- 5 months ago
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00:00:00Soldiers 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, life to 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 is
00:01:00war, 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.
00:01:45In 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 U.S. and Arvin forces were killing more Viet Cong and North
00:02:38Vietnamese troops than the enemy could replace, appeared to have been reached in almost all
00:02:43of South Vietnam. But the United States had suffered nearly 75,000 casualties. By July 4th,
00:02:5314,624 Americans had died. And 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.
00:03:28It was true that the enemy rarely won a battle in the traditional military sense that they drove the Americans from the field.
00:03:36But it was also true that no American victory seemed to matter. Battered enemy units were quickly reinforced and rearmed.
00:03:47Pacification, winning the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people, was not working.
00:03:54Saigon still controlled only a fraction of a country roughly the size of Florida. And its government remained unpopular and riddled with corruption.
00:04:07President 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.
00:04:21That summer, racial unrest would grip American cities.
00:04:32Maybe now you can't hear them, but you will.
00:04:37The president would have to send the army into Detroit to end five days of rioting that left 43 dead and hundreds of buildings razed.
00:04:48Twenty-six more died in Newark, New Jersey, demonstrating yet again how wide a gap remained between black and white Americans.
00:05:00Only a third of the country saw any sign of progress in Vietnam, and half of the country now disapproved of the president's handling of the war.
00:05:12Meanwhile, Lei Zuan and his comrades, who ran things in Hanoi, were secretly planning a new offensive that they believed would destroy what they called the puppet government in Saigon,
00:05:27and 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 the mainframe computers took up the whole basement.
00:05:43And they put on the old punch cards everything you could quantify.
00:05:47You know, numbers of ships, numbers of airplanes, numbers of tanks, numbers of helicopters, artillery, machine gun, ammo, everything you could quantify.
00:05:54Put it in the hopper and said, when will we win in Vietnam?
00:05:58Went away on Friday, the thing ground away all weekend, came back on Monday, and there was one card in the output tray.
00:06:03And it said, you won in 1965. The only problem is the enemy gets a vote, and they weren't on the punch cards.
00:06:18There were nearly half a million American soldiers in Vietnam by the middle of 1967, with thousands more on the way.
00:06:27Only 20% would ever be in combat. The rest served in support units. None of them had been taught very much about the people against whom and for whom they had been asked to fight.
00:06:43Troops called the Vietnamese guks, a term first used by U.S. Marines to refer to the people of Haiti and Nicaragua during the American occupation of those countries, and then applied to the Asian enemy in Korea.
00:07:01Or slopes, an epithet for the Japanese during the Pacific War. Or dinks, an Australian term for the Chinese.
00:07:10And so in basic training, they taught you that you were going to be fighting guks.
00:07:16It was part of the song that you sang as you jogged down the road.
00:07:21As you went through bayonet training, you were not talking about Vietnamese. You were always talking about guks.
00:07:29Vietnamese might be people, but guks are close to being animals.
00:07:34G.I.s called Vietnamese homes hooches, a corruption of the Japanese word for dwelling places that they had learned during the battle for Okinawa in the Second World War.
00:07:48Soldiers referred to older Vietnamese women as mamasans, the term they used for women who ran whorehouses in occupied Japan.
00:07:57The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese called G.I.s, invaders, imperialists, and Zoc Mi, American bandits.
00:08:09South Vietnam had been divided into four tactical zones.
00:08:19By the summer of 1967, American troops were fighting in all four of them.
00:08:25In IV Corps, the Brownwater Navy patrolled the rivers and canals and marshes of the densely populated Mekong Delta, searching for the enemy.
00:08:39In III Corps, the army continued to sweep the thick jungles of the Iron Triangle, the Viet Cong sanctuary near Saigon that was supposed to have been permanently denied to the enemy by big American operations earlier in the year.
00:08:57In II Corps, a series of bloody battles in the central highlands around Docto temporarily drove North Vietnamese troops back into Cambodia and Laos.
00:09:12But some of the most intense combat would take place in I Corps, made up of the five northernmost provinces of South Vietnam, where the Marines would bear the brunt of the fighting.
00:09:26More than two and a half million people lived there, all but two percent of them within the narrow, rice-growing river valleys along the South China Sea.
00:09:37The Marines wanted to eradicate the Viet Cong there and provide security to the people village by village, hamlet by hamlet.
00:09:46The vast, largely empty highlands that 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.
00:10:05But General William Westmoreland, the American commander, feared that thousands of North Vietnamese Army regulars, the NVA, were planning to seize the two northernmost provinces.
00:10:18Finding and destroying them remained his first goal.
00:10:25He insisted the 3rd Marine Division move North to meet that challenge.
00:10:30Establish a base at Dong Ha, and man strong points at Zhou Lin, Kantian, Cam Lo, Camp Carroll, the Rock Pile, and Khe San.
00:10:43Khe San overlooked Route 9, the east-west highway that Westmoreland hoped would one day carry American troops across the border into Laos,
00:10:53where North Vietnamese men and supplies were streaming south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
00:10:59But the thousands of Marines monitoring the border would find themselves within range of highly accurate North Vietnamese artillery and rocket launchers hidden within the DMZ.
00:11:14Tell me, you came here at full strength?
00:11:24I had 13 when I came.
00:11:26And it's four days later now, and how many are still here?
00:11:29Six.
00:11:30Six.
00:11:31The rifles have been jamming, the mud's been, uh, slowed everything down, and the artillery comes in everywhere.
00:11:43And, uh, it just gets pretty futile and frustrating as I've done.
00:11:47I can't say that I'm scared stiff, but I'm scared.
00:11:53I mean, after a while, you know it's gonna come.
00:11:56You can't do nothing about it.
00:11:58And you just look to God.
00:12:00Private First Class John Musgrave of Fairmount, Missouri, who had volunteered to join the 3rd Marine Division,
00:12:11was sent to the battle-scarred countryside around Contien, a few kilometers south of the DMZ.
00:12:22For the Marines in Northern I Corps and the 3rd Marine Division, in the spring and summer of 1967,
00:12:27we called the DMZ the Dead Marine Zone.
00:12:31Musgrave's 1st Battalion had already suffered so many casualties in a series of bloody sweeps
00:12:38that it was believed to be a hard-luck outfit.
00:12:42They were called the Walking Dead.
00:12:48I joined the Marine Corps to be in the varsity.
00:12:52And I felt like I wasn't varsity unless I was up north fighting the NVA.
00:12:58I have never regretted that decision.
00:13:01There were times when we were under artillery fire,
00:13:04where I thought, you know, what were you thinking?
00:13:09Here it is in a nutshell.
00:13:11If I lived to be 63 years old,
00:13:14I didn't want to look in the mirror some morning and have a guy looking back at me
00:13:17that hadn't done everything for what he believed.
00:13:20That let somebody else do the harder part.
00:13:22Let's do the harder part.
00:13:29Every major contact I remember with the NVA was initiated by them ambushing us.
00:13:34They wouldn't hit us unless they outnumbered us.
00:13:37And we were fighting in their yard.
00:13:39They knew the ground we didn't.
00:13:43They were just really good.
00:13:45The North Vietnamese carried Soviet-made, seemingly indestructible AK-47s.
00:13:48The North Vietnamese carried Soviet-made, seemingly indestructible AK-47s.
00:13:49The Marines had to fight with newly issued
00:14:19M16 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.
00:14:31Their rifles worked, ours didn't.
00:14:34The 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.
00:14:45My hatred for them was pure.
00:14:46Pure.
00:14:47I hated them so much.
00:14:48My hatred for them was pure.
00:14:49Pure.
00:14:50I hated them so much.
00:14:52And I was so scared of them.
00:14:53I was so scared of them.
00:14:54Boy, I was terrible.
00:14:55I was terrible.
00:14:56I was terrible.
00:14:57My hatred for them was pure.
00:14:59Pure.
00:15:00I hated them so much.
00:15:01And I was so scared of them.
00:15:02Boy, I was terrified of them.
00:15:03And the scarier I got, the more I hated them.
00:15:04And the scarier I got, the more I hated them.
00:15:09I was scared of them.
00:15:10And the scarier I got, the more I hated them.
00:15:12I was terrified of them.
00:15:18I was terrible.
00:15:23We were terrible.
00:15:26It wasn't that bad.
00:15:27We were terrible.
00:15:28We were terrible.
00:15:30More terrible.
00:15:31I 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 going to have to do this
00:16:06for the next 13 months, I'm going to go crazy, and I saw a Marine step on a bouncing bedding
00:16:12mine, and that's when I made my deal with the devil, in that I said, I will never kill
00:16:19another human being as long as I'm in Vietnam.
00:16:22However, I will waste as many gooks as I can find.
00:16:27I will wax as many dinks as I can find.
00:16:31I will smoke as many zips as I can find, but I ain't going to kill anybody.
00:16:36You know, you turn a subject into an object.
00:16:41It's racism 101.
00:16:43It turns out to be a very necessary tool when you have children fighting your wars, for them
00:16:49to stay sane doing their work.
00:16:50On one early patrol, Musgrave watched an American fighter swoop down to drop napalm on enemy
00:17:04troops hidden behind a hedgerow.
00:17:07He could hear their AK-47s firing at the plane until the instant they were engulfed in flames.
00:17:14If the enemy is willing to die like that, he thought, this is going to be one very long war.
00:17:21They knew if 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.
00:17:34So that, firefights like that we called brawls, they were very intimate, and they were very
00:17:41deadly, and they were absolutely terrifying.
00:17:45The Marines were spread too thin to hold any of the territory they fought so hard to take.
00:17:56Again and again, they were sent out from one stronghold or another along the DMZ, looking
00:18:03for enemy soldiers.
00:18:05The disillusionment for me began when I was going back to fight at places we'd already fought
00:18:10before.
00:18:11We had fought, captured, and then left, and the DMZ came right back.
00:18:18You don't like getting wounded in places you've already been before.
00:18:23War is a real estate business.
00:18:26We're supposed to take real estate away from the enemy and then deny the enemy access to
00:18:31that real estate.
00:18:32On the morning of July 2nd, 1967, the 1st Battalion launched yet another sweep of the area northeast
00:18:42of Cantien.
00:18:44When they reached a crossroads called the Marketplace, barely a mile and a quarter from their base,
00:18:50they were ambushed.
00:18:51One company was virtually annihilated.
00:19:00John Musgrave's company rushed to rescue the survivors, only to be pinned down there as
00:19:06well.
00:19:09It was one of the worst days the Marine Corps endured in Vietnam.
00:19:14Fifty-three dead and 190 wounded were carried off the battlefield.
00:19:21Thirty-four more dead had to be left behind.
00:19:26And when Marines fought their way back two days later to retrieve their bodies, they found
00:19:32that a number had died because their M-16s had jammed as the enemy closed in.
00:19:37Many had been executed, shot in the face or back of the head at close range.
00:19:45Some bodies had been booby-trapped, others mutilated.
00:19:51Marine Amphibious Force Headquarters was so desperate to get North Vietnamese prisoners
00:19:57that they offered us three-day in-country R&R if we'd bring a prisoner in.
00:20:03Yeah, good luck, you know.
00:20:05Don't you know what we're doing up here?
00:20:09Do you know who we're fighting?
00:20:12I want to make this clear.
00:20:13We did not torture prisoners, and we did not mutilate them.
00:20:23But to be a prisoner, you had to make it to the rear, you know.
00:20:27If he was what fell into our hands, he was just one sorry fucker.
00:20:35I don't know how to explain it, that it would make sense.
00:20:53Roxbury, where I grew up, was the African-American neighborhood, and South Boston was the Irish
00:20:58Catholic, Bastion, you know, there was a lot of hate.
00:21:02South Boston folks hated us.
00:21:04We hated them.
00:21:06And ironically, you know, you end up in a war.
00:21:11And the Vietnamese didn't care whether you were from Roxbury or South Boston, they saw you
00:21:18as American, and they wanted to kill you because you were American.
00:21:23Private Roger Harris had joined the Marines in part, he said, because he wanted to be a
00:21:29gladiator, a killer of his country's enemies.
00:21:32On July 28th, two weeks after John Musgrave's badly mangled 1st Battalion was pulled back
00:21:41to rest and recover, Roger Harris and the 2nd Battalion moved out of Contien and into the
00:21:48southern half of the demilitarized zone itself.
00:21:51We wanted the non-Vietnamese army to expose themselves.
00:21:57So basically, you put the bait out there, and then we could call in and rain hell on them.
00:22:05Roger Harris's battalion advanced into the DMZ along a rough cart track that led to the
00:22:11Ben High River.
00:22:12But planners had failed to see that a concrete bridge over an impassable stream was too narrow
00:22:21and too weak to carry armored vehicles.
00:22:24Now the Marines had no choice but to violate a cardinal rule of infantry tactics, turn around
00:22:32and try to go back the way they had come.
00:22:36The enemy was waiting.
00:22:42Massive ambushes and a lot of death and craziness.
00:22:59The Marines were forced to run a bloody gauntlet of mortars, machine gun fire, and rocket-propelled
00:23:06grenades.
00:23:07I have the utmost respect for not needing these army soldiers.
00:23:12When you see someone jump out and confront a tank, you know, with a big 50-calibre machine
00:23:20gun on it and a 90-millimeter cannon on it, and an individual takes on a tank, I think that
00:23:29says something.
00:23:30Roger Harris's company held up the rear, hounded by enemy soldiers on all sides.
00:23:40The Marines staggered back out of the DMZ alongside the battered armored vehicles, heaped with
00:23:48dead and wounded Americans.
00:23:51The battalion suffered 214 casualties.
00:23:55It wasn't a good day for Marines at all.
00:24:01A lot of people died.
00:24:02People got their legs shot off.
00:24:03People got run over by tanks.
00:24:08I don't want to talk about it because it's...
00:24:11It's not a good day.
00:24:15It wasn't a good day.
00:24:16It's not a good day.
00:24:46It was a good day.
00:25:16It was a good day.
00:25:20But it must be a good day.
00:25:21You have to choose the weight of the soldiers.
00:25:22This is Bao Kuh, the day of voting in Vietnam.
00:25:29And it's a solemn day in the village of Hung Thao Phu and in other villages throughout the country.
00:25:34And these people have dressed up in their Sunday best for it.
00:25:37South Vietnamese Prime Minister, Nguyễn Cao Cái, had crushed his Buddhist opponents
00:25:45in 1966, but he had been forced by the Americans and his political rivals to make at least
00:25:52tentative moves toward democracy, election of a national assembly, a new constitution,
00:25:59and a promise of elections for president and vice president.
00:26:04But when Cái's old adversary, Win Von Thieu, declared he wanted to challenge Cái for
00:26:10the top spot, things in Saigon had threatened to come apart again.
00:26:17We were watching the rivalry between Thieu and Cái, and that was a game.
00:26:22In Vietnam, the country was watching like we were watching a movie.
00:26:28And Thieu and Cái was watching as to not whoever had the support of the people, but who had
00:26:33the support of the Americans and the White House.
00:26:38Ellsworth Bunker, the American ambassador, called both men to his residence and warned that the
00:26:44United States would not tolerate another power struggle.
00:26:48Thieu and Cái needed to meet with their fellow generals and decide who would run for president
00:26:54and who would be his running mate.
00:26:58Thieu emerged on top.
00:27:00He was unassuming and unflappable, interested largely in accumulating power and personal wealth,
00:27:07and was thought unlikely ever to embarrass Washington.
00:27:12Cái would be his vice president.
00:27:15Together, they won with only 35 percent of the vote.
00:27:21No one who had called for an end to the war had been allowed to run.
00:27:25Many Buddhists had boycotted the election.
00:27:28And Viet Cong intimidation had kept many more from the polls.
00:27:33But the State Department immediately declared the election an important step forward.
00:27:42Some South Vietnamese did believe that a measure of stability had finally been achieved.
00:27:49Others were not so sure.
00:27:53In terms of corruption, yes, they were corrupt.
00:27:56Both Thieu and Cái, they abused their position.
00:28:02We pay a very high price for having leaders like Cái and Cái.
00:28:09And we continue to pay the price.
00:28:13My father was in the United States Army, and then when the Air Force came about,
00:28:21he switched over to the Air Force.
00:28:24I grew up out of the country in desegregated settings.
00:28:29I was usually the only little black girl in the class.
00:28:33If you look at my class pictures, I look like the little chocolate chip in the vanilla ice cream.
00:28:39I was always a good student.
00:28:41I remember people saying, oh, you speak so well.
00:28:44And the unstated part is for a black girl, probably a Negro girl or colored girl at that point.
00:28:50Eva Jefferson's father had served a year on air bases in Vietnam and returned home convinced the United States had no business being there.
00:29:00But when his daughter entered Northwestern University in the Chicago suburb of Evanston in September 1967,
00:29:09the war was not uppermost in students' minds.
00:29:14The war was not really an issue.
00:29:16It's like, well, no, the president has our best interest at heart.
00:29:20He, of course, would only prosecute a war that made sense.
00:29:24And I think most of America felt that way.
00:29:27At the University of Nebraska, Jack Todd also supported the war.
00:29:34He 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, Todd and many of his fellow students began to change their minds.
00:30:00All young people go through changes, but we were going through astronomical changes at such a rapid rate.
00:30:10All the music, the culture, everything that we'd listened to, everything that we thought was transforming.
00:30:16And the core of it all was Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam.
00:30:20It just kept going in the background.
00:30:22First it was kind of like a background noise, and then it got to be the elephant in the room,
00:30:26and then it was the elephant sitting on your head, and 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, the photographs that we saw, the news images,
00:30:47and the fact that there was no discernible progress that really started to eat away at what we thought.
00:30:52In the summer of 67, I was at Camp Upshur, you know, wanting to go kill Vietnamese people.
00:30:59And in October, I was completely against the war.
00:31:03Westmoreland came in last night to me, and he says that he has concentrated more firepower in bombing in the last week on the DMZ.
00:31:17And they've concentrated more on us than's ever been concentrated in any equivalent period in the history of warfare.
00:31:24Much more than was ever poured on Berlin or Tokyo.
00:31:28And 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.
00:31:39And it would just be suicide if we stopped the bombing, as these idiots talking about.
00:31:45When 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. That's all.
00:32:00Yeah.
00:32:01Neither 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 Le Zuan and the other men who ran North Vietnam.
00:32:27But Le Zuan, like Lyndon Johnson, was in trouble that summer.
00:32:32The war with the Americans had produced little more than a bloody stalemate.
00:32:37Some Viet Cong commanders in the south resented Hanoi's insistence on directing their tactics.
00:32:44Many North Vietnamese civilians were weary of the war,
00:32:49and of the bombing that had disrupted their lives,
00:32:52and destroyed so much of their infrastructure.
00:32:56The country's most revered figures, Ho Chi Minh and Va Wen Zap,
00:33:01were urging patience, continuing to wage a war of attrition
00:33:06they still believed would pay off in the end.
00:33:11Hanoi's Soviet and Chinese patrons offered conflicting advice as well.
00:33:18To silence his critics and break the stalemate,
00:33:21Le Zuan began to devise and promote a new and riskier version of the plan for victory he had tried in 1964.
00:33:30He called it the General Offensive, General Uprising.
00:33:37North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units would launch scores of coordinated attacks on South Vietnamese cities and towns and military bases.
00:33:48That offensive, Le Zuan believed, would ignite a mass civilian uprising.
00:33:54These simultaneous blows would destroy the Saigon regime and leave Washington with no choice but to withdraw.
00:34:03He believed that he could win the war.
00:34:06He believed that he could win the war.
00:34:08HÃ Ná»™i was ready to keep the government to keep the government.
00:34:11The money was ready.
00:34:14If HÃ Ná»™i was ready,
00:34:16if HÃ Ná»™i was ready to win the war,
00:34:18then the police officers would wear a special weapon to keep the government to keep the government to keep the government in the north.
00:34:26I thought that in the city,
00:34:29everyone has a force of the United States and the United States.
00:34:35So they were ready to protect the United States.
00:34:39He was responsible for the work in the city.
00:34:41He told the city of HÃ Ná»™i was like a fish,
00:34:44a fish is full of fish.
00:34:47The fish is full of fish in the area.
00:34:48Now, we only need a small amount of fish.
00:34:51The fish will release it.
00:34:53We talk about our own hubris.
00:34:55There's 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.
00:35:19Le Zouan neutralized those who opposed his plan.
00:35:23Members of General Zapp's staff were arrested.
00:35:26So was Ho Chi Minh's secretary.
00:35:29He was a poor health,
00:35:32so he was brought to Hungary to cure disease in the mid-7th of 1967.
00:35:37He was brought to China to cure disease in the mid-7th of 1967.
00:35:41He was brought to China to cure disease in the mid-9th of 1967.
00:35:45Hundreds of less prominent figures, journalists, students,
00:35:50even highly decorated heroes of the French War were also rounded up.
00:35:56Many were locked up in the old French prison
00:35:59that the American POWs also confined there called the Hanoi Hilton.
00:36:06The date eventually chosen for the attack would be January 31, 1968,
00:36:12the first day of the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration, known as Tet.
00:36:20Hundreds, then thousands of North Vietnamese regulars in civilian clothes
00:36:25began slipping southward to join tens of thousands of Viet Cong already in place.
00:36:32When we went to China, we reached the U.K.
00:36:35The U.K. was given to the U.K.
00:36:37We were able to get more weapons,
00:36:42batteries, food, food and food,
00:36:45food,
00:36:46food,
00:36:47food,
00:36:48food,
00:36:49food,
00:36:50food,
00:36:51food,
00:36:52food,
00:36:53food.
00:36:55The U.K.
00:36:56The U.K.
00:36:57The U.K.
00:36:58The U.K.
00:36:59The U.K.
00:37:00the U.K.
00:37:01charger
00:37:06The U.K.
00:37:07The U.K.
00:37:08The U.K.
00:37:09The U.K.
00:37:10the CSVN
00:37:17was the most glamorous
00:37:25in the possabouts.
00:37:26and put a gap in the middle of the people when they went to the army.
00:37:31No one thinks that if I went like that and didn't come back,
00:37:36this will be a tragedy for them.
00:37:43In preparation for the coming offensive,
00:37:45the North Vietnamese hoped to lure American and South Vietnamese forces
00:37:50away from cities and big military bases.
00:37:54To do that, they would mount a series of assaults on remote outposts
00:37:58near Cambodia, Laos, and the DMZ.
00:38:03These preliminary attacks became known as the Border Battles.
00:38:08Khantien would be the first.
00:38:15In September and October,
00:38:17John Musgraves and Roger Harris' outfits took turns defending Khantien
00:38:22as the North Vietnamese tightened the noose around them.
00:38:26The only way in or out was by helicopter.
00:38:31Khantien in Vietnamese means Hill of Angels.
00:38:36The time at Khantien 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,
00:38:51and they were going to hit something every shot.
00:38:54Because Khantien was such a small area,
00:38:57and they pounded it.
00:38:58With that artillery from North Vietnam,
00:39:00they couldn't miss.
00:39:09I've never been as afraid.
00:39:12In fact, that's why I'm not afraid of anything now.
00:39:14I mean, there's nothing you can do.
00:39:19It's just listening 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
00:39:28whether or not the North Vietnamese intend to overrun Khantien.
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.
00:39:40I sat in water.
00:39:42I slept in water.
00:39:44I ate in water because our holes were full.
00:39:47I mean, a flood to foxhole can drown a wounded man.
00:39:50Spending your day filling up sandbags,
00:39:53trying to create barriers,
00:39:55and you just put another layer on, put another layer on.
00:39:58A lot of mud, blood, and artillery.
00:40:04There's this red clay up there,
00:40:07and 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 on that stuff,
00:40:13and running, when you're at a place
00:40:15where they're firing heavy artillery at you,
00:40:16running's pretty important.
00:40:19During the siege of the fall of 1967,
00:40:21we were getting newspaper articles in the mail from our families,
00:40:25and we were being called the Alamo.
00:40:27You know, hey, we knew what the Alamo was.
00:40:30We knew what happened there.
00:40:34Like, 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,
00:41:00and put that in the green bag,
00:41:02and that's what goes back, you know,
00:41:05as Marine Lance Corporal so-and-so and so.
00:41:08But sometimes you're not even sure,
00:41:10because 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.
00:41:15I carried a wallet calendar from Clifford Farlow Insurance.
00:41:20He was my dad's insurance agent,
00:41:22and I marked off each of the days religiously.
00:41:26And then in October, we went up to Contean again.
00:41:31I just stopped because I thought,
00:41:34well, this is pointless.
00:41:35I'm not getting, I'm not gonna go home.
00:41:37I'm not gonna make it home.
00:41:39What, 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,
00:41:47and I was telling my mother what was happening over there,
00:41:49and I was telling her, you know,
00:41:51she shouldn't believe what she sees in the newspaper
00:41:53and sees on television because we're losing the war.
00:41:58And I said, you'll probably never see me again
00:42:01because we're the most northern outposts that the Marines have.
00:42:05You know, we could literally could look right into Vietnam.
00:42:08We could see the sparks when the guns fired on us.
00:42:10And I said, everybody in my unit's dying, you know,
00:42:13and I probably won't be coming back.
00:42:15And my mother said, no, you're coming back.
00:42:17She said, I talk to God every day, and you're special.
00:42:21You know, you're coming back.
00:42:23And I said, Ma, everybody's mother thinks that they're special.
00:42:26You know, I'm putting pieces of special people in bags.
00:42:30And I was feeling that my 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.
00:42:37I said, Ma, this isn't a joke.
00:42:39I said, everybody's dying over here, you know.
00:42:41Everybody's dying.
00:42:42And she said, you're not going to die.
00:42:43You're not going to die.
00:42:45And the last thing she said to me was, God has a plan for you.
00:42:49And I said, yeah, right.
00:42:51And I hung up.
00:42:57Mr. Stout, during what period of time were you in Vietnam?
00:43:00I was in Vietnam from September of 1966 to September of 1967.
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 the 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 combat.
00:43:26Wounded three times, he became an Army reporter covering the 327th Regiment of the 101st Airborne.
00:43:36He 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-gorilla the gorillas.
00:43:55Tiger Force fought in six different provinces, repeatedly suffering heavy losses.
00:44:02If you've lost your best friend and you want revenge, it's the officers who say, no, you can't do that.
00:44:11And if you do it, then there's consequences.
00:44:14But when the officers, and it includes the platoon leader and the battalion commander,
00:44:19are telling you that this is what you're supposed to do, then it gets completely out of hand.
00:44:25Some at Mach V worried that such a freewheeling outfit, operating on its own, would be difficult to control.
00:44:36But General Westmoreland and commanders in the field admired Tiger Force for its reliable ferocity.
00:44:44In the summer of 1967, Tiger Force was sent to the fertile Songvei Valley.
00:44:50The entire population had already been herded from their homes and crowded into a refugee camp.
00:44:58But some had come back to resume the farming they had always done.
00:45:04The valley had officially been declared a free fire zone.
00:45:09And Tiger Force's officers took that literally.
00:45:12There are no friendlies, one lieutenant told his men.
00:45:17Shoot anything that moves.
00:45:23Over a seven-month period, they killed scores of unarmed civilians.
00:45:29Among their victims were two blind brothers, an elderly Buddhist monk, women, children, and old people hiding in underground shelters,
00:45:39and three farmers trying to plant rice.
00:45:42All were reported as enemy, killed in action.
00:45:46These atrocities were committed by soldiers of units I was assigned to as a reporter for the Army newspapers.
00:45:58Tiger 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.
00:46:10She was captured, kept for interrogation.
00:46:13Over a two-day period, she was raped.
00:46:17Then on the morning of the third day, she was killed.
00:46:20Was she raped by more than one person?
00:46:23Yes, 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?
00:46:32Yes. After the rape incident, I complained to the battalion sergeant major.
00:46:37And his response was that this type of thing happens in all wars and that I was not to mention it.
00:46:44It was a common occurrence.
00:46:46Then later, I went to the chaplain, told him about it.
00:46:50He made an investigation himself, found that this was true, went with me to the sergeant major.
00:46:57The sergeant major then said that we told the chaplain to stick to religion, sent him away,
00:47:05and then he told me to keep quiet, that I did not have to return from the next operation.
00:47:09Years later, another soldier came forward with more allegations of war crimes,
00:47:17and 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. The official records were buried in the archives.
00:47:32They should have all gone to jail. They 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,
00:47:46tarred all veterans, and there are hundreds of thousands of veterans who went and did their duty,
00:47:51as honorable as they possibly could, and they're tarred with the same brush.
00:47:55One of the things that I learned in the war is that we're not the top species on the planet because we're nice.
00:48:05We are a very aggressive species. It is in us.
00:48:10And people talk a lot about how well the military turns, you know, kids into, you know, killing machines and stuff.
00:48:17And I'll always argue that it's just finishing school.
00:48:20What we do with civilization is that we learn to inhibit and rope in these aggressive tendencies.
00:48:30And we have to recognize them.
00:48:32I worry about a whole country that doesn't recognize it.
00:48:36Because you think of how many times we get ourselves in scrapes as a nation because we're always the good guys.
00:48:42Sometimes I think if we thought that we weren't always the good guys, we might actually get in less wars.
00:48:46Mr. Ruben, how do you realistically expect to shut down the Pentagon?
00:48:56The Pentagon represents the murder of people throughout the world.
00:49:00And the American people have no control of what their government's doing.
00:49:04And 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.
00:49:25We were on maneuvers in Louisiana one night by the light of the moon.
00:49:31The captain told us to fall a river, that's how it all begun.
00:49:35We were knee deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on.
00:49:42There 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,
00:49:56but we would take as many people out of that demonstration as we could and lead them to the Pentagon.
00:50:04And at the Pentagon, try to do something more militant than simply stand around and make speeches opposing the war,
00:50:12which is what these demonstrations had become.
00:50:14And when the time came to lead people away from the Lincoln Memorial toward the Pentagon, 50,000 people marched.
00:50:27We 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.
00:50:41And 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.
00:51:00I was working that weekend day.
00:51:03The secretaries who were working in my area were frightened to hell
00:51:08what these Vietnam protesters would do.
00:51:12They thought they were going to come into the building and rape them.
00:51:15Some of them actually came over the walls.
00:51:18It was a sense of revolution.
00:51:23Waist deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on.
00:51:28Waist 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.
00:51:37Some people, the hippies, said they were going to levitate the building.
00:51:41Other people wanted to commit vandalism in the building.
00:51:44Other people wanted to distribute anti-war literature in the building, talk to people.
00:51:49Just the idea of getting into the headquarters of the United States military.
00:51:54It was the first time that anti-war demonstrators had confronted active-duty military personnel.
00:52:04We didn't consider them the enemy.
00:52:07We considered them victims of the war.
00:52:10But we began to see our own government as the enemy.
00:52:15President 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.
00:52:32Mr. President?
00:52:33Yes.
00:52:35How have you been, Mr. President?
00:52:37I'm doing fine under the circumstances.
00:52:40But we just had hell, and these college students, I've had Hoover in after them.
00:52:44They came, marched here, and we arrested 600 of them, and we gave 29 of them pretty tough times.
00:52:51We found most of them really were mentally diseased.
00:52:55Hoover's taking 256 that turned in, supposedly, their draft cards.
00:52:59So you're dealing with mental problems.
00:53:01I think we talk too damn much about civil liberties and constitutional rights of the individual,
00:53:06and not enough about the rights of the masses.
00:53:09And that's what we have. We were freely elected people, and we've got to stand behind them.
00:53:14I think your government's in trouble, General.
00:53:17I think it's in, I don't know how to say this, but I think we're in more danger from these left-wing influences now
00:53:22than we've ever been in 37 years I've been here.
00:53:25And they're working in my party from within.
00:53:27Allard Lowenstein, a 38-year-old attorney from New York, shared the anti-war fervor of the protesters.
00:53:38But he believed the most effective way to end the fighting was to work within the political system, not outside it.
00:53:46The 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.
00:54:02He asked Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, who had begun to criticize the Johnson administration over the war.
00:54:10He asked Lieutenant General James Gavin.
00:54:13He asked Senator George McGovern of South Dakota.
00:54:17They all turned him down.
00:54:20Lowenstein kept looking.
00:54:22At Fort Sill, Oklahoma, on November 17, 1967, friends and family of a fallen soldier gathered for a funeral, one of five military funerals held there that month.
00:54:41First Sergeant Pascal Cletus Pula had been killed as he tried to drag one of his wounded men off the battlefield near the village of Loch Ninh.
00:54:54He was a remarkable soldier.
00:54:57He had been awarded one silver star in World War II, two more in Korea, and was awarded a fourth posthumously for his gallantry in Vietnam.
00:55:08He was a Kiowa Indian.
00:55:11He was a Kiowa Indian.
00:55:13He and three of his sons were among the 42,000 Native Americans who would serve in Vietnam, the highest per capita service rate of any ethnic group in the United States.
00:55:26Pascal Pula's widow spoke at the ceremony.
00:55:32He has followed the trail of the great chiefs, she said.
00:55:36His 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.
00:55:46He has given his life for the people and the country, he loved so much.
00:55:47He has given his life for the people and the family he loved so much.
00:55:49He has given his life for the people and the women and our college he loved so much.
00:55:50When the truth is found to be lies
00:55:59And all the joy within you dies
00:56:06Don't you want somebody to love?
00:56:10Don't you need somebody to love?
00:56:13Wouldn't you love somebody to love?
00:56:17You better find somebody to love
00:56:21I didn't hear the word hippie until I was at Contien
00:56:30And 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
00:56:38And pictures of the girls running around without their tops
00:56:40You know, free love, and they were hippies
00:56:42And we thought it was hippie, because they had two peas
00:56:45You know, hey, I'm going to go and be one of these hippies
00:56:47Because, look, the girls don't wear no clothes
00:56:50You know, and they'll go to bed with anybody
00:56:52And, you know, even I can score
00:56:54But the only information I had on the peace movement
00:56:58Came from Stars and Stripes
00:56:59And that wasn't a real objective newspaper
00:57:03And so, uh, I hated them
00:57:06Before I ever even knew anything about them
00:57:08The monsoon rains continued to make life miserable
00:57:18For 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
00:57:33Before dawn on November 7th
00:57:38Two companies of Musgrave's outfit
00:57:40Were sent half a mile into the countryside
00:57:43Northwest of the base
00:57:44To sweep the area again
00:57:46And we got into an area that was old hedgerows
00:57:51That's grown over with jungle
00:57:53Very difficult to see very far
00:57:55In the clear area, we had three NVA
00:57:58Show themselves and start just spraying
00:58:0130 rounds out of their AKs
00:58:03And then booking
00:58:04The company commander himself
00:58:07Said, I want their bodies
00:58:09Bring me their bodies
00:58:11Everything's about body count
00:58:13Right?
00:58:13We said, man, this is as old as Custer
00:58:17These guys are showing themselves
00:58:19To draw us into an ambush
00:58:21Lieutenant, don't do this
00:58:22You know, please
00:58:24These guys are bait
00:58:27Well, the skipper says, we gotta go
00:58:30We gotta go
00:58:31And
00:58:33We went
00:58:35And I can't tell you a whole lot about the ambush
00:58:40That was one of the first people to be shot
00:58:43One round put me down
00:58:45And
00:58:47My grenadier was down
00:58:48And we were trying to get him back
00:58:50And
00:58:50Marines
00:58:52From the first day in boot camp
00:58:54You learn that Marines don't leave their dead
00:58:57And they never
00:58:58Never leave their wounded
00:59:00And that's why I'm alive today
00:59:03First guy that came for me
00:59:07I was lying on my face
00:59:09He reached down and stuck his arms under my shoulders
00:59:13And lifted me up
00:59:14And the machine gun wasn't any far
00:59:17It was maybe
00:59:18Nine feet, ten feet at the most
00:59:22Away from me
00:59:23This is a very intimate ambush
00:59:25It's a brawl
00:59:26And
00:59:28He fired a burst into my chest
00:59:30That blew me out of this
00:59:32The Marines arms that was holding me
00:59:34And then he was shot
00:59:35Another very brave young Marine
00:59:40Is 18 year old
00:59:42From Louisiana
00:59:44His first firefight
00:59:45Had seen what happened
00:59:47And still came for me
00:59:48And he reached for me
00:59:52And he was shot
00:59:52I think in the forearm
00:59:53And he was
00:59:56Laying beside me
00:59:58And I've got a hole through my chest
01:00:00Big enough to stick your fist through
01:00:01And I'm dying
01:00:03And I know it
01:00:04And I heard this horrible screaming
01:00:07Going on
01:00:08And I was trying to figure out
01:00:09Who was screaming like that
01:00:12Because it sounded so
01:00:13And then I realized it was me
01:00:20When they began to drag us out
01:00:25They were being pursued
01:00:26By the North Vietnamese
01:00:27And they would drop us
01:00:29And lay on top of us
01:00:31They knew we were both dying
01:00:33The Grenadier had been shot
01:00:34In the right side of his chest
01:00:35They knew we were both dead
01:00:38But we were still alive
01:00:40So they weren't going to leave us
01:00:43They would die
01:00:44Before they would leave us
01:00:45And they covered us with their bodies
01:00:47And fired back at the NVA
01:00:48And then they'd jump up
01:00:49And drag us a little farther
01:00:51And then drop us
01:00:51And lay back on top of us
01:00:53And I kept telling them to leave me
01:00:55And I meant it
01:00:57I meant it
01:00:58But
01:00:58All of a sudden
01:01:00I got scared
01:01:01That they might really leave me
01:01:02I was triaged three times
01:01:06And the senior corpsman said
01:01:09He's either shot through the heart
01:01:11Or the lungs
01:01:12Because there's nothing I can do for him
01:01:13And he just turned away
01:01:14And I went
01:01:15Oh, okay
01:01:16And then a helicopter come in
01:01:21And they threw me into the bird
01:01:23And the corpsman on the bird
01:01:27Straddled me
01:01:28Stood over me
01:01:29And looked down at me
01:01:30And then looked up
01:01:31At the door gunner
01:01:32And went
01:01:32Get me out of the way
01:01:35Because he couldn't work on me
01:01:37Because he couldn't work on me
01:01:37I was a dead man
01:01:38And they flew me to Delta Med
01:01:42At Dongho
01:01:42And I thought, okay
01:01:44I made it this far
01:01:45And this doctor comes over
01:01:48And looks at me
01:01:48And I'm conscious
01:01:49I'm lucid
01:01:51And he checks a couple of things
01:01:54And I've got this huge hole in him
01:01:55And he looks at me
01:01:56And right in the eye
01:01:57And 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
01:02:02I can't help this man
01:02:03And then he walked away
01:02:05Another surgeon walks by
01:02:08And he looked at me
01:02:11And I was raised to be
01:02:13To always be nice to people
01:02:14And when he looked at me
01:02:16I smiled at him and nodded
01:02:18And he said, why isn't somebody
01:02:21Helping this man?
01:02:24And inside I'm going, yeah
01:02:25Why isn't somebody helping this man?
01:02:28When they put me to sleep
01:02:30I thought, boy, this is really it
01:02:32You know, and it was kind of
01:02:35Okay, God
01:02:36Into your hands I deliver my spirit
01:02:39And I thought that was it
01:02:42And when I woke up
01:02:45In the surgical intensive care ward
01:02:47Which was a Quonset hut
01:02:48I thought, holy mackerel
01:02:51I just couldn't
01:02:53I couldn't believe it
01:02:58Yesterday over Hanoi
01:03:01Three American planes were shot down
01:03:03And at least two of their pilots captured
01:03:06One of them was Lieutenant Commander
01:03:08John McCain III
01:03:09The son of the US Naval Commander in Europe
01:03:12I wanted to see
01:03:15Well, no one of those who died
01:03:18It was, no one of the NASA
01:03:19I was just
01:03:22I was 4000
01:03:24The vol fetal
01:03:25I was turned around
01:03:25And I was a very happy
01:03:26I was the one
01:03:28The vol tweeted
01:03:29The vol
01:03:30I made up
01:03:31I was roving
01:03:32I was with a bomb
01:03:33And he went down there
01:03:34And he was shot down there
01:03:35And he was just
01:03:35And then he was shot down here
01:03:35And he was shot down here
01:03:36And he was shot down here
01:03:38And then he was shot down here
01:03:38and the army was killed, but there was a lot of American soldiers who were killed.
01:03:45They were killed by McCain.
01:03:51Hanoi was so pleased to have captured the son of an American admiral
01:03:55that they allowed a French journalist to interview McCain in the hospital.
01:04:00He had just had his broken bones set without even an aspirin for the pain.
01:04:06Lieutenant Commander John McCain.
01:04:10How many raids have you done until the last one?
01:04:13About 23.
01:04:15In which circumstances have you been shot down?
01:04:19I was on a flight over the city of Hanoi,
01:04:24and I was bombing and was hit by either missile or anti-aircraft fire.
01:04:33I'm not sure which.
01:04:36And the plane continued straight down.
01:04:40And I ejected it and broke my leg and both arms
01:04:48and went into a lake, parachuted into a lake,
01:04:55and I was picked up by some North Vietnamese
01:05:00and taken to the hospital where I almost died.
01:05:07I would just like to tell my wife that I will go get well.
01:05:22I love her.
01:05:25I hope to see her soon.
01:05:30After the interview, McCain was beaten
01:05:33for not expressing sufficient gratitude to his captors.
01:05:38All through the fall of 1967, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong
01:05:51continued their series of border battles
01:05:53in preparation for their surprise offensive still months away.
01:05:57Can Thien, where John Musgrave was wounded, had been the first.
01:06:04Then came the Arvin base at Song Bay.
01:06:07The South Vietnamese outpost adjacent to the provincial capital of Loch Ninh was next.
01:06:13There, large units of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong regulars mounted a coordinated attack,
01:06:20and then fought for five days to hold onto the ground they gained,
01:06:25something they had never done before.
01:06:28American commanders were puzzled.
01:06:32Then, in early November, reports reached Mach V that five North Vietnamese regiments
01:06:38and the Viet Cong battalion, some 7,000 men in all,
01:06:43had begun massing in the Central Highlands around the U.S. Special Forces camp at Doh Toh again.
01:06:50Among the North Vietnamese regulars was Nguyen Thanh Son,
01:06:55who had been so eager to fight that he, too, had filled his pockets with rocks to pass his physical.
01:07:04The leader of the U.S. said,
01:07:06I wanted to call the U.S. here.
01:07:09The goal was to fight against the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S.
01:07:12to fight against the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S.
01:07:15on the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S.
01:07:17As the NVA deployed their troops, Westmoreland sent his to Doh Toh,
01:07:24exactly what the enemy wanted him to do.
01:07:27Among the Americans were the men of the elite 173rd Airborne, Westmoreland's Fire Brigade.
01:07:36We all knew in a general sense that we wouldn't be brought back if there wasn't something big going on.
01:07:48You just knew that the area was crawling with North Vietnamese and that they were there not to avoid contact with us,
01:07:58but they were there to have contact with us.
01:08:01First Lieutenant Matthew Harrison was now with Alpha Company of the 2nd Battalion,
01:08:07the same rifle company that had been ambushed and so badly shattered back in June,
01:08:12on the slopes of Hill 1338, just 14 miles to the east.
01:08:17This wasn't like the Viet Cong, where if you could find them, you could kill them.
01:08:22Our problem wasn't finding them, our problem was what to do with them once you found them.
01:08:27The 174th NVA Regiment was waiting.
01:08:32When Tan Sun and his men were already dug in on the high ground,
01:08:37they knew the Americans would want to command.
01:08:40Hill 875.
01:08:42We went back to the Army for a month.
01:08:46We went to the airport for a month.
01:08:47The airport was a vessel around the area.
01:08:51When I was prepared, I was very surprised.
01:08:54It was a very beautiful forest, green forest.
01:08:57Now, I just went to the airport and I didn't want to do anything.
01:09:00I was told,
01:09:02I was prepared for the members to prepare.
01:09:04They will come here.
01:09:06On Sunday morning, November 19th, 1967,
01:09:10Alpha, Charlie and Delta companies were ordered to take Hill 875.
01:09:17Matt Harrison had been wounded in an earlier fight
01:09:21and was not permitted to accompany his men.
01:09:24He anxiously followed their progress over the radio.
01:09:29Heavy 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.
01:09:39The Chief of F-100s was wounded.
01:09:44The Army's most wounded in the air is all.
01:09:46That's why the ground was wounded.
01:09:48But the Army had wounded all.
01:09:50The Army had wounded.
01:09:51The troops were wounded.
01:09:52The army's almost wounded.
01:09:53They were wounded.
01:09:54It was wounded.
01:09:55So, we were wounded.
01:09:56The three companies moved up the slope, Charlie and Delta in the lead, Alpha bringing up the rear.
01:10:05The paratroopers stepped warily into a clearing filled with fallen trees from the morning's bombardment and only a little over 300 yards from the summit.
01:10:17We didn't shoot. We were very close. We were about 5 feet. We were very close.
01:10:31Thousands of automatic weapon rounds ripped through the air.
01:10:35Chinese made grenades came rolling and bumping down the slopes.
01:10:40The Americans sought cover where they could, behind fallen trees,
01:10:44scrabbled 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.
01:11:03Meanwhile, near the foot of the hill, other North Vietnamese troops surprised Alpha Company from behind.
01:11:10They were first spotted moving up through the trees by a private from the Bronx named Carlos Lozada.
01:11:17As the men of his company scrambled up the slope, dragging their wounded with them,
01:11:22Lozada provided what cover he could, firing his M60 machine gun from his hip before a bullet hit him in the head.
01:11:29He would be awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.
01:11:34Back 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.
01:11:49There's no sign yet of any letter.
01:11:51Over the weekend, 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.
01:12:03Then they came under heavy fire from the hill.
01:12:05Two of the three companies charged the hill. The other stayed back as a rear guard.
01:12:10By early afternoon, the three companies had basically been decapitated.
01:12:16The company commanders were dead. Most of the officers and most of the NCOs were dead.
01:12:23The survivors from all three companies clustered in the clearing and did their best to set up a defensive circle.
01:12:31American bombs and napalm pounded enemy positions until it grew almost too dark to see.
01:12:39After that, the entire battles multiplied in the war came up high and as an army goes into a river valley.
01:12:48The ships in the reservation was a large area in the area of space.
01:12:49It was wide asarm and large as this.
01:12:51I was a people who burned.
01:12:53They were all burned.
01:12:55It was burned.
01:12:57They were burned in the face, around the neck, feet, on the ground.
01:13:00So I ran around and heard anything like that.
01:13:03I took the fire to explode.
01:13:05I poured them out and fired the fire to explode.
01:13:08Then another American plane roared in and dropped two bombs.
01:13:14One landed among the hidden enemy troops.
01:13:17The other fell directly on the Americans.
01:13:23In a fraction of a second, 42 were killed.
01:13:27A badly hit lieutenant managed to find a working radio.
01:13:32No more fucking planes, he shouted into it.
01:13:35They're killing us up here.
01:13:39The fighting on the hillside continued.
01:13:42The men ran out of water, began to run out of ammunition.
01:13:47Helicopters that tried to ferry in supplies were shot down.
01:13:53The following day, Matt Harrison was able to chop her in.
01:13:58It was chaos.
01:14:00It was collections of guys who had tunneled and dug down behind trees.
01:14:06These were guys who had gone without water in that heat for two days.
01:14:11And almost every one of them was wounded.
01:14:15And then all around were bodies.
01:14:19Guys who had been shot and blown up.
01:14:23It was the third circle of hell.
01:14:27On November 23rd, two fresh battalions of the 173rd finally made it to the top of the hill
01:14:34for which so many had died.
01:14:38But the night before, the surviving North Vietnamese troops had slipped down the other side and disappeared
01:14:45into Cambodia and Laos.
01:14:49The powers that be decided it would be important to our morale for us to be in on taking the top of the hill.
01:14:56I had 26 guys left out of a company that started out of 140 and all 26 had been wounded.
01:15:05Then Harrison and his exhausted men were helicoptered to the top of yet another hill.
01:15:16It was Thanksgiving.
01:15:18Chinook helicopters clattered down out of the sky, carrying huge containers of hot turkey
01:15:24and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, so that the 173rd could have their Thanksgiving
01:15:31dinner.
01:15:32If there are any more remote or dangerous spots to spend Thanksgiving Day in Vietnam than this
01:15:36one, then 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, and I remember
01:15:45hearing the reporter in tone, today is November 23rd, Thanksgiving Day, and I was really angry.
01:15:53It's as though we were entertainers.
01:16:00107 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, but their losses are thought to have
01:16:16been staggering.
01:16:20Back in June, Matt Harrison had lost two West Point classmates on Hill 1338.
01:16:27He lost two more on Hill 875.
01:16:30Of the eight with whom he had served in the 2nd Battalion, four were now dead, and two had
01:16:36been wounded.
01:16:40To take tops of mountains in a triple canopy jungle along the Cambodian-Laotian border accomplished
01:16:47nothing of any importance.
01:16:51The battle for Hill 875 was, in my thinking today, a microcosm of what we were doing and
01:16:58what went wrong in Vietnam.
01:17:01There was no reason to take that hill.
01:17:06We literally got to the top of the hill about midday on November 23rd.
01:17:13And sat there for, I don't know, a half an hour, an hour, just kind of gathering ourselves
01:17:19and everything together.
01:17:21Chinooks came in, took us off the hill.
01:17:25And I doubt that there's been an American on Hill 875 since November 23rd.
01:17:31We accomplished nothing.
01:17:32A new phase is now starting.
01:17:37We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.
01:17:44As Matt Harrison and his men fought for Hill 875, the Johnson administration was in the
01:17:50midst of a success offensive, a PR campaign aimed at shoring up support for the war and
01:17:57the way it was being waged.
01:18:01McVe released a new and surprisingly low estimate of enemy forces to show how much damage the United
01:18:08States had done to them.
01:18:10It was only two-thirds of the total suggested by the CIA because after a bitter and prolonged
01:18:16debate behind the scenes, Westmoreland had chosen to exclude from it the part-time guerrillas,
01:18:23farmers, old men, women, even children who helped place the mines, grenades, and booby traps
01:18:31that accounted for more than a third of all American casualties.
01:18:36General Westmoreland also told the press that the impressive body counts his commanders
01:18:41reported were very, very conservative.
01:18:45It probably represented, he said, 50% or even less of the enemy that has been killed.
01:18:53Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker joined the chorus using a metaphor first used 13 years earlier
01:19:00by the French commander in Vietnam, not long before their great defeat at the NBN Phu.
01:19:07I think we're now beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel.
01:19:11Mr. Ambassador, you talk about light at the end of the tunnel, how long is this tunnel?
01:19:16Well, I don't think that you can put it into any particular timeframe, a situation like this.
01:19:25LBJ's success offensive succeeded.
01:19:32The number of Americans who believed the United States was making real progress in the war grew.
01:19:40Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did not take part in the public relations campaign.
01:19:47He had become so disillusioned with the war he'd done so much to plan and prosecute,
01:19:52that he wrote another secret memo to the president advising Johnson to freeze American troop levels,
01:19:59turn over ground operations to the South Vietnamese,
01:20:03and halt the bombing of North Vietnam in order to bring about negotiations.
01:20:08There was no reason to believe, McNamara wrote, that the prolonged infliction of grievous casualties
01:20:16or the heavy punishment of air bombardment will suffice to break the will of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.
01:20:23The continuation of our present course of action in Southeast Asia would be dangerous, costly in lives,
01:20:31and unsatisfactory to the American people.
01:20:36Johnson never responded.
01:20:38Instead, he arranged for McNamara to become the president of the World Bank.
01:20:44McNamara would keep silent about the doubts he had harbored since the beginning of the ground war for the next 28 years.
01:20:55His successor as defense secretary would be Clark Clifford,
01:20:59a prominent Washington lawyer and trusted counselor to Democratic presidents
01:21:04whom Johnson was sure would be supportive of the war.
01:21:10Meanwhile, Allard Lowenstein's year-long search for a Democratic challenger to the president had finally succeeded.
01:21:18On November 30, 1967, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy announced that he would run.
01:21:27This is an issue which has to be taken to the people of the country in the campaign of 1960.
01:21:37By the end of 1967, 20,057 Americans had died in Vietnam.
01:21:45The time had come, General Westmoreland said, for an all-out offensive on all fronts.
01:21:55But the enemy was just a month away from launching an all-out offensive of its own.
01:22:02I see a vector and I wrote it into black.
01:22:23No colors anymore, I want them to turn black.
01:22:28I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes.
01:22:35I have to turn my head until my darkness goes.
01:22:41I see a line of cars and they are painted black.
01:22:47The flowers and my love won't never come back.
01:22:52I see people turn their heads and quickly look away.
01:22:59Like a newborn baby, it just happens every day.
01:23:05I look inside myself and see my heart is black.
01:23:10I see my red door and I just have it into black.
01:23:17Maybe then I'll fade away, it's not time to face the facts.
01:23:23It's not easy facing up when your whole world is black.
01:23:28No more will my green seagulls turn the deeper blue.
01:23:35I could not foresee this thing happening to you.
01:23:40If I look hard enough into the setting sun.
01:23:43If I look hard enough into the setting sun.
01:23:48My love will laugh with me before the morning comes.
01:23:54I see a red door and I want it painted black.
01:23:59No colors anymore, I want them to turn black.
01:24:06I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes.
01:24:12I have to turn my head until my darkness goes.
01:24:17I want to see you painted, painted, painted, painted black.
01:24:28Yeah.
01:24:29Yeah.
01:24:30Yeah.
01:25:00Yeah.
01:25:02So you know for it.
01:25:05It's the light?
01:25:06So that's a beautiful beauty or she's going to be all alone?
01:25:11Yeah.
01:25:13Me?
01:25:18Yeah.
01:25:21So I guess I did.
01:25:24I can't go Torres doing so these days when you're back in the evening.
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