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00:00:00To be continued...
00:00:30Coming home from Vietnam was close to as traumatic as the war itself.
00:01:00For years, nobody talked about Vietnam.
00:01:07We were friends with a young couple, and it was only after 12 years that the two wives
00:01:13were talking, found out that we both had been Marines in Vietnam.
00:01:18Never said a word about it, never mentioned it.
00:01:22And the whole country was like that.
00:01:25It was so divisive.
00:01:29But it's like living in a family with an alcoholic father.
00:01:33Shh, we don't talk about that.
00:01:38Our country did that with Vietnam.
00:01:40It's only been very recently that I think that the baby boomers are finally starting
00:01:45to say, what happened?
00:01:47What happened?
00:01:48What we need now in this country is to heal the wolves and to put Vietnam behind us.
00:01:54What we need now in this country is to heal the wolves and to put Vietnam behind us.
00:02:06The killing in this tragic war must stop.
00:02:19The general Westmoreland strategy is producing results.
00:02:33The enemy is no longer closer to victory.
00:02:38The enemy is no longer closer to victory.
00:02:42No matter how you measure it, we're better off than we thought we would be at this time.
00:02:55You have been less than candid as to how deeply we are involved in Vietnam.
00:03:03We have increased our assistance to the government, its logistics.
00:03:07We have not sent combat troops there.
00:03:09You have a row of dominoes set up, and you knock over the first one, and the last one is certainly
00:03:16little wolves.
00:03:17If a question is successful in Korea, we can expect it to spread throughout Asia and Europe
00:03:22and to this hemisphere.
00:03:39The enemy is one of those who is at the center of the country.
00:03:58Oh where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
00:04:03and where have you been, my darling young one?
00:04:08You know, to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in suffering.
00:04:16And for those of us who suffered because of Vietnam, that's been our quest ever since.
00:04:26And it's hard, it's hard, it's hard, it's hard, it's hard rain, you're gonna fall.
00:04:38America's involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy.
00:04:43It ended 30 years later in failure, witnessed by the entire world.
00:04:49And what did you see, my darling?
00:04:53It was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American
00:05:00overconfidence and Cold War miscalculation.
00:05:05And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been
00:05:10caused by tragic decisions made by five American presidents belonging to both political parties.
00:05:21Before the war was over, more than 58,000 Americans would be dead.
00:05:27At least 250,000 South Vietnamese troops died in the conflict as well.
00:05:34So did over a million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerrillas.
00:05:45Two million civilians, North and South, are thought to have perished, as well as tens of
00:05:50thousands more in the neighboring states of Laos and Cambodia.
00:05:58For many Vietnamese, it was a brutal civil war.
00:06:02For others, the bloody climactic chapter in a century-old struggle for independence.
00:06:09For those Americans who fought in it, and for those who fought against it back home, as
00:06:19well as for those who merely glimpsed it on the nightly news, the Vietnam War was a decade
00:06:26of agony, the most divisive period since the Civil War.
00:06:34Vietnam seemed to call everything into question.
00:06:39The value of honor and gallantry.
00:06:43The qualities of cruelty and mercy.
00:06:48The candor of the American government, and what it means to be a patriot.
00:07:02And those who lived through it have never been able to erase its memory, have never stopped
00:07:07arguing about what really happened, why everything went so badly wrong, who was to blame, and whether
00:07:16it was all worth it.
00:07:46I don't think there's a game against that.
00:07:49I'm just going to lose.
00:07:52I'm just going to lose.
00:07:55There's only two in a row,
00:07:58and I'm not going to lose.
00:08:16I
00:08:46The French conquest of Indochina began with an attack on the ancient Vietnamese port of
00:09:01Da Nang in 1858. It took 50 years to lay claim to the whole region, Laos and Cambodia, as well
00:09:10as the 1,200-mile-long area that would come to be called Vietnam. All of it was ruled by a French
00:09:21governor-general from his palace in Hanoi. The French largely lived on plantation estates,
00:09:30and in cities like Saigon, made to look as much as possible like those at home.
00:09:35Most did not even bother to learn the language spoken by their subjects. Instead,
00:09:44they installed a series of puppet emperors and employed a network of French-speaking
00:09:49Vietnamese officials, mandarins, willing to carry out their wishes.
00:09:57The French put their subjects to work, building roads and canals, railroads and bridges.
00:10:05The Vietnamese people did not take easily to French occupation, just as they had fought against
00:10:26earlier invasions by the Chinese. By the early 20th century, nationalism was on the rise.
00:10:34But anyone who dared resist colonial rule risked exile, prison, or the guillotine.
00:10:44They controlled everything. They were a source from our country.
00:10:51But mostly, they took our independence and our freedom. When I was a small child, I got a
00:10:59national disability already from school. And I always looked at the French as my enemy.
00:11:09My enemy.
00:11:10My hatred for them was pure.
00:11:23My hatred for them was pure.
00:11:39Pure. I hated them so much. And I was so scared of them.
00:11:45I was just, boy, I was terrified of them.
00:11:52And the scarier I got, the more I hated them.
00:12:03I was an 18-year-old Marine rifleman with the ink still wet on my high school diploma.
00:12:11I didn't want to shame myself in front of my buddies.
00:12:16But I was so scared, I felt like I was hanging on to my honor by my fingernails the whole time I was there.
00:12:22In the spring of 1919, as the victorious Allied powers met in Paris to rebuild a world shattered by the Great War,
00:12:33President Woodrow Wilson headed the American delegation, housed in the Hotel Crillon.
00:12:53One day, a tall, slender, 29-year-old man appeared with a petition for the president he and other Vietnamese nationalists had written.
00:13:08Inspired by Wilson's declaration that the interests of colonial peoples should be given equal weight with those of their European rulers,
00:13:17the man was asking that this principle be applied to his homeland.
00:13:21The president's secretary promised to show it to Wilson, but there is no evidence that he ever did.
00:13:30His name was Wintat Tan, but he was now living under an alias, Wyn I Kwok, Wyn the Patriot.
00:13:41During his long shadowy career, he would adopt some 70 different pseudonyms,
00:13:47finally settling on the most enlightened one.
00:13:51Ho Chi Minh.
00:13:54Ho Chi Minh was a man who succeeded in projecting an image of somebody who was totally
00:14:01dedicated to freeing his country and his people from foreign domination,
00:14:08to the point that he sacrificed his own well-being, his own life,
00:14:12not having a family of his own.
00:14:17To Vietnamese, that's such a big sacrifice, because to us, everybody needs a family.
00:14:24Ho Chi Minh was born in 1890, the son of a minor official in the French regime.
00:14:29After taking part in a demonstration against the puppet emperor and the Frenchman who pulled his
00:14:36strings, Ho was expelled from school and marked for arrest.
00:14:40He left Vietnam in 1911 and remained in exile for 30 years.
00:14:50He served as a cook's helper aboard a French liner and visited New York and Boston,
00:14:55where he worked for a time as a pastry chef at the Parker House.
00:15:01He shoveled snow in London, tinted photographs in Paris.
00:15:06There, Ho Chi Minh joined the French Socialist Party, but when he discovered the anti-colonial
00:15:14writings of Lenin, he became a communist. He was invited to Moscow to study, underwent
00:15:22training as a Soviet agent, was sometimes criticized for being a nationalist first,
00:15:28a communist second, and then was dispatched to China to organize a cell of other Vietnamese exiles
00:15:36and help establish the Indo-Chinese Communist Party.
00:15:41Through it all, he was taut and quivering, a friend remembered, with only one thought,
00:15:48his country, Vietnam.
00:15:58By 1940, much of the world was at war again.
00:16:18Germany had seized most of Western Europe, including France.
00:16:23Imperial Japan threatened many of the European colonies in Asia and occupied Vietnam,
00:16:33where they permitted their allies, the collaborationist French, to continue to oversee their colony.
00:16:42To some Vietnamese, the coming of the Japanese seemed to signal a welcome end to white colonial rule.
00:16:49But Ho Chi Minh, still in exile in China, saw the Japanese as alien invaders, no more welcome than the French.
00:17:00They were only interested in exploiting his country and seizing Vietnamese crops to fill their own rice bowls.
00:17:07The time had come, he said, to rally patriots of all ages and all types, peasants, workers, merchants, and soldiers, to defeat the Japanese and the collaborationist French.
00:17:22In February of 1941, after three decades away from his homeland, Ho Chi Minh slipped back across the Chinese border into Vietnam,
00:17:36and set up headquarters near the remote village of Poc Ba, in a limestone cave at the side of a mountain he named for Karl Marx.
00:17:46Overlooking a jungle stream, he named for his hero, Lenin.
00:17:54There, he founded a revolutionary movement, which he called the Vietnam Independence League, the Viet Minh.
00:18:04Everybody wants to join the Viet Minh with the fight.
00:18:07Mostly, nobody knows about the Vietnam as a communist organization.
00:18:16To build and lead a fighting force for his revolution, Ho called upon Va Nguyen Zap, a one-time teacher of French history, who had instructed the children of Hanoi's elite.
00:18:27Zap was an early convert to communism, whose lifelong hatred for the French intensified when they beat his wife to death in prison.
00:18:40Inspired by Napoleon, Lawrence of Arabia, and the communist Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong,
00:18:47Zap had already begun to develop a distinctive theory of warfare that relied on guerrilla tactics,
00:18:54until a full-scale conventional attack could be mounted.
00:18:59And the fight for independence, which he believed was coming, his army, Zap said, would be everywhere and nowhere.
00:19:10The reason Vietnamese had always resort to guerrilla warfare was because we were a small country,
00:19:16and it was just a way of fight the weak against the strong.
00:19:20Don't fight unless you're sure you can win, and surprise is a big element.
00:19:31Choose your own battle.
00:19:40I had about 26 guys that day out of 45.
00:19:43We were always somewhat under strength, and this day we were quite under strength.
00:19:49My platoon's on point.
00:19:58And all of a sudden, the very point man, the first guy in the column, said,
00:20:03VC on the trail, VC on the trail.
00:20:08Before I had a chance to digest this, he went down, shot right through the chest.
00:20:15And what was a very well-laid ambush erupted.
00:20:19I knew I'd lost a bunch of guys.
00:20:32I said a prayer to God, saying, basically, if you need any more guys from my platoon, take me.
00:20:39Don't take any more of my men.
00:20:41As soon as I said it, I freaked myself out.
00:20:44I said, holy shit.
00:20:46Can I take that prayer back?
00:21:00By the spring of 1945, more than three years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
00:21:07the United States government was looking for allies behind the lines in Vietnam.
00:21:13The Americans were hoping to find a way to undermine Japanese forces there
00:21:19when they were contacted by Ho Chi Minh.
00:21:22And so it was decided to drop an OSS team in to meet with the Viet Minh leadership.
00:21:29Paul Hoagland was the medic on their team.
00:21:35And the first thing he was told was that he must attend to their leader, who was desperately sick.
00:21:41So he was taken to a grass shack where a bewhiskered, skinny man lay in a bundle of straw,
00:21:48desperately ill.
00:21:50And that was Ho Chi Minh.
00:21:51The OSS, the secret wartime precursor of the CIA, supplied Ho's ragtag derillas with arms
00:22:02and marveled at how quickly they learned to handle them.
00:22:07Ho Chi Minh began to call his followers the Viet American Army
00:22:12and praised the United States as a champion of democracy that would surely help them end colonial rule.
00:22:19So, we saw the Americans coming.
00:22:24And when we look at the Americans, we consider them as a kind of free man,
00:22:31liberating the people.
00:22:33They have liberated Europe already.
00:22:37Meanwhile, famine gripped the northern part of the country.
00:22:42Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were dying of starvation,
00:22:46while Japanese storehouses were filled with rice.
00:22:52In those days, garbage was collected by people pushing carts.
00:22:56And my mother remembers that every morning she would see these garbage carts going around
00:23:03and people picking up dead bodies and throwing them on the carts.
00:23:08It was incredible.
00:23:09And people who lived through it would never, never have forgot.
00:23:14Zhuang von Mai's father was the deputy governor of a province east of Hanoi,
00:23:19the son and grandson of mandarins who had all served the French.
00:23:24He and his wife had 17 children.
00:23:27Zhuang von Mai's father's father's father's father's father.
00:23:29Parents who had children who had, who were, you know, plump,
00:23:33were very afraid of their children being stolen and killed.
00:23:38And it was really like hell on earth.
00:23:42The government didn't have a clue on how to deal with this calamity.
00:23:46But Ho Chi Minh did.
00:23:50He directed the Viet Minh to break into the Japanese storehouses wherever they could
00:23:56and distribute the rice to the people.
00:24:00They were hailed as saviors.
00:24:11When an atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima and three days later a second one destroyed Nagasaki,
00:24:25Japanese surrender seemed imminent.
00:24:29Ho Chi Minh called upon all Vietnamese to rise up and take over their own country
00:24:35before the free French could re-establish their old colonial regime.
00:24:39They did, in cities and towns across the country.
00:24:48On September 2nd, 1945, the same day the Japanese formally surrendered,
00:24:55hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese streamed into Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi
00:25:01to see for the first time the mysterious leader of the Viet Minh
00:25:05and hear him proclaim Vietnam's independence.
00:25:15With an OSS officer standing nearby, Ho Chi Minh began with the words of Thomas Jefferson,
00:25:22He said that all men, all men are created equal.
00:25:26They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
00:25:31But among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:25:36For all the people of Vietnam, the country of Vietnam, the country of Vietnam has been
00:25:46independent, independent, and united, and has faith in the world.
00:25:55Everyone is very proud of it.
00:25:56Ho Chi Minh had great hopes that the U.S. would support the Vietnam desire for independence,
00:26:06not necessarily by intervening, but by doing what it could to support an independence movement.
00:26:16Ho Chi Minh's hopes for American support were calculated, but understandable.
00:26:21President Franklin Roosevelt had promised a post-war world that would respect the rights
00:26:28of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live.
00:26:33But Roosevelt was dead now, and his successor Harry Truman had inherited a very different world.
00:26:43The alliance with the Soviet Union that had won the Second World War had collapsed. The Soviets now
00:26:51occupied the Eastern European countries they had overrun, and hoped to spread their influence
00:26:57farther into Iran, Turkey, and the Mediterranean. A new Cold War had begun.
00:27:08French President Charles de Gaulle warned that if the United States insisted on independence
00:27:14for her colonies, France might have no choice but to fall into the Russian orbit.
00:27:21The United States must do nothing to undercut the restoration of France's empire, including Vietnam.
00:27:32There were hardly any Americans in Vietnam, you know, State Department people,
00:27:38consular officials, a few businessmen. Hardly anyone from this country knew where Vietnam was located.
00:27:47George Wicks was part of a seven-man OSS mission sent to Saigon, the largest city in the South.
00:27:55The United States was officially neutral, hoping the French and Viet Minh could reach some peaceful
00:28:02solution on their own. Allied leaders had agreed temporarily to divide Vietnam into two separate zones.
00:28:10Nationalist Chinese troops were to handle things in the North. British colonial troops would try to
00:28:18perform the same task in the South, where rival factions, including the French and Viet Minh, were already
00:28:26fighting in the streets of Saigon.
00:28:30No one was in charge. On both sides, there was brutality and atrocity and violence.
00:28:39It wasn't quite a civil war, but it was getting very close to civil war in the streets of Saigon.
00:28:46Lieutenant Colonel Peter Dewey, the 28-year-old commander of the OSS in Saigon, tried to make sense of it all.
00:28:54Right from the start, he was in touch with everybody. Not only the French, but very soon he established a
00:29:00connection with various Vietnamese groups. The Viet Minh soon established themselves as the most successful.
00:29:10Dewey, who spoke fluent French, brokered talks between a Viet Minh spokesman and the senior French representative in the city.
00:29:18His efforts infuriated British General Douglas Gracie, who commanded Allied forces in the South.
00:29:26Gracie was convinced that French control should be reimposed as soon as possible.
00:29:32By conferring with the Viet Minh, Gracie said, Colonel Dewey had become a subversive force.
00:29:39The violence in and around Saigon escalated.
00:29:47Colonel Dewey urgently cabled his superiors.
00:29:51Vietnam is burning, he wrote. The French and British are finished here,
00:29:57and the United States, he concluded, ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.
00:30:02Two days later, September 26, 1945, he set out for the airport, prepared to fly to OSS headquarters.
00:30:18At a roadblock, the Viet Minh mistook Dewey for a Frenchman and opened fire.
00:30:26He was killed instantly.
00:30:28Ho Chi Minh wrote to the United States, lamenting the deaths of Dewey,
00:30:36whom he recognized as a person sympathetic to his cause.
00:30:41It seemed a terrible irony that Dewey, who was
00:30:45doing what he could to help the Vietnamese independence movement,
00:30:50should have been killed by the Vietnamese by a mistake.
00:30:58An elderly African-American woman answered the door.
00:31:14I think she knew the instant she saw us why we were there.
00:31:17And the Padres said, I'm terribly sorry to inform you, but your son was killed in Vietnam.
00:31:33And she just sat down, didn't so work.
00:31:35And her husband says, no, there's a mistake.
00:31:42He comes back with this letter, and he said, look, see, we got it yesterday.
00:31:48Our son was still alive yesterday.
00:31:52And the chaplain looked at the letter, and he said, it's a week old.
00:31:55I think your son was killed on the day he wrote this letter.
00:32:09In the fall of 1945, a week after Colonel Dewey's death,
00:32:13fresh French troops began arriving in Saigon, taking over from the British.
00:32:18They quickly established control of the city and set out to reoccupy the entire country.
00:32:29Ho Chi Minh hoped somehow to achieve independence without a war with France.
00:32:34And he still hoped the United States would intervene.
00:32:38You never had an empire, never exploited the Asian peoples,
00:32:42he would tell a visiting American journalist.
00:32:45Do not be blinded by this issue of communism.
00:32:48He did not want to fight the French as an enemy of America.
00:32:55And in fact, I saw the letters he wrote to President Truman,
00:33:02saying, we believe in the same things you believe.
00:33:05Those letters I saw in the CIA files,
00:33:09they had never been given to President Truman.
00:33:12In June of 1946, Ho Chi Minh returned to Paris in a fruitless attempt to get the French to live up
00:33:24to a promise they had made of increased autonomy for his country.
00:33:29While Ho was away, General Zopp began consolidating communist control of the revolution.
00:33:38He conducted a merciless purge of members of rival nationalist parties and people he called reactionary saboteurs.
00:33:46Landlords and moneylenders, Trotskyites and Catholics, men and women accused of collaborating with the French.
00:33:55Hundreds were shot, drowned, buried alive.
00:34:00So I think the Vietnamese, the Russian people, killed the Nazi people,
00:34:06and it was not really fighting for the Nazi people,
00:34:09and it was fighting for the Russian government system.
00:34:11On December 19, 1946, after months of building tension,
00:34:18fighting broke out in Hanoi between the Viet Minh and the French.
00:34:27The Viet Minh proved no match for French firepower.
00:34:30Ho, Zopp, and their comrades slipped out of the city
00:34:40and returned to their mountain stronghold far to the north.
00:34:44Those who have rifles will use their rifles, Ho declared in a radio address
00:34:51calling for a nationwide guerrilla war.
00:34:54Those who have swords will use swords.
00:34:58Those who have no swords will use spades or sticks.
00:35:07I have a feeling about the importance of fighting the country.
00:35:18I remember that the war was very nice and beautiful.
00:35:23When we went together, we used to sing a song, a song, a song, a song, a song, a song, a song, a song.
00:35:32But the country Ho Chi Minh hoped to unite was itself bitterly divided.
00:35:40Families were being torn apart.
00:35:43Despite her father's position in the French government,
00:35:47Zhuang Von Mai's sister felt compelled to answer Ho's call.
00:35:51My older sister, Trang, was married to a man who had great sympathy for the Viet Minh.
00:36:01And by that time, Ho Chi Minh had evacuated his government to the mountain base.
00:36:06So my sister and her husband tricked all the way from Hanoi toward the base in order to join the resistance against the French.
00:36:18So the Vietnam War was really a civil war, down to the family level.
00:36:25France poured thousands of men into Vietnam.
00:36:35French regulars, European mercenaries, and colonial troops from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Senegal.
00:36:44Who fought alongside an army of Cambodians, Laotians, and anti-communist Vietnamese.
00:36:51French forces managed to occupy most of the large towns and province capitals,
00:37:01and established hundreds of isolated outposts.
00:37:06The French also set out to try to win over rural Vietnamese,
00:37:11through a program they called pacification,
00:37:15pacification, building dikes, schools, and roads,
00:37:19and vaccinating children.
00:37:25The French would pacify a village,
00:37:27and during the daytime they could control it.
00:37:31But at night the Viet Minh would come back,
00:37:34and so it was never completely secure.
00:37:38My father would shake his head and said,
00:37:42you know, pacification is really futile,
00:37:44because it's like trying to hold sand in your fingers.
00:37:48The Viet Minh mined roads, blew up bridges and railroads,
00:37:56ambushed French patrols, and then disappeared.
00:38:01French soldiers sometimes took revenge on the nearest village,
00:38:09burning homes, raping women,
00:38:11executing men suspected of aiding the Viet Minh.
00:38:16The Viet Minh have been killed in my village.
00:38:30But the Communists proved every bit as ruthless as the French.
00:39:00It is better to kill even those who might be innocent, one commander said, than to let a guilty person go.
00:39:09And they specifically targeted anyone who had links to the French.
00:39:14Once my father started working for the French, then he was a target.
00:39:19Especially the higher he rose, the bigger target he became.
00:39:24A Vietnamese agent actually came in with a pistol to shoot him, but at the last moment decided not to.
00:40:0312 tầng áp bức.
00:40:12French casualties continued to mount.
00:40:17There are days when we are so discouraged that we would like to give it all up,
00:40:21a French soldier wrote his mother. Convoys under attack, roads cut,
00:40:27firing in all directions every night. The indifference at home.
00:40:33I had the opportunity to call my mother, you know,
00:40:47and I was telling my mother what was happening over there and I was telling her how
00:40:52she shouldn't believe what she sees in the newspaper and
00:40:55or sees on television because we're losing the war.
00:40:59I said, you'll probably never see me again because
00:41:01we're the most northern outposts that the Marines have. You know, we could literally
00:41:06could look right into Vietnam. We could see the sparks when the guns fired on us.
00:41:10And I said, everybody in my unit's dying.
00:41:13I probably won't be coming back. And my mother said, no, you're coming back.
00:41:17She said, I talk to God every day and you're special.
00:41:21You're coming back.
00:41:22And I said, my, everybody's mother thinks that they're special.
00:41:28You know, I'm putting pieces of special people in bags.
00:41:37President Truman's dramatic announcement that Russia had the atom secret caused state
00:41:41departments all over the world to stir uneasily.
00:41:44We were very aware that there was a cold war and that we had an enemy and that enemy was the Soviet
00:41:54Union. The United States stood at one pole and the Soviet Union stood at the other pole. It was kind
00:42:01of a Manichaean dynamic that there was evil and there was good and we were good and the other side
00:42:07was evil. It wasn't morally ambiguous. Just a few weeks after Russia became a nuclear power,
00:42:18there was more stunning news. Communist forces under Mao Zedong seized control of China.
00:42:27Separate communist insurrections were also underway in the British colonies of Burma and Malaya.
00:42:33In January 1950, Mao formally recognized Ho Chi Minh's insurgency and agreed to provide the arms,
00:42:44equipment and military training he had been seeking. The Soviets recognized the Viet Minh as well and
00:42:52also offered help. President Truman, who was being blamed by his political opponents for having lost
00:43:00China and having failed to contain communism, approved a $23 million aid program for the French in Vietnam.
00:43:11The United States was no longer neutral.
00:43:15We were caught on the horns of a dilemma of how can we maintain our friendship and our alliance with the
00:43:22French and support them in Indochina while we as a former colony ourselves sympathize with the Vietnamese
00:43:30and their aspirations for freedom and independence.
00:43:38A highly trained and well-equipped North Korean army swarmed across the 30th parallel to attack unprepared
00:43:44South Korean and South Korean defenders. In June of 1950, China's ally, communist North Korea, invaded South Korea.
00:43:56President Truman ordered tens of thousands of American ground troops onto the Korean peninsula.
00:44:02The United States and its allies eventually pushed the invaders back north.
00:44:15Meanwhile, in southern China, Mao's military was beginning to turn the Viet Minh into a modern fighting
00:44:22force, capable of inflicting a heavy toll on the French occupiers.
00:44:32In July, the Truman administration quietly dispatched transport planes and a shipload of jeeps to Vietnam.
00:44:44Thirty-five military advisers went along to oversee their use.
00:44:50None of them and no one in the American embassy spoke a word of Vietnamese.
00:44:56But the United States was now officially in Vietnam.
00:45:04In October of 1950, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops began pouring into North Korea,
00:45:12driving the allies back down the peninsula. As that fighting raged, Truman continued to increase
00:45:20military aid for the French war in Vietnam.
00:45:27If aggression is successful in Korea, we can expect it to spread throughout Asia
00:45:32and Europe and to this hemisphere.
00:45:37We are fighting in Korea for our own national security and survival.
00:45:41In the autumn of 1951, a young Massachusetts congressman named John F. Kennedy dined at the rooftop bar
00:45:57of the Hotel Majestic overlooking Saigon. As he and his party ate, they could hear the thunder of guns
00:46:05across the Saigon River. French commanders assured Kennedy that with more American support,
00:46:13French rule would be re-established. But Kennedy spent two hours with Seymour Topping,
00:46:20a seasoned American reporter who gave him a very different perspective.
00:46:25The French were losing, he said, and many Vietnamese who had once admired the Americans
00:46:31were beginning to despise them for backing the French. Kennedy believed the reporter.
00:46:39Unless the United States could persuade the Vietnamese that it was as opposed to injustice
00:46:45and inequality as it was to communism, he told his constituents when he got home,
00:46:51the current effort would result in foredoomed failure.
00:46:55In 1952, General Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, in part because he promised to take a tougher
00:47:13stance on communism. That year, American taxpayers were footing more than 30 percent of the bill
00:47:21for the French war in Vietnam. Within two years, that number would rise to nearly 80 percent.
00:47:33Many of you ask this question. Why is the United States spending hundreds of millions of dollars
00:47:40supporting the forces of the French Union in the fight against communism in Indochina?
00:47:47I think perhaps if we go over to the map here, I can indicate to you why it is so vitally important.
00:47:54Here is Indochina. If Indochina falls,
00:47:58Thailand is put in almost impossible position. The same is true of Malaya with its rubber and tin.
00:48:05Now, may I say that as far as the war in Indochina is concerned, that I was there,
00:48:12right on the battlefield, or close to it, and it's a bloody war, and it's a better one.
00:48:22By 1953, the French had been fighting for seven years. They had suffered over 100,000 casualties
00:48:31and failed to pacify the countryside. Six commanders had come and gone.
00:48:36Nevertheless, the seventh commander, General Henri Navarre, assured his countrymen that victory was
00:48:44near. Now we can see it clearly, he said, like the light at the end of the tunnel.
00:48:54Meanwhile, large parts of the French population were horrified by reports of French brutality,
00:49:00and the widespread use of napalm, gelatinized petroleum that burned foliage, homes, and human flesh.
00:49:13When returning French troops disembarked at Marseille, members of the Longshoremen's Union pelted them
00:49:20with rocks. Parisian leftists began to call the conflict La Salle Guerre, the Dirty War.
00:49:30The camera was a close-up, was over the shoulder of the stormtrooper, who had a kid by the
00:49:43cruff of his shirt, and he smacked someone. At that moment in time, I realized that anybody
00:49:49who really cared for America was spent halfway around the world chasing some ghost in the jungle.
00:49:55In the meantime, my country's being torn apart. So I saw somebody who looked like my dad,
00:50:02hitting somebody who looked like me. Whose side would I be on?
00:50:05In Korea, three years of combat end as United Nations and communist negotiators at Panmunjom sign a
00:50:19truce. In July of 1953, the Korean War ended in a negotiated settlement and a still divided peninsula.
00:50:29American policymakers saw it as proof that communism in Asia could be contained.
00:50:35And in Washington, a dramatic evening press...
00:50:37That fall, the French indicated their willingness to begin talks to end the fighting in Vietnam.
00:50:44Ho Chi Minh agreed to meet. But before the negotiators were to convene in Geneva,
00:50:53each side sought to improve its position on the battlefield. General Navarre set up a fortified base
00:51:01in a remote valley in northwestern Vietnam called Dien Bien Phu, where he hoped to lure the Viet Minh into a
00:51:09decisive battle. Navarre was certain that superior French firepower and air support would crush any attack by
00:51:19the Viet Minh. He and his commanders saw no need to worry about the jungle-covered hills that overlooked his
00:51:2711,000 men dug in on the valley floor. The artillery commander was so confident of victory,
00:51:36he complained. I have more guns than I need. General Zopp saw his chance. We decided to wipe out,
00:51:48at all costs, the whole enemy force at Dien Bien Phu, he remembered.
00:51:53To do it, he pulled off one of the greatest logistical feats in military history, a feat that would be
00:52:02restaged in propaganda films and celebrated for decades. A quarter of a million civilian porters,
00:52:11nearly half of them women, moved everything he needed for a siege, from sacks of rice to disassembled
00:52:19artillery pieces, on foot, through the jungle. Zopp surrounded the valley with 50,000 soldiers
00:52:28and 200 big guns, dug in and camouflaged so well they could not be spotted from the air.
00:52:36On March 13, 1954, the Et Minh artillery on the hillsides began raining down 50 shells
00:52:49a minute on the French troops huddled below. The airstrip was destroyed.
00:52:56The besieged troops could only be reinforced and resupplied by airdrop.
00:53:09The French artillery commander, who had underestimated his enemy, committed suicide.
00:53:17The airlift to Dien Bien Phu continues, vital men and supplies for the heroic garrison that has
00:53:22defied the massed Vietnam onslaughts for over six weeks. Today, Dien Bien Phu is a human dam,
00:53:28trying to stem the red tide that threatens to engulf Southeast Asia.
00:53:33The French government begged President Eisenhower to intervene. He refused to act without
00:53:40congressional approval and support from European allies. Britain said no, and the Congress would not
00:53:48support unilateral action. The communists under Ho Chi Minh are able to claim that they are fighting
00:53:54for independence, and the French appear to be fighting for a maintenance of colonial rule.
00:53:59I therefore believe that before the United States moves in in any degree, that independence must be
00:54:05granted to the people, that the people must support the struggle. I am convinced Eisenhower confided to
00:54:13his diary that no military victory is possible in this theater. Still, without consulting Congress,
00:54:21the President had secretly sent more American transport planes, their markings painted over and
00:54:29flown by civilian contractors to help resupply the desperate French troops at Dien Bien Phu.
00:54:36Everyone understood that in and of itself, Vietnam didn't mean very much.
00:54:46But they believed, I believed, if we lost it, that the rest of Asia would tumble to communism.
00:54:53You have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the falling domino principle.
00:55:01You have a row of dominoes set up, and you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the
00:55:09last one is that the certainly little go over very quickly.
00:55:24On the afternoon of May 7th, 1954, after 55 days of siege, the exhausted French forces at Dien Bien Phu surrendered.
00:55:46They had lost 8,000 men, killed, wounded, or missing.
00:55:58General Zap had lost three times as many, but he had won a great victory.
00:56:03Even Zhuang Van Mai's parents could not help but be impressed.
00:56:21Even Zhuang Van Mai's parents could not help but be impressed.
00:56:26We have been caught bluffing by our enemies, Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson said.
00:56:50Today, it is Indochina. Tomorrow, Asia may be in flames. And the day after, the Western Alliance will lie in ruins.
00:57:02We should have seen it as the end of the colonial era in Southeast Asia, which it really was.
00:57:08But instead, we saw it in Cold War terms, and we saw it as a defeat for the free world
00:57:15that was related to the rise of China. And it was a total misreading of a pivotal event,
00:57:23which cost us very dearly.
00:57:31The former home of the League of Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, where East is meeting West
00:57:35in the international conference that may decisively affect the political future of Asia.
00:57:39The day after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, diplomats from nine nations gathered in Geneva to settle the
00:57:48future of Vietnam. The talks dragged on for nearly two and a half months.
00:57:58Despite their victory, Ho Chi Minh and General Zap could not keep fighting without more support from
00:58:05China and the Soviet Union. But China had lost a million men in Korea and did not want to become
00:58:13involved in another war along its border. The Soviet Union was hoping to ease tensions with the West.
00:58:23Both of Ho Chi Minh's communist patrons urged him to agree to a negotiated settlement,
00:58:29a partition like the one that had ended the Korean War. Ho had no option but to give in.
00:58:41In the end, no one was satisfied.
00:58:46Vietnam was temporarily to be divided at the 17th parallel. The 130,000 French-led troops stationed in
00:58:55the North were to withdraw to the South, and somewhere between 50 and 90,000 Viet Minh were to
00:59:02regroup to the North. The two halves would be separated by a demilitarized zone, until an election could
00:59:10be held to reunify North and South Vietnam, an election everyone knew Ho Chi Minh would win.
00:59:18Vietnam was signed by the German Union to receive two months from a judicial approval for the
00:59:23Supreme Court in Europe to receive a resiquation.
00:59:26The United States esca. No one believed the
00:59:27Uichasher Union was the extension of the United States.
00:59:28I was a更all B 너무 customer on the Board to become involved in so many years.
00:59:32They were going outside the United States to look back for many years.
00:59:32They were living in New South and New South.
00:59:34They were making a new image to使ils in New South.
00:59:37We had started walking up, and we'd probably gotten about a third of the way up the hill, and then they unleashed on us.
01:00:02We were in the middle of this horrible shit sandwich. That's what we called it.
01:00:07One of the things that I learned in the war is that we're not the top species on the planet because we're nice.
01:00:21People talk a lot about how well the military turns kids into killing machines and stuff, and I'll always argue that it's just finishing school.
01:00:29Braving the dangers of the open sea in tiny rickety crap, thousands of Roman Catholic and Buddhist faith have found life impossible under the Communists. For them, it's freedom or nothing.
01:00:47Under the Geneva Accords, civilians living in either half of Vietnam who wanted to relocate to the other would have 300 days to do so.
01:01:05My mother and father wanted to stay and meet my sister Thang again because they knew Thang would come back, but on the other hand, they couldn't risk that.
01:01:15They were convinced that when Ho Chi Minh and his government arrived in Hanoi, my father would be the first one to be killed, and all of us would be persecuted.
01:01:28And I remember the day we left, I looked around, I thought, I'll never come back here again.
01:01:38It was extremely traumatic. It was like the ground was suddenly cut from under you.
01:01:45In the end, some 900,000 refugees, including more than half of all the Catholics living in the North, fled to the South, many of them aboard American ships.
01:02:04The United States hoped somehow to encourage the building of a legitimate government in the South.
01:02:10That government was now headed by Ngo Deng Diem, both a Roman Catholic and a Confucian in a largely Buddhist country.
01:02:22He was a celibate bachelor who had once planned to be a priest.
01:02:28The war for us really started when we became the partner, or I would say the victim, of President Diem.
01:02:38We were going to help him turn South Vietnam into a democracy.
01:02:43That's what he said he wanted to do, and we believed him.
01:02:47Like Ho Chi Minh, Diem had spent years abroad seeking support for his own brand of Vietnamese nationalism.
01:02:55He was a veteran politician whose loathing for the French was matched only by his hatred for the Communists, who had imprisoned him and buried alive his eldest brother and his nephew.
01:03:10Diem was aloof, autocratic, mistrustful of anyone much beyond his own family.
01:03:16He also proved to be shrewd, resourceful, and skilled at exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents.
01:03:25But he faced a daunting task in creating a new country.
01:03:29The French, who still had thousands of troops stationed in the south, detested Diem.
01:03:38Several provinces were under the sway of religious sects, with armies of their own.
01:03:44Tens of thousands of Viet Minh soldiers had gone north, but several thousand cadre, trained and dedicated Communist Party workers, had stayed behind to organize resistance in the countryside.
01:03:59And Saigon itself was ruled by the Binh Suyen, a crime syndicate backed by the French.
01:04:07And the French were behind the Binh Suyen sort of supporting them, because they didn't want Diem to succeed.
01:04:14And that became the central contest.
01:04:17Some in the CIA believed that Diem could be the savior of South Vietnam.
01:04:24Others were not so sure.
01:04:25He is a messiah without a message, one diplomat reported to Washington.
01:04:32The U.S. ambassador agreed.
01:04:35On April 27th, 1955, President Eisenhower decided to end American support for Diem's regime.
01:04:44But then, Diem made an all-out assault on the Binh Suyen syndicate.
01:04:54Suddenly, in the middle of the day, we heard gunfire, and then we saw flames, and the neighborhood was burning.
01:05:03There are hundreds of dead and wounded on both sides as the street fighting continues for an entire week.
01:05:09For the United States, the situation presents a grave problem.
01:05:13Diem finally regains control of Saigon.
01:05:16In the end, Diem's forces prevailed.
01:05:23Eisenhower now saw no option but to stick with Diem.
01:05:29The French then announced their intention to withdraw completely from South Vietnam, ending nearly a century of occupation.
01:05:39Diem became wildly popular because he seemed to embody the nationalist cause in the South.
01:05:49He succeeded in getting the French out of Vietnam all the way, and Ho Chi Minh had only got them out of the northern half.
01:05:56Flush with victory, Diem called for a referendum in the South.
01:06:02The CIA warned him not to meddle too much with the returns.
01:06:08But when the ballots were counted, Diem claimed to have won 98.2% of the vote.
01:06:15On October 26, 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem named himself the first president of the brand-new Republic of Vietnam.
01:06:30The election to reunify the North and South that had been promised at Geneva would never be held.
01:06:37He became our ally, or rather, our master, because the goal of preventing the communism taking over the South was so strong that we couldn't afford for him to lose.
01:06:54So Diem started to boss us around.
01:06:58And this was a typical relationship.
01:06:59You need any ally you believe to be the centerpiece of your foreign policy.
01:07:06They understand that right away.
01:07:08And the tail wags the dog.
01:07:14From the Far East comes a distinguished visitor.
01:07:17President Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam is accorded one of President Eisenhower's rare airport greetings as he arrives for a four-day state visit.
01:07:24President Diem, one of America's staunchest allies in Southeast Asia, will seek an increase in aid to shore up his country against increasing communist pressure.
01:07:34A request to which the president lends a sympathetic ear.
01:07:39Most politicians, Democrats as well as Republicans, now seem to share the changing views of Senator John F. Kennedy.
01:07:46South Vietnam is our offspring, he said. We cannot abandon it. If it fell, the United States would be held responsible. And our prestige in Asia will sink to a new low.
01:08:00There had never before been a South Vietnamese nation. But Americans, who had rebuilt much of their own country during the New Deal, and had helped rebuild Western Europe through the Marshall Plan, were convinced they could build one nonetheless.
01:08:18Eisenhower ordered scores of American civilians to South Vietnam, full of plans for economic development, meant to win, he hoped, the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.
01:08:34But those civilians would always be outnumbered by military advisors, with orders to modernize, train, and equip Diem's forces, now called the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the ARVN.
01:08:53Some ARVN officers found American methods unsuited to the guerrilla war they expected to wage against the communists.
01:09:04Most American military advisors were veterans of the war in Korea, determined to prepare South Vietnamese forces to slow a conventional invasion from the North.
01:09:15But no one in North Vietnam was planning a conventional invasion.
01:09:25Ho Chi Minh was focused on rebuilding his country, devastated by more than a decade of war.
01:09:35The communists imposed brutal land reforms, modeled on those underway in China, with a ruthlessness that left thousands of people dead.
01:09:45Including not only landlords who had sided with the French, but also many villagers who had fought with the Viet Minh.
01:09:56Ho Chi Minh was still determined to reunite Vietnam.
01:10:00But he worried that if he took direct military action against the South, the United States would be drawn more deeply into the struggle.
01:10:07He cautioned his comrades in the South to put their faith in political agitation and avoid violence.
01:10:18But that message rang hollow among embattled Southern revolutionaries struggling to survive under Diem's increasingly harsh regime.
01:10:27In a campaign he called Denounce the Communists, Diem had imprisoned tens of thousands of citizens without trial, and ordered the executions of hundreds more.
01:10:44Now, the communists took matters into their own hands, and began attacking South Vietnamese officials.
01:10:52For example, the Nimitz colonial caTOone's capital JOSHI had несколько fresh rehab, and they went to theиваемs.
01:11:00The Chinese Security Commission were able to help the shoddy by Buri-ka, for many years.
01:11:06The soldiers met a relationship with桑 Tsai-gee-paular Herman, the store-smart,
01:11:07for many of them going to kill the DAI-UA!.
01:11:09The� general status of domination of the guychine II's propaganda became the strongest regime in controlling the
01:11:19forces of the Music الص-antitsu.
01:11:21As violence in South Vietnam intensified, new leaders emerged in Hanoi.
01:11:39Ho Chi Minh would remain the face of the revolution around the world,
01:11:44but he now began to share power with men who were growing impatient with his caution.
01:11:50Men about whom Americans knew almost nothing.
01:11:55The most important proved to be a carpenter's son from Quang Tri Province in the South named Lei Zuan.
01:12:04He had helped found the Indo-Chinese Communist Party, survived nearly ten years in a French prison,
01:12:12and proved himself a shrewd political infighter as he rose to become first secretary of the party.
01:12:20In 1951, I met him in the first time.
01:12:25At that time, I was a young man who didn't learn anything.
01:12:29He was a person who was different from many other leaders.
01:12:35He brought the aim of the people of the Middle East.
01:12:40By 1959, Lei Zuan and his hardline allies were gaining influence within the North Vietnamese Politburo and beginning to change its policy.
01:12:52They now argued that Hanoi should do everything within its power to help southern revolutionaries remove Diem by force.
01:13:15The North Vietnamese adopted a more aggressive posture.
01:13:21They did not accept the division of the country as such,
01:13:26and they would like to have the country reunified again at any cost.
01:13:34Now, bands of 40 to 50 armed Viet Minh began slipping back home into South Vietnam,
01:13:43following jungle paths hacked through the Laotian Mountains that the Americans would soon call the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
01:13:53Violence against the Diem regime steadily accelerated.
01:14:02On the evening of July 8th, 1959, at Bien Hoa, 20 miles northeast of Saigon,
01:14:18six American military advisers were watching a movie in their mess hall.
01:14:24Viet Minh guerrillas who had crept silently into the compound opened fire through the windows.
01:14:36Major Dale Bice from Pender, Nebraska,
01:14:39and Master Sergeant Chester Avnand from Copperas Cove, Texas, were killed.
01:14:45They were the first American soldiers to die from enemy fire in the Vietnam War.
01:14:55We must prove all over again to a watching world, as we stand on a most conspicuous stage,
01:15:03whether this nation, conceived as it is, with its freedom of choice, its breadth of opportunity,
01:15:11its range of alternatives, can compete with the single-minded advance of the communist system.
01:15:19On November 8th, 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected president of the United States.
01:15:26His vice president was Senator Lyndon Johnson.
01:15:29They had narrowly beaten Vice President Richard Nixon and his running mate Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.
01:15:39During the campaign, both Kennedy and Nixon had pledged to hold the line against international communism,
01:15:46wherever it seemed to be a threat.
01:15:50But very few Americans knew or cared about what was going on in Vietnam.
01:15:56Six weeks after Kennedy's election, at a remote jungle village called Tun Lop, near the Cambodian border,
01:16:05representatives of southern revolutionary groups met to form a new organization to replace the Viet Minh,
01:16:12dedicated to overthrowing Ngo Dinh Diem and ousting the foreigners supporting him.
01:16:18Behind the scenes, Lei Zouan and his communist comrades in Hanoi were orchestrating everything.
01:16:27The new organization would be called the National Liberation Front, the NLF.
01:16:35The armed wing of the NLF was called the People's Liberation Armed Forces,
01:16:43but its enemies in Saigon and Washington preferred a more disparaging term.
01:16:50In their eyes, the revolutionaries were communist traitors to the Vietnamese nation, the Viet Cong.
01:16:57The international members were declared that the people of the NLF were destined to defeat the last number of the NLF.
01:17:15The people of the NLF were destined to defeat the last number of the NLF.
01:17:17The people of the NLF were destined to defeat the Vietnam War.
01:17:19and it is a very important thing.
01:17:23In fact, people can't understand
01:17:26the North Pole
01:17:29that the most powerful message
01:17:32is the death of their own.
01:17:36After this,
01:17:38the war will be the best
01:17:40to death many people like this.
01:17:49nation know whether it wishes us well or ill that we shall pay any price bear any burden
01:18:03meet any hardship support any friend oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of
01:18:13liberty for me i'd always thought of courage as charging enemy bunkers or standing up under fire
01:18:34but just to walk day after day from village to village and through the paddies up into the
01:18:41mountains just to get up in the morning and look out at the land and think in a few minutes i'll be
01:18:51walking out there and will my corpse be there or there i lose a leg out there just to walk felt
01:19:00incredibly brave i would sometimes look at my legs as i walked thinking how am i doing this
01:19:11oh where have you been my blue-eyed son
01:19:24and where have you been my darling young one
01:19:28i've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
01:19:38i've walked and i crawled on six crooked highways
01:19:44i've stepped in the middle of seven side forests
01:19:48i've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
01:19:57i've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
01:20:02and it's hard and it's hard it's hard it's a hard it's a hard it's a hard rain
01:20:13that seems
01:20:15that gonna fall
01:20:22oh what did you see my blue-eyed son
01:20:26And what did you see, my darling young one
01:20:33I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
01:20:40I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
01:20:46I saw a black branch with blood that kept dripping
01:20:56I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleeding
01:21:02I saw a white ladder all covered with water
01:21:09I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
01:21:16I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
01:21:21And it's hard, it's hard, it's hard
01:21:26And it's hard, it's hard rains are gonna fall
01:21:36And it's hard, it's hard, it's hard
01:21:41And it's hard, it's hard rains are gonna fall
01:22:11It's hard, it's hard woman
01:22:12Where does the signs decide to fall
01:22:13And the same way from those times
01:22:26Or the same way from those times
01:22:28And the same way from those hiv arc teams
01:22:30Can they control those in the right direction?
01:22:32Would you relax that way based on that בא�
01:22:35And I have no other way from a or lagi
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