(radio chatter)
(distant helicopter blades beating)
ROGER HARRIS: Soldiers adapt.
You go over there with one mindset, you know,
and then you adapt.
You adapt to the atrocities of war.
You adapt to...
...killing and dying, you know.
After a while it doesn't bother you.
Well, I should say it doesn't bother you as much.
When I first arrived in Vietnam, there were some...
(sighs)
there were some interesting things that happened
and I questioned some of the Marines.
I was made to realize that this is war, and this is what we do.
And that stuck in my head.
This is war.
This is what we do.
And after a while you embrace that.
This is war.
This is what we do.
("Are You Experienced?" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience playing)
This evening I came here to speak to you about Vietnam.
There is progress in the war itself,
rather dramatic progress considering the situation
that actually prevailed when we sent our troops there in 1965.
The grip of the Viet Cong on the people is being broken.
HENDRIX: ♪ If you can just get your mind together ♪
(rapid gunfire)
♪ Then come across to me
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1967,
the men overseeing the war in Vietnam
remained outwardly optimistic--
whatever private doubts they may have held.
HENDRIX: ♪ But first
♪ Are you experienced?
(airplane flying overhead)
(explosion)
♪ Have you ever been experienced? ♪
NARRATOR: The American military command in Vietnam, MACV,
claimed to have killed 200,000 enemy troops
and had told the president
that the all-important "crossover point"--
the moment when U.S. and ARVN forces were killing
more Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops
than the enemy could replace-- appeared to have been reached
in almost all of South Vietnam.
But the United States had suffered
nearly 75,000 casualties.
By July 4, 14,624 Americans had died,
and, off the record,
many officers were much less sanguine than their commanders.
From Saigon, R.W. Apple of theNew York Time s summarized
their views: "Victory is not close at hand," he wrote.
In fact, "It may be beyond reach."
("Are You Experienced?" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience playing)
(rapid gunfire)
It was true that the enemy rarely won a battle
in the traditional military sense that they drove
the Americans from the field.
But it was also true that no American victory
seemed to matter.
Battered enemy units were quickly reinforced and rearmed.
Pacification-- winning the hearts and minds
of the South Vietnamese people-- was not working.
Saigon still controlled only a fraction of a country
roughly the size of Florida,
and its government remained
unpopular and riddled with corruption.
President Johnson had been forced to raise taxes
to meet the war's ever-climbing cost.
His ambitious social program-- his War on Poverty--
was in retreat.
HENDRIX: ♪ Trumpets and violins I can hear in the distance ♪
NARRATOR: That summer, racial unrest would grip American cities.
HENDRIX: ♪ Maybe now you can't hear them ♪
♪ But you will
NARRATOR: The president would have to send the Army into Detroit
to end five days of rioting
that left 43 dead and hundreds of buildings razed.
Twenty-six more died in Newark, New Jersey,
demonstrating yet again how wide a gap
remained between black and white Americans.
Only a third of the country saw any sign of progress in Vietnam,
and half of the country now disapproved
of the president's handling of the war.
Meanwhile, Le Duan and his comrades
who ran things in Hanoi, were secretly planning
a new offensive that they believed would destroy
what they called the puppet government in Saigon
and convince the United States the war could never be won
on the battlefield.
JAMES WILLBANKS: There'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,
and they put on the old punch cards everything
you could quantify-- numbers of ships,
numbers of airplanes, numbers of tanks, numbers of helicopters,
artillery, machine gun, ammo-- everything you could quantify,
put it in the hopper and said, "When will we win in Vietnam?"
Went away on Friday.
The thing ground away all weekend.
Came back on Monday and there was one card in the output tray
and it said, "You won in 1965."
The only problem is the enemy gets a vote
and they weren't on the punch cards.
NARRATOR: There were nearly half a million American soldiers in Vietnam
by the middle of 1967,
with thousands more on the way.
Only 20% would ever be in combat.
The rest served in support units.
None of them had been taught very much about the people
against whom-- and for whom-- they had been asked to fight.
Troops called the Vietnamese "gooks"--
a term first used by U.S. Marines to refer
to the people of Haiti and Nicaragua
during the American occupation of those countries,
and then applied to the Asian enemy in Korea.
Or "slopes," an epithet for the Japanese during the Pacific War,
or "dinks," an Australian term for the Chinese.
And so in basic training they taught you
that you were going to be fighting gooks.
It was part of the song that you sang
as you jogged down the road.
As you went through bayonet training,
you were not talking about Vietnamese.
You were always talking about gooks.
Vietnamese might be people, but gooks are-are...
are close to being animals.
NARRATOR: GIs 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.
Soldiers referred to older Vietnamese women as "mama sans,"
the term they used for women who ran whorehouses
in occupied Japan.
The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese
called GIs "invaders," "imperialists,"
and (speaking Vietnamese)--
"American bandits."
South Vietnam had been divided into four tactical zones.
By the summer of 1967, American troops were fighting
in all four of them.
In IV Corps, the "Brown Water Navy"
patrolled the rivers and canals and marshes
of the densely populated Mekong Delta,
searching for the enemy.
In III Corps, the Army continued to sweep the thick jungles
of the Iron Triangle, the Viet Cong sanctuary
near Saigon that was supposed to have been permanently denied
to the enemy by big American operations earlier in the year.
In II Corps, a series of bloody battles
in the Central Highlands around Dak To temporarily drove
North Vietnamese troops back into Cambodia and Laos.
But some of the most intense combat would take place
in I Corps-- made up of the five northernmost provinces
of South Vietnam-- where the Marines would bear
the brunt of the fighting.
More than two-and-a-half million people lived there,
all but 2% of them within
the narrow rice-growing river valleys
along the South China Sea.
The Marines wanted to eradicate the Viet Cong there,
and provide security to the people,
village by village, hamlet by hamlet.
The vast, largely empty highlands that stretched
westward all the way to Laos, the Marines argued,
could be left to the enemy.
"The real war is among the people,"
said Marine lieutenant general Victor Krulak,
"and not among the mountains."
But General William Westmoreland,
the American commander, feared that thousands
of North Vietnamese Army regulars-- the NVA--
were planning to seize the two northernmost provinces.
Finding and destroying them remained his first goal.
(helicopter blades beating)
He insisted the Third Marine Division
move north to meet that challenge,
establish a base at Dong Ha and man strongpoints at Gio Linh,
Con Thien, Cam Lo, Camp Carroll, the Rockpile and Khe Sanh.
Khe Sanh overlooked Route 9, the East-West highway
that Westmoreland hoped would one day carry American troops
across the border into Laos, where North Vietnamese men
and supplies were streaming south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
But 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.
("I'm a Man" by The Spencer Davis Group playing"
(explosions)
JOHN LAURENCE: Tell me...
You came here at full strength?
I had 13 men when I came.
And it's four days later now and how many are still here?
Six.
("I'm a Man" continues)
The rifles have been jamming, the mud's been...
it slowed everything down.
And the artillery comes in everywhere.
And, ah, it just gets pretty futile
and frustrating sometimes.
("I'm a Man" continues)
I can't say that I'm scared stiff, but I'm scared.
I mean, after a while, you know it's going to come.
And you can't do nothing about it.
And you just look to God.
SPENCER DAVIS GROUP: ♪ Well, my pad is very messy
♪ And there's whiskers on my chin. ♪
NARRATOR: Private First Class John Musgrave
of Fairmount, Missouri, who had volunteered to join
the 3rd Marine Division,
was sent to the battle-scarred countryside around Con Thien,
a few kilometers south of the DMZ.
(explosion)
JOHN MUSGRAVE: For the Marines in northern I Corps in the 3rd Marine Division
in the spring and summer of 1967 we called the DMZ
the "Dead Marine Zone."
NARRATOR: Musgrave's 1st Battalion had already suffered
so many casualties in a series of bloody sweeps
that it was believed to be a hard-luck outfit.
They were called the "Walking Dead."
SPENCER DAVIS GROUP: ♪ I'm a man, yes I am, and I can't... ♪
MUSGRAVE: I joined the Marine Corps to be in the varsity.
And I felt like I wasn't varsity unless I was up north
fighting the NVA.
I have never regretted that decision.
There were times when we were under artillery fire,
where I thought, you know, "What-what were you thinking?"
Here it is in a nutshell: if I lived to be 63 years old,
I 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,
that let somebody else do the harder part.
Every major contact I remember with the NVA was initiated
by them ambushing us.
They wouldn't hit us unless they outnumbered us.
And we were fighting in their yard.
They knew the ground; we didn't.
They were just really good.
LE VAN CHO:
NARRATOR: The North Vietnamese carried Soviet-made,
seemingly indestructible AK-47s.
The Marines had to fight with newly issued M-16 rifles
that had for a time a potentially fatal design flaw:
they needed constant cleaning
and often jammed in the middle of firefights.
MUSGRAVE: Their rifles worked; ours didn't.
The M-16 was a piece of shit.
You can't throw your bullets at the enemy
and have them be effective.
And that rifle malfunctioned on us repeatedly.
(gunfire)
HO HUU LAN:
My hatred for them was pure.
Pure.
I hated them so much.
And I was so scared of them.
Boy, I was terrified of them.
And the scareder I got, the more I hated them.
MUSGRAVE: I only killed one human being in Vietnam.
And that was the first man that I ever killed.
And I was sick with guilt about killing that guy
and thinking I'm going to have to do this
for the next 13 months.
I'm-I'm going to go crazy.
And I saw a Marine step on a bouncing Betty mine,
and that's when I made my deal with the devil
and that I said, "I will never kill another human being
"as long as I'm in Vietnam.
"However, I will waste as many gooks as I can find.
"I'll wax as many dinks as I can find.
"I'll smoke as many zips as I can find.
But I ain't gonna kill anybody," you know?
Turn the subject into an object.
It's Racism 101.
It turns out to be a very necessary tool
when you have children fighting your wars,
for them to stay sane doing their work.
NARRATOR: On one early patrol, Musgrave watched
an American fighter swoop down to drop napalm on enemy troops
hidden behind a hedgerow.
He could hear their AK-47s firing at the plane
until the instant they were engulfed in flames.
"If the enemy is willing to die like that," he thought,
"this is going to be one very long war."
MUSGRAVE: They knew if they would pop the ambush close
and then get amongst you,
we couldn't or would hesitate to call in air on ourselves.
So that... firefights like that we called brawls.
They were very intimate.
And they were very deadly.
And they were absolutely terrifying.
NARRATOR: The Marines were spread too thin to hold any of the territory
they fought so hard to take.
Again and again, they were sent out from one stronghold
or another along the DMZ, looking for enemy soldiers.
MUSGRAVE: The disillusionment for me began when I was going back
to fight at places we'd already fought before.
We had fought, captured, and then left
and the NVA came right back.
You don't like getting wounded
in places you've already been before.
War is a real estate business.
We're supposed to take real estate away from the enemy
and then deny the enemy access to that real estate.
NARRATOR: On the morning of July 2, 1967, the 1st Battalion launched
yet another sweep of the area northeast of Con Thien.
When they reached a crossroads called "The Marketplace,"
barely a mile and quarter from their base, they were ambushed.
One company was virtually annihilated.
John Musgrave's company rushed to rescue the survivors,
only to be pinned down there as well.
It was one of the worst days the Marine Corps endured in Vietnam:
53 dead and 190 wounded were carried off the battlefield.
Thirty-four more dead had to be left behind,
and when Marines fought their way back two days later
to retrieve their bodies, they found that a number
had died because their M-16s had jammed as the enemy closed in.
Many had been executed, shot in the face
or back of the head at close range.
Some bodies had been booby-trapped,
others mutilated.
MUSGRAVE: Marine amphibious force headquarters
was so desperate to get North Vietnamese prisoners,
that they offered us three day in-country R&R
if we'd bring a prisoner in.
Yeah, good luck.
You know?
Don't you know who... what we're doing up here?
Do you know who we're fighting?
I want to make this clear, we did not torture prisoners
and we did not mutilate them.
But to be a prisoner you had to make it to the rear, you know.
If he was with... fell into our hands
he was just one sorry fucker.
I don't know how to explain it that it would make sense.
("Green Onions" by Booker T. & the M.G.s playing)
HARRIS: Roxbury, where I grew up,
was the African-American neighborhood,
and South Boston was the Irish-Catholic bastion.
You know, there was a lot of hate.
South Boston folks hated us, we hated them.
And ironically, um...
(sighs)
You know, you end up in a war.
And the Vietnamese didn't care
whether you were from Roxbury or South Boston.
They saw you as American.
And they wanted to kill you because you're American.
NARRATOR: Private Roger Harris had joined the Marines in part, he said,
because he wanted to be "a gladiator,"
a killer of his country's enemies.
On July 28, two weeks after
John Musgrave's badly mangled 1st Battalion was pulled back
to rest and recover,
Roger Harris and the 2nd Battalion moved out of Con Thien
and into the southern half of the Demilitarized Zone itself.
HARRIS: We wanted the North Vietnamese Army
to expose themselves.
So, basically, you put the bait out there,
and then we could call in and rain hell on them.
NARRATOR: Roger Harris's battalion advanced into the DMZ
along a rough cart track that led to the Ben Hai River.
But planners had failed to see that a concrete bridge
over an impassable stream
was too narrow and too weak to carry armored vehicles.
Now the Marines had no choice but to violate a cardinal rule
of infantry tactics--
turn around and try to go back the way they had come.
The enemy was waiting.
(explosion, rapid gunfire)
Massive ambushes and...
(gunfire, shouting)
...and, um, a lot of death.
And...
...craziness.
NARRATOR: The Marines were forced to run a bloody gauntlet of mortars,
machine gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades.
HARRIS: I had the utmost respect for the North Vietnamese Army soldiers.
When you see someone jump out and confront a tank, you know,
with a big 50-caliber machine gun on it
and a 90-millimeter cannon on it,
and an individual takes on the tank,
I think that says something.
NARRATOR: Roger Harris's company held up the rear,
hounded by enemy soldiers on all sides.
The Marines staggered back out of the DMZ
alongside the battered armored vehicles
heaped with dead and wounded Americans.
The battalion suffered 214 casualties.
HARRIS: Wasn't a good day for Marines at all.
A lot of people died.
People got their legs shot off.
People got run over by tanks.
I don't want to talk about it because it's...
it's not a good day, wasn't a good day.
LO KHAC TAM:
This is "bau cu", the day of voting in Vietnam,
and it's a solemn day in the village of Hung Thao Phu
and in other villages throughout the country.
And these people have dressed up in their Sunday best for it.
NARRATOR: South Vietnamese prime minister Nguyen Cao Ky
had crushed his Buddhist opponents in 1966,
but he had been forced by the Americans
and his political rivals to make at least tentative moves
toward democracy-- election of a national assembly,
a new constitution, and a promise of elections
for president and vice president.
But when Ky's old adversary Nguyen Van Thieu declared
he wanted to challenge Ky for the top spot,
things in Saigon had threatened to come apart again.
PHAN QUANG TUE: We were watching the rivalry between Thieu and Ky.
And that was a game.
In Vietnam, the country was watching like a...
we were watch... watching a movie.
And Thieu and Ky was watching as to,
not whoever had the support of the people,
but who had the support of the Americans and the White House.
NARRATOR: Ellsworth Bunker, the American ambassador,
called both men to his residence and warned that
the United States would not tolerate another power struggle:
Thieu and Ky needed to meet with their fellow generals
and decide who would run for president
and who would be his running mate.
Thieu emerged on top.
He was unassuming and unflappable,
interested largely in accumulating power
and personal wealth and was thought unlikely
ever to embarrass Washington.
Ky would be his vice president.
Together, they won with only 35% of the vote.
No one who had called for an end to the war
had been allowed to run.
Many Buddhists had boycotted the election,
and Viet Cong intimidation had kept many more from the polls.
But the State Department immediately declared
the election an important "step forward."
Some South Vietnamese did believe that a measure
of stability had finally been achieved.
Others were not so sure.
TUE: In terms of corruption, yes, they were corrupt.
Both Thieu and Ky, they abused their position.
We pay a very high price for having leaders
like a Ky and Thieu.
And we continue to pay the price.
("Soul Dressing" by Booker T. & The M.G.s playing)
EVA JEFFERSON PATERSON: My father was in the United States Army.
And then when the Air Force came about he switched over
to the Air Force.
I grew up out of the country in desegregated settings.
I was usually the only little black girl in the class.
If you look at my class pictures I look
like the little chocolate chip in the vanilla ice cream.
I was always a good student.
I remember people saying, "Oh, you speak so well."
And the unstated part is "for a black girl,"
probably a Negro girl or colored girl, at that point.
NARRATOR: Eva Jefferson's father had served a year on airbases
in Vietnam and returned home convinced the United States
had no business being there.
But when his daughter entered Northwestern University
in the Chicago suburb of Evanston in September 1967,
the war was not uppermost in students' minds.
PATERSON: The war was not really an issue.
It's like, "Well, no, the president has
"our best interests at heart.
"He, of course, would only prosecute a war
that made sense."
And I think most of America felt that way.
("Strange Brew" by Cream playing)
NARRATOR: At the University of Nebraska,
Jack Todd also supported the war.
He had felt so strongly about it in 1966 that he had signed up
for Marine officer training.
I went into the Marine Corps
thinking this was all I wanted to do.
I mean my... my goal was to be commander,
a platoon commander in Vietnam.
NARRATOR: But as time went by and the war went on,
Todd and many of his fellow students
began to change their minds.
TODD: All young people go through changes.
But we were going through astronomical changes
at such a rapid rate.
All the music, the culture, everything that we listened to,
everything that we thought was transforming
and the core of it all was Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam.
It just kept going in the background.
First, it was kind of like a background noise
and then it got to be the elephant in the room.
And then it was the elephant sitting on your head
and we... we couldn't escape this.
NARRATOR: Todd attended officer training school
at Camp Upshur in Quantico, Virginia.
But doubts about the war followed him there, too.
TODD: I guess the emotional things that were happening
on the ground, the photographs that we saw, the news images,
and the fact that there was no discernible progress,
that really started to eat away at what we thought.
In the summer of '67, I was at Camp Upshur, you know,
wanting to go kill Vietnamese people.
And in October, I was completely against the war.
JOHNSON: Westmoreland came in last night to me...
And he says that he has concentrated more firepower
and bombing in the last week on the DMZ
and they've concentrated more on us than has ever been
concentrated in any equivalent period
in the history of warfare...
EVERETT DIRKSEN: Yeah.
JOHNSON: ...much more than was ever poured on
Berlin or Tokyo,
and that his only defense of the DMZ to stop
this aggression up there with the North Vietnamese
trying to come in is bombing their gun positions.
DIRKSEN: Yeah.
JOHNSON: And it would just be suicide if we stopped the bombing
as these idiots talking about.
When you say stop the bombing
you say, "Kill more American Marines."
That's all it means.
DIRKSEN: Yeah.
JOHNSON: Now if we stop bombing, without their talking
and without any reciprocity on their part,
it just means we kill more Americans, that's all
DIRKSEN: Yeah.
NARRATOR: Neither the ongoing bombing of the North,
nor the concentrated bombing around the DMZ,
nor the behind-the-scenes offers
made by President Johnson to stop it
had any discernible effect on Le Duan
and the other men who ran North Vietnam.
But Le Duan, like Lyndon Johnson,
was in trouble that summer.
The war with the Americans had produced little more
than a bloody stalemate.
Some Viet Cong commanders in the South
resented Hanoi's insistence on directing their tactics.
Many North Vietnamese civilians were weary of the war
and of the bombing that had disrupted their lives
and destroyed so much of their infrastructure.
The country's most revered figures,
Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, were urging patience,
continuing to wage a war of attrition, they still believed,
would pay off in the end.
Hanoi's Soviet and Chinese patrons offered
conflicting advice, as well.
To silence his critics and break the stalemate,
Le Duan began to devise and promote
a new and riskier version of the plan for victory
he had tried in 1964.
He called it the "General Offensive, General Uprising."
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units would launch
scores of coordinated attacks on South Vietnamese cities
and towns and military bases.
That offensive, Le Duan believed,
would ignite a mass civilian uprising.
These simultaneous blows would destroy the Saigon regime
and leave Washington with no choice but to withdraw.
WILLBANKS: We talk about our own hubris.
There's some hubris on their side as well.
And once they had convinced themselves
that this was going to be a great success,
it is what some wags have called drinking your own bathwater.
They decided it's going to be a victory,
even though there are people in the South saying,
"Hey, this is not a great idea."
But these people are charged with subjectivism
and basically are told to shut up and keep rolling.
NARRATOR: Le Duan neutralized those who opposed his plan.
Members of General Giap's staff were arrested.
So was Ho Chi Minh's secretary.
HUY DUC:
NARRATOR: Hundreds of less prominent figures-- journalists, students,
even highly decorated heroes of the French War--
were also rounded up.
Many were locked up in the old French prison
that the American POWs also confined there called
the "Hanoi Hilton."
The date eventually chosen for the attack would be
January 31, 1968,
the first day of the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration,
known as Tet.
Hundreds, then thousands, of North Vietnamese regulars
in civilian clothes began slipping southward
to join tens of thousands of Viet Cong already in place.
HO HUU LAN:
HUY DUC:
NARRATOR: In preparation for the coming offensive,
the North Vietnamese hoped to lure American
and South Vietnamese forces away from cities
and big military bases.
To do that, they would mount a series of assaults
on remote outposts near Cambodia, Laos, and the DMZ.
These preliminary attacks became known as the "Border Battles."
Con Thien would be the first.
In September and October,
John Musgrave's and Roger Harris's outfits
took turns defending Con Thien
as the North Vietnamese tightened the noose around them.
The only way in or out was by helicopter.
Con Thien in Vietnamese means "Hill of Angels."
(explosion)
MUSGRAVE: Time at Con Thien was time in the barrel.
(multiple explosions)
We were the fish, they had the shotguns,
they stuck in the barrel and blasted away.
And they were gonna hit something every shot.
Because Con Thien was such a small area,
and they pounded it with that artillery
from North Vietnam, they couldn't miss.
HO HUU LAN:
I've never been, uh, as afraid.
In fact that's why I'm not afraid of anything now.
I mean...
there's nothing you can do.
You just listen to the sounds of the rockets coming over.
And you just pray that they don't land on you.
The big question really seems to be whether or not
the North Vietnamese intend to overrun Con Thien.
The Marines have tripled the number of troops
guarding the outpost,
and they've moved up more battalions to be ready
to reinforce.
MUSGRAVE: I sat in water.
I slept in water.
I ate in water, because our holes were full.
I mean a flooded foxhole could drown a wounded man.
HARRIS: Spend your day filling up sand bags,
trying to create barriers that you just put another layer on,
put another layer on.
A lot of mud, blood, uh...
and artillery.
MUSGRAVE: It's red clay up there.
And it's real sticky and it could just grab onto you
and pull your boots off.
It's hard to run in that stuff.
And running, when you're at a place
where they're firing heavy artillery at you,
running's pretty important.
During the siege in the fall of 1967,
we were getting newspaper articles in the mail
from our families and we were being called the Alamo.
You know, hey, we knew what the Alamo was.
We knew what happened there.
(explosions)
(men shouting)
(explosions continue)
HARRIS: Like almost like every hour there'd be a barrage.
People get blown to bits, literally blown to bits.
You find a... a boot with a leg in it, right.
And so is the leg white or black?
So who... who was the white Marine that was here?
Who was the black?
So then you try to remember and you tag it
and put that in the green bag.
And that's what goes back, you know,
as Marine Lance Corporal so and so.
And so, but sometimes you're not even sure because the body
has literally been blown to bits, and the only thing
that's left is a foot or a piece of an arm.
MUSGRAVE: I carried a wallet calendar from Clifford Forlow Insurance.
He was my dad's insurance agent.
And I marked off each of the days religiously.
And then in October, we went up to Con Thien again.
I just stopped, because I thought, "This is pointless.
"I'm not getting... I'm not gonna go home.
"I'm not gonna make it home.
What... you know, what's the point?"
So I just quit marking them off.
HARRIS: I had the opportunity to call my mother, you know.
And I was telling my mother what was happening over there
and I was telling her how she shouldn't believe
what she sees in the newspaper and-and sees on television
because we're losing the war.
And I said, "You'll probably never see me again
"because we're the most northern outpost that the Marines have,
"you know.
"We could literally could look right into North Vietnam.
We could see the sparks when the guns fired on us."
And I said, "And everybody in my unit is dying, you know.
And I probably won't be coming back."
And my mother said, "No, you're coming back."
She said, "I talk to God every day and you're special.
You're coming back."
And I said, "Ma, everybody's mother thinks that
"they're special, you know.
I'm putting pieces of special people in bags."
And I was feeling that my mother's in denial.
She just doesn't want to face the fact that her only son
is gonna die in Vietnam.
And I said, "Ma, this isn't a joke."
I said, "Everybody's dying over here, you know.
Everybody's dying."
And she said, "You're not gonna die.
You're not gonna die."
And, uh, the last thing she said to me was,
"God has a plan for you."
And I said, "Yeah, right."
And I hung up.
(explosion)
Mr. Stout, during what period of time were you in Vietnam?
I was in Vietnam from September of 1966
to September of 1967, one year.
And with what unit?
With the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne.
During the time that you were in Vietnam,
did you personally witness any atrocities
on the part of American troops?
Yes, I did.
NARRATOR: Dennis Stout from Phoenix, Arizona, had enlisted
in the Army at 20, and served nine months in combat.
Wounded three times, he became an Army reporter
covering the 327th Regiment of the 101st Airborne.
He would spend most of his time with a unique commando platoon
called "Tiger Force"--
small, handpicked teams, capable of remaining
in the jungle for weeks at a time,
fast-moving and deadly,
intended to "out-guerrilla the guerrillas."
Tiger Force fought in six different provinces,
repeatedly suffering heavy losses.
(rapid gunfire)
RION CAUSEY: If you've lost your best friend and you want revenge,
it's the officers who say, "No, you can't do that."
And if you do it, then there's consequences.
But when the officers, and it includes the platoon leader
and the battalion commander, are telling you that this is
what you're supposed to do, then it gets completely out of hand.
NARRATOR: Some at MACV worried that such a freewheeling outfit,
operating on its own, would be difficult to control.
(gunfire)
But General Westmoreland and commanders in the field
admired Tiger Force for its reliable ferocity.
In the summer of 1967, Tiger Force was sent
to the fertile Song Ve Valley.
The entire population had already been herded
from their homes and crowded into a refugee camp.
But some had come back to resume the farming
they had always done.
The valley had officially been declared a free-fire zone,
and Tiger Force's officers took that literally.
"There are no friendlies," one lieutenant told his men.
"Shoot anything that moves."
Over a seven-month period, they killed scores
of unarmed civilians.
Among their victims were two blind brothers;
an elderly Buddhist monk; women, children, and old people
hiding in underground shelters;
and three farmers trying to plant rice.
All were reported as "enemy-- killed in action."
STOUT: These atrocities were committed by soldiers
of units I was assigned to as a reporter
for the Army newspapers, such as...
NARRATOR: Tiger Force was not the only platoon
Dennis Stout covered that crossed the line.
One such incident was the rape and killing
of a Vietnamese girl.
She was captured, kept for interrogation.
Over a two-day period, she was raped, then,
on the morning of the third day, she was killed.
Was she raped by more than one person?
Yes, all but the medic and myself,
and possibly one other man from the platoon.
Did you protest?
Did you try in any way to have them stopped?
Yes. After the rape incident, I complained
to the battalion sergeant major, and his response was that
this type of thing happens in all wars,
and that I was not to mention it; it was a common occurrence.
Then later, I went to the chaplain, told him about it,
he made an investigation himself,
found that this was true, went with me
to the sergeant major.
The sergeant major then said that...
well, he told the chaplain to stick to religion,
sent him away, and then he told me to keep quiet,
that I did nothave t o return from the next operation.
NARRATOR: Years later, another soldier came forward
with more allegations of war crimes,
and an Army investigation would find probable cause
to try 18 members of Tiger Force for murder or assault.
But no charges were ever brought.
The official records were buried in the archives.
WILLBANKS: They should have all gone to jail.
They were guilty of murder.
Period.
At the same time, I felt like that incident,
which I think was an aberration, not the norm,
tarred all veterans, and there are hundreds of thousands
of veterans who went and did their duty,
and as honorable as they possibly could,
and they're tarred with the same brush.
KARL MARLANTES: One of the things that I learned in the war is that
we're not the top species on the planet because we're nice.
We are a very aggressive species.
It is in us.
And people 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.
What we do with civilization is that we learn to inhibit
and rope in these aggressive tendencies.
And we have to recognize them.
I worry about a whole country that doesn't recognize it.
'Cause you think of how many times we get ourselves
in scrapes as a nation because we're always the good guys.
Sometimes, I think if we thought that we weren't always
the good guys, we might actually get in less wars.
(static humming)
REPORTER: Mr. Rubin,
how do you realistically expect to shut down the Pentagon?
The Pentagon represents the murder of people
throughout the world.
And the American people have no control
of what their government's doing.
And so we're going to go there in the scores of thousands,
and block doors and fill hallways,
so the work of the Pentagon stops.
Because the work of the Pentagon should stop.
The only thing to do with the Pentagon is to shut it down.
("Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" by Pete Seeger playing)
♪ It was back in 1942
♪ I was a member of a good platoon ♪
♪ We were on maneuvers in Louisiana ♪
♪ One night by the light of the moon ♪
♪ The captain told us to ford a river ♪
♪ That's how it all begun
♪ We were knee deep in the Big Muddy ♪
♪ The big fool says to push on
BILL ZIMMERMAN: There was a major demonstration either in New York
or in Washington every fall and every spring.
We decided that we would go to the demonstration
in Washington at the Lincoln Memorial in the fall of '67,
but we would take as many people out of that demonstration
as we could and lead them to the Pentagon.
And at the Pentagon, try to do something more militant
than simply stand around and make speeches opposing the war,
which is what these demonstrations had become.
SEEGER: ♪ No man will be able to swim.
ZIMMERMAN: And when the time came to lead people away
from the Lincoln Memorial toward the Pentagon,
50,000 people marched.
SEEGER: ♪ Men, follow me, I'll lead on
♪ We were neck deep in the Big Muddy ♪
♪ The big fool says to push on. ♪
NARRATOR: Bill Zimmerman, now an assistant professor of psychology
at Brooklyn College, had been against the war
since the beginning.
ZIMMERMAN: Then we found when we got there concentric defense perimeters
that had been set up around the Pentagon to keep us
at a distance from the building.
We pushed against them, we tore down their fences.
SEEGER: ♪ With the captain dead and gone ♪
♪ We stripped and dived and found his body. ♪
LESLIE GELB: I was working that weekend day.
The secretaries who were working in my area were frightened
to hell what these Vietnam protesters would do.
They thought they were going to come into the building
and rape them.
Some of them actually came over the walls.
SEEGER: ♪ The big fool said to push on. ♪
GELB: It was a sense of revolution.
(crowd yelling)
SEEGER: ♪ Waist 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. ♪
ZIMMERMAN: God knows what we were going to do when we got in the building.
Some people, the hippies,
said they were going to levitate the building.
Other people wanted to commit vandalism in the building.
Other people wanted to distribute antiwar literature
in the building, talk to people.
Just the idea of getting into the headquarters
of the United States military...
It was the first time that antiwar demonstrators
had confronted active-duty military personnel.
We didn't consider them the enemy.
We considered them victims of the war.
But we began to see our own government as the enemy.
NARRATOR: President Johnson believed that international communism
was somehow behind the demonstration.
He had directed the CIA to come up with the evidence,
and was furious when it found none.
DWIGHT EISENHOWER: Mr. President?
LYNDON JOHNSON: Yes.
This is General Eisenhower.
How've you been, Mr. President?
I'm doing fine under the circumstances.
But we just had hell, and these college students,
I've had Hoover in after them.
They came marched here, and we arrested 600 of them,
and we gave 29 of them pretty tough times.
We found most of them really were mentally diseased.
Hoover's taken 256 that turned in supposedly their draft cards.
So, you're dealing with mental problems,
I think that we talk too damn much
about civil liberties and constitutional rights
of the individual and not enough
about the rights of the masses.
EISENHOWER: That's why we have it.
We have freely elected people and we've got to
stand behind them.
JOHNSON: I think your government's in trouble, General.
I think it's in... I don't want to say this.
But I think we're in more danger
from these left-wing influences now
than we've ever been in 37 years I've been here.
And they're working in my party from within.
And Bobby thinks he's going to get the nomination.
NARRATOR: Allard Lowenstein, a 38-year-old attorney from New York,
shared the antiwar fervor of the protestors,
but he believed the most effective way
to end the fighting was to work within the political system,
not outside it.
The answer, he said, was to stop Lyndon Johnson
from getting a second full term as president.
He had traveled the country all year in search of someone
willing to challenge the president in the upcoming
Democratic primaries.
He asked Senator Robert Kennedy of New York,
who had begun to criticize the Johnson administration
over the war.
He asked Lieutenant General James Gavin.
He asked Senator George McGovern of South Dakota.
They all turned him down.
Lowenstein kept looking.
At Fort Sill, Oklahoma, on November 17, 1967,
friends and family of a fallen soldier gathered
for a funeral, one of five military funerals
held there that month.
First Sergeant Pascal Cleatus Poolaw had been killed
as he tried to drag one of his wounded men
off the battlefield near the village of Loc Ninh.
He was a remarkable soldier, had been awarded one Silver Star
in World War II, two more in Korea, and was awarded a fourth,
posthumously, for his gallantry in Vietnam.
He was a Kiowa Indian.
He and three of his sons were among
the 42,000 Native Americans who would serve in Vietnam,
the highest per capita service rate of any ethnic group
in the United States.
Pascal Poolaw's widow spoke at the ceremony.
"He has followed the trail of the great chiefs," she said.
"His people hold him in honor and highest esteem.
"He has given his life for the people and the country
he loved so much."
("Somebody to Love" by Jefferson Airplane playing)
♪ When the truth is found
♪ To be lies
♪ And all the joy
♪ Within you dies
♪ Don't you want somebody to love? ♪
♪ Don't you need somebody to love? ♪
♪ Wouldn't you love somebody to love? ♪
♪ You better find somebody to love ♪
♪ Love.
MUSGRAVE: I didn't hear the word "hippie" until I was at Con Thien
and we got aPlaybo y, somebody got aPlayboy in the mail,
which was obviously very important to us.
And there was an article on Haight-Ashbury
and pictures of the girls running around
without their tops, you know, free love.
And they were hippies.
And we thought it was "hip pie" cause it had two Ps.
You know, "Hey, I'm gonna go home
"and be one of these hip pies
"because the girls don't wear no clothes.
You know, and they'll go to bed with anybody."
You know, even I could score.
But the only information I had of the peace movement
came fromStars and Stripes.
And that wasn't a real objective newspaper.
And so I hated them
before I ever even knew anything about them.
("Somebody to Love" continues)
NARRATOR: The monsoon rains continued to make life miserable
for John Musgrave and the other Marines at Con Thien.
But by early November, the worst of the shelling had ended.
American airstrikes, artillery, and Navy fire
had taken a fearful toll on the besieging enemy.
Before dawn on November 7, two companies of Musgrave's outfit
were sent half a mile into the countryside
northwest of the base to sweep the area again.
MUSGRAVE: We got into an area that was old hedgerows
that's grown over with jungle.
Very difficult to see very far.
In the clear area, we had three NVA show themselves
and start just spraying 30 rounds out of their AKs
and then booking.
(gunfire)
The company commander himself said, "I want their bodies.
Bring me their bodies."
Everything's about body count, right?
We said, "Man, this is as old as Custer.
"These guys are showing themselves to draw us
"into an ambush.
"Lieutenant, don't do this," you know.
"Please, these guys are bait."
Well, the skipper says, "We got to go.
We got to go."
And... we went.
(gunfire)
And I can't tell you a whole lot about the ambush.
I was one of the first people to be shot.
One round put me down.
(gunfire)
And my grenadier was down, and we were trying to get him back.
And Marines, from the first day in boot camp,
you learn that Marines don't leave their dead,
and they never, never leave their wounded.
And that's why I'm alive today.
First guy that came for me-- I was lying on my face...
(gunfire)
he reached down and stuck his arms under my shoulders
and lifted me up and the machine gun wasn't any far,
was maybe nine feet, ten feet at the most, away from me.
This is a very intimate ambush.
It's a brawl.
(gunfire)
And he fired a burst into my chest that blew me out
of the Marine's arms that was holding me and then he was shot.
(gunfire)
Another very brave young Marine, this 18-year-old from Louisiana,
his first firefight, had seen what happened
and still came for me.
And he reached for me, and he was shot I think in the forearm.
And he was laying beside me.
Now, I've got a hole through my chest big enough
to stick your fist through.
I'm dying and I know it.
(gunfire)
And I heard this horrible screaming going on,
and I was trying to figure out who was screaming like that,
because it sounded so...
(distant gunfire)
And then I realized it was me.
When they began to drag us out, they were being pursued
by the North Vietnamese, and they would drop us
and lay on top of us.
They knew... we were both dying.
The grenadier had been shot in the right side of his chest.
They knew... we were both dead.
But we were still alive.
So, they weren't gonna leave us.
They would die before they would leave us.
And they covered us with their bodies and fired back
at the NVA and then they'd jump up and drag us a little farther
and then drop us and lay back on top of us.
And I kept telling them to leave me.
And I meant it. I meant it.
But all of a sudden I got scared that they might really leave me.
(distant gunfire)
I was triaged three times.
And the senior corpsman said,
"He's either shot through the heart or the lungs.
There's nothing I can do for him."
And he just turned away.
I went, "Well, okay."
And then, a helicopter came in.
And they threw me into the bird.
(distant helicopter blades humming)
And the corpsman on the bird straddled me, stood over me,
and looked down at me, and then looked up at the door gunner
and went... get me out of the way
because he couldn't work on me.
I was a dead man.
(muted helicopter blades beating)
And they flew me to Delta Med at Dong Ha.
And I thought, "Okay, I made it this far."
And this doctor comes over and looks at me
and I'm conscious.
I'm lucid.
And he checks a couple of things.
And I've got this huge hole in me.
And he looks at me right in the eye, and he says,
"What's your religion, Marine?"
And I said, "Well, I'm a Protestant."
And he says, "Get a chaplain over here.
I can't help this man."
And then he walked away.
Another surgeon walks by, and he looked at me,
and I was raised to always be nice to people.
And when he looked at me, I smiled at him and nodded.
And he said, "Why isn't somebody helping this man?"
And inside I'm going,
"Yeah, why isn't somebody helping this man?"
When they put me to sleep, I thought,
"Boy, this is really it," you know.
And it was kind of, "Okay, God,
into your hands, I deliver my spirit."
And I thought that was it.
And when I woke up in the surgical intensive care ward,
which was a Quonset hut,
I thought, "Holy mackerel."
I just couldn't... I couldn't believe it.
Yesterday over Hanoi,
three American planes were shot down
and at least two of their pilots captured.
One of them was Lieutenant Commander John McCain III,
the son of the U.S. Naval commander in Europe.
BAO NINH:
NARRATOR: Hanoi was so pleased to have captured the son
of an American admiral that they allowed a French journalist
to interview McCain in the hospital.
He had just had his broken bones set without even an aspirin
for the pain.
INTERVIEWER: What is your name?
Lieutenant Commander John McCain.
How many raids have you done until the last one?
About 23.
In which circumstances have you been shot down?
I was on a flight over the city of Hanoi,
and I was bombing and I was hit by either a missile
or anti-aircraft fire.
I'm not sure which, and the plane continued straight down,
and I ejected and broke my leg and both arms
and went into a lake; parachuted into a lake.
And I was picked up by some North Vietnamese
and taken to the hospital, where I almost died.
I would just like to tell...
...my wife...
...I will get well...
...and I love her and I hope to see her soon.
NARRATOR: After the interview, McCain was beaten
for not expressing sufficient gratitude to his captors.
(soldiers conversing)
NARRATOR: All through the fall of 1967, the North Vietnamese
and the Viet Cong continued their series of "Border Battles"
in preparation for their surprise offensive,
still months away.
Con Thien, where John Musgrave was wounded,
had been the first.
Then came the ARVN base at Song Be.
The South Vietnamese outpost adjacent to
the provincial capital of Loc Ninh was next.
There, large units of North Vietnamese
and Viet Cong regulars mounted a coordinated attack,
and then fought for five days to hold on to the ground
they'd gained, something they had never done before.
American commanders were puzzled.
Then, in early November, reports reached MACV
that five North Vietnamese regiments
and a Viet Cong battalion-- some 7,000 men in all--
had begun massing in the Central Highlands
around the U.S. Special Forces camp at Dak To again.
Among the North Vietnamese regulars was Nguyen Thanh Son,
who had been so eager to fight that he too had filled
his pockets with rocks to pass his physical.
NGUYEN THANH SON:
NARRATOR: As the NVA deployed their troops,
Westmoreland sent his to Dak To,
exactly what the enemy wanted him to do.
Among the Americans were the men of the elite 173rd Airborne,
Westmoreland's Fire Brigade.
MATT HARRISON: We all knew in a general sense that we wouldn't be brought back
if there wasn't something big going on.
You just knew that the area was crawling with North Vietnamese,
and that they were there not to avoid contact with us,
but they were there to have contact with us.
NARRATOR: First Lieutenant Matthew Harrison was now
with Alpha Company of the 2nd Battalion,
the same rifle company that had been ambushed
and so badly shattered back in June on the slopes of Hill 1338,
just 14 miles to the east.
HARRISON: This wasn't like the Viet Cong where if you could find them,
you could kill them.
Our problem wasn't finding them.
Our problem was what to do with them once you found them.
NARRATOR: The 174th NVA Regiment was waiting.
Nguyen Thanh Son and his men were already dug in
on the high ground they knew the Americans would want
to command: Hill 875.
NGUYEN THANH SON:
NARRATOR: On Sunday morning, November 19, 1967,
Alpha, Charlie, and Delta Companies were ordered
to take Hill 875.
Matt Harrison had been wounded in an earlier fight
and was not permitted to accompany his men.
He anxiously followed their progress over the radio.
Heavy artillery and flights of F-100s blasted the hillside
ahead of them, meant to knock out enemy positions
before the paratroopers ever got within range.
NGUYEN THANH SON:
NARRATOR: The three companies moved up the slope,
Charlie and Delta in the lead,
Alpha bringing up the rear.
The paratroopers stepped warily into a clearing
filled with fallen trees from the morning's bombardment
and only a little over 300 yards from the summit.
NGUYEN THANH SON:
(gunfire)
NARRATOR: Thousands of automatic weapon rounds ripped through the air.
Chinese-made grenades came rolling and bumping
down the slopes.
The Americans sought cover where they could behind fallen trees,
scrabbled at the earth with their helmets,
trying to dig fighting holes.
(gunfire)
(soldiers yelling)
(rapid gunfire)
Charlie and Delta companies were pinned down
and being torn to pieces.
(gunfire)
Meanwhile, near the foot of the hill,
other North Vietnamese troops surprised Alpha Company
from behind.
They were first spotted moving up through the trees
by a private from the Bronx named Carlos Lozada.
As the men of his company scrambled up the slope,
dragging their wounded with them,
Lozada provided what cover he could,
firing his M-60 machine gun from his hip--
before a bullet hit him in the head.
He would be awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.
Back home, the battle led the nightly news.
(helicopter humming)
WALTER CRONKITE: The Battle of Dak To is now on its 19th day,
and already ranks among the bloodiest campaigns
of the Vietnam War.
There's no sign yet of any let-up.
Over the weekend, three companies
of the 173rd Airborne Brigade moved down this river valley,
up which North Vietnamese normally infiltrate,
until they got down here by Hill 875.
Then, they came under heavy fire from the hill.
Two of the three companies charged the hill,
the other stayed back as a rear guard.
They found a...
HARRISON: By early afternoon, the three companies
had basically been decapitated.
The company commanders were dead;
most of the officers and most of the NCOs were dead.
(soldiers yelling)
NARRATOR: The survivors from all three companies clustered
in the clearing and did their best to set up
a defensive circle.
American bombs and napalm pounded enemy positions
until it grew almost too dark to see.
NGUYEN THANH SON:
NARRATOR: Then, another American plane roared in and dropped two bombs.
One landed among the hidden enemy troops.
The other fell directly on the Americans.
In a fraction of a second, 42 were killed.
A badly hit lieutenant managed to find a working radio.
"No more fucking planes," he shouted into it.
"You're killingus up here."
(explosion)
The fighting on the hillside continued.
The men ran out of water, began to run out of ammunition.
Helicopters that tried to ferry in supplies were shot down.
The following day, Matt Harrison was able to chopper in.
HARRISON: It was chaos.
It was collections of guys who had who had tunneled
and dug down behind trees.
These were guys who had gone without water in that heat
for two days.
And almost every one of them was wounded.
And then all around were bodies,
guys who had been shot and blown up.
It was the third circle of hell.
NARRATOR: On November 23, two fresh battalions of the 173rd
finally made it to the top of the hill,
for which so many had died.
But the night before,
the surviving North Vietnamese troops had slipped down
the other side and disappeared into Cambodia and Laos.
The powers that be decided it would be important
to our morale for us to be in on the taking the top of the hill.
I had 26 guys left out of a company that started out of 140,
and all 26 had been wounded.
NARRATOR: Then Harrison and his exhausted men were helicoptered
to the top of yet another hill.
(helicopter blades whirring)
It was Thanksgiving.
Chinook helicopters clattered down out of the sky,
carrying huge containers of hot turkey and mashed potatoes
and cranberry sauce so that the 173rd could have
their Thanksgiving dinner.
If there are any more remote or dangerous spots
to spend Thanksgiving Day in Vietnam than this one,
then most of these men have never seen them.
HARRISON: There was a TV cameraman and reporter off to the side
using us as a backdrop.
And I remember hearing the reporter intone,
"Today is November 23, Thanksgiving Day,"
and I was really angry.
It's as though we were entertainers.
NARRATOR: 107 Americans had died taking Hill 875;
another 282 were wounded.
Ten more were missing.
The number of North Vietnamese casualties is unknown,
but their losses are thought to have been staggering.
Back in June, Matt Harrison had lost two West Point classmates
on Hill 1338.
He lost two more on Hill 875.
Of the eight with whom he had served in the 2nd Battalion,
four were now dead and two had been wounded.
HARRISON: To take tops of mountains in a triple canopy jungle
along the Cambodian-Laotian border accomplished nothing
of any importance.
The Battle for Hill 875 was, in my thinking today,
a microcosm of what we were doing and what went wrong
in Vietnam.
There was no reason to take that hill.
We literally got to the top of the hill
about mid-day on November 23 and sat there for,
I don't know, half an hour, an hour,
just kind of gathering ourselves and everything together.
Chinooks came in, took us off the hill.
And I doubt that there's been an American on Hill 875
since November 23.
We accomplished nothing.
WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: A new phase is now starting.
We have reached an important point when the end
begins to come into view.
NARRATOR: As Matt Harrison and his men fought for Hill 875,
the Johnson administration was in the midst
of a "Success Offensive,"
a PR campaign aimed at shoring up support for the war
and the way it was being waged.
MACV released a new and surprisingly low estimate
of enemy forces to show how much damage the United States
had done to them.
It 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.
General Westmoreland also told the press
that the impressive body counts his commanders reported
were "very, very conservative."
It probably represented, he said,
"50 percent or even less of the enemy that has been killed."
Ambassador 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 Dien Bien Phu.
And I think we're now beginning to see light
at the end of the tunnel.
Mr. Ambassador, you talk about light at the end of the tunnel.
How long is this tunnel?
Well, I don't think that you can put it
into any particular timeframe, a situation like this.
NARRATOR: LBJ's Success Offensive succeeded.
The number of Americans who believed the United States
was making real progress in the war grew.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
did not take part in the public relations campaign.
He 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."
There 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.
"The continuation of our present course of action
"in Southeast Asia would be dangerous, costly in lives,
and unsatisfactory to the American people."
Johnson never responded.
Instead, he arranged for McNamara to become
the president of the World Bank.
McNamara would keep silent about the doubts he had harbored
since the beginning of the ground war
for the next 28 years.
His 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.
Students of Harvard...
NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Allard Lowenstein's yearlong search
for a Democratic challenger to the president
had finally succeeded.
On November 30, 1967, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy
announced that he would run.
This is an issue which has to be taken
to the people of the country in the campaign of 1968.
(crowd cheers)
NARRATOR: By the end of 1967,
20,057 Americans had died in Vietnam.
The time had come, General Westmoreland said,
for an "all-out offensive on all fronts."
But the enemy was just a month away from launching
an all-out offensive of its own.
("Paint in Black" by the Rolling Stones playing)
♪ I see a red door and I want it painted black ♪
♪ No colors anymore, I want them to turn black ♪
♪ I see the girls walk by
♪ Dressed in their summer clothes ♪
♪ I have to turn my head until my darkness goes ♪
♪ I see a line of cars and they're all painted black ♪
♪ With flowers and my love, both never to come back ♪
♪ I see people turn their heads and quickly look away ♪
♪ Like a newborn baby, it just happens every day ♪
♪ I look inside myself and see my heart is black ♪
♪ I see my red door and must have it painted black ♪
♪ Maybe then I'll fade away and not have to face the facts ♪
♪ It's not easy facing up when your whole world is black ♪
♪ No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue ♪
♪ I could not foresee this thing happening to you ♪
♪ If I look hard enough into the setting sun ♪
♪ My love will laugh with me before the morning comes ♪
♪ I see a red door and I want it painted black ♪
♪ No colors anymore, I want them to turn black ♪
♪ I see the girls walk by
♪ Dressed in their summer clothes ♪
♪ I have to turn my head until my darkness goes ♪
(humming)
♪ I wanna see it painted
♪ Painted, painted, painted black ♪
♪ Yeah.
(humming)