The Vietnam War - Se1 - Ep05 - This Is What We Do July 1967-December 1967

Name: The Vietnam War - Se1 - Ep05 - This Is What We Do July 1967-December 1967
Uploaded: 2025-11-11T06:50:12+00:00
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Description: Documentary, The Vietnam War - Se1 - Ep05 - This Is What We Do July 1967-December 1967 <br />#TheVietnamWar #VietnamWar

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Documentary, The Vietnam War - Se1 - Ep05 - This Is What We Do July 1967-December 1967
#TheVietnamWar #VietnamWar

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00:00:00Major support for the Vietnam War was provided by members of the Better Angels Society, including Jonathan and Jeannie Levine, Diane and Hal Brierly, Amy and David Abrams, John and Catherine Debs, the Fullerton Family Charitable Fund, the Montrone Family, Linda and Stuart Resnick,

00:00:25the Perry and Donna Gokin Family Foundation, the Lynch Foundation, the Roger and Rosemary Enrico Foundation, and by these additional funders.

00:00:36Major funding was also provided by David H. Koch, the Blavatnik Family Foundation, the Park Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Charitable Trusts,

00:00:53the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Ford Foundation Just Films, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by viewers like you. Thank you.

00:01:08Bank of America proudly supports Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's film, The Vietnam War.

00:01:20Because fostering different perspectives and civil discourse around important issues furthers progress, equality, and a more connected society.

00:01:29Go to bankofamerica.com slash betterconnected to learn more.

00:01:38Bank of America

00:01:43You

00:02:05So just adapt

00:02:06You go over there one mindset, you know, and then you adapt you adapt to the atrocities of war

00:02:12You adapt to

00:02:16Killing, dying

00:02:18You know

00:02:20After a while it doesn't bother you

00:02:25I should say it doesn't bother you as much

00:02:28When I first arrived in Vietnam

00:02:31There was some

00:02:33There were some interesting things that happened and I questioned some of the Marines

00:02:37I was made to realize that this is war and this is what we do

00:02:44And I stuck in my head

00:02:46This is war, this is what we do

00:02:49And after a while

00:02:52You embrace that

00:02:55This is war

00:02:56This is what we do

00:02:59This evening, I came here to speak to you about Vietnam

00:03:01This evening, I came here to speak to you about Vietnam

00:03:16There is progress in the war itself

00:03:18Rather dramatic progress

00:03:21Considering the situation that actually prevailed when we sent our troops there in 1965

00:03:27The grip of the Viet Cong on the people is being broken

00:03:31If you can just get your mind together

00:03:36Then come on across to me

00:03:43In the summer of 1967

00:03:46The men overseeing the war in Vietnam remained outwardly optimistic

00:03:51Whatever private doubts they may have held

00:03:53But first, are you experienced?

00:04:03Or have you ever been experienced?

00:04:05Well

00:04:07The American military command in Vietnam, MACV

00:04:11Claimed to have killed 200,000 enemy troops

00:04:15And had told the president that the all-important crossover point

00:04:19The moment when US and ARVN forces were killing more Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops than the enemy could replace

00:04:27Appeared to have been reached in almost all of South Vietnam

00:04:32But the United States had suffered nearly 75,000 casualties

00:04:39By July 4th, 14,624 Americans had died

00:04:45And off the record, many officers were much less sanguine than their commanders

00:04:52From Saigon, R. W. Apple of the New York Times summarized their views

00:04:59Victory is not close at hand, he wrote

00:05:02In fact, it may be beyond reach

00:05:05It was true that the enemy rarely won a battle in the traditional military sense that they drove the Americans from the field

00:05:24But it was also true that no American victory seemed to matter

00:05:29Battered enemy units were quickly reinforced and re-armed

00:05:33Pacification, winning the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people, was not working

00:05:42Saigon still controlled only a fraction of a country roughly the size of Florida

00:05:49And its government remained unpopular and riddled with corruption

00:05:54President Johnson had been forced to raise taxes to meet the war's ever-climbing cost

00:06:01His ambitious social program, his war on poverty, was in retreat

00:06:08Trumpets and violence

00:06:11I can all hear in the distance

00:06:14That summer, racial unrest would grip American cities

00:06:19Maybe now you can't hear them

00:06:22But you will

00:06:23The president would have to send the army into Detroit to end five days of rioting

00:06:30That left 43 dead and hundreds of buildings razed

00:06:3526 more died in Newark, New Jersey

00:06:40Demonstrating yet again how wide a gap remained between black and white Americans

00:06:45Only a third of the country saw any sign of progress in Vietnam

00:06:53And half of the country now disapproved of the president's handling of the war

00:06:59Meanwhile, Lei Zuan and his comrades, who ran things in Hanoi, were secretly planning a new offensive

00:07:09That they believed would destroy what they called the puppet government in Saigon

00:07:15And convinced the United States the war could never be won on the battlefield

00:07:20There'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

00:07:31And they put on the old punch cards everything you could quantify

00:07:35Numbers of ships, numbers of airplanes, numbers of tanks, numbers of helicopters, artillery

00:07:39Machine gun, ammo, everything you could quantify

00:07:41Put it in the hopper and said when will we win in Vietnam

00:07:45Went away on Friday, the thing ground away all weekend

00:07:49Came back on Monday and there was one card in the output tray

00:07:51And it said you won in 1965

00:07:54The only problem is the enemy gets a vote and they weren't on the punch cards

00:08:06There were nearly half a million American soldiers in Vietnam

00:08:09By the middle of 1967

00:08:13With thousands more on the way

00:08:15Only 20% would ever be in combat

00:08:19The rest served in support units

00:08:23None of them had been taught very much about the people against whom and for whom they had been asked to fight

00:08:31Troops called the Vietnamese guks

00:08:34A term first used by U.S. Marines to refer to the people of Haiti and Nicaragua during the American occupation of those countries

00:08:44And then applied to the Asian enemy in Korea

00:08:48Or slopes, an epithet for the Japanese during the Pacific War

00:08:53Or dinks, an Australian term for the Chinese

00:08:57And so in basic training, they taught you that you were going to be fighting guks

00:09:03It was part of the song that you sang as you jog down the road

00:09:08As you went through bayonet training, you were not talking about Vietnamese

00:09:13You were always talking about guks

00:09:16Vietnamese might be people, but guks are close to being animals

00:09:21G.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

00:09:35Soldiers referred to older Vietnamese women as mamasans, the term they used for women who ran whorehouses in occupied Japan

00:09:44The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese called G.I.s, invaders, imperialists, and Zoc Mi, American bandits

00:10:02South Vietnam had been divided into four tactical zones

00:10:07By the summer of 1967, American troops were fighting in all four of them

00:10:14In IV Corps, the brown water navy patrolled the rivers and canals and marshes of the densely populated Mekong Delta, searching for the enemy

00:10:27In III Corps, the army continued to sweep the thick jungles of the Iron Triangle

00:10:33The Viet Cong sanctuary near Saigon, that was supposed to have been permanently denied to the enemy by big American operations earlier in the year

00:10:46In II Corps, a series of bloody battles in the Central Highlands around Docto

00:10:51temporarily drove North Vietnamese troops back into Cambodia and Laos

00:10:59But some of the most intense combat would take place in I Corps

00:11:05Made up of the five northernmost provinces of South Vietnam

00:11:10Where the marines would bear the brunt of the fighting

00:11:12More than two and a half million people lived there

00:11:17All but two percent of them within the narrow, rice-growing river valleys along the South China Sea

00:11:24The marines wanted to eradicate the Viet Cong there

00:11:28And provide security to the people, village by village, hamlet by hamlet

00:11:32The vast, largely empty highlands that stretched westward all the way to Laos, the marines argued, could be left to the enemy

00:11:43The real war is among the people, said Marine Lieutenant General Victor Krulak

00:11:49And not among the mountains

00:11:51But General William Westmoreland, the American commander

00:11:55feared that thousands of North Vietnamese Army regulars, the NVA, were planning to seize the two northernmost provinces

00:12:05Finding and destroying them remained his first goal

00:12:13He insisted the 3rd Marine Division move north to meet that challenge

00:12:18Establish a base at Dong Ha

00:12:20And man strong points at Zhou Lin, Kantian, Cam Lo, Camp Carroll, the Rock Pile, and Khe Sanh

00:12:30Khe Sanh overlooked Route 9

00:12:34The east-west highway that Westmoreland hoped would one day carry American troops across the border into Laos

00:12:41Where North Vietnamese men and supplies were streaming south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail

00:12:46But 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

00:13:01Tell me, uh, you came here at full strength?

00:13:13I had 13 here when I came

00:13:15And it's four days later now, and how many are still here?

00:13:17Six

00:13:18The rifles have been jamming, the mud's been, uh, has slowed everything down, and the artillery comes in everywhere

00:13:31And, uh, it just gets pretty futile and frustrating sometimes

00:13:35I can't say that I'm scared stiff, but I'm scared

00:13:36I mean, after a while, you know it's gonna come, and you can't do nothing about it, and you just look to God

00:13:43Private First Class John Musgrave of Fairmount, Missouri, who had volunteered to join the 3rd Marine Division

00:13:57Was sent to the battle-scarred countryside around Cantien, a few kilometers south of the DMZ

00:14:09For the Marines in Northern I Corps and the 3rd Marine Division, in the spring and summer of 1967

00:14:15We called the DMZ the Dead Marine Zone

00:14:18Musgrave's 1st Battalion had already suffered so many casualties in a series of bloody sweeps

00:14:24that it was believed to be a hard-luck outfit

00:14:28They were called the Walking Dead

00:14:35I joined the Marine Corps to be in the varsity

00:14:39And I felt like I wasn't varsity unless I was up north fighting the NBA

00:14:44I have never regretted that decision

00:14:47There were times when we were under artillery fire

00:14:50Where I thought, you know, what, what were you thinking?

00:14:56Here it is in a nutshell

00:14:58If I lived to be 63 years old

00:15:01I didn't want to look in the mirror some morning and have a guy looking back at me that hadn't done everything for what he believed

00:15:07That let somebody else do the harder part

00:15:10Every major contact I remember with the NBA was initiated by them ambushing us

00:15:21They wouldn't hit us unless they outnumbered us

00:15:24And we were fighting in their yard

00:15:27They knew the ground we didn't

00:15:30They were just really good

00:15:35They were just really good

00:15:38The North Vietnamese carried Soviet-made, seemingly indisputable, and the names of the soldiers

00:15:42The Marines had to fight with newly issued M16 rifles that had, for a time, a potentially fatal design flaw

00:15:46The Marines had to fight with newly issued M16 rifles that had, for a time, a potentially fatal design flaw

00:16:00They needed constant cleaning and often

00:16:15Their rifles worked, ours didn't

00:16:19The M16 was a piece of shit

00:16:22You can't throw your bullets at the enemy and have them be effective

00:16:25And that rifle malfunctioned on us repeatedly

00:16:29And that rifle malfunctioned on us repeatedly

00:16:55My hatred for them was pure

00:17:01Pure

00:17:03I hated them so much

00:17:06And I was so scared of them

00:17:08Boy, I was terrified of them

00:17:11And the scarier I got, the more I hated them

00:17:13I only killed one human being in Vietnam

00:17:31I only killed one human being in Vietnam

00:17:34I only killed one human being in Vietnam, and that was the first man that I ever killed.

00:17:47I was sick with guilt about killing that guy and thinking,

00:17:52I'm going to have to do this for the next 13 months. I'm going to go crazy.

00:17:57And I saw a Marine step on a bouncing bedding mine,

00:18:01and that's when I made my deal with the devil in that

00:18:03I said I will never kill another human being as long as I'm in Vietnam.

00:18:10However, I will waste as many gooks as I can find.

00:18:15I'll wax as many dinks as I can find.

00:18:18I'll smoke as many zips as I can find, but I ain't going to kill anybody.

00:18:25Turn a subject into an object. It's racism one-on-one.

00:18:29It turns out to be a very necessary tool when you have children fighting your wars for them to stay sane doing their work.

00:18:37On one early patrol, Musgrave watched an American fighter swoop down to drop napalm on enemy troops hidden behind a hedgerow.

00:18:53He could hear their AK-47s firing at the plane until the instant they were engulfed in flames.

00:19:02If the enemy is willing to die like that, he thought, this is going to be one very long war.

00:19:08They knew if they would pop the ambush close and then get amongst you, we couldn't or would hesitate to call an air on ourselves.

00:19:19Firefights like that we called brawls, they were very intimate, and they were very deadly, and they were absolutely terrifying.

00:19:32The Marines were spread too thin to hold any of the territory they fought so hard to take.

00:19:44Again and again, they were sent out from one stronghold or another along the DMZ, looking for enemy soldiers.

00:19:52The disillusionment for me began when I was going back to fight at places we'd already fought before.

00:19:58We had fought, captured, and then left, and the DMZ came right back.

00:20:06You don't like getting wounded in places you've already been before.

00:20:11War is a real estate business.

00:20:14We're supposed to take real estate away from the enemy and then deny the enemy access to that real estate.

00:20:19On the morning of July 2nd, 1967, the 1st Battalion launched yet another sweep of the area northeast of Cantien.

00:20:32When they reached a crossroads called the Marketplace, barely a mile and a quarter from their base, they were ambushed.

00:20:40One company was virtually annihilated.

00:20:43John Musgrave's company rushed to rescue the survivors, only to be pinned down there as well.

00:20:57It was one of the worst days the Marine Corps endured in Vietnam.

00:21:0253 dead and 190 wounded were carried off the battlefield.

00:21:0734 more dead had to be left behind.

00:21:13And when Marines fought their way back two days later to retrieve their bodies,

00:21:19they found that a number had died because their M-16s had jammed as the enemy closed in.

00:21:26Many had been executed, shot in the face or back of the head at close range.

00:21:31Some bodies had been booby-trapped, others mutilated.

00:21:39Marine Amphibious Force Headquarters was so desperate to get North Vietnamese prisoners

00:21:45that they offered us 3-day in-country R&R if we'd bring a prisoner in.

00:21:51Yeah, good luck, you know.

00:21:53Don't you know what we're doing up here?

00:21:56Do you know who we're fighting?

00:21:57I want to make this clear.

00:22:00We did not torture prisoners, and we did not mutilate them.

00:22:10But to be a prisoner, you had to make it to the rear, you know.

00:22:15If he was what fell into our hands, he was just one sorry fucker.

00:22:27I don't know how to explain it, but it wouldn't make sense.

00:22:41Roxbury, where I grew up, was the African-American neighborhood,

00:22:44and South Boston was the Irish-Catholic bastion.

00:22:48You know, there was a lot of hate.

00:22:50South Boston folks hated us.

00:22:51We hated them.

00:22:54And ironically, you know, you end up in a war.

00:23:01And the Vietnamese didn't care whether you were from Roxbury or South Boston.

00:23:05They saw you as American, and they wanted to kill you because you're American.

00:23:11Private Roger Harris had joined the Marines in part, he said,

00:23:15because he wanted to be a gladiator, a killer of his country's enemies.

00:23:21On July 28th, two weeks after John Musgrave's badly mangled 1st Battalion

00:23:27was pulled back to rest and recover,

00:23:30Roger Harris and the 2nd Battalion moved out of Contien

00:23:34and into the southern half of the demilitarized zone itself.

00:23:39We wanted the North Vietnamese Army to expose themselves.

00:23:43So basically, he put the bait out there,

00:23:47and then we could call in and rain hell on him.

00:23:52Roger Harris' battalion advanced into the DMZ

00:23:56along a rough cart track that led to the Ben High River.

00:24:01But planners had failed to see that a concrete bridge

00:24:05over an impassable stream was too narrow and too weak

00:24:09to carry armored vehicles.

00:24:12Now the Marines had no choice

00:24:14but to violate a cardinal rule of infantry tactics,

00:24:18turn around and try to go back the way they had come.

00:24:23The enemy was waiting.

00:24:25Massive ambushes and a lot of death and craziness.

00:24:46The Marines were forced to run a bloody gauntlet

00:24:50of mortars, machine gun fire, and rocket-propelled grenades.

00:24:54I have the utmost respect for the North Vietnamese Army soldiers.

00:25:00When you see someone jump out and confront a tank,

00:25:06you know, with a big 50-caliber machine gun on it

00:25:08and a 90-millimeter cannon on it,

00:25:12and an individual takes on a tank,

00:25:14I think that says something.

00:25:19Roger Harris' company held up the rear,

00:25:22hounded by enemy soldiers on all sides.

00:25:28The Marines staggered back out of the DMZ

00:25:31alongside the battered armored vehicles

00:25:34heaped with dead and wounded Americans.

00:25:39The battalion suffered 214 casualties.

00:25:43It wasn't a good day for Marines at all.

00:25:48A lot of people died.

00:25:49People got their legs shot off.

00:25:51People got run over by tanks.

00:25:55I don't want to talk about it because it's...

00:25:58It's not a good day.

00:26:03It wasn't a good day.

00:26:03It's not a good day.

00:26:33It was a good day.

00:26:37It was a good day.

00:26:40It was a good day.

00:26:41It was a good day for the travelers.

00:26:43In the end of the day, I was hurt and hurt, so I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't sleep, and I cried, and I cried.

00:27:02And I was also a doctor of Dũng Sĩ Diện Mỹ, but I had to change the color of the team.

00:27:13This is Bao Khoo, the day of voting in Vietnam.

00:27:16And it's a solemn day in the village of Hung Thao Phu

00:27:20and in other villages throughout the country.

00:27:22And these people have dressed up

00:27:23in their Sunday best for it.

00:27:27South Vietnamese Prime Minister,

00:27:29Nguyễn Cao Cí had crushed his Buddhist opponents in 1966.

00:27:35But he had been forced by the Americans

00:27:37and his political rivals to make at least tentative moves

00:27:41toward democracy, election of a national assembly,

00:27:45a new constitution, and a promise of elections

00:27:48for president and vice president.

00:27:52But when Cí's old adversary, Win Von Thieu,

00:27:55declared he wanted to challenge Cí for the top spot,

00:27:59things in Saigon had threatened to come apart again.

00:28:04We were watching the rivalry between Thieu and Cí,

00:28:07and that was a game.

00:28:08In Vietnam, the country was watching like we were watching a movie.

00:28:15And Thieu and Cí was watching as to,

00:28:17not whoever had the support of the people,

00:28:20but who had the support of the Americans and the White House.

00:28:25Ellsworth Bunker, the American ambassador,

00:28:28called both men to his residence

00:28:30and warned that the United States

00:28:33would not tolerate another power struggle.

00:28:35Thieu and Cí needed to meet with their fellow generals

00:28:39and decide who would run for president

00:28:42and who would be his running mate.

00:28:45Thieu emerged on top.

00:28:47He was unassuming and unflappable,

00:28:50interested largely in accumulating power and personal wealth,

00:28:54and was thought unlikely ever to embarrass Washington.

00:28:58Cí would be his vice president.

00:29:03Together, they won with only 35% of the vote.

00:29:08No one who had called for an end to the war had been allowed to run.

00:29:13Many Buddhists had boycotted the election,

00:29:16and Viet Cong intimidation had kept many more from the polls.

00:29:20But the State Department immediately declared the election

00:29:25an important step forward.

00:29:29Some South Vietnamese did believe that a measure of stability

00:29:33had finally been achieved.

00:29:36Others were not so sure.

00:29:41In terms of corruption, yes, they were corrupt.

00:29:45Both Thieu and Cí, they abused their position.

00:29:48We pay a very high price for having leaders like Thieu and Thieu.

00:29:56And we continue to pay the price.

00:30:04My father was in the United States Army,

00:30:06and then when the Air Force came about,

00:30:08he switched over to the Air Force.

00:30:12I grew up out of the country in desegregated settings.

00:30:17I was usually the only little black girl in the class.

00:30:20If you look at my class pictures,

00:30:21I look like the little chocolate chip in the vanilla ice cream.

00:30:26I was always a good student.

00:30:28I remember people saying,

00:30:29oh, you speak so well.

00:30:31And the unstated part is for a black girl,

00:30:34probably a negro girl or colored girl at that point.

00:30:37Eva Jefferson's father had served a year on air bases in Vietnam,

00:30:42and returned home convinced the United States had no business being there.

00:30:47But when his daughter entered Northwestern University in the Chicago suburb of Evanston

00:30:53in September 1967, the war was not uppermost in students' minds.

00:30:59The war was not really an issue.

00:31:03It's like, well, no, the president has our best interest at heart.

00:31:08He, of course, would only prosecute a war that made sense.

00:31:11And I think most of America felt that way.

00:31:16At the University of Nebraska, Jack Todd also supported the war.

00:31:21He had felt so strongly about it in 1966 that he had signed up for Marine officer training.

00:31:29I went into the Marine Corps thinking this was all I wanted to do.

00:31:33I mean, my goal was to be commander, a platoon commander in Vietnam.

00:31:39But as time went by and the war went on,

00:31:42Todd and many of his fellow students began to change their minds.

00:31:46All young people go through changes.

00:31:51But we were going through astronomical changes at such a rapid rate.

00:31:58All the music, the culture, everything that we'd listened to,

00:32:01everything that we thought was transforming.

00:32:03And the core of it all was Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam.

00:32:07It just kept going in the background.

00:32:09First, it was kind of like a background noise.

00:32:11And then it got to be the elephant in the room.

00:32:13And then it was the elephant sitting on your head.

00:32:14And we couldn't escape this.

00:32:18Todd attended officer training school at Camp Upshur in Quantico, Virginia.

00:32:23But doubts about the war followed him there, too.

00:32:29I guess the emotional things that were happening on the ground,

00:32:31the photographs that we saw, the news images,

00:32:34and the fact that there was no discernible progress

00:32:37that really started to eat away at what we thought.

00:32:39In the summer of 1967, I was at Camp Upshur, you know, wanting to go kill Vietnamese people.

00:32:46And in October, I was completely against the war.

00:32:50Westmoreland came in last night to me, and he says that he has concentrated more firepower in bombing

00:33:01in the last week on the DMZ.

00:33:04And they've concentrated more on us than's ever been concentrated in any equivalent period in the history of warfare.

00:33:11Yeah.

00:33:12Much more than was ever poured on Berlin or Tokyo.

00:33:16And that his only defense of the DMZ to stop this aggression up there,

00:33:22where the North Vietnamese trying to come in, is bombing their gun positions.

00:33:27Yeah.

00:33:27And it would just be suicide if we stopped the bombing, as these idiots talking about.

00:33:32Yeah.

00:33:33When you say stop the bombing, you say kill more American Marines.

00:33:38That's all it means.

00:33:39Yeah.

00:33:40Now, if we stop bombing without their talking and without any reciprocity on their part,

00:33:46it just means we kill more Americans.

00:33:48That's all.

00:33:48Yeah.

00:33:57Neither the ongoing bombing of the North, nor the concentrated bombing around the DMZ,

00:34:03nor the behind-the-scenes offers made by President Johnson to stop it,

00:34:08had any discernible effect on Le Zuan and the other men who ran North Vietnam.

00:34:15But Le Zuan, like Lyndon Johnson, was in trouble that summer.

00:34:20The war with the Americans had produced little more than a bloody stalemate.

00:34:25Some Viet Cong commanders in the south resented Hanoi's insistence on directing their tactics.

00:34:33Many North Vietnamese civilians were weary of the war,

00:34:36and of the bombing that had disrupted their lives, and destroyed so much of their infrastructure.

00:34:43The country's most revered figures, Ho Chi Minh and Val Nguyen Zap, were urging patience,

00:34:49continuing to wage a war of attrition they still believed would pay off in the end.

00:34:58Hanoi's Soviet and Chinese patrons offered conflicting advice as well.

00:35:05To silence his critics and break the stalemate,

00:35:09Le Zuan began to devise and promote a new and riskier version of the plan for victory he had tried

00:35:16in 1964. He called it the General Offensive, General Uprising.

00:35:25North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units would launch scores of coordinated attacks on South Vietnamese

00:35:32cities and towns and military bases. That offensive, Le Zuan believed,

00:35:38would ignite a mass civilian uprising. These simultaneous blows would destroy the Saigon regime

00:35:45and leave Washington with no choice but to withdraw.

00:35:51He believed he could make a battle for victory.

00:35:55Hanoi was ready to maintain the government.

00:35:59The money was already ready.

00:36:01Hanoi had been made a victory.

00:36:04Hanoi had made a victory.

00:36:08They would have made a victory for the government to maintain the government in the south.

00:36:13I thought that in the city,

00:36:16everyone has an army of the United States and the United States.

00:36:22So, they are ready to protect the United States.

00:36:26He was responsible for the work in the city.

00:36:29He told the city of the city is like a fish,

00:36:32a fish is full of fish in the area.

00:36:35Now, we only need to make sure that it will release the fish.

00:36:40We talk about our own hubris.

00:36:42There's some hubris on their side as well.

00:36:45And once they had convinced themselves

00:36:47that this was going to be a great success,

00:36:49it is what some WAGs have called drinking your own bathwater.

00:36:53They decided it's going to be a victory,

00:36:55even though there are people in the South saying,

00:36:57hey, this is not a great idea.

00:36:59But these people are charged with subjectivism

00:37:03and basically are told to shut up and keep rolling.

00:37:06Le Zouan neutralized those who opposed his plan.

00:37:10Members of General Zapp's staff were arrested.

00:37:13So was Ho Chi Minh's secretary.

00:37:16The health of General Zapp was brought to Hungary to treat the disease

00:37:22in the middle of the 7th of 1967.

00:37:24In the middle of the 9th of 1967,

00:37:28he was brought to China to treat the disease.

00:37:33Hundreds of less prominent figures, journalists, students,

00:37:37even highly decorated heroes of the French war,

00:37:41were also rounded up.

00:37:43Many were locked up in the old French prison

00:37:46that the American POWs also confined there,

00:37:49called the Hanoi Hilton.

00:37:52The date eventually chosen for the attack

00:37:56would be January 31st, 1968,

00:38:00the first day of the Vietnamese lunar New Year celebration,

00:38:04known as Tet.

00:38:06Hundreds, then thousands of North Vietnamese regulars in civilian clothes

00:38:12began slipping southward

00:38:14to join tens of thousands of Viet Cong already in place.

00:38:18As the battle between J Herodwami is now ready for the Hanoi Hilton.

00:38:20I was ready for the Hanoi Hilton.

00:38:21In the Hanoi Hilton's As a military leader

00:38:23after the mission,

00:38:25with the military travel,

00:38:26equipment,

00:38:28weapons,

00:38:31vegetables,

00:38:32food,

00:38:33meal,

00:38:34It was a big deal, even on the other side.

00:38:38And what I wanted was to go to the beach.

00:38:44The deal that we saw was made by the Communist Party.

00:38:50It was very fantastic.

00:38:52And the people who went to the beach were like,

00:38:54to go to the Nam, to fight.

00:38:56My first friend, when I got the results,

00:39:02that when he went to the army, he went to the army to go to the army.

00:39:06And many people in my hometown have not had enough weight to be able to go to the army,

00:39:12so they have left a gap in front of the army when they went to the army.

00:39:18No one thinks about the fact that if I went like that,

00:39:22if I didn't come back, it will be a tragedy for them.

00:39:25In preparation for the coming offensive,

00:39:32the North Vietnamese hoped to lure American and South Vietnamese forces

00:39:37away from cities and big military bases.

00:39:41To do that, they would mount a series of assaults on remote outposts

00:39:46near Cambodia, Laos, and the DMZ.

00:39:50These preliminary attacks became known as the Border Battles.

00:39:55Khan Tien would be the first.

00:40:02In September and October,

00:40:04John Musgraves and Roger Harris' outfits took turns defending Khan Tien

00:40:09as the North Vietnamese tightened the noose around them.

00:40:14The only way in or out was by helicopter.

00:40:19Khan Tien in Vietnamese means Hill of Angels.

00:40:25The time at Khan Tien was time in the barrel.

00:40:34We were the fish.

00:40:35They had the shotguns, they stuck in the barrel and blasted away,

00:40:39and they were going to hit something every shot.

00:40:41Because Khan Tien was such a small area,

00:40:44and they pounded it with that artillery from North Vietnam they couldn't miss.

00:40:56I've never been as afraid.

00:41:00In fact, that's why I'm not afraid of anything now.

00:41:02I mean, there's nothing you can do.

00:41:06You just listen to the sounds of the rockets coming over,

00:41:09and you just pray that they don't land on you.

00:41:13The big question really seems to be

00:41:16whether or not the North Vietnamese intend to overrun Khan Tien.

00:41:19The Marines have tripled the number of troops guarding the outpost,

00:41:23and they've moved up more battalions to be ready to reinforce.

00:41:27I sat in water, I slept in water, I ate in water because our holes were full.

00:41:35I mean, a flood of foxhole can drown a wounded man.

00:41:38Spending your day filling up sandbags,

00:41:41trying to create barriers, and you just put another layer on,

00:41:44put another layer on, a lot of mud, blood, and artillery.

00:41:51It's just red clay up there, and it's real sticky,

00:41:56and it could just grab onto you and pull your boots off.

00:41:59It's hard to run on that stuff, and running,

00:42:01when you're at a place where they're firing heavy artillery at you,

00:42:04running's pretty important.

00:42:06During the siege of the fall of 1967,

00:42:09we were getting newspaper articles in the mail from our families,

00:42:12and we were being called the Alamo.

00:42:15You know, hey, we knew what the Alamo was.

00:42:18We knew what happened there.

00:42:21Like, almost, like, every hour, there'd be a barrage.

00:42:32People get blown to bits, literally blown to bits.

00:42:36You find a boot with a leg in it, right?

00:42:40And so, is the leg white or black?

00:42:42So who was the white Marine that was here?

00:42:45Who was the black?

00:42:46So then you try to remember, and you tag it,

00:42:48and put that in the green bag,

00:42:50and that's what goes back, you know,

00:42:52as Marine Lands Corporal so-and-so and so.

00:42:55But sometimes you're not even sure,

00:42:57because the body has literally been blown to bits,

00:42:59and the only thing that's left is a foot or a piece of an arm.

00:43:03I carried a wallet calendar from Clifford Farlow Insurance.

00:43:07He was my dad's insurance agent.

00:43:09And I marked off each of the days religiously.

00:43:12And then in October, we went up to Contean again.

00:43:17I just stopped, because I thought, well, this is pointless.

00:43:22I'm not getting, I'm not going to go home.

00:43:24I'm not going to make it home.

00:43:26What, you know, what's the point?

00:43:28So I just quit marking them off.

00:43:30I had the opportunity to call my mother, you know?

00:43:33And I was telling my mother what was happening over there,

00:43:36and I was telling her she shouldn't believe what she sees in the newspaper

00:43:41and sees on television, because we're losing the war.

00:43:44And I said, you'll probably never see me again,

00:43:48because we're the most northern outposts that the Marines have.

00:43:52You know, we could literally could look right into Vietnam.

00:43:55We could see the sparks when the guns fired on us.

00:43:57And I said, everybody in my unit's dying, you know?

00:44:01And I probably won't be coming back.

00:44:02And my mother said, no, you're coming back.

00:44:05She said, I talk to God every day, and you're special.

00:44:09You know, you're coming back.

00:44:11And I said, Ma, everybody's mother thinks that they're special.

00:44:14You know, I'm putting pieces of special people in bags.

00:44:18And I was feeling that my mother's in denial.

00:44:20She just doesn't want to face the fact

00:44:22that her only son's going to die in Vietnam.

00:44:25I said, Ma, this isn't a joke.

00:44:26I said, everybody's dying over here, you know?

00:44:28Everybody's dying.

00:44:29And she said, you're not going to die.

00:44:31You're not going to die.

00:44:33And the last thing she said to me was, God has a plan for you.

00:44:37And I said, yeah, right.

00:44:39And I hung up.

00:44:44Mr. Staub, during what period of time were you in Vietnam?

00:44:47I was in Vietnam from September of 1966 to September of 1967.

00:44:52And with what unit?

00:44:54With the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne.

00:44:57During the time that you were in Vietnam,

00:44:58did you personally witness any atrocities on the part of American troops?

00:45:03Yes, I did.

00:45:05Dennis Stout from Phoenix, Arizona, had enlisted in the Army at 20 and served nine months in combat.

00:45:14Wounded three times, he became an Army reporter covering the 327th Regiment of the 101st Airborne.

00:45:22He would spend most of his time with a unique commando platoon called Tiger Force.

00:45:29Small, hand-picked teams capable of remaining in the jungle for weeks at a time.

00:45:35Fast moving and deadly.

00:45:38Intended to out-guerrilla the gorillas.

00:45:41Tiger Force fought in six different provinces, repeatedly suffering heavy losses.

00:45:52If you've lost your best friend and you want revenge, it's the officers who say,

00:45:57no, you can't do that. And if you do it, then there's consequences.

00:46:02But when the officers, and it includes the platoon leader and the battalion commander,

00:46:07are telling you that this is what you're supposed to do, then it gets completely out of hand.

00:46:13Some at MACV worried that such a freewheeling outfit,

00:46:17operating on its own, would be difficult to control.

00:46:23But General Westmoreland and commanders in the field

00:46:26admired Tiger Force for its reliable ferocity.

00:46:30In the summer of 1967, Tiger Force was sent to the fertile Songve Valley.

00:46:38The entire population had already been herded from their homes and crowded into a refugee camp.

00:46:46But some had come back to resume the farming they had always done.

00:46:52The valley had officially been declared a free fire zone,

00:46:55and Tiger Force's officers took that literally.

00:47:00There are no friendlies, one lieutenant told his men.

00:47:04Shoot anything that moves.

00:47:10Over a seven-month period, they killed scores of unarmed civilians.

00:47:16Among their victims were two blind brothers, an elderly Buddhist monk,

00:47:21women, children, and old people hiding in underground shelters,

00:47:26and three farmers trying to plant rice.

00:47:30All were reported as enemy, killed in action.

00:47:37These atrocities were committed by soldiers of units I was assigned to as a reporter for the army newspapers.

00:47:44Tiger Force was not the only platoon Dennis Stout covered that crossed the line.

00:47:53One such incident was the rape and killing of a Vietnamese girl.

00:47:57She was captured, kept for interrogation.

00:48:02Over a two-day period, she was raped.

00:48:04Then, on the morning of the third day, she was killed.

00:48:07Was she raped by more than one person?

00:48:11Yes, all but the medic and myself and possibly one other man from a platoon.

00:48:16Did you protest? Did you try in any way to have them stopped?

00:48:20Yes. After the rape incident, I complained to the battalion sergeant major.

00:48:25And his response was that this type of thing happens in all wars,

00:48:30and that I was not to mention it. It was a common occurrence.

00:48:33Then, later, I went to the chaplain, told him about it.

00:48:37He made an investigation himself, found that this was true, went with me to the sergeant major.

00:48:44The sergeant major then said that we told the chaplain that to stick to religion,

00:48:50sent him away, and then he told me to keep quiet,

00:48:54that I did not have to return from the next operation.

00:48:56Years later, another soldier came forward with more allegations of war crimes,

00:49:04and an army investigation would find probable cause to try 18 members of Tiger Force

00:49:11for murder or assault.

00:49:14But no charges were ever brought.

00:49:17The official records were buried in the archives.

00:49:20They should have all gone to jail. They were guilty of murder. Period.

00:49:27At the same time, I felt like that incident, which I think was an aberration, not the norm,

00:49:34tarred all veterans, and there are hundreds of thousands of veterans who went and did their duty,

00:49:38as honorable as they possibly could, and they're tarred with the same brush.

00:49:42One of the things that I learned in the war is that we're not the top species on the planet,

00:49:50because we're nice. We are a very aggressive species. It is in us. And people talk a lot

00:50:00about how well the military turns kids into killing machines and stuff. And I'll always argue that it's

00:50:07just finishing school. What we do with civilization is that we learn to inhibit and rope in these

00:50:15aggressive tendencies, and we have to recognize them. I worry about a whole country that doesn't

00:50:22recognize it, because you think of how many times we get ourselves in scrapes as a nation,

00:50:27because we're always the good guys. Sometimes I think if we thought that we weren't always the good

00:50:32guys, we might actually get in less wars. How do you realistically expect to shut down the Pentagon?

00:50:42The Pentagon represents the murder of people throughout the world, and the American people

00:50:48have no control of what their government's doing. And so we're going to go there in the scores of

00:50:53thousands and block doors and fill hallways so the work of the Pentagon stops, because the work of the

00:51:00Pentagon should stop. The only thing to do with the Pentagon is to shut it down.

00:51:07It was back in 1942, I was a member of a good platoon. We were on maneuvers in Louisiana,

00:51:15one night by the light of the moon. The captain told us to fall a river, that's how it all begun.

00:51:23We were knee deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on.

00:51:28There was a major demonstration either in New York or in Washington, every fall and every spring.

00:51:38We decided that we would go to the demonstration in Washington at the Lincoln Memorial in the fall

00:51:43of 67, but we would take as many people out of that demonstration as we could and lead them to the

00:51:50Pentagon. And at the Pentagon, try to do something more militant than simply stand around and make speeches

00:51:58opposing the war, which is what these demonstrations had become. And when the time came to lead people

00:52:07away from the Lincoln Memorial toward the Pentagon, 50,000 people marched.

00:52:12And then follow me, I'll lead on. We were neck deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on.

00:52:21Bill Zimmerman, now an assistant professor of psychology at Brooklyn College,

00:52:26had been against the war since the beginning.

00:52:28And we found when we got there, concentric defense perimeters that had been set up

00:52:35around the Pentagon to keep us at a distance from the building. We pushed against them. We tore down their fences.

00:52:47I was working that weekend day. The secretaries who were working in my area were frightened to hell

00:52:56what these Vietnam protesters would do. They thought they were going to come into the building and rape them.

00:53:02Some of them actually came over the walls. It was a sense of revolution.

00:53:10Waist deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on. Waist deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on.

00:53:21God knows what we were going to do when we got in the building. Some people, the hippies,

00:53:26said they were going to levitate the building. Other people wanted to commit vandalism in the building.

00:53:31Other people want to distribute anti-war literature in the building. Talk to people.

00:53:36Just the idea of getting into the headquarters of the United States military.

00:53:44It was the first time that anti-war demonstrators had confronted active duty military personnel.

00:53:51We didn't consider them the enemy. We considered them victims of the war.

00:53:58But we began to see our own government as the enemy.

00:54:04President Johnson believed that international communism was somehow behind the demonstration.

00:54:10He had directed the CIA to come up with the evidence and was furious when it found none.

00:54:16Mr. President, how have you been, Mr. President?

00:54:23I'm doing fine under the circumstances.

00:54:27Well, we just had hell, and these college students, I've had Hoover in after them, and

00:54:32they came, marched here, and we arrested 600 of them, and we gave 29 of them, pretty tough times.

00:54:39We found most of them really were mentally diseased. Hoover's taken 256 that turned in, supposedly,

00:54:45their draft cards. So you're dealing with mental problems. I think we talk too damn much about

00:54:51civil liberties and constitutional rights of the individual and not enough about the rights of the

00:54:55masses. And that's what we have. We were freely elected people, and we've got to stand behind them.

00:55:01I think your government's in trouble, General. I think it's in, I don't know how to say this,

00:55:06but I think we're in more danger from these left-wing influences now than we've ever been in 37 years

00:55:11I've been here. And they're working in my party from within. Bobby thinks he's going to get the

00:55:17nomination. Allard Lowenstein, a 38-year-old attorney from New York, shared the anti-war fervor of the

00:55:24protesters. But he believed the most effective way to end the fighting was to work within the political

00:55:30system, not outside it. The answer, he said, was to stop Lyndon Johnson from getting a second full term

00:55:38as president. He had traveled the country all year in search of someone willing to challenge the

00:55:45president in the upcoming Democratic primaries. He asked Senator Robert Kennedy of New York,

00:55:52who had begun to criticize the Johnson administration over the war. He asked Lieutenant General James

00:55:59Gavin. He asked Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. They all turned him down. Lowenstein kept

00:56:08looking at Fort Sill, Oklahoma on November 17th, 1967. Friends and family of a fallen soldier

00:56:23gathered for a funeral, one of five military funerals held there that month.

00:56:30First Sergeant Pascal Cletus Pula had been killed as he tried to drag one of his wounded men

00:56:37off the battlefield near the village of Loch Ninh. He was a remarkable soldier. He had been awarded one

00:56:46silver star in World War II, two more in Korea, and was awarded a fourth posthumously for his gallantry

00:56:55in Vietnam. He was a Kiowa Indian. He and three of his sons were among the 42,000 Native Americans who would

00:57:06serve in Vietnam, the highest per capita service rate of any ethnic group in the United States.

00:57:15Pascal Pula's widow spoke at the ceremony. He has followed the trail of the great chiefs, she said.

00:57:23His people hold him in honor and highest esteem.

00:57:27He has given his life for the people and the country he loved so much.

00:57:34He was a Kiowa Indian. He was a villain. He was about to try to do what he called to do, but it's not true.

00:57:38Let's go to the village of the church.

00:57:39When the truth is found

00:57:43To be lies

00:57:47And all the joy

00:57:50Within you

00:57:53Dies

00:57:54Don't you want somebody to love?

00:57:57Don't you need somebody to love?

00:58:01Wouldn't you love somebody to love?

00:58:05You better find somebody to love.

00:58:10Love.

00:58:15I didn't hear the word hippie until I was at Contien,

00:58:18and we got a Playboy, somebody got a Playboy in the mail,

00:58:20which was obviously very important to us.

00:58:22And there was an article on Haight-Ashbury

00:58:25and pictures of the girls running around without their tops,

00:58:28you know, free love, and they were hippies,

00:58:30and we thought it was hippie because they had two peas.

00:58:33You know, hey, I'm going to go home and be one of these hippies

00:58:35because, look, the girls don't wear no clothes, you know,

00:58:38and they'll go to bed with anybody, and, you know, even I can score.

00:58:42But the only information I had on the peace movement

00:58:45came from Stars and Stripes,

00:58:47and that wasn't a real objective newspaper,

00:58:50and so I hated them before I ever even knew anything about them.

00:58:55The monsoon rains continued to make life miserable

00:59:05for John Musgrave and the other Marines at Contien.

00:59:09But by early November, the worst of the shelling had ended.

00:59:13American airstrikes, artillery, and Navy fire

00:59:17had taken a fearful toll on the besieging enemy.

00:59:20Before dawn on November 7th,

00:59:25two companies of Musgrave's outfit

00:59:27were sent half a mile into the countryside northwest of the base

00:59:32to sweep the area again.

00:59:34And we got into an area that was old hedgerows

00:59:39that's grown over with jungle, very difficult to see very far.

00:59:44In the clear area, we had three NVA show themselves

00:59:47and start just spraying 30 rounds out of their AKs

00:59:50and then booking.

00:59:53The company commander himself said,

00:59:56I want their bodies.

00:59:57Bring me their bodies.

00:59:59Everything's about body count, right?

01:00:02We said, man, this is as old as Custer.

01:00:05These guys are showing themselves

01:00:07to draw us into an ambush.

01:00:09Lieutenant, don't do this.

01:00:11You know, please.

01:00:12These guys are bait.

01:00:15Well, the skipper says, we got to go.

01:00:17We got to go.

01:00:20And we went.

01:00:23And I can't tell you a whole lot about the ambush.

01:00:28I was one of the first people to be shot.

01:00:31One round put me down.

01:00:34And my grenadier was down,

01:00:36and we were trying to get him back.

01:00:38And Marines, from the first day in boot camp,

01:00:42you learn that Marines don't leave their dead,

01:00:45and they never, never leave their wounded.

01:00:49And that's why I'm alive today.

01:00:51The first guy that came for me,

01:00:55I was lying on my face.

01:00:58He reached down and stuck his arms under my shoulders

01:01:00and lifted me up.

01:01:02And the machine gun wasn't any far.

01:01:05It was maybe nine feet, ten feet at the most,

01:01:10away from me.

01:01:11This is a very intimate ambush.

01:01:12It's a brawl.

01:01:15And he fired a burst into my chest

01:01:18that blew me out of the Marines' arms

01:01:21that was holding me,

01:01:21and then he was shot.

01:01:22Another very brave young Marine is 18-year-old

01:01:29from Louisiana, his first firefight.

01:01:33Had seen what happened and still came for me.

01:01:36And he reached for me,

01:01:39and he was shot, I think, in the forearm.

01:01:43And he was laying beside me,

01:01:46and I've got a hole through my chest

01:01:47big enough to stick your fist through.

01:01:50And I'm dying, and I know it.

01:01:53And I heard this horrible screaming going on,

01:01:56and I was trying to figure out

01:01:57who was screaming like that,

01:01:59because it sounded so...

01:02:06And then I realized it was me.

01:02:11When they began to drag us out,

01:02:12they were being pursued by the North Vietnamese,

01:02:15and they would drop us and lay on top of us.

01:02:19They knew we were both dying.

01:02:21The Grenadier had been shot

01:02:22in the right side of his chest.

01:02:24They knew we were both dead,

01:02:26but we were still alive.

01:02:29So they weren't going to leave us.

01:02:30They would die before they would leave us,

01:02:33and they covered us with their bodies

01:02:34and fired back at the NVA,

01:02:36and then they'd jump up and drag us a little farther

01:02:38and then drop us and lay back on top of us.

01:02:40And I kept telling them to leave me.

01:02:43And I meant it.

01:02:44I meant it.

01:02:45But all of a sudden,

01:02:48I got scared that they might really leave me.

01:02:49I was triaged three times.

01:02:55And the senior corpsman said,

01:02:57he's either shot through the heart or the lungs,

01:02:59there's nothing I can do for him,

01:03:00and he just turned away.

01:03:02I went, oh, okay.

01:03:06And then a helicopter come in,

01:03:08and they threw me into the bird.

01:03:10And the corpsman on the bird straddled me,

01:03:16stood over me,

01:03:16and looked down at me

01:03:17and then looked up at the door gunner

01:03:20and went,

01:03:21get me out of the way

01:03:23because he couldn't work on me.

01:03:24I was a dead man.

01:03:26And they flew me to Delta Med at Dongho.

01:03:30And I thought,

01:03:31okay, I made it this far.

01:03:34And this doctor comes over and looks at me,

01:03:36and I'm conscious.

01:03:37I'm lucid.

01:03:40And he checks a couple of things,

01:03:42and I've got this huge hole in him,

01:03:43and he looks at me right in the eye,

01:03:44and he says,

01:03:44what's your religion, Marine?

01:03:46And I said,

01:03:47well, I'm a Protestant.

01:03:48He says,

01:03:49get a chaplain over here.

01:03:50I can't help this man.

01:03:51And then he walked away.

01:03:52Another surgeon walks by,

01:03:56and he looked at me,

01:03:59and I was raised to be,

01:04:01to always be nice to people.

01:04:03And when he looked at me,

01:04:04I smiled at him and nodded.

01:04:07And he said,

01:04:08why isn't somebody helping this man?

01:04:11And inside I'm going,

01:04:12yeah, why isn't somebody helping this man?

01:04:16When they put me to sleep,

01:04:18I thought, boy, this is really it.

01:04:20You know,

01:04:22and it was kind of,

01:04:23okay, God,

01:04:25into your hands,

01:04:25I'd deliver my spirit.

01:04:28And I thought that was it.

01:04:32And when I woke up

01:04:33in the surgical intensive care ward,

01:04:35which was at Quonset hut,

01:04:36I thought, holy mackerel.

01:04:39I just couldn't,

01:04:40I couldn't believe it.

01:04:41I didn't want him,

01:04:42but I didn't want him to go back.

01:04:47Yesterday, over Hanoi,

01:04:49three American planes were shot down,

01:04:51and at least two of their pilots captured.

01:04:54One of them was

01:04:54Lieutenant Commander John McCain III,

01:04:57the son of the U.S. Naval Commander in Europe.

01:05:00He was shot down to New York.

01:05:01He was shot down on New York,

01:05:06and I was shot down to the U.S.T.

01:05:10We were shot down on New York.

01:05:13He was shot down,

01:05:14but I was shot down.

01:05:15He was shot down to the place where he was shot down.

01:05:17The police at the street

01:05:19was hit that hit.

01:05:21He was bomed out,

01:05:21because he was shot down there

01:05:22to make the U.S.T.

01:05:23He had to shoot down the Hồ.

01:05:27He killed them,

01:05:28Hanoi was so pleased to have captured the son of an American admiral that they allowed

01:05:44a French journalist to interview McCain in the hospital.

01:05:48He had just had his broken bones set without even an aspirin for the pain.

01:05:53What is your name? Lieutenant Commander John McCain. How many raids have you done until

01:06:00the last one? About 23. In which circumstances have you been shot down? I was on a flight

01:06:09over the city of Hanoi and I was bombing and was hit by either missile or anti-aircraft fire.

01:06:21I'm not sure which and the plane continued straight down and I ejected it and broke my leg and both arms

01:06:36and went into a lake, parachuted into a lake and I was picked up by some North Vietnamese

01:06:49and taken to the hospital where I almost died.

01:06:56I would just like to tell my wife that I will get well. I love her. I hope to see her soon.

01:07:16After the interview, McCain was beaten for not expressing sufficient gratitude to his captors.

01:07:29All through the fall of 1967, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong continued their series of border battles

01:07:42in preparation for their surprise offensive still months away.

01:07:46Khan Tian, where John Musgrave was wounded, had been the first. Then came the Arvin base at Song Bay.

01:07:55The South Vietnamese outpost adjacent to the provincial capital of Loch Ninh was next.

01:08:01There, large units of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong regulars mounted a coordinated attack

01:08:08and then fought for five days to hold onto the ground they gained, something they had never done before.

01:08:15American commanders were puzzled. Then, in early November, reports reached Mach V that five North Vietnamese regiments

01:08:26and the Viet Cong battalion, some 7,000 men in all, had begun massing in the Central Highlands

01:08:33around the U.S. Special Forces camp at Docto again.

01:08:38Among the North Vietnamese regulars was Nguyen Thanh Sun, who had been so eager to fight that he too had filled his pockets with rocks to pass his physical.

01:08:51As the NVA deployed their troops, Westmoreland sent his to Docto, exactly what the enemy wanted him to do.

01:09:02Among the Americans were the men of the elite 173rd Airborne,

01:09:08Westmoreland's Fire Brigade.

01:09:29We all knew, in a general sense, that we wouldn't be brought back if there wasn't something big going on.

01:09:35We just knew that the area was crawling with North Vietnamese and that they were there not to avoid contact with us,

01:09:46but they were there to have contact with us.

01:09:49First Lieutenant Matthew Harrison was now with Alpha Company of the 2nd Battalion,

01:09:55the same rifle company that had been ambushed and so badly shattered back in June,

01:10:00on the slopes of Hill 1338, just 14 miles to the east.

01:10:06This wasn't like the Viet Cong, where if you could find them, you could kill them.

01:10:11Our problem wasn't finding them, our problem was what to do with them once you found them.

01:10:15The 174th NVA Regiment was waiting.

01:10:21Wintan Sun and his men were already dug in on the high ground they knew the Americans would want to command, Hill 875.

01:10:31On Sunday morning, November 19th, 1967,

01:10:46Alpha, Charlie and Delta companies were ordered to take Hill 875.

01:11:05Matt Harrison had been wounded in an earlier fight and was not permitted to accompany his men.

01:11:12He anxiously followed their progress over the radio.

01:11:16Heavy artillery and flights of F-100s blasted the hillside ahead of them,

01:11:22meant to knock out enemy positions before the paratroopers ever got within range.

01:11:28The three companies moved up the slope, Charlie and Delta in the lead, Alpha bringing up the rear.

01:11:53The paratroopers stepped warily into a clearing filled with fallen trees from the morning's bombardment,

01:12:00and only a little over 300 yards from the summit.

01:12:05We just threw up and threw up and threw up.

01:12:08We didn't shoot.

01:12:09We were very close.

01:12:11It was about five feet.

01:12:13We saw each other's face.

01:12:15We were very close.

01:12:17We didn't shoot.

01:12:19Thousands of automatic weapon rounds ripped through the air.

01:12:23Chinese-made grenades came rolling and bumping down the slopes.

01:12:28The Americans sought cover where they could, behind fallen trees,

01:12:32scrabbled at the earth with their helmets, trying to dig fighting holes.

01:12:37Charlie and Delta companies were pinned down and being torn to pieces.

01:12:51Meanwhile, near the foot of the hill, other North Vietnamese troops surprised Alpha Company from behind.

01:12:58They were first spotted moving up through the trees by a private from the Bronx named Carlos Lozada.

01:13:04As the men of his company scrambled up the slope, dragging their wounded with them,

01:13:10Lozada provided what cover he could, firing his M60 machine gun from his hip before a bullet hit him in the head.

01:13:19He would be awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.

01:13:25Back home, the battle led the nightly news.

01:13:30The Battle of Docto is now on its 19th day.

01:13:33It already ranks among the bloodiest campaigns of the Vietnam War.

01:13:37There's no sign yet of any luck.

01:13:39Over the weekend, the three companies of the 173rd Airborne Brigade moved down this river valley,

01:13:44up which North Vietnamese normally infiltrate, until they got down here by Hill 875.

01:13:50Then they came under heavy fire from the hill.

01:13:53Two of the three companies charged the hill.

01:13:55The other stayed back as a rear guard.

01:13:57They found a tough fight...

01:13:59By early afternoon, the three companies had basically been decapitated.

01:14:04The company commanders were dead.

01:14:06Most of the officers and most of the NCOs were dead.

01:14:09The survivors from all three companies clustered in the clearing and did their best to set up a defensive circle.

01:14:19American bombs and napalm pounded enemy positions until it grew almost too dark to see.

01:14:27The entire battle, it was on the ground.

01:14:30All up and down, they hit the ground like a wide army.

01:14:35They went through the battle and the entire area.

01:14:37It was very wide, like that.

01:14:39I was the one who was shot, and I was the one who was shot.

01:14:42The ground, the face, the knees and the knees like this.

01:14:46The ground was a big fan.

01:14:48So, when I was running around, the enemy would get down the ground and hit me.

01:14:52It was a strike.

01:14:53I was hit by the fire.

01:14:54It was hit by the fire.

01:14:55Then, another American plane roared in and dropped two bombs.

01:15:01One landed among the hidden enemy troops.

01:15:05The other fell directly on the Americans.

01:15:10In a fraction of a second, 42 were killed.

01:15:15A badly hit lieutenant managed to find a working radio.

01:15:19No more fucking planes, he shouted into it.

01:15:22They're killing us up here.

01:15:26The fighting on the hillside continued.

01:15:29The men ran out of water, began to run out of ammunition.

01:15:34Helicopters that tried to ferry in supplies were shot down.

01:15:40The following day, Matt Harrison was able to chop her in.

01:15:46It was chaos.

01:15:48It was collections of guys who had tunneled and dug down behind trees.

01:15:53These were guys who had gone without water in that heat for two days.

01:15:58And almost every one of them was wounded.

01:16:02And then all around were bodies.

01:16:06Guys who had been shot and blown up.

01:16:10It was the third circle of hell.

01:16:15On November 23rd, two fresh battalions of the 173rd finally made it to the top of the hill

01:16:22for which so many had died.

01:16:25But the night before, the surviving North Vietnamese troops had slipped down the other side and disappeared

01:16:32into Cambodia and Laos.

01:16:36The powers that be decided it would be as important to our morale for us to be in on the taking the top of the hill.

01:16:44I had 26 guys left out of a company that started out of 140 and all 26 had been wounded.

01:16:52Then Harrison and his exhausted men were helicoptered to the top of yet another hill.

01:17:03It was Thanksgiving.

01:17:06Chinook helicopters clattered down out of the sky, carrying huge containers of hot turkey and

01:17:12mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce so that the 173rd could have their Thanksgiving dinner.

01:17:18If there are any more remote or dangerous spots to spend Thanksgiving Day in Vietnam than this one,

01:17:24then most of these men have never seen them.

01:17:27There was a TV cameraman and reporter off to the side using us as a backdrop and I remember

01:17:32hearing the reporter in tone, today is November 23rd, Thanksgiving Day, and I was really angry.

01:17:40It's as though we were entertainers.

01:17:45One hundred and seven Americans had died taking Hill 875.

01:17:52Another 282 were wounded.

01:17:55Ten more were missing.

01:17:57The number of North Vietnamese casualties is unknown, but their losses are thought to have been staggering.

01:18:05Back in June, Matt Harrison had lost two West Point classmates on Hill 1338.

01:18:13He lost two more on Hill 875.

01:18:17Of the eight with whom he had served in the 2nd Battalion, four were now dead, and two had been wounded.

01:18:25To take tops of mountains in a triple canopy jungle along the Cambodian-Laotian border accomplished nothing of any importance.

01:18:37The battle for Hill 875 was, in my thinking today, a microcosm of what we were doing and what went wrong in Vietnam.

01:18:49There was no reason to take that hill.

01:18:53We literally got to the top of the hill about midday on November 23rd and sat there for, I don't know, half an hour, an hour, just kind of gathering ourselves and everything together.

01:19:08Chinooks came in, took us off the hill, and I doubt that there's been an American on Hill 875 since November 23rd.

01:19:18We accomplished nothing.

01:19:21A new phase is now starting.

01:19:24We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.

01:19:31As Matt Harrison and his men fought for Hill 875, the Johnson administration was in the midst of a success offensive.

01:19:39A PR campaign aimed at shoring up support for the war and the way it was being waged.

01:19:48McVe released a new and surprisingly low estimate of enemy forces to show how much damage the United States had done to them.

01:19:57It was only two-thirds of the total suggested by the CIA because after a bitter and prolonged debate behind the scenes, Westmoreland had chosen to exclude from it the part-time guerrillas, farmers, old men, women, even children who helped place the mines, grenades, and booby traps that accounted for more than a third of all American casualties.

01:20:22General Westmoreland also told the press that the impressive body counts his commanders reported were very, very conservative.

01:20:32It probably represented, he said, 50% or even less of the enemy that has been killed.

01:20:39Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker joined the chorus, using a metaphor first used 13 years earlier by the French commander in Vietnam, not long before their great defeat at the NBN Phu.

01:20:53I think we're now beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel.

01:20:58Mr. Ambassador, you talk about light at the end of the tunnel. How long is this tunnel?

01:21:03I don't think that you can put it into any particular timeframe, a situation like this.

01:21:12LBJ's success offensive succeeded.

01:21:18The number of Americans who believed the United States was making real progress in the war grew.

01:21:25Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did not take part in the public relations campaign.

01:21:33He had become so disillusioned with the war he'd done so much to plan and prosecute that he wrote another secret memo to the president, advising Johnson to freeze American troop levels, turn over ground operations to the South Vietnamese, and halt the bombing of North Vietnam in order to bring about negotiations.

01:21:56There was no reason to believe, McNamara wrote, that the prolonged infliction of grievous casualties or the heavy punishment of air bombardment will suffice to break the will of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

01:22:11The continuation of our present course of action in Southeast Asia would be dangerous, costly in lives, and unsatisfactory to the American people.

01:22:23Johnson never responded.

01:22:26Instead, he arranged for McNamara to become the president of the World Bank.

01:22:32McNamara would keep silent about the doubts he had harbored since the beginning of the ground war for the next 28 years.

01:22:42His successor as defense secretary would be Clark Clifford, a prominent Washington lawyer and trusted counselor to Democratic presidents whom Johnson was sure would be supportive of the war.

01:22:57Meanwhile, Allard Lowenstein's year-long search for a Democratic challenger to the president had finally succeeded.

01:23:05On November 30, 1967, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy announced that he would run.

01:23:14This is an issue which has to be taken to the people of the country in the campaign of 1967.

01:23:20By the end of 1967, 20,057 Americans had died in Vietnam.

01:23:32The time had come, General Westmoreland said, for an all-out offensive on all fronts.

01:23:39But the enemy was just a month away from launching an all-out offensive of its own.

01:23:51I see a winter and I want it into black.

01:24:10No colors anymore, I want them to turn black.

01:24:16I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes.

01:24:23I have to turn my head until my darkness goes.

01:24:29I see a line of cars and they are painted black.

01:24:35With flowers and my love for never to come back.

01:24:41I see people turn their heads and quickly look away.

01:24:46Like a newborn baby, it just happens every day.

01:24:52I look inside myself and see my heart is black.

01:24:58I see my red door, I must have it into black.

01:25:04Maybe then I'll fade away and not have to face the facts.

01:25:11It's not easy facing up when your whole world is black.

01:25:17No more will my green seagull turn a deeper blue.

01:25:23I could not foresee this thing happening to you.

01:25:30If I look hard enough into the setting sun.

01:25:36My love will laugh with me before the morning comes.

01:25:42I see a red door and I want it painted black.

01:25:48No colors anymore, I want them to turn black.

01:25:54I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes.

01:26:00I have to turn my head until my darkness goes.

01:26:10I want to see a faded, faded, faded, faded, faded black.

01:26:15Yeah.

01:26:17mà mai mà mà mà mà màu 보지

01:26:36VIII

01:26:46The Vietnam War is available on Blu-ray and DVD.

01:26:54The companion book, soundtrack, and original score from the film are also available.

01:26:59To order, visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

01:27:03Episodes of the series are also available for download from iTunes.

01:27:10Bank of America proudly supports Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's film, The Vietnam War.

01:27:17Because fostering different perspectives and civil discourse around important issues furthers progress, equality, and a more connected society.

01:27:31Go to bankofamerica.com slash betterconnected to learn more.

01:27:37Major support for the Vietnam War was provided by members of the Better Angels Society,

01:27:43including Jonathan and Jeannie Levine,

01:27:47Diane and Hal Brierly,

01:27:51Amy and David Abrams,

01:27:53John and Catherine Debs,

01:27:55the Fullerton Family Charitable Fund,

01:27:58the Montrone Family,

01:28:01Linda and Stuart Resnick,

01:28:03the Perry and Donna Gokin Family Foundation,

01:28:06the Lynch Foundation,

01:28:06the Roger and Rosemary Enrico Foundation,