- 1 year ago
The_Vietnam_War_se_1_ep_1_360P
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00:00:00You
00:00:30Coming home from Vietnam was close to as traumatic as the war itself.
00:01:00For years, nobody talked about Vietnam.
00:01:07We were friends with a young couple, and it was only after 12 years that the two wives
00:01:13were talking.
00:01:14Found out that we both had been Marines in Vietnam.
00:01:18Never said a word about it, never mentioned it.
00:01:22And the whole country was like that.
00:01:25It was so divisive.
00:01:29And it's like living in a family with an alcoholic father.
00:01:33Shh, we don't talk about that.
00:01:38Our country did that with Vietnam.
00:01:40It's only been very recently that I think that, you know, the baby boomers are finally starting
00:01:45to say, what happened?
00:01:50What happened?
00:01:54What we need now in this country is to heal the wounds and to put Vietnam behind us.
00:02:06The killing in this tragic war must stop.
00:02:19The general Westmoreland strategy is producing results.
00:02:22The enemy is no longer closer to victory.
00:02:35No matter how you measure it, we're better off than we thought we would be at this time.
00:02:49You have been less than candid as to how deeply we are involved in Vietnam.
00:03:03We have increased our assistance to the government, its logistics.
00:03:07We have not sent combat groups there.
00:03:10You have a row of dominoes set up and you knock over the first one and the last one certainly
00:03:16little over.
00:03:17If aggression is successful in Korea, we can expect it to spread throughout Asia and Europe
00:03:22and to this hemisphere.
00:03:24If such problems were indicated, you did not know it was yet the day before the weekend.
00:03:32All the sudden they are a eager in Ireland.
00:03:34Glad to say it was given to me for an image and no time of mass of ourselves.
00:03:40When you were being present, you Aah!
00:03:44Ray De arose with a gentleman, I have contracted your grace and your son!
00:03:50Speak yourindign call freer.
00:03:53Have you been, my darling young one?
00:03:58Victor Frankel, who survived the death camps in World War II,
00:04:03wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning.
00:04:08You know, to live is to suffer.
00:04:11To survive is to find meaning in suffering.
00:04:16And for those of us who suffered because of Vietnam,
00:04:20that's been our quest.
00:04:23Ever since.
00:04:25And it's hard, it's hard, it's hard,
00:04:30it's hard, it's hard rain.
00:04:37America's involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy.
00:04:43It ended 30 years later in failure,
00:04:47witnessed by the entire world.
00:04:49It was begun in good faith by decent people
00:04:56out of fateful misunderstandings,
00:04:59American overconfidence,
00:05:01and Cold War miscalculation.
00:05:03And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through
00:05:08than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions
00:05:12made by five American presidents
00:05:15belonging to both political parties.
00:05:18people of men with their hammers of bleeding.
00:05:20Before the war was over,
00:05:22more than 58,000 Americans would be dead.
00:05:27At least 250,000 South Vietnamese troops
00:05:30died in the conflict as well.
00:05:34So did over a million North Vietnamese soldiers
00:05:37and Viet Cong guerrillas.
00:05:39Two million civilians North and South are thought to have perished,
00:05:49as well as tens of thousands more
00:05:52in the neighboring states of Laos and Cambodia.
00:05:55For many Vietnamese, it was a brutal civil war.
00:06:02For others, the bloody, climactic chapter
00:06:05in a century-old struggle for independence.
00:06:09And what do you do now, my blue-eyed son?
00:06:14For those Americans who fought in it,
00:06:16and for those who fought against it back home,
00:06:19as well as for those who merely glimpsed it on the nightly news,
00:06:23the Vietnam War was a decade of agony,
00:06:27the most divisive period since the Civil War.
00:06:33Vietnam seemed to call everything into question.
00:06:38The value of honor and gallantry.
00:06:42The qualities of cruelty and mercy.
00:06:47The candor of the American government.
00:06:50We're the home in the valley meets the dampness.
00:06:52And what it means to be a patriot.
00:06:56Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten.
00:07:01And those who lived through it
00:07:03have never been able to erase its memory,
00:07:06have never stopped arguing about what really happened,
00:07:10why everything went so badly wrong,
00:07:12who was to blame,
00:07:14and whether it was all worth it.
00:07:17Come on the mountain so all souls can see it.
00:07:22The time passed for 40 years.
00:07:28I was the total of 40 years.
00:07:30My son was the same of Vietnam to win.
00:07:34I was the same,
00:07:34who was the same.
00:07:38The battle of the fight against China,
00:07:38well, I didn't have to fight it.
00:07:41And the battle of the fight against you,
00:07:44are the only war that was the same.
00:07:45The battle of the fight against China,
00:07:46team
00:07:59and it's
00:08:12and
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00:34:34Ho, Zop, and their comrades slipped out of the city and returned to their mountain stronghold far to the north.
00:34:47Those who have rifles will use their rifles, Ho declared in a radio address calling for a nationwide guerrilla war.
00:34:56Those who have swords will use swords.
00:35:00Those who have no swords will use spades or sticks.
00:35:04Those who have no swords will use spades.
00:35:35But the country Ho Chi Minh hoped to unite was itself bitterly divided.
00:35:41Families were being torn apart.
00:35:44Despite her father's position in the French government, Zhuang Von Mai's sister felt compelled to answer Ho's call.
00:35:52My older sister, Thang, was married to a man who had great sympathy for the Viet Minh.
00:36:03And by that time, Ho Chi Minh had evacuated his government to the mountain base.
00:36:07So my sister and her husband tricked all the way from Hanoi toward the base in order to join the resistance against the French.
00:36:17So the Vietnam War was really a civil war, down to the family level.
00:36:23France poured thousands of men into Vietnam.
00:36:36French regulars, European mercenaries, and colonial troops from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Senegal,
00:36:44who fought alongside an army of Cambodians, Laotians, and anti-communist Vietnamese.
00:36:52French forces managed to occupy most of the large towns and province capitals and established hundreds of isolated outposts.
00:37:06The French also set out to try to win over rural Vietnamese, through a program they called pacification,
00:37:16pacification, building dikes, schools and roads, and vaccinating children.
00:37:25The French would pacify a village, and during the daytime, they could control it.
00:37:31But at night, the Viet Minh would come back, and so it was never completely secure.
00:37:40My father would shake his head and said, you know, pacification is really futile,
00:37:45because it's like trying to hold sand in your fingers.
00:37:52The Viet Minh mined roads, blew up bridges and railroads, ambushed French patrols.
00:38:01French soldiers sometimes took revenge on the nearest village, burning homes, raping women,
00:38:12executing men suspected of aiding the Viet Minh.
00:38:16French
00:38:31French
00:38:36French
00:38:43But the communists proved every bit as ruthless as the French.
00:39:00It is better to kill even those who might be innocent, one commander said, than to let
00:39:06a guilty person go.
00:39:10They specifically targeted anyone who had links to the French.
00:39:15Once my father started working for the French, then he was a target, especially the higher
00:39:21he rose, the bigger target he became.
00:39:24A Vietnamese agent actually came in with a pistol to shoot him, but at the last moment
00:39:31decided not to.
00:39:40They were killed in Vietnam in the US and killed them.
00:39:45They were killed in the US and killed them in the US, and killed them in the US.
00:39:51We killed them in a difficult way, in a way to live,
00:39:55but we don't need to be able to kill them.
00:40:01We have lived in 12 floors.
00:40:12French casualties continued to mount.
00:40:16There are days when we are so discouraged
00:40:19that we would like to give it all up, a French soldier wrote his mother.
00:40:23Convoys under attack.
00:40:25Roads cut.
00:40:26Firing in all directions every night.
00:40:29The indifference at home.
00:40:42While I was there, I had the opportunity to call my mother, you know?
00:40:45And I was telling my mother what was happening over there,
00:40:49and I was telling her, you know,
00:40:51she shouldn't believe what she sees in the newspaper
00:40:53and everyone sees on television because we're losing the war.
00:40:58I said, you'll probably never see me again
00:41:00because we're the most northern outposts that the Marines have.
00:41:04You know, we could literally could look right into Vietnam.
00:41:07We could see the sparks when the guns fired on us.
00:41:10And I said, everybody in my unit's dying.
00:41:12I probably won't be coming back.
00:41:14And my mother said, no, you're coming back.
00:41:16She said, I talk to God every day, and you're special.
00:41:20You know, you're coming back.
00:41:23And I said, Ma, everybody's mother thinks that they're special.
00:41:27You know, I'm putting pieces of special people in bags.
00:41:36President Truman's dramatic announcement
00:41:38that Russia had the atom secret
00:41:40caused State Departments all over the world to stir uneasily.
00:41:45We were very aware that there was a Cold War
00:41:48and that we had an enemy,
00:41:50and that enemy was the Soviet Union.
00:41:54The United States stood at one pole,
00:41:57and the Soviet Union stood at the other pole.
00:41:59It was kind of a Manichaean dynamic that there was evil,
00:42:04and there was good, and we were good,
00:42:06and the other side was evil.
00:42:08It wasn't morally ambiguous.
00:42:14Just a few weeks after Russia became a nuclear power,
00:42:17there was more stunning news.
00:42:20Communist forces under Mao Zedong seized control of China.
00:42:24Separate Communist insurrections were also underway
00:42:29in the British colonies of Burma and Malaya.
00:42:35In January 1950, Mao formally recognized Ho Chi Minh's insurgency
00:42:41and agreed to provide the arms, equipment,
00:42:44and military training he had been seeking.
00:42:48The Soviets recognized the Viet Minh as well,
00:42:51and also offered help.
00:42:54President Truman, who was being blamed by his political opponents
00:42:58for having lost China and having failed to contain communism,
00:43:03approved a $23 million aid program for the French in Vietnam.
00:43:10The United States was no longer neutral.
00:43:15We were caught on the horns of a dilemma
00:43:17of how can we maintain our friendship and our alliance with the French
00:43:21and support them in Indochina,
00:43:24while we as a former colony ourselves sympathize with the Vietnamese
00:43:29and their aspirations for freedom and independence.
00:43:32A highly trained and well-equipped North Korean army swarmed across the 38th parallel
00:43:42to attack unprepared South Korean defenders.
00:43:45In June of 1950, China's ally, Communist North Korea, invaded South Korea.
00:43:56President Truman ordered tens of thousands of American ground troops
00:44:00onto the Korean peninsula.
00:44:08The United States and its allies eventually pushed the invaders back north.
00:44:15Meanwhile, in southern China,
00:44:17Mao's military was beginning to turn the Viet Minh into a modern fighting force,
00:44:23capable of inflicting a heavy toll on the French occupiers.
00:44:35In July, the Truman administration quietly dispatched transport planes
00:44:40and a shipload of Jeeps to Vietnam.
00:44:42Thirty-five military advisers went along to oversee their use.
00:44:50None of them, and no one in the American Embassy, spoke a word of Vietnamese.
00:44:57But the United States was now officially in Vietnam.
00:45:04In October of 1950, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops
00:45:09began pouring into North Korea, driving the Allies back down the peninsula.
00:45:15As that fighting raged, Truman continued to increase military aid
00:45:20for the French War in Vietnam.
00:45:26If aggression is successful in Korea,
00:45:29we can expect it to spread throughout Asia and Europe
00:45:32and to this hemisphere.
00:45:33We are fighting in Korea for our own national security and survival.
00:45:48In the autumn of 1951,
00:45:51a young Massachusetts congressman named John F. Kennedy
00:45:55dined at the rooftop bar of the Hotel Majestic overlooking Saigon.
00:45:59As he and his party ate,
00:46:02they could hear the thunder of guns across the Saigon River.
00:46:07French commanders assured Kennedy
00:46:10that with more American support, French rule would be reestablished.
00:46:15But Kennedy spent two hours with Seymour Topping,
00:46:19a seasoned American reporter who gave him a very different perspective.
00:46:23The French were losing, he said,
00:46:27and many Vietnamese who had once admired the Americans
00:46:31were beginning to despise them for backing the French.
00:46:36Kennedy believed the reporter.
00:46:38Unless the United States could persuade the Vietnamese
00:46:42that it was as opposed to injustice and inequality as it was to communism,
00:46:47he told his constituents when he got home,
00:46:51the current effort would result in foredoomed failure.
00:46:56In 1952, General Dwight Eisenhower was elected president,
00:47:10in part because he promised to take a tougher stance on communism.
00:47:13That year, American taxpayers were footing more than 30% of the bill for the French War in Vietnam.
00:47:24Within two years, that number would rise to nearly 80%.
00:47:28And many of you ask this question.
00:47:33Why is the United States spending hundreds of millions of dollars
00:47:39supporting the forces of the French Union
00:47:44in the fight against communism in Indochina?
00:47:47I think perhaps if we go over to the map here,
00:47:50I can indicate to you why it is so vitally important.
00:47:52Here is Indochina.
00:47:55If Indochina falls, Thailand is put in almost impossible position.
00:48:01The same is true of Malaya, with its rubber and tin.
00:48:04Now, may I say that as far as the war in Indochina is concerned,
00:48:09that I was there, right on the battlefield, or close to it,
00:48:14and it's a bloody war, and it's a bitter one.
00:48:16By 1953, the French had been fighting for seven years.
00:48:27They had suffered over 100,000 casualties,
00:48:30and failed to pacify the countryside.
00:48:33Six commanders had come and gone.
00:48:36Nevertheless, the seventh commander, General Henri Navarre,
00:48:41assured his countrymen that victory was near.
00:48:44Now we can see it clearly, he said, like the light at the end of the tunnel.
00:48:53Meanwhile, large parts of the French population were horrified by reports of French brutality,
00:49:00and the widespread use of napalm, gelatinized petroleum that burned foliage, homes, and human flesh.
00:49:09When returning French troops disembarked at Marseille, members of the Longshoremen's Union pelted them with rocks.
00:49:19Parisian leftists began to call the conflict, La Salle Guerre, the dirty war.
00:49:26The camera was a close-up, was over the shoulder of the stormtrooper, who had a kid by the cruff of his shirt, and he smacks him.
00:49:44At that moment in time, I realized that anybody who really cared for America was sent halfway around the world chasing some ghosts in the jungle.
00:49:54In the meantime, my country is being torn apart.
00:49:59So I saw somebody who looked like my dad hitting somebody who looked like me.
00:50:04Whose side would I be on?
00:50:05In Korea, three years of combat end as United Nations and Communist negotiators at Panmunjom sign a truce.
00:50:20In July of 1953, the Korean War ended in a negotiated settlement and a still divided peninsula.
00:50:28American policymakers saw it as proof that communism in Asia could be contained.
00:50:36That fall, the French indicated their willingness to begin talks to end the fighting in Vietnam.
00:50:44Ho Chi Minh agreed to meet.
00:50:47But before the negotiators were to convene in Geneva, each side sought to improve its position on the battlefield.
00:50:56General Navarre set up a fortified base in a remote valley in northwestern Vietnam called Dien Bien Phu,
00:51:06where he hoped to lure the Viet Minh into a decisive battle.
00:51:11Navarre was certain that superior French firepower and air support would crush any attack by the Viet Minh.
00:51:19He and his commanders saw no need to worry about the jungle-covered hills that overlooked his 11,000 men dug in on the valley floor.
00:51:30The artillery commander was so confident of victory, he complained,
00:51:37I have more guns than I need.
00:51:40General Zopp saw his chance.
00:51:44We decided to wipe out, at all costs, the whole enemy force at Dien Bien Phu, he remembered.
00:51:55To do it, he pulled off one of the greatest logistical feats in military history.
00:52:01A feat that would be restaged in propaganda films and celebrated for decades.
00:52:06A quarter of a million civilian porters, nearly half of them women, moved everything he needed for a siege,
00:52:16from sacks of rice to disassembled artillery pieces, on foot, through the jungle.
00:52:22Zopp surrounded the valley with 50,000 soldiers and 200 big guns, dug in and camouflaged so well they could not be spotted from the air.
00:52:36On March 13th, 1954, Viet Minh artillery on the hillsides began raining down 50 shells a minute on the French troops huddled below.
00:52:53The airstrip was destroyed.
00:52:57The besieged troops could only be reinforced and resupplied by airdrop.
00:53:04The French artillery commander, who had underestimated his enemy, committed suicide.
00:53:17The airlift of Dien Bien Phu continues, vital men and supplies for the heroic garrison that has defied the massed Viet Minh onslaughts for over six weeks.
00:53:25Today, Dien Bien Phu is a human dam trying to stem the red tide that threatens to engulf Southeast Asia.
00:53:31The French government begged President Eisenhower to intervene.
00:53:37He refused to act without congressional approval and support from European allies.
00:53:43Britain said no.
00:53:45And the Congress would not support unilateral action.
00:53:50The communists under Ho Chi Minh are able to claim that they are fighting for independence and the French appear to be fighting for a maintained maintenance of colonial rule.
00:53:58I therefore believe that before the United States moved in, in any degree, that independence must be granted to the people, that the people must support the struggle.
00:54:08I am convinced Eisenhower confided to his diary that no military victory is possible in this theater.
00:54:18Still, without consulting Congress, the President had secretly sent more American transport planes.
00:54:25Their markings painted over and flown by civilian contractors to help resupply the desperate French troops at Dien Bien Phu.
00:54:35Everyone understood that, in and of itself, Vietnam didn't mean very much.
00:54:45But they believed, I believed, if we lost it, that the rest of Asia would tumble to communism.
00:54:52You have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the falling domino principle.
00:55:02You have a row of dominoes set up, and you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainly little rover very quickly.
00:55:22On the afternoon of May 7th, 1954, after 55 days of siege, the exhausted French forces at Dien Bien Phu surrendered.
00:55:45They had lost 8,000 men, killed, wounded, or missing.
00:55:57General Zap had lost three times as many, but he had won a great victory.
00:56:04Even Zhuang Van Mai's parents could not help but be impressed.
00:56:25They were very proud that the Ving had defeated the French.
00:56:31This great Western power, admiration and respect on the one hand, but fear on the other hand, and fear was a stronger emotion.
00:56:44We have been caught bluffing by our enemies, Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson said.
00:56:49Today, it is Indochina. Tomorrow, Asia may be in flames. And the day after, the Western alliance will lie in ruins.
00:57:02We should have seen it as the end of the colonial era in Southeast Asia, which it really was.
00:57:08But instead, we saw it in Cold War terms, and we saw it as a defeat for the free world that was related to the rise of China.
00:57:17And it was a total misreading of a pivotal event, which cost us very dearly.
00:57:30The former home of the League of Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, where East is meeting West in the international conference that may decisively affect the political future of Asia.
00:57:39The day after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, diplomats from nine nations gathered in Geneva to settle the future of Vietnam.
00:57:50The talks dragged on for nearly two and a half months.
00:57:54Despite their victory, Ho Chi Minh and General Zopp could not keep fighting without more support from China and the Soviet Union.
00:58:07But China had lost a million men in Korea, and did not want to become involved in another war along its border.
00:58:15The Soviet Union was hoping to ease tensions with the West.
00:58:22Both of Ho Chi Minh's communist patrons urged him to agree to a negotiated settlement.
00:58:29A partition like the one that had ended the Korean War.
00:58:33Ho had no option but to give in.
00:58:36In the end, no one was satisfied.
00:58:46Vietnam was temporarily to be divided at the 17th parallel.
00:58:51The 130,000 French-led troops stationed in the north were to withdraw to the south,
00:58:57and somewhere between 50 and 90,000 Viet Minh were to regroup to the north.
00:59:04The two halves would be separated by a demilitarized zone, until an election could be held to reunify North and South Vietnam.
00:59:14An election everyone knew Ho Chi Minh would win.
00:59:19I had a greener in the north's
00:59:28The 2018 year to the first two years.
00:59:30The election was held late in the north.
00:59:36The international unity was held to the south.
00:59:38The U.S. National Reporter system was held in the north and sós.
00:59:41The U.S. National Guard.
00:59:42The U.S. National Guard.
00:59:43The U.S. National Guard.
00:59:44The U.S. National Guard.
00:59:46We had started walking up and we'd probably gotten about a third of the way up the hill
00:59:58and then they unleashed on us.
01:00:02We were in the middle of this horrible shit sandwich.
01:00:05That's what we called it.
01:00:06One of the things that I learned in the war is that we're not the top species on the planet because we're nice.
01:00:22People talk a lot about how well the military turns kids into killing machines and stuff.
01:00:28And I'll always argue that it's just finishing school.
01:00:36Braving the dangers of the open sea in tiny rickety crap,
01:00:43thousands of Roman Catholic and Buddhist faith have found life impossible under the communists.
01:00:48For them, it's freedom or nothing.
01:00:54Under the Geneva Accords, civilians living in either half of Vietnam
01:00:59who wanted to relocate to the other would have 300 days to do so.
01:01:06My mother and father wanted to stay and meet my sister Thang again
01:01:11because they knew Thang would come back.
01:01:13But on the other hand, they couldn't risk that.
01:01:17They were convinced that when Ho Chi Minh and his government arrived in Hanoi,
01:01:22my father would be the first one to be killed
01:01:26and all of us would be persecuted.
01:01:28And I remember the day we left, I looked around, I thought, I'll never come back here again.
01:01:38It was extremely traumatic.
01:01:41It was like the ground was suddenly cut from under you.
01:01:47In the end, some 900,000 refugees,
01:01:51including more than half of all the Catholics living in the north,
01:01:55fled to the south, many of them aboard American ships.
01:02:04The United States hoped somehow to encourage the building
01:02:08of a legitimate government in the south.
01:02:13That government was now headed by Ngo Deng Ziem.
01:02:17Both a Roman Catholic and a Confucian in a largely Buddhist country,
01:02:22he was a celibate bachelor who had once planned to be a priest.
01:02:26The war for us really started when we became the partner,
01:02:34or I would say the victim, of President Ziem.
01:02:38We were going to help him turn South Vietnam into a democracy.
01:02:44That's what he said he wanted to do, and we believed him.
01:02:47Like Ho Chi Minh, Ziem had spent years abroad
01:02:51seeking support for his own brand of Vietnamese nationalism.
01:02:56He was a veteran politician whose loathing for the French
01:03:00was matched only by his hatred for the communists,
01:03:03who had imprisoned him and buried alive
01:03:06his eldest brother and his nephew.
01:03:11Ziem was aloof, autocratic,
01:03:13mistrustful of anyone much beyond his own family.
01:03:16He also proved to be shrewd, resourceful,
01:03:21and skilled at exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents.
01:03:25But he faced a daunting task in creating a new country.
01:03:31The French, who still had thousands of troops
01:03:34stationed in the south, detested Ziem.
01:03:38Several provinces were under the sway of religious sects
01:03:41with armies of their own.
01:03:43Tens of thousands of Viet Minh soldiers had gone north,
01:03:48but several thousand cadre,
01:03:50trained and dedicated Communist Party workers,
01:03:54had stayed behind to organize resistance in the countryside.
01:03:59And Saigon itself was ruled by the Binh Suyen,
01:04:04a crime syndicate backed by the French.
01:04:07And the French were behind the Binh Suyen,
01:04:10sort of supporting them,
01:04:11because they didn't want Ziem to succeed.
01:04:14And that became the central contest.
01:04:18Some in the CIA believed that Ziem
01:04:21could be the savior of South Vietnam.
01:04:24Others were not so sure.
01:04:27He is a messiah without a message,
01:04:29one diplomat reported to Washington.
01:04:31The U.S. ambassador agreed.
01:04:36On April 27, 1955,
01:04:39President Eisenhower decided to end American support
01:04:43for Ziem's regime.
01:04:44But then, Ziem made an all-out assault
01:04:50on the Binh Suyen syndicate.
01:04:55Suddenly, in the middle of the day,
01:04:57we heard gunfire,
01:04:59and then we saw flames,
01:05:01and the neighborhood was burning.
01:05:04There are hundreds of dead and wounded on both sides
01:05:07as the street fighting continues for an entire week.
01:05:09For the United States,
01:05:11the situation presents a grave problem.
01:05:15Ziem finally regains control of Saigon.
01:05:19In the end, Ziem's forces prevailed.
01:05:24Eisenhower now saw no option
01:05:27but to stick with Ziem.
01:05:29The French then announced their intention
01:05:33to withdraw completely from South Vietnam,
01:05:37ending nearly a century of occupation.
01:05:42Ziem became wildly popular
01:05:44because he seemed to embody
01:05:46the nationalist cause in the South.
01:05:50He succeeded in getting the French
01:05:52out of Vietnam all the way,
01:05:54and Ho Chi Minh had only got them
01:05:55out of the northern half.
01:05:57Flush with victory,
01:05:59Ziem called for a referendum in the South.
01:06:03The CIA warned him
01:06:05not to meddle too much with the returns.
01:06:09But when the ballots were counted,
01:06:11Ziem claimed to have won
01:06:1398.2% of the vote.
01:06:18On October 26, 1955,
01:06:22Noding Ziem named himself
01:06:24the first president
01:06:25of the brand-new Republic of Vietnam.
01:06:31The election to reunify the North and South
01:06:34that had been promised at Geneva
01:06:35would never be held.
01:06:39He became our ally,
01:06:42or rather, our master,
01:06:44because the goal of preventing
01:06:47the communism taking over the South
01:06:48was so strong that we couldn't afford
01:06:52for him to lose.
01:06:55So Ziem started to boss us around.
01:06:58And this was a typical relationship.
01:07:01You need any ally you believe
01:07:03to be the centerpiece of your foreign policy.
01:07:06They understand that right away.
01:07:07And the tail wags the dog.
01:07:14From the Far East
01:07:15comes a distinguished visitor.
01:07:17President Ngo Dinh Diem
01:07:18of Vietnam
01:07:19has accorded one of President Eisenhower's
01:07:21rare airport greetings
01:07:22as he arrives for a four-day state visit.
01:07:25President Diem,
01:07:26one of America's staunchest allies
01:07:28in Southeast Asia,
01:07:29will seek an increase in aid
01:07:31to shore up his country
01:07:32against increasing communist pressure,
01:07:34a request to which
01:07:35the president lends a sympathetic ear.
01:07:39Most politicians,
01:07:41Democrats as well as Republicans,
01:07:43now seem to share
01:07:44the changing views
01:07:45of Senator John F. Kennedy.
01:07:48South Vietnam is our offspring,
01:07:50he said.
01:07:51We cannot abandon it.
01:07:53If it fell,
01:07:54the United States
01:07:55would be held responsible,
01:07:57and our prestige in Asia
01:07:59will sink to a new low.
01:08:02There had never before
01:08:04been a South Vietnamese nation,
01:08:06but Americans
01:08:07who had rebuilt
01:08:09much of their own country
01:08:10during the New Deal
01:08:11and had helped rebuild
01:08:13Western Europe
01:08:14through the Marshall Plan
01:08:15were convinced
01:08:17they could build one
01:08:18nonetheless.
01:08:22Eisenhower ordered
01:08:24scores of American civilians
01:08:26to South Vietnam,
01:08:28full of plans
01:08:28for economic development,
01:08:30meant to win,
01:08:31the hearts and minds
01:08:33of the Vietnamese people.
01:08:38But those civilians
01:08:39would always be outnumbered
01:08:41by military advisors
01:08:43with orders to modernize,
01:08:45train,
01:08:46and equip ZM's forces
01:08:47now called
01:08:49the Army of the Republic of Vietnam,
01:08:52the ARVN.
01:08:54Some ARVN officers
01:08:56found American methods
01:08:58unsuited to the guerrilla war
01:09:00they expected to wage
01:09:02against the communists.
01:09:04Most American military advisors
01:09:06were veterans of the war
01:09:07in Korea,
01:09:09determined to prepare
01:09:10South Vietnamese forces
01:09:11to slow a conventional invasion
01:09:15from the north.
01:09:19But no one in North Vietnam
01:09:21was planning
01:09:22a conventional invasion.
01:09:24Ho Chi Minh
01:09:26was focused
01:09:27on rebuilding
01:09:28his country,
01:09:29devastated
01:09:30by more than
01:09:31a decade of war.
01:09:35The communists
01:09:37imposed brutal land reforms
01:09:39modeled on those
01:09:40underway in China
01:09:41with a ruthlessness
01:09:42that left
01:09:43thousands of people dead,
01:09:46including not only
01:09:47landlords
01:09:48who had sided
01:09:48with the French,
01:09:50but also many villagers
01:09:51who had fought
01:09:52with the Viet Minh.
01:09:54Ho Chi Minh
01:09:57was still determined
01:09:58to reunite Vietnam,
01:10:00but he worried
01:10:01that if he took
01:10:01direct military action
01:10:03against the South,
01:10:04the United States
01:10:05would be drawn
01:10:06more deeply
01:10:07into the struggle.
01:10:09He cautioned
01:10:10his comrades
01:10:10in the South
01:10:11to put their faith
01:10:12in political agitation
01:10:14and avoid violence.
01:10:18But that message
01:10:20rang hollow
01:10:21among embattled
01:10:22southern revolutionaries
01:10:23struggling to survive
01:10:25under Diem's
01:10:26increasingly harsh regime.
01:10:30In a campaign
01:10:32he called
01:10:33Denounce the Communists,
01:10:35Diem had imprisoned
01:10:36tens of thousands
01:10:37of citizens
01:10:38without trial
01:10:39and ordered the executions
01:10:41of hundreds more.
01:10:44Now,
01:10:45the communists
01:10:46took matters
01:10:47into their own hands
01:10:48and began attacking
01:10:50South Vietnamese officials.
01:10:52the communists.
01:10:53The communists
01:10:54were killed
01:10:55in the U.S.
01:10:55in the U.S.
01:10:56in the U.S.
01:10:56It started to chop the mả tấu, and then we started to chop the mả tấu, and then we went to the city of Công An Sọc,
01:11:05and then we organized 12 mả tấu.
01:11:10We shot the mả tấu, and we went to the street, and we went to the city of Công An Sọc.
01:11:18As violence in South Vietnam intensified, new leaders emerged in Hanoi.
01:11:39Ho Chi Minh would remain the face of the revolution around the world, but he now began to share
01:11:46power with men who were growing impatient with his caution.
01:11:51Men about whom Americans knew almost nothing.
01:11:56The most important proved to be a carpenter's son from Quang Tri Province in the South, named
01:12:02Lei Zuan.
01:12:05He had helped found the Indo-Chinese Communist Party, survived nearly 10 years in a French
01:12:11prison, and proved himself a shrewd political infighter as he rose to become First Secretary
01:12:18of the Party.
01:12:19In 1951, I met Lê Duẩn first.
01:12:26Lúc đó, we were a kind of young man who didn't learn anything.
01:12:30He was very different from many other leaders.
01:12:36He brought the purpose of the people of the miền Nam of the time.
01:12:42Lê Duẩn first.
01:12:54By 1959, Lei Zuan and his hardline allies were gaining influence within the North Vietnamese
01:13:01Politburo and beginning to change its policy.
01:13:06They now argued that Hanoi should do everything within its power to help southern revolutionaries
01:13:12remove Siem by force.
01:13:17The North Vietnamese adopted a more aggressive posture.
01:13:21They did not accept the division of the country as such.
01:13:27And they would like to have the country reunified again at any cost.
01:13:36Now bands of 40 to 50 armed Viet Minh began slipping back home into South Vietnam, following
01:13:44jungle paths hacked through the Laotian Mountains that the Americans would soon call the Ho Chi
01:13:50Minh Trail.
01:13:57Defense against the Diem regime steadily accelerated.
01:14:11On the evening of July 8, 1959, at Bien Hoa, 20 miles northeast of Saigon, six American military
01:14:20advisers were watching a movie in their mess hall.
01:14:25Viet Minh guerrillas who had crept silently into the compound opened fire through the windows.
01:14:37Major Dale Bice from Pender, Nebraska, and Master Sergeant Chester Avnand from Copperas
01:14:43Cove, Texas were killed.
01:14:47They were the first American soldiers to die from enemy fire in the Vietnam War.
01:14:54We must prove all over again to a watching world, as we stand on a most conspicuous stage, whether
01:15:04this nation, conceived as it is, with its freedom of choice, its breadth of opportunity, its range
01:15:13of alternatives, can compete with the single-minded advance of the communist system.
01:15:19On November 8, 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected President of the United States.
01:15:27His Vice President was Senator Lyndon Johnson.
01:15:32They had narrowly beaten Vice President Richard Nixon and his running mate, Senator Henry Cabot
01:15:37Lodge.
01:15:40During the campaign, both Kennedy and Nixon had pledged to hold the line against international
01:15:46communism, wherever it seemed to be a threat.
01:15:51But very few Americans knew or cared about what was going on in Vietnam.
01:15:59Six weeks after Kennedy's election, at a remote jungle village called Tun Lop near the Cambodian
01:16:04border, representatives of Southern revolutionary groups met to form a new organization to replace
01:16:12the Viet Minh, dedicated to overthrowing Ngo Dinh Diem and ousting the foreigners supporting
01:16:18him.
01:16:21Behind the scenes, Lei Zuan and his communist comrades in Hanoi were orchestrating everything.
01:16:30The new organization would be called the National Liberation Front, the NLF.
01:16:38The armed wing of the NLF was called the People's Liberation Armed Forces.
01:16:44But its enemies in Saigon and Washington preferred a more disparaging term.
01:16:50In their eyes, the revolutionaries were communist traitors to the Vietnamese nation, the Viet Cong.
01:16:57The NLF was the first and the Chinese nation of the NLF.
01:17:13The veganists of the United States were saying that we are gekommen to surrender to Vietnam's
01:17:17Vietnam's ultimate people.
01:17:19These words are very important to me.
01:17:24In fact, people don't know about it.
01:17:27They can't fully understand the fact that
01:17:30what they are saying is that it is the death of them.
01:17:37After that, they will see that
01:17:39the war will be worth the death of a lot of people.
01:17:49every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear
01:18:00any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival
01:18:12and the success of liberty.
01:18:26For me, I'd always thought of courage as charging enemy bunkers or standing up under fire.
01:18:34But just to walk day after day from village to village and through the paddies and up
01:18:41into the mountains, just to get up in the morning and look out at the land and think in a few
01:18:50minutes I'll be walking out there and will my corpse be there or there, will I lose a
01:18:56leg out there?
01:18:59Just to walk felt incredibly brave.
01:19:03I would sometimes look at my legs as I walked, thinking, how am I doing this?
01:19:11Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
01:19:23And where have you been, my darling young one?
01:19:32I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains.
01:19:38I've walked and I crawled on six crooked highways.
01:19:44I've stepped in the middle of seven-side forests.
01:19:51I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans.
01:19:57I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard.
01:20:04And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard rain that's gonna fall.
01:20:22Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
01:20:29And what did you see, my darling young one?
01:20:35I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it.
01:20:42I saw a highway diamonds with nobody on it.
01:20:49I saw a black branch with blood that kept dripping.
01:20:56I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleeding.
01:21:03I saw a white ladder all covered with water.
01:21:10I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken.
01:21:16I saw guns and chopped swords in the hands of young children.
01:21:21And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard rain that's gonna fall.
01:21:36And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard rain that's gonna fall.
01:21:49But it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard rain that we've had.
01:21:59And I saw a brown one.
01:22:02I saw a hard, I saw a weak one.
01:22:07And I saw a yellow one that was called a little dry.
01:22:12And I saw a white one that I saw in the back.
01:22:18You
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