, they would mount a series of assaults
00:37:56on remote outposts near Cambodia, Laos, and the DMZ.
00:38:02These preliminary attacks became known as the Border Battles.
00:38:08Kantien would be the first.
00:38:15In September and October,
00:38:16John Musgraves and Roger Harris's outfits
00:38:19took turns defending Kantien
00:38:22as the North Vietnamese tightened the noose around them.
00:38:26The only way in or out was by helicopter.
00:38:32Kantien in Vietnamese means Hill of Angels.
00:38:38Time at Kantien was time in the barrel.
00:38:46We were the fish.
00:38:48They had the shotguns.
00:38:49They stuck in the barrel and blasted away.
00:38:52And they were going to hit something every shot.
00:38:54Because Kantien was such a small area,
00:38:57and they pounded it with that artillery from North Vietnam.
00:39:00They couldn't miss.
00:39:08I've never been as afraid.
00:39:12In fact, that's why I'm not afraid of anything now.
00:39:15I mean, there's nothing you can do.
00:39:19You just listen to the sounds of the rockets coming over,
00:39:23and you just pray that they don't land on you.
00:39:26The big question really seems to be whether or not the North Vietnamese intend to overrun Kantien.
00:39:32The Marines have tripled the number of troops guarding the outpost,
00:39:36and they've moved up more battalions to be ready to reinforce.
00:39:39I sat in water, I slept in water, I ate in water, because our holes were full.
00:39:47I mean, a flood of foxhole can drown a wounded man.
00:39:50Spending your day filling up sandbags, trying to create barriers,
00:39:54and you just put another layer on, put another layer on.
00:39:57I mean, a lot of mud, blood, and artillery.
00:40:04It's just red clay up there, and it's real sticky,
00:40:08and it could just grab onto you and pull your boots off.
00:40:11It's hard to run in that stuff, and running, when you're at a place
00:40:14where they're firing heavy artillery at you, running's pretty important.
00:40:19During the siege of the fall of 1967, we were getting newspaper articles
00:40:23in the mail from our families, and we were being called the Alamo.
00:40:27You know, hey, we knew what the Alamo was.
00:40:30We knew what happened there.
00:40:40Like, almost like every hour, there'd be a barrage.
00:40:45People get blown to bits, literally blown to bits.
00:40:49You find a boot with a leg in it, right?
00:40:53And so, is the leg white or black?
00:40:55So who was the white Marine that was here?
00:40:57Who was the black?
00:40:58So then you try to remember, and you tag it, and put that in the green bag,
00:41:02and that's what goes back, you know, as Marine Lands Corp, or so-and-so and so.
00:41:08But sometimes you're not even sure, because the body has literally been blown to bits,
00:41:12and the only thing that's left is a foot or a piece of an arm.
00:41:16I carried a wallet calendar from Clifford Farlow Insurance.
00:41:20He was my dad's insurance agent, and I marked off each of the days religiously.
00:41:25And then in October, we went up to Contean again.
00:41:31I just stopped, because I thought, well, this is pointless.
00:41:35I'm not getting, I'm not going to go home.
00:41:37I'm not going to make it home, and what, you know, what's the point?
00:41:41So I just quit marking them off.
00:41:44I had the opportunity to call my mother, you know, and I was telling my mother what was
00:41:49happening over there, and I was telling her, you know, she shouldn't believe what she sees
00:41:52in the newspaper and sees on television, because we're losing the war.
00:41:58And I said, you'll probably never see me again, because we're the most northern outposts that
00:42:04the Marines have, you know.
00:42:05We could literally could look right into Vietnam.
00:42:08We could see the sparks when the guns fired on us, and I said, everybody in my unit's dying,
00:42:13you know, and I probably won't be coming back.
00:42:15And my mother said, no, you're coming back.
00:42:18She said, I talk to God every day, and you're special.
00:42:21You know, you're coming back.
00:42:24And I said, ma, everybody's mother thinks that they're special.
00:42:26You know, I'm putting pieces of special people in bags.
00:42:31And I was feeling that.
00:42:32My mother's in denial.
00:42:33She just doesn't want to face the fact that her only son's going to die in Vietnam.
00:42:36I said, ma, this isn't a joke, because everybody's dying over here, you know.
00:42:41Everybody's dying.
00:42:42And she said, you're not going to die.
00:42:44You're not going to die.
00:42:46And the last thing she said to me was, God has a plan for you.
00:42:50And I said, yeah, right.
00:42:51And I hung up.
00:42:56Mr. Stout, during what period of time were you in Vietnam?
00:42:59I was in Vietnam from September of 1966 to September of 1967.
00:43:04One year.
00:43:05And with what unit?
00:43:06With the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne.
00:43:09During the time that you were in Vietnam, did you personally witness any atrocities on
00:43:13the part of American troops?
00:43:15Yes, I did.
00:43:17Dennis Stout, from Phoenix, Arizona, had enlisted in the Army at 20 and served nine months in
00:43:24combat.
00:43:25Wounded three times, he became an Army reporter covering the 327th Regiment of the 101st Airborne.
00:43:34He would spend most of his time with a unique commando platoon called Tiger Force.
00:43:42Small, hand-picked teams capable of remaining in the jungle for weeks at a time.
00:43:48Fast moving and deadly.
00:43:50Intended to out-guerrilla the gorillas.
00:43:55Tiger Force fought in six different provinces, repeatedly suffering heavy losses.
00:44:01If you've lost your best friend and you want revenge, it's the officers who say no.
00:44:09You can't do that.
00:44:10And if you do it, then there's consequences.
00:44:13But when the officers, and it includes the platoon leader and the battalion commander,
00:44:18are telling you that this is what you're supposed to do, then it gets completely out of hand.
00:44:25Some at MACV worried that such a freewheeling outfit, operating on its own, would be difficult to control.
00:44:34But General Westmoreland and commanders in the field admired Tiger Force for its reliable ferocity.
00:44:43In the summer of 1967, Tiger Force was sent to the fertile Songvay Valley.
00:44:50The entire population had already been herded from their homes and crowded into a refugee camp.
00:44:57But some had come back to resume the farming they had always done.
00:45:03The valley had officially been declared a free-fire zone.
00:45:08And Tiger Force's officers took that literally.
00:45:12There are no friendlies, one lieutenant told his men.
00:45:16Shoot anything that moves.
00:45:22Over a seven-month period, they killed scores of unarmed civilians.
00:45:28Among their victims were two blind brothers, an elderly Buddhist monk, women, children,
00:45:35and old people hiding in underground shelters, and three farmers trying to plant rice.
00:45:42All were reported as enemy, killed in action.
00:45:49These atrocities were committed by soldiers of units I was assigned to as a reporter for the army newspapers.
00:45:57Tiger Force was not the only platoon Dennis Stout covered that crossed the line.
00:46:04One such incident was the rape and killing of a Vietnamese girl.
00:46:09She was captured, kept for interrogation.
00:46:12Over a two-day period, she was raped.
00:46:16Then, on the morning of the third day, she was killed.
00:46:19Was she raped by more than one person?
00:46:22Yes, all but the medic and myself and possibly one other man from a platoon.
00:46:28Did you protest? Did you try in any way to have them stopped?
00:46:31Yes.
00:46:32After the rape incident, I complained to the battalion sergeant major.
00:46:36And his response was that this type of thing happens in all wars and that I was not to mention it.
00:46:43It was a common occurrence.
00:46:45Then, later, I went to the chaplain, told him about it.
00:46:49He made an investigation himself, found that this was true, went with me to the sergeant major.
00:46:55The sergeant major then said that we told the chaplain to stick to religion, sent him away,
00:47:03and then he told me to keep quiet, that I did not have to return from the next operation.
00:47:10Years later, another soldier came forward with more allegations of war crimes,
00:47:16and an Army investigation would find probable cause to try 18 members of Tiger Force for murder or assault.
00:47:26But no charges were ever brought.
00:47:29The official records were buried in the archives.
00:47:33They should have all gone to jail.
00:47:36They were guilty of murder, period.
00:47:39At the same time, I felt like that incident, which I think was an aberration, not the norm,
00:47:45tarred all veterans, and there are hundreds of thousands of veterans who went and did their duty,
00:47:50as honorable as they possibly could, and they're tarred with the same brush.
00:47:56One of the things that I learned in the war is that we're not the top species on the planet because we're nice.
00:48:04We are a very aggressive species.
00:48:08It is in us, and people talk a lot about how well the military turns kids into killing machines and stuff,
00:48:17and I'll always argue that it's just finishing school.
00:48:21What we do with civilization is that we learn to inhibit and rope in these aggressive tendencies,
00:48:29and we have to recognize them.
00:48:31I worry about a whole country that doesn't recognize it
00:48:35because you think of how many times we get ourselves in scrapes as a nation because we're always the good guys.
00:48:41Sometimes I think if we thought that we weren't always the good guys, we might actually get in less wars.
00:48:46How do you realistically expect to shut down the Pentagon?
00:48:55The Pentagon represents the murder of people throughout the world, and the American people have no control of what their government's doing.
00:49:03And so we're going to go there in the scores of thousands and block doors and fill hallways so the work of the Pentagon stops.
00:49:12Because the work of the Pentagon should stop. The only thing to do with the Pentagon is to shut it down.
00:49:16It was back in 1942, I was a member of a good platoon. We were on maneuvers in Louisiana one night by the light of the moon. The captain told us to ford a river, that's how it all begun. We were knee deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on.
00:49:41There was a major demonstration either in New York or in Washington every fall and every spring.
00:49:50We decided that we would go to the demonstration in Washington at the Lincoln Memorial in the fall of 67, but we would take as many people out of that demonstration as we could and lead them to the Pentagon.
00:50:03And at the Pentagon, try to do something more militant than simply stand around and make speeches opposing the war, which is what these demonstrations had become.
00:50:15And when the time came to lead people away from the Lincoln Memorial toward the Pentagon, 50,000 people marched.
00:50:25We were neck deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on.
00:50:34Bill Zimmerman, now an assistant professor of psychology at Brooklyn College, had been against the war since the beginning.
00:50:42And we found, when we got there, concentric defense perimeters that had been set up around the Pentagon to keep us at a distance from the building.
00:50:52We pushed against them. We tore down their fences.
00:50:55I was working that weekend day. The secretaries who were working in my area were frightened to hell what these Vietnam protesters would do.
00:51:11They thought they were going to come into the building and rape them. Some of them actually came over the walls.
00:51:16The big fool said to push on. It was a sense of revolution.
00:51:22Waist deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on. Waist deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on.
00:51:33God knows what we were going to do when we got in the building.
00:51:36Some people, the hippies, said they were going to levitate the building.
00:51:40Other people wanted to commit vandalism in the building. Other people wanted to distribute anti-war literature in the building.
00:51:47Talk to people. Just the idea of getting into the headquarters of the United States military.
00:51:55It was the first time that anti-war demonstrators had confronted active duty military personnel.
00:52:04We didn't consider them the enemy. We considered them victims of the war.
00:52:09But we began to see our own government as the enemy.
00:52:16President Johnson believed that international communism was somehow behind the demonstration.
00:52:22He had directed the CIA to come up with the evidence and was furious when it found none.
00:52:31Mr. President? Yes. Mr. Eisenhower. How have you been, Mr. President?
00:52:36I'm doing fine under the circumstances.
00:52:39But we just had hell, and these college students, I've had Hoover in after them.
00:52:43And they came, marched here, and we arrested 600 of them.
00:52:47And we gave 29 of them, pretty tough times.
00:52:51We found most of them really were mentally diseased.
00:52:54Hoover's taken 256 that turned in supposedly their draft cards.
00:52:58So you're dealing with mental problems, sir, really.
00:53:00I think it, we talk too damn much about civil liberties and constitutional rights of the individual,
00:53:05and not enough about the rights of the masses.
00:53:08And that's what we have. We were freely elected people, and we've got to stand behind them.
00:53:13I think your government's in trouble, General. I think it's in, I don't know how to say this,
00:53:17but I think we're in more danger from these left-wing influences now than we've ever been in 37 years I've been here.
00:53:24And they're working in my party from within.
00:53:27Bobby thinks he's going to get the nomination.
00:53:30Allard Lowenstein, a 38-year-old attorney from New York, shared the anti-war fervor of the protesters.
00:53:37But he believed the most effective way to end the fighting was to work within the political system, not outside it.
00:53:45The answer, he said, was to stop Lyndon Johnson from getting a second full term as president.
00:53:52He had traveled the country all year in search of someone willing to challenge the president in the upcoming Democratic primaries.
00:54:01He asked Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, who had begun to criticize the Johnson administration over the war.
00:54:08He asked Lieutenant General James Gavin.
00:54:12He asked Senator George McGovern of South Dakota.
00:54:16They all turned him down.
00:54:18Lowenstein kept looking.
00:54:21At Fort Sill, Oklahoma, on November 17, 1967, friends and family of a fallen soldier gathered for a funeral,
00:54:37one of five military funerals held there that month.
00:54:42First Sergeant Pascal Cletus Pula had been killed as he tried to drag one of his wounded men off the battlefield,
00:54:50near the village of Loch Ninh.
00:54:54He was a remarkable soldier.
00:54:56He had been awarded one silver star in World War II, two more in Korea,
00:55:02and was awarded a fourth posthumously for his gallantry in Vietnam.
00:55:09He was a Kiowa Indian.
00:55:11He and three of his sons were among the 42,000 Native Americans who would serve in Vietnam.
00:55:19The highest per capita service rate of any ethnic group in the United States.
00:55:26Pascal Pula's widow spoke at the ceremony.
00:55:31He has followed the trail of the great chiefs, she said.
00:55:35His people hold him in honor and highest esteem.
00:55:39He has given his life for the people and the country he loved so much.
00:55:51When the truth is found to be lies, we know the joy within you dies.
00:56:06Don't you want somebody to love?
00:56:09Don't you need somebody to love?
00:56:13Wouldn't you love somebody to love?
00:56:16You better find somebody to love.
00:56:21Love.
00:56:23I didn't hear the word hippie until I was at Contien.
00:56:29And we got a playboy, somebody got a playboy in the mail,
00:56:32which was obviously very important to us.
00:56:34And there was an article on Haight Ashbury
00:56:37and pictures of the girls running around without their tops, you know, free love.
00:56:40And they were hippies.
00:56:41And we thought it was hippie because they had two Ps.
00:56:44You know, hey, I'm going to go and be one of these hippies
00:56:47because the girls don't wear no clothes, you know,
00:56:50and they'll go to bed with anybody.
00:56:51And, you know, even I could score.
00:56:54But the only information I had on the Peace Movement
00:56:57came from Stars and Stripes.
00:56:59And that wasn't a real objective newspaper.
00:57:02And so I hated them before I ever even knew anything about them.
00:57:14The monsoon rains continued to make life miserable
00:57:17for John Musgrave and the other Marines at Contien.
00:57:21But by early November, the worst of the shelling had ended.
00:57:25American airstrikes, artillery, and Navy fire
00:57:29had taken a fearful toll on the besieging enemy.
00:57:34Before dawn on November 7th,
00:57:37two companies of Musgrave's outfit
00:57:39were sent half a mile into the countryside
00:57:42northwest of the base to sweep the area again.
00:57:46And we got into an area that was old hedgerows
00:57:51that's grown over with jungle, very difficult to see very far.
00:57:55In the clear area, we had three NVA show them
00:57:58and start just spraying 30 rounds out of their AKs
00:58:02and then booking.
00:58:04The company commander himself said,
00:58:07I want their bodies. Bring me their bodies.
00:58:10Everything's about body count, right?
00:58:13We said, man, this is as old as Custer.
00:58:16These guys are showing themselves to draw us into an ambush.
00:58:20Lieutenant, don't do this.
00:58:22You know, please, these guys are bait.
00:58:26Well, the skipper says, we got to go. We got to go.
00:58:31And we went.
00:58:34And I can't tell you a whole lot about the ambush.
00:58:40I was one of the first people to be shot.
00:58:43One round put me down.
00:58:46And my grenadier was down and we were trying to get him back.
00:58:49And Marines, from the first day in boot camp,
00:58:53you learn that Marines don't leave their dead.
00:58:56And they never, never leave their wounded.
00:59:01And that's why I'm alive today.
00:59:04The first guy that came for me, I was lying on my face.
00:59:09He reached down and stuck his arms under my shoulders
00:59:12and lifted me up.
00:59:14And the machine gun wasn't any far.
00:59:17It was maybe nine feet, ten feet at the most, away from me.
00:59:23This is a very intimate ambush.
00:59:24It's a brawl.
00:59:27And he fired a burst into my chest
00:59:30that blew me out of this, the Marines' arms that was holding me.
00:59:33And then he was shot.
00:59:37Another very brave young Marine, his 18-year-old,
00:59:42from Louisiana, his first firefight,
00:59:45had seen what happened and still came for me.
00:59:49And he reached for me and he was shot, I think, in the forearm.
00:59:54And he was laying beside me.
00:59:58And I've got a hole through my chest big enough to stick your fist through.
01:00:01And I'm dying and I know it.
01:00:04And I heard this horrible screaming going on
01:00:07and I was trying to figure out who was screaming like that
01:00:11because it sounded so...
01:00:18And then I realized it was me.
01:00:22When they began to drag us out,
01:00:24they were being pursued by the North Vietnamese
01:00:26and they would drop us and lay on top of us.
01:00:30They knew we were both dying.
01:00:32The Grenadier had been shot in the right side of his chest.
01:00:35They knew we were both dead.
01:00:37But we were still alive.
01:00:40So they weren't going to leave us.
01:00:42They would die before they would leave us.
01:00:44And they covered us with their bodies and fired back at the NVA.
01:00:47And then they'd jump up and drag us a little farther
01:00:49and then drop us and lay back on top of us.
01:00:52And I kept telling them to leave me.
01:00:54And I meant it. I meant it.
01:00:57But all of a sudden I got scared that they might really leave me.
01:01:03I was triaged three times.
01:01:06And the senior corpsman said,
01:01:09he's either shot through the heart or the lungs,
01:01:11there's nothing I can do for him.
01:01:12And he just turned away.
01:01:13I went, oh, okay.
01:01:16And then a helicopter come in and they threw me into the bird.
01:01:22And the corpsman on the bird straddled me, stood over me and looked down at me.
01:01:29And then looked up at the door gunner and went, get me out of the way.
01:01:34Because he couldn't work on me. I was, I was a dead man.
01:01:39And they flew me to Delta Med at Dongha.
01:01:42And I thought, okay, I made it this far.
01:01:45And this doctor comes over and looks at me and I'm conscious.
01:01:49I'm lucid.
01:01:51And he, he checks a couple of things and I've got this huge hole in him.
01:01:55And he looks at me right in the eye and he says, what's your religion, Marine?
01:01:58And I said, well, I'm a Protestant.
01:02:00He says, get a chaplain over here. I can't help this man.
01:02:03And then he walked away.
01:02:06Another surgeon walks by.
01:02:09And he looked at me and I was raised to be, to always be nice to people.
01:02:15And when he looked at me, I smiled at him and nodded.
01:02:19And he said, why isn't somebody helping this man?
01:02:23And inside I'm going, yeah, why isn't somebody helping this man?
01:02:28When they put me to sleep, I thought, boy, this is really it.
01:02:32You know, and it was kind of, okay, God, into your hands I'd deliver my spirit.
01:02:38And I thought that was it.
01:02:41And when I woke up in the surgical intensive care ward, which was a Quonset hut, I thought, holy mackerel.
01:02:50I just couldn't, I couldn't believe it.
01:02:57Yesterday over Hanoi, three American planes were shot down and at least two of their pilots captured.
01:03:05One of them was Lieutenant Commander John McCain III, the son of the US Naval Commander in Europe.
01:03:12I, I can't believe in where he ran.
01:03:13And he ran out.
01:03:14And he didn't, but I couldn't believe it.
01:03:15He was in the back of the administrations.
01:03:16He blew up.
01:03:17And he was shot down and he died and he was shot down.
01:03:19He hurt and he got that bad.
01:03:21He hit that bad.
01:03:22And he was killed.
01:03:23And he ran out and he smashed down.
01:03:24Sometimes, I died when he fell.
01:03:26And I ran out.
01:03:27And he ran out of the撮影ище.
01:03:29And I saw it in the distance.
01:03:30He disappeared.
01:03:31And the soldiers were shot down.
01:03:32He was shot down.
01:03:33And killed the officer.
01:03:35He died.
01:03:36And he died, he just blew up on people.
01:03:38Hanoi was so pleased to have captured the son of an American Admiral that they allowed a French
01:03:57journalist to interview McCain in the hospital. He had just had his broken bones set without even
01:04:04an aspirin for the pain. What is your name? Lieutenant Commander John McCain. How many
01:04:11raids have you done until the last one? About 23. In which circumstances have you been shot down?
01:04:20I was on a flight over the city of Hanoi and I was bombing and was hit by either missile
01:04:32or anti-aircraft fire. I'm not sure which and the plane continued straight down and I ejected it
01:04:44and broke my leg and both arms and went into a lake, parachuted into a lake
01:04:55and I was picked up by some North Vietnamese and taken to the hospital where I almost died.
01:05:07I would just like to tell my wife. I will get well.
01:05:23I love her. I hope to see her soon.
01:05:28After the interview, McCain was beaten for not expressing sufficient gratitude to his captors.
01:05:46All through the fall of 1967, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong continued their series of border
01:05:53battles in preparation for their surprise offensive, still months away.
01:06:00Khan Tien, where John Musgrave was wounded, had been the first. Then came the Arvin base at Song Bay.
01:06:08The South Vietnamese outpost adjacent to the provincial capital of Loch Ninh was next.
01:06:14There, large units of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong regulars mounted a coordinated attack
01:06:21and then fought for five days to hold onto the ground they gained, something they had never done before.
01:06:29American commanders were puzzled. Then, in early November, reports reached MACV that five North
01:06:38Vietnamese regiments and the Viet Cong battalion, some 7,000 men in all, had begun massing in the
01:06:45central highlands around the U.S. Special Forces camp at Docto again.
01:06:52Among the North Vietnamese regulars was Nguyen Thanh Son, who had been so eager to fight that he too
01:06:59had filled his pockets with rocks to pass his physical.
01:07:02As the NVA deployed their troops, Westmoreland sent his to Docto, exactly what the enemy wanted him to do.
01:07:27Among the Americans were the men of the elite 173rd Airborne, Westmoreland's Fire Brigade.
01:07:41We all knew in a general sense that we wouldn't be brought back if there wasn't something big going on.
01:07:47We just knew that the area was crawling with North Vietnamese and that they were there
01:07:56not to avoid contact with us, but they were there to have contact with us.
01:08:03First Lieutenant Matthew Harrison was now with Alpha Company of the 2nd Battalion,
01:08:08the same rifle company that had been ambushed and so badly shattered back in June,
01:08:13on the slopes of Hill 1338, just 14 miles to the east.
01:08:19This wasn't like the Viet Cong, where if you could find them, you could kill them.
01:08:24Our problem wasn't finding them, our problem was what to do with them once you found them.
01:08:28The 174th NVA Regiment was waiting.
01:08:34Nguyen Thanh Son and his men were already dug in on the high ground they knew the Americans would want
01:08:40to command, Hill 875.
01:08:43On Sunday morning, November 19th, 1967,
01:09:11Alpha, Charlie and Delta companies were ordered to take Hill 875.
01:09:18Matt Harrison had been wounded in an earlier fight and was not permitted to accompany his men.
01:09:25He anxiously followed their progress over the radio.
01:09:30Heavy artillery and flights of F-100s blasted the hillside ahead of them,
01:09:34meant to knock out enemy positions before the paratroopers ever got within range.
01:09:41The three companies moved up the slope, Charlie and Delta in the lead,
01:10:02Alpha bringing up the rear.
01:10:05The paratroopers stepped warily into a clearing filled with fallen trees from the morning's bombardment,
01:10:13and only a little over 300 yards from the summit.
01:10:17They did.
01:10:28Thousands of automatic weapon rounds ripped through the air.
01:10:36Chinese-made grenades came rolling and bumping down the slopes.
01:10:41The Americans sought cover where they could, behind fallen trees,
01:10:45scrabbled at the earth with their helmets, trying to dig fighting holes.
01:10:56Charlie and Delta companies were pinned down and being torn to pieces.
01:11:04Meanwhile, near the foot of the hill,
01:11:06other North Vietnamese troops surprised Alpha Company from behind.
01:11:11They were first spotted moving up through the trees by a private from the Bronx named Carlos Lozada.
01:11:18As the men of his company scrambled up the slope, dragging their wounded with them,
01:11:23Lozada provided what cover he could, firing his M60 machine gun from his hip before a bullet hit him in the head.
01:11:32He would be awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.
01:11:36Back home, the battle led the nightly news.
01:11:43The Battle of Docto is now on its 19th day.
01:11:46It already ranks among the bloodiest campaigns of the Vietnam War.
01:11:50There's no sign yet of any letter.
01:11:52Over the weekend, the three companies of the 173rd Airborne Brigade moved down this river valley,
01:11:57up which North Vietnamese normally infiltrate, until they got down here by Hill 875.
01:12:04Then they came under heavy fire from the hill.
01:12:06Two of the three companies charged the hill.
01:12:08The other stayed back as a rear guard.
01:12:10By early afternoon, the three companies had basically been decapitated.
01:12:17The company commanders were dead.
01:12:19Most of the officers and most of the NCOs were dead.
01:12:22The survivors from all three companies clustered in the clearing and did their best to set up a defensive circle.
01:12:32American bombs and napalm pounded enemy positions until it grew almost too dark to see.
01:12:39American bombs and napalm pounded enemy positions until it grew up.
01:13:09Another American plane roared in and dropped two bombs.
01:13:13One landed among the hidden enemy troops.
01:13:17The other fell directly on the Americans.
01:13:22In a fraction of a second, 42 were killed.
01:13:27A badly hit lieutenant managed to find a working radio.
01:13:31No more fucking planes, he shouted into it.
01:13:34You're killing us up here.
01:13:36The men ran out of water, began to run out of ammunition.
01:13:46Helicopters that tried to ferry in supplies were shot down.
01:13:52The following day, Matt Harrison was able to chop her in.
01:13:56It was chaos.
01:14:00It was collections of guys who had tunneled and dug down behind trees.
01:14:05These were guys who had gone without water in that heat for two days.
01:14:10And almost every one of them was wounded.
01:14:13And then all around were bodies.
01:14:18Guys who had been shot and blown up.
01:14:23It was the third circle of hell.
01:14:24On November 23rd, two fresh battalions of the 173rd finally made it to the top of the hill for which so many had died.
01:14:36But the night before, the surviving North Vietnamese troops had slipped down the other side and disappeared into Cambodia and Laos.
01:14:47The powers that be decided it would be important to our morale for us to be in on the taking the top of the hill.
01:14:56I had 26 guys left out of a company that started out of 140.
01:15:01And all 26 had been wounded.
01:15:03Then Harrison and his exhausted men were helicoptered to the top of yet another hill.
01:15:15It was Thanksgiving.
01:15:18Chinook helicopters clattered down out of the sky, carrying huge containers of hot turkey and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce,
01:15:26so that the 173rd could have their Thanksgiving dinner.
01:15:31If there are any more remote or dangerous spots to spend Thanksgiving Day in Vietnam than this one,
01:15:37then most of these men have never seen them.
01:15:39There was a TV cameraman and reporter off to the side using us as a backdrop.
01:15:44And I remember hearing the reporter in tone,
01:15:47Today is November 23rd, Thanksgiving Day.
01:15:50And I was really angry.
01:15:54It's as though we were entertainers.
01:15:58One hundred and seven Americans had died taking Hill 875.
01:16:05Another 282 were wounded.
01:16:08Ten more were missing.
01:16:10The number of North Vietnamese casualties is unknown,
01:16:14but their losses are thought to have been staggering.
01:16:17Back in June, Matt Harrison had lost two West Point classmates on Hill 1338.
01:16:26He lost two more on Hill 875.
01:16:30Of the eight with whom he had served in the 2nd Battalion,
01:16:34four were now dead,
01:16:36and two had been wounded.
01:16:37To take tops of mountains in a triple canopy jungle along the Cambodian-Laotian border
01:16:46accomplished nothing of any importance.
01:16:51The battle for Hill 875 was, in my thinking today,
01:16:56a microcosm of what we were doing and what went wrong in Vietnam.
01:17:00There was no reason to take that hill.
01:17:05We literally got to the top of the hill about midday on November 23rd
01:17:11and sat there for, I don't know, half an hour, an hour,
01:17:17just kind of gathering ourselves and everything together.
01:17:21Chinooks came in, took us off the hill,
01:17:24and I doubt that there's been an American on Hill 875 since November 23rd.
01:17:31We accomplished nothing.
01:17:34A new phase is now starting.
01:17:37We have reached an important point
01:17:39when the end begins to come into view.
01:17:43As Matt Harrison and his men fought for Hill 875,
01:17:48the Johnson administration was in the midst of a success offensive,
01:17:52a PR campaign aimed at shoring up support for the war
01:17:57and the way it was being waged.
01:18:01McVie released a new and surprisingly low estimate of enemy forces
01:18:05to show how much damage the United States had done to them.
01:18:10It was only two-thirds of the total suggested by the CIA
01:18:14because after a bitter and prolonged debate behind the scenes,
01:18:18Westmoreland had chosen to exclude from it the part-time guerrillas,
01:18:23farmers, old men, women, even children
01:18:27who helped place the mines, grenades, and booby traps
01:18:30that accounted for more than a third of all American casualties.
01:18:36General Westmoreland also told the press
01:18:38that the impressive body counts his commanders reported
01:18:42were very, very conservative.
01:18:44It probably represented, he said,
01:18:4850% or even less of the enemy that has been killed.
01:18:53Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker joined the chorus
01:18:56using a metaphor first used 13 years earlier
01:19:00by the French commander in Vietnam,
01:19:02not long before their great defeat at the NBN Phu.
01:19:06...progress, and I think we're now beginning to see light
01:19:10at the end of the tunnel.
01:19:11Mr. Ambassador, you talk about light at the end of the tunnel.
01:19:15How long is this tunnel?
01:19:17I don't think that you can put it into any particular time frame,
01:19:24a situation like this.
01:19:27LBJ's success offensive succeeded.
01:19:31The number of Americans who believed the United States
01:19:35was making real progress in the war grew.
01:19:38Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
01:19:43did not take part in the public relations campaign.
01:19:47He had become so disillusioned with the war
01:19:50he'd done so much to plan and prosecute
01:19:52that he wrote another secret memo to the president,
01:19:56advising Johnson to freeze American troop levels,
01:20:00turn over ground operations to the South Vietnamese,
01:20:03and halt the bombing of North Vietnam
01:20:06in order to bring about negotiations.
01:20:09There was no reason to believe, McNamara wrote,
01:20:13that the prolonged infliction of grievous casualties
01:20:16or the heavy punishment of air bombardment
01:20:19will suffice to break the will of the North Vietnamese
01:20:22and Viet Cong.
01:20:24The continuation of our present course of action
01:20:27in Southeast Asia
01:20:29would be dangerous, costly in lives,
01:20:32and unsatisfactory to the American people.
01:20:36Johnson never responded.
01:20:39Instead, he arranged for McNamara
01:20:42to become the president of the World Bank.
01:20:45McNamara would keep silent
01:20:47about the doubts he had harbored
01:20:49since the beginning of the ground war
01:20:51for the next 28 years.
01:20:55His successor as defense secretary
01:20:58would be Clark Clifford,
01:21:00a prominent Washington lawyer
01:21:01and trusted counselor to Democratic presidents
01:21:04whom Johnson was sure
01:21:06would be supportive of the war.
01:21:11Meanwhile, Allard Lowenstein's year-long search
01:21:14for a Democratic challenger to the president
01:21:16had finally succeeded.
01:21:18On November 30, 1967,
01:21:22Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy
01:21:24announced that he would run.
01:21:27This is an issue
01:21:27which has to be taken to the people of the country
01:21:31in the campaign of 1960.
01:21:36By the end of 1967,
01:21:4020,057 Americans had died in Vietnam.
01:21:43The time had come,
01:21:47General Westmoreland said,
01:21:48for an all-out offensive on all fronts.
01:21:55But the enemy was just a month away
01:21:58from launching an all-out offensive of its own.
01:22:02I see a vector
01:22:19and I want it into black
01:22:22No colors any more
01:22:26I want them to turn black
01:22:28I see the girls
01:22:31walk by dressed in their summer clothes
01:22:34I have to turn my head
01:22:38until my darkness goes
01:22:40I see a line of cars
01:22:44and they are painted black
01:22:47With flowers and my love
01:22:50talk never to come back
01:22:53I see people turn their heads
01:22:56and quickly look away
01:22:58Like a newborn baby
01:23:01It just happens every day
01:23:04I look inside myself
01:23:08And see my heart is black
01:23:11I see my red door
01:23:14I must have it into black
01:23:17Maybe then I'll fade away
01:23:20It's not time to face the facts
01:23:23It's not easy facing up
01:23:26When your whole world is black
01:23:29No more will my green seagull
01:23:32Turn the deeper blue
01:23:35I could not foresee
01:23:38This thing happening to you
01:23:41If I look hard enough
01:23:45Into the setting sun
01:23:47My love will laugh with me
01:23:51Before the morning comes
01:23:53I see a red door
01:23:56And I want it painted black
01:23:59No colors anymore
01:24:03I want them to turn black
01:24:05I see the girls walk by
01:24:09dressed in their summer clothes
01:24:11I have to turn my head
01:24:15until my darkness goes
01:24:18I want to see you painted
01:24:25Painted, painted, painted
01:24:27Painted black
01:24:28Yeah
01:24:29Painted, painted, framed
01:24:30Painted, painted, painted
01:24:33Painted, painted, transparent
01:24:41Painted, painted, et al어가
01:24:59You
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