(faint voice on radio)
We have them in sight and we're engaging at present time.
MAN: Roger.
RON FERRIZZI: Helicopters are phenomenal machines.
You could float in the air.
You can be like God.
I flew below 500 feet.
Above 500 feet was a kill zone.
You better be below 200 feet, the lower the better.
My job was to get shot at.
My job was to draw enemy fire.
I was a duck, a decoy.
I got shot at a lot.
I engaged the enemy a lot.
(voice on helicopter radio)
(gunfire)
You're screaming as loud as you can to try to cover up the sound
of the incoming bullets
because when they pass by your ear
you could hear the popping sound.
You don't hear the gunshot.
That a 50-caliber just opened up on you,
shooting a half-inch piece of lead flying at you...
And the aircraft was... vroom!
You're flying, you're 90 degrees the other way
and you're-you're shooting yourself down
because the rotor blades are right in front of you
and you're trying to keep the gun from jamming
because you're running around like this.
And if your gun jams, you're done.
NARRATOR: Vietnam was the first real helicopter war.
Helicopter pilots flew more than 36 million sorties.
Their crews scattered propaganda leaflets over the enemy
and poured lethal fire into their positions;
carried troops and supplies and artillery into battle;
and lifted the wounded off the battlefield so swiftly
that most reached a field hospital within 15 minutes.
Ron Ferrizzi, a policeman's son
from the Swampoodle neighborhood of North Philadelphia,
got to Vietnam in November of 1967.
He was a crew chief in a scout helicopter
with the 1st Air Cavalry,
flying out of Landing Zone Two- Bits in the Central Highlands.
One day, after returning from a combat mission,
he was approached by a journalist.
FERRIZZI: And there was this...
there was a beautiful woman.
You know, round eye woman... statuesque, round eye woman
with nice hair and she looked pretty.
Wow!
She said, "Can I ask you a couple of questions?
"What was it like out there?
"How does it feel that a 50-caliber just opened up
shooting a half-inch piece of lead at you?"
When you... it's hard to describe.
It's shitty.
I mean, isn't it... isn't it apparent what it's like?
You want to know what it's like?
Go look at it.
Go out there.
Go see the bodies.
I was ready to whack her.
I wanted to blast her.
I was ready to... whoa!
"You want to know what it's like?
"Boom! There it is.
"I'll give it to you right now!
"You want to feel it? You want to see it?
"I'll give it to you if that's what you want.
Is that what you want?"
I don't want to tell you what it's like
because I don't want to remember it.
That's the insanity that it brings out.
(Big Brother and the Holding Company playing "Summertime")
LYNDON JOHNSON: The enemy has been defeated in battle after battle.
He continues to hope that America's will to persevere
can be broken.
Well, he is wrong.
JANIS JOPLIN: ♪ Summer...
NARRATOR: 1968 would prove to be a watershed year
in the history of the Vietnam War and the United States.
As the year began,
there were 485,600 American troops in Vietnam
and American leaders promised
that victory was finally in sight,
that there really was "light at the end of the tunnel."
JOPLIN: ♪ Don't you cry...
NARRATOR: But then, North Vietnam would mount a massive offensive
that would result in a terrible defeat for them,
that in the long run would turn out to have been
a still-greater victory.
America itself would be convulsed by assassinations
and battles in the streets over the war and civil rights.
An American president,
a master politician used to getting things done,
would continue to find himself besieged by problems
he could not solve.
JOPLIN: ♪ You're gonna rise...
NARRATOR: Robert Kennedy, the brother of the slain president
who had escalated American presence in Vietnam,
wrote an editorial that year that seemed to speak for many.
"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," he said,
quoting the poet William Butler Yeats.
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."
JOPLIN: ♪ No, no, no, don't you cry
♪ Cry.
General Westmoreland, when you said
that you'd never been more encouraged
in the four years that you have been in Vietnam,
some critics, on the other hand,
have never been more discouraged.
I wonder if you could detail one or two or three things
that cause you to be so encouraged.
I could quote a number of meaningful statistics
such as the roads that are being opened,
increasing number of enemy that have been killed
and other statistical information,
which suggests that we are making progress
and we are winning.
And I find an attitude of confidence and growing optimism.
It prevails all over the country.
And, to me, this is the most significant evidence
I can give you that constant, real progress is being made.
(man speaking Vietnamese)
NARRATOR: On the evening of January 1, 1968,
Ho Chi Minh broadcast a poem over Radio Hanoi.
HO CHI MINH:
NARRATOR: Communist commanders took this to mean
that the ultimate battle,
the General Offensive and General Uprising
they had been planning for months, was imminent.
Party First Secretary Le Duan,
who had insisted on the offensive
and had purged those opposed,
believed it would finally bring about an end to the war.
Viet Cong units supported by North Vietnamese troops
were to simultaneously attack cities and bases
all over the South.
Le Duan promised those troops that when the fighting started,
the people of South Vietnam would rise up
and overthrow the Saigon government,
just as the Vietnamese had risen up against the Japanese
in August of 1945.
With Saigon defeated, the Americans would have no choice
but to withdraw from Vietnam.
The surprise attacks would begin at the end of the month,
at the start of the Lunar New Year celebration called Tet.
HO HUU LAN:
NARRATOR: The Viet Cong were already infiltrating
scores of cities and towns.
Tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops
were now in place in South Vietnam.
Tons of smuggled Chinese and Soviet-made weapons
had been spirited towards intended targets in sampans
and flower carts and false-bottomed trucks,
and then buried in paddy fields and garbage dumps and cemeteries
until the moment came for them to be retrieved.
LE VAN CHO:
NARRATOR: More than 10,000 American military
and civilian intelligence officers were at work
in South Vietnam,
and here and there, hints of what was to come
filtered up the chain of command.
Enemy units were moving around in inexplicable ways;
captured enemy reports described coming attacks
on different cities;
11 agents were caught in the city of Qui Nhon
carrying prerecorded tapes calling on the local people
to rise up against the Saigon government.
All of these things were saying to us,
"Something's going to happen."
But we don't know exactly what.
NARRATOR: General Westmoreland thought he knew.
"I believe that the enemy will attempt
a country-wide show of strength just prior to Tet,"
he cabled Washington, "with Khe Sanh being the main event."
("Voodoo Chile" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience playing)
Some 30,000 North Vietnamese troops had gathered
near Khe Sanh, the westernmost strongpoint below the DMZ
that was being held by just 6,000 Marines.
Westmoreland believed North Vietnam wanted to isolate
and annihilate the U.S. forces there,
just as the Viet Minh had done to the French at Dien Bien Phu
14 years earlier.
Enemy attacks elsewhere, Westmoreland was sure,
would only be a diversion.
One American general, Frederick C. Weyand, was not so sure.
He was able to persuade Westmoreland to let him pull
half his troops back from the Cambodian border
to take up defensive positions outside Saigon just in case.
ROBERT GORALSKI: This is an underground bunker at Khe Sanh,
one of two cement havens left
from the earlier days of the war
when the Special Forces held this base.
It is dark, dank, dreary.
You feel something in the air, about the buildup.
I don't know, you could...
you could almost feel them working around you at night.
Who?
Uh, the NVA.
NARRATOR: On January 21,
the North Vietnamese began shelling Khe Sanh.
(mortar shrieks)
(explosions, shouting)
CAO XUAN DAI:
("You Keep Me Hangin' On" by Vanilla Fudge playing)
(song continues, gunfire, men shouting)
NARRATOR: When he learned of the attack on Khe Sanh,
Lyndon Johnson made the Joint Chiefs sign a pledge
that the base would never fall.
"I don't want any damn 'Dinbinphoo,'" he said.
The president had a scale-model of the battlefield installed
in the White House so that he could follow the fighting there
hour by hour.
("You Keep Me Hangin' On" continues)
NARRATOR: But Westmoreland's and Johnson's basic assumption was wrong.
Khe Sanh was the sideshow;
the attacks on cities and towns that were about to begin
throughout South Vietnam would be the main event.
But First Secretary Le Duan's basic assumptions
were about to be tested, too.
For the coming offensive to succeed,
the South Vietnamese Army, the ARVN, would have to collapse,
and the people of the South
would have to join the revolution.
LE CONG HUAN:
NARRATOR: "All our thinking was focused on finishing off the enemy,"
one North Vietnamese general remembered.
"We were intoxicated by that thought."
HUY DUC:
MORTON DEAN: Okay, we've got our three wounded GIs on board.
At least one of them is hit pretty bad.
Medic's got a busy, busy few minutes ahead of him
before we get back.
NARRATOR: As the date for the Tet Offensive approached,
the war continued for the hundreds of thousands
of Americans in country.
HAL KUSHNER: I did see the reality of war,
a real education for a young doctor.
The war seemed to be going very well from our point of view.
The war seemed to be going just fine, thank you.
NARRATOR: Captain Hal Kushner was a 26-year-old recent graduate
of medical school from Danville, Virginia.
The father of a three-year-old girl,
with another baby on the way,
he had volunteered to serve in Vietnam
and became a flight surgeon with the 1st Air Cavalry.
KUSHNER: And I was supposed to give
a lecture on the dangers of night flying, ironically.
And I did.
We had terrible weather that night.
And it was dark and it was rainy and it was windy.
As we were flying
I saw that we had drifted west of the highway.
And I knew that was wrong.
NARRATOR: In the fog and rain,
Kushner's helicopter slammed into a mountain.
KUSHNER: And the next thing I knew
I was hanging upside down in a burning helicopter.
Major Porcella was dead.
I just jumped away from the helicopter,
and it just went whoosh, and it just burned up.
There was an M60 machine gun on the helicopter
and the rounds had... cooking off and it was exploding.
And one or several of the rounds went through my shoulder,
my left shoulder.
On the ground I saw Warrant Officer Bedworth.
And he was hurt very badly.
I took some branches and splinted his leg.
So the rule is you wait with the aircraft until you get rescued.
And we just sat there.
So we waited one day.
We waited two days.
We had no food or water.
On the morning of the third day, Bedworth died.
And he just slipped away.
It was very, very sad.
And I thought that my best choice was to leave the aircraft
and try to go down the mountain.
NARRATOR: It took the wounded Kushner four hours
to stagger down the hill.
When he finally reached level ground, he looked back up
and saw two American helicopters hovering above the crash site.
Their pilots did not see him.
KUSHNER: And I saw this peasant working in a rice paddy.
And he saw me.
And I had captain's bars and a Caduceus, a medical symbol,
on my collar.
And he said (speaking Vietnamese).
Captain, doctor.
He took me about another mile to a little hooch, a little house,
and he sat me down on the front of it
and he brought out a can of condensed milk.
And as I was eating the stuff--
it was just the best stuff I've ever eaten in my whole life--
I hear another person say, "(repeating Vietnamese phrase).
"Surrender, no kill."
There was a squad of Viet Cong there.
And I put my one arm up.
And he shot me with an M2 carbine.
And I think he was more nervous than I was.
And he shot me right where the M60 had shot me.
And it went right through my neck and came out the back.
And they tied my arms very tightly in commo wire.
He went through my wallet and he took my Geneva Convention card,
which was white with a red cross.
And he tore it up.
And he said, in English, "No P.O.W.
Criminal. Criminal."
So then they took my boots.
And we started marching.
And then we walked for a month.
30 days, almost always at night.
And my feet were just lacerated.
I didn't think I could possibly survive.
NGUYEN NGOC:
NARRATOR: By January 30,
an informal 36-hour truce for Tet was in effect.
Thousands of ARVN troops had gone home for the holiday.
The enemy had not.
NGUYEN VAN TONG:
NARRATOR: That same day, Marine Corporal Roger Harris
was scheduled to fly out of Vietnam.
His 13-month tour was over.
But he and his unit were still hunkered down
under constant shelling at Camp Carroll, just south of the DMZ.
HARRIS: Well, once I had my orders, you know,
I said goodbye to all my friends.
And then I went over to the landing zone.
So when the helicopters come in,
I put the body bags on the helicopter.
And I got on with the bodies.
We landed in Dong Ha, which was division headquarters.
And we got about 200 meters from the airstrip,
the airstrip started getting hit.
I'm just thinking personally that God realizes
that he made a mistake because some of the guys that got killed
that were with me were good Christians that never had sex,
didn't swear, you know.
And, you know, I had been this sinner.
And I'm thinking God realized he made a mistake.
He killed the Christians and I got away.
And so now Death is following me.
And they told us that in another hour or so
a plane was going to come in.
When it came in, then the artillery started coming in.
And we jumped on and took off.
And it landed in Danang.
And then the sun came up and we went to the airstrip
and we boarded airplanes.
And we were sitting there.
Everybody's giving each other pounds and slapping five.
We made it.
And then all of a sudden...
(imitates whistles and explosions)
Danang airstrip starts getting hit, artillery's coming in.
And I'm thinking, "It's all coming after me."
It's all about me, you know.
God doesn't want me to make it out of here.
NARRATOR: In the early morning hours of January 31, 1968,
84,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops attacked
36 of South Vietnam's 44 provincial capitals,
dozens of American and ARVN military bases
and the six largest cities in the country,
including Hue, Danang, and Saigon.
(automatic gunfire)
Their goal, their commanders told them,
was to "crack the sky and shake the earth."
(shouting, explosions)
In Saigon, General Westmoreland mistook the first explosions
as holiday firecrackers.
His deputy commander, General Creighton W. Abrams,
was asleep, and his aides did not bother to wake him.
Not a single top commander was present at "Pentagon East,"
the sprawling MACV headquarters at Tan Son Nhut Air Base
on the outskirts of Saigon,
when mortars and rockets began cratering the runways.
It's moving.
NARRATOR: Viet Cong soldiers spread out to attack specific targets
in and around the capital.
The war had come to the streets of Saigon.
Had General Weyand not insisted on stationing troops
around the city,
Saigon itself would have been in far greater danger.
DUONG VAN MAI ELLIOTT: We heard gunfire
and our first reaction was, "Must be another coup d'état."
(gunfire)
And then we heard that the Viet Cong had attacked Saigon
and were still attacking.
It came as a total shock because we always thought
Saigon was safe, the safest place in all of South Vietnam.
NARRATOR: One Viet Cong squad made it
all the way to the Presidential Palace,
but was stopped by South Vietnamese tanks.
The survivors holed up in a building across the street
and were shot by ARVN troops and American MPs.
All over Saigon, nothing was going according to plan.
Viet Cong units were taking heavy losses from U.S. troops
and determined South Vietnamese forces.
(shouting)
NGUYEN THANH TUNG:
(indistinct chatter on radio)
("The Blue Danube" playing on radio)
DON WEBSTER: This is the main Vietnamese language radio station
in Saigon.
And right now there are an undisclosed number of VC inside
occupying the station.
NARRATOR: The Viet Cong managed to seize
South Vietnam's national radio station
and prepared to broadcast a taped message from Ho Chi Minh
calling upon the people to rise up.
But a technician radioed to the transmitting tower
to cut them off and broadcast Viennese waltzes
and Beatles songs instead.
("Tomorrow Never Knows" by the Beatles playing)
♪ Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream ♪
♪ It is not dying
♪ But listen to the color of your dreams ♪
♪ It is not living, it is not living ♪
(song continues)
NARRATOR: The Saigon suburb of Bien Hoa was under attack, too.
Enemy forces were assaulting both the airbase there
and Long Binh,
the largest American installation in Vietnam.
BRADY: There were VC moving on the house, moving everywhere.
A lot of shooting, a lot of confusion going on.
And we were shooting out the window.
And my wife was reloading.
When we ran out of ammunition, we'd sli...
slide the magazine down the tiles
and she was down there at the other end
filling 'em up and sliding 'em back.
NARRATOR: Viet Cong commandos managed to slip through the wire
at Long Binh and blow up a huge ammunition dump.
A mushroom cloud rose above the airfield,
so vast that some of the Americans thought there had been
a nuclear explosion.
The blast blew off the door of Brady's building.
BRADY: They went up against the wire in Long Binh
and paid a frightful price.
There were just layers of bodies.
The Americans just cut them down.
Hi, this is Johnny Carson.
As you know, this is the usual starting time
for theTonight Show.
But because of the critical war situation in Vietnam,
especially around Saigon, NBC, for the next 15 minutes,
is going to bring you a special news program via satellite.
Just after midnight their time,
a band of Viet Cong raiders blew up a power installation
and attacked two police stations in Saigon.
It all amounts to the most ambitious series
of communist attacks yet mounted,
spreading violence into at least ten provincial capitals,
plus American air bases and civilian installations
stretching the entire length of the country.
None had greater psychological impact
than the assault on the American embassy in Saigon.
NARRATOR: In the first few hours of the fighting,
19 specially trained commandos had blasted their way
into the sprawling compound of the United States embassy.
DON NORTH: There's a... there's a rush, they're rushing the embassy.
That's fire coming from the other side of the street now,
outside the embassy.
They're exchanging across the street.
You can see the tracer bullets going past.
(explosions, gunfire, shouting)
That's outside the embassy.
MAN (on radio): Uh, this is Waco, roger.
Uh, can you get in the gates now?
Are the gates open and can you take a force in there
and clean out that embassy right now?
(shouting)
NORTH: Apparently the Viet Cong are trapped in the basement
of this side building, an incredible situation.
Heavy firing, incoming and outgoing.
Don North, ABC News, at the U.S. embassy, in Saigon.
NARRATOR: All of the intruders were eventually killed or captured.
NORTH: What a sight.
A small frog hopping through a pool of blood
that's issuing from the head of a Viet Cong,
lying on the green grassy lawn of the U.S. embassy.
NGUYEN VAN TONG:
NARRATOR: An American Marine and four Army MPs were killed
at the embassy.
REPORTER: General, how would you assess
yesterday's activities and today's?
What is the enemy doing? Are these major attacks?
Or... (explosion)
That's E.O.D. setting off a couple of M-79 duds, I believe.
The enemy, very deceitfully,
has taken advantage of the Tet truce,
in order to, uh... create maximum consternation.
In my opinion, this is diversionary...
NARRATOR: Early wire service dispatches reported incorrectly
that the Viet Cong had made it inside the embassy itself.
REPORTER: Embassy ID cards were found on some of the Viet Cong.
NARRATOR: And the first television footage did little
to reassure the American public.
REPORTER: Is Saigon secure right now?
Saigon's secure as far as I know.
There's no more fighting in the streets?
There may be some in the outskirts still.
I'm not sure, don't know.
I'm not sure about that, no.
NARRATOR: Saigon was far from secure.
(shouting)
(no voice)
(distant, echoing gunfire)
(screaming)
Viet Cong assassination squads,
some guided by North Vietnamese spies,
moved through the streets with orders to kill what they called
"blood" enemies of the people...
(gunfire, screaming)
bureaucrats, intelligence officers, ARVN commanders,
and ordinary soldiers home on leave, and their families.
DUONG VAN MAI ELLIOTT: I went home to visit my parents
and I found them kind of huddled in their house, the doors shut,
the windows shut, very dark.
They were very afraid because our house was located
near a slum.
And we always assumed that there were a lot of Viet Cong agents
living among the poor where they could hide very easily,
and that they were going to come out
and look for government officials,
military personnel to kill.
So my parents were very afraid.
NGUYEN TAI:
(gunfight)
NARRATOR: On the second day of the fighting,
a Viet Cong agent named Nguyen Van Lem
was brought before Nguyen Ngoc Loan,
the head of the South Vietnamese National Police.
As an AP photographer and an NBC cameraman watched,
Loan ordered another officer to shoot the captive.
When he hesitated, Loan did the job himself.
HOWARD TUCKNER: The Chief of South Vietnam's National Police Force,
Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, was waiting for him.
JACK HORNER: Good morning, Mr. President.
JOHNSON: Hi, Jack.
Uh, we need guidance this morning, sir.
Guidance? Uh, is that all you want?
Yes, sir. No quotation?
That's right. No attribution.
No connection.
Give it absolutely none.
Absolutely none.
Your press is lying like drunken sailors every day.
Uh, first thing I wake up this morning was trying to figure out
after seeing CBS, watching the networks,
reading the morning papers, was how can we win--
possibly win-- and survive as a nation
and have to fight the press's lies.
Yes, sir.
I'm trying to protect my country,
and they're all whipping me.
Not a son of a bitch said a word about Ho Chi Minh.
They talk about us bombing, yet these sons of bitches
come in and bomb our embassy and 19 of them try a raid on it.
All 19 get killed and yet they blame the embassy.
(chuckles)
I don't understand it.
We think we've killed 20,000; we think we lost 400.
We think that of course it's bad to lose anybody,
any one of the 400,
but we think that the Good Lord has been so good to us
that it is a major, dramatic victory.
And I think what would have happened
if I'd lost 20,000 and they'd lost 400?
I ask you that.
Oh, it would've been terrible.
(explosion)
It appears that a mortar or a rocket shell came in
and, well, there's blood on my pants.
And I guess I'm... I'm hit.
Well, this is the streets of Saigon,
and that's where the war is now.
Howard Tuckner, NBC News.
NARRATOR: The American press focused almost entirely
on the fighting in Saigon.
But the Tet Offensive was happening almost everywhere.
Most assaults were being quickly beaten back by ARVN
and American forces.
Everywhere the enemy was suffering terrible losses.
(gunfire)
LE VAN CHO:
NARRATOR: The Americans called in massive air and artillery firepower
to dislodge a Viet Cong regiment from the city of Ben Tre
in the Mekong Delta.
Afterwards, a reporter quoted an American major as having said,
"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."
Right now, the Navy and the Army boats that also bring supplies
up the Perfume River are having to undergo heavy small arms
and mortar fire as they turn the bend in the river
here around Hue itself.
And the landing zone on this the south side of the river
has been under almost constant mortar and small arms fire.
And today, at any rate, Hue is cut off.
NARRATOR: The longest, bloodiest battle of the Tet Offensive
was being fought in the streets
of one of the country's loveliest cities,
the former imperial capital Hue.
(gunfire)
(shouting, gunfire)
The Perfume River divided Hue in two.
The enemy-- North Vietnamese regulars
and Viet Cong guerrillas--
had taken over both sides of the city.
Only the American advisers' compound on the south bank
and the 1st ARVN division headquarters
within the thick-walled Citadel on the north side
held out against them.
NGUYEN NGOC:
NARRATOR: Marine Corporal Bill Ehrhart was at the end of his tour
and was preparing to go home.
But when his company was ordered
to relieve the besieged American compound in Hue,
he chose to go with his comrades.
EHRHART: I had spent 12 months in Vietnam looking for somebody to shoot at
and there was nobody there.
And then all of a sudden
it seemed like here's every NVA in the world
trying to kill me and my pals.
It was an entirely different kind of fight.
NARRATOR: Ehrhart and his unit endured a bloody ambush,
finally fought their way through to the MACV compound,
and then began days of brutal block-by-block battle
to retake the surrounding neighborhoods.
Every house became a battlefield.
"It was exhilarating," Ehrhart remembered.
"I was scared utterly witless,
"but it was the greatest adrenaline high
I'd ever experienced."
EHRHART: It was ugly, ugly fighting.
You literally have to clear houses a room at a time,
a floor at a time, a house at a time.
And then you go to the next one.
NGUYEN THI HOA:
(gunfire)
(soldier yelling instructions over deafening gunfight)
(gunfight grows louder)
(explosion, then silence)
February 5, I was wounded by a B40 rocket.
I was utterly stone deaf.
Under any other circumstances I would have been evacuated.
But I could see, I could walk, and I could shoot.
So I stayed.
(distant, muffled gunfire)
(heartbeat grows louder over muted din)
(explosion, shouting)
NARRATOR: The fighting continued.
(gunshots whizzing, soldiers cacophonously screaming in pain)
"We had to blow our way through every wall of every house,"
one Marine remembered.
"It's a shame we had to damage such a beautiful city."
EHRHART: Of course, all these civilians have been herded
into the university.
They had all gone there to get the hell away
from having grenades thrown in their living rooms.
And one of the guys comes in and says,
"I found this-this girl who will fuck us all for C rations."
And I'm thinking,
"Wait, we're in the middle of this big battle
and I'm gonna go and..."
But I'm 19 years old and my buddies are gonna, and I just...
I demonstrated to myself how little courage I actually had.
I've lived with it ever since, but I-I-I did it
because I wasn't gonna say,
"You guys, we shouldn't do something like this."
Even more than the killings,
the thing I think I'm most ashamed of
when I think back on the time I spent there.
I think it's because my mother's a woman, my wife's a woman,
my daughter's a woman.
(sighs)
Somebody gets shot, not a good thing.
You see somebody running away,
I don't know, it could've been a VC.
But that woman?
Nah.
I had every opportunity to say no.
(gunfire)
NARRATOR: The next day, in the midst of still another firefight,
a lieutenant in a jeep pulled up in front of the building
from which Ehrhart and five fellow Marines were firing
at the enemy.
"Come on, Ehrhart!" he shouted.
"Chopper's on the LZ right now.
You want to go home or not?"
From the helicopter that lifted him up and away
from the ruined, smoking city,
he could see a farmer and his water buffalo
working a flooded field
and women in conical hats carrying twin baskets
hurrying along between the paddies as if there were no war.
Back in Hue, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops
now found themselves trapped inside the city.
NGUYEN NGOC:
(gunfire)
NARRATOR: It would take two weeks
for the Marines to fight their way across the river
to support the ARVN,
who had stubbornly kept the enemy
from overwhelming their division headquarters in the Citadel.
DAVID BURRINGTON: What's the hardest part of it?
Not knowing where they are, that's the worst of it.
Riding around and running in the sewers, in the gutters,
anywhere.
Could be anywhere.
Just hoping to stay alive and day to day.
Everybody just wants to go back home and go to school.
That's about it.
Have you lost any friends?
Quite a few.
We lost one the other day, good buddy of mine.
The whole thing stinks, really.
(gunfire, shouting)
HO HUU LAN:
He's still alive.
NGUYEN THI HOA:
NARRATOR: After 26 days of bitter, bloody fighting,
the flag of South Vietnam flew again above the Citadel.
The surviving North Vietnamese and Viet Cong
were finally permitted by their commanders
to pull out of the city.
Some 6,000 civilians had died in the rubble.
Of the city's 135,000 citizens, 110,000 had lost their homes.
All that was left of Hue, one reporter wrote,
was "ruins divided by a river."
JOHNSON (on TV): The biggest fact is
that the stated purposes of the General Uprising--
a military victory or a psychological victory--
have failed.
DON WEBSTER: The attack on the radio station
started at 2:30 in the morning.
NARRATOR: Night after night for weeks,
American television screens had been filled with images
of blood and violence and devastation
the public had rarely seen before.
GEORGE SYVERTSON: The enemy was nowhere and everywhere.
NARRATOR: But it was one photograph that for many people
would come to define the Tet Offensive.
SAM HYNES: I remember he was wearing a checked shirt.
And the photographer had come up very close
and had pressed his shutter
just as the officer pulled his trigger.
So camera and gun went off together
and you could see the man's head bulging at the side
where the bullet was about to come out.
We were there, face-to-face with this man who was dying,
right now, dead.
JAMES WILLBANKS: It's a devastating thing to see.
And I think many Americans began to ask themselves,
"Are we supporting the wrong guys here?"
And it sort of brings home, I think to, to the dinner table,
or the breakfast table if you see it in the papers,
the brutality of this war
and the fact that it looks like it's never going to end.
PHAN QUANG TUE: But what we know is the price that we pay for that picture.
It was the turning point.
Because that put the gov... Americans to position and say,
"Hey, look, we want to spend money
"and the lives of our young people
to protect such a system?"
NARRATOR: For a month, Hal Kushner's captors had made him walk
deeper and deeper into the Central Highlands,
always moving at night
so that they would not be spotted from the air.
KUSHNER: They took me to this place that I assume was a hospital.
It was just a series of caves
but there were a lot of wounded lying around.
And this female nurse came out and inspected my wound.
And then she gave me a bamboo stick to bite on.
She laid me down and she gave me this bamboo stick to bite on.
And then she took this rifle-cleaning rod
and she heated it up in a fire until it was red hot.
And she took it and put it through my wound
through and through.
And it really hurt.
It really, really, really hurt.
And then she put Mercurochrome on the wound.
And she gave me an aspirin tablet.
And I... I thought, what else can they do to me?
NARRATOR: Kushner would eventually arrive at a remote jungle camp,
joining a handful of other American prisoners.
And this Vietnamese officer came to me and he spoke English.
And that was the first real English speaker that I had seen.
And he had a little reel-to-reel tape recorder,
battery-powered tape recorder.
And he asked me to make a message to my family
to let them know that I was safe.
And I could do that if I would make a statement
against the war.
And I told... I told him with great bravado
that I would rather die than make a statement
against my country.
And he said to me,
"You will find dying is very easy.
"Living will be the difficult thing.
Living is the difficult thing."
NARRATOR: In early March, two weeks after Hue had finally been recaptured,
Second Lieutenant Phil Gioia of the 82nd Airborne Division
led his platoon along the Perfume River,
looking for weapons that might have been buried
by the retreating enemy.
Gioia's sergeant, Reuben Torres,
saw something sticking up from the sandy soil.
It was an elbow.
So to us it seemed as though this was going to be a grave
where the enemy had buried some of his own people
on the withdrawal from Hue.
Sergeant Torres said, "You know, sir,
I think we better start to dig here."
We found the first body and it was a woman.
She was wearing a white blouse and black trousers.
She had her hands tied behind her back
and she'd been shot in the back of the head.
Next to her was a child, who'd also been shot.
The next person coming up was another woman.
At that point it was clear that this-this wasn't
enemy North Vietnamese or Viet Cong.
NGUYEN NGOC:
(gunfire)
NARRATOR: Before they abandoned the city,
the communists had systematically executed
at least 2,800 people they called "hooligans"
and "reactionaries."
Hanoi would always deny
that any innocent civilians had been killed.
(woman sobbing)
NGUYEN NGOC:
(woman wailing in grief)
HO HUU LAN:
NARRATOR: President Johnson insisted that the Tet Offensive had been
"a devastating defeat for the communists."
Militarily, he was right.
The basic assumptions on which the North Vietnamese mounted
their offensive had all proved to be wrong.
Hanoi's leaders had assumed the ARVN would crumble,
that South Vietnamese soldiers would come over to their side.
Instead, not a single unit defected.
The civilian populace Hanoi expected to rise up
may have been unhappy with their government,
but they had little sympathy for communism,
and when the fighting began, they had hidden in their homes
to escape the fury in the streets.
PHAM DUY TAT:
NARRATOR: North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap,
who had opposed the offensive from the beginning,
later remembered that Tet had been a "costly lesson,
paid for in blood and bone."
NARRATOR: Of the 84,000 enemy troops who are estimated
to have taken part in the Tet Offensive, more than half--
as many as 58,000 men and women, most of them Viet Cong--
are thought to have been killed or wounded or captured.
JOHN LAURENCE: The American military command celebrated the Tet Offensive
as a victory.
You know, "They finally came at us, and we blew them away,"
which was basically true.
But the administration had been telling the American public
for most of the end of '67 and for the first month of 1968
that the war was being won;
that the NLF and the North Vietnamese were ground down
to such an extent that we could see the end of the war,
a victory.
The Tet Offensive has forced our generals to re-evaluate...
So when Tet hit, it contradicted everything
that the administration and the Saigon country team
had been telling the American public through its journalists
for the previous four or five months.
John Laurence, CBS News, Saigon.
("White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane playing)
BRADY: It broke the will of the United States to fight that war.
It was such a shock that it stripped away the last vestiges
of the fiction and fanciful interpretations
that had led us down this primrose path into disaster.
After that nobody could be convinced.
And then the most ferocious possible argument erupted
inside the U.S. government
because the hawks on the war were saying,
"Tet was North Vietnam's last gasp.
"It was their last shot at winning the war,
"and they failed.
We beat them, and that's the end of them."
And we said, "After all these years of war,
"if that's what they are able to do,
"we ought to learn some lesson about their commitment
to this war as well and the cost to us."
NARRATOR: On March 10, theNew York Times reported
that the Army was requesting 206,000 additional troops
for Vietnam.
But if the United States had been winning the war,
many Americans asked, if Tet had in fact been a disaster
for the enemy, why were still more men needed?
More and more members of the president's own party
now felt free to express their doubts.
"Our enemy has finally shattered the mask of official illusion,"
Senator Robert Kennedy said.
"Unable to defeat him or break his will,
we must actively seek a peaceful settlement."
...can cope with its problems.
NARRATOR: Walter Cronkite, the respected anchor of theCBS Evening News,
had come home from covering the Tet Offensive
convinced victory was no longer possible.
We have been too often disappointed by the optimism
of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington,
to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find
in the darkest clouds.
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe,
in the face of the evidence,
the optimists who have been wrong in the past.
To suggest we are on the edge of defeat
is to yield to unreasonable pessimism.
To say that we are mired in stalemate
seems the only realistic if unsatisfactory conclusion.
But it is increasingly clear to this reporter
that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate,
not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up
to their pledge to defend democracy
and did the best they could.
This is Walter Cronkite.
Goodnight.
EUGENE McCARTHY: In 1966, in '67,
and again in '68,
most recently we hear the same hollow claims of progress
and of advance toward victory.
The fact is, however, as we know from events of recent weeks,
events which one is almost saddened to report,
that the enemy has become bolder than ever.
NARRATOR: On the evening of March 12,
President Johnson watched the returns come in
from the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary,
where he was facing an unexpected challenge.
The most recent poll had suggested
he would beat Eugene McCarthy two to one.
But Johnson won just 49.6% of the vote
against 41.9% for his opponent,
even though most of those who voted against the president
actually wanted him to prosecute the war more vigorously.
Johnson knew he was in trouble.
ROBERT KENNEDY: ...for the presidency of the United States...
NARRATOR: And there was more to come.
I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man...
NARRATOR: Just four days after the New Hampshire primary,
Robert F. Kennedy declared his candidacy for the presidency,
and polls suggested he was more popular than Lyndon Johnson.
...about what must be done.
I run because it is now unmistakably clear
that we can change these disastrous, divisive policies
only by changing the men who are now making them.
(din of large crowd)
LYNDON JOHNSON: I think what we've got to do, too,
is get out of the posture of just being the war candidate
that McCarthy has put us in, and Bobby's putting us in,
the kids are putting us in,
and the papers are putting us in.
We've got to come up with something.
CLARK CLIFFORD: What it is: we're out to win,
but we're not out to win the war.
We're out to win the peace.
JOHNSON: That's right.
CLIFFORD: And that's what we give them,
and what our slogan could very well be--
win the peace with honor.
JOHNSON: But we've got to have something new and fresh that goes in there
along with the statement that we're going to win.
CLIFFORD: Right.
But we have to be very careful
what it is we say we're going to win.
JOHNSON: That's right.
CLIFFORD: They think, well hell, that means we're just going
to keep pouring men in until we win militarily.
And that isn't what we're after, really.
JOHNSON: Uh, we're not going to get these doves,
but we can neutralize the country;
that way it won't follow them,
if we can come up with something.
NARRATOR: On March 26, the Wise Men, a group of veteran cold warriors
who had earlier urged the president to hold steady
in Vietnam, now advised him to change course.
Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's secretary of state,
spoke for the majority.
"We can no longer do the job we set out to do
in the time we have left," he said,
"and we must begin to take steps to disengage."
The president agreed to send just 13,500 more troops,
not the 206,000 the generals had requested,
and decided to recall William Westmoreland to Washington
as chief of staff of the Army,
replacing him with his deputy, General Creighton W. Abrams.
NEIL SHEEHAN: His face was a... was a mask of exhaustion and defeat.
It was very sad to see the man.
He-he was broken by it.
NARRATOR: On March 30, Gallup reported
that 63% of the public disapproved
of Johnson's handling of the war,
the lowest point of his presidency.
The following evening, March 31, 1968,
the president asked for time on all three networks.
Good evening, my fellow Americans.
Tonight, I want to speak to you
of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
NARRATOR: Johnson announced that he had decided to stop bombing
the densely populated areas around Hanoi and Haiphong
in the hope that North Vietnam would finally be willing
to come to the negotiating table.
Only the southern half of the country,
the staging areas north of the DMZ,
would continue to be targeted.
Then he stunned the country and the world.
I do not believe that I should devote an hour
or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes
or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office,
the presidency of your country.
Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept,
the nomination of my party for another term as your president.
("Live Right Now" by Eddie Harris playing)
ROGER HARRIS: I land in California and take a plane from California to Boston.
And I'm feeling good because I've survived
and, you know, I fought for my country.
I got off the plane at Logan and I stepped out there
and I'm just happy to be home.
And I had my uniform on and walked out to the curb,
and the cabs just kept going by me, kept going by me.
And there was a state trooper that was standing there.
And I didn't realize what was happening.
And then he stepped in the street and he stopped a cab
and he says, "You have to take this man.
You have to take this soldier."
And the driver looked over at me and he said,
"I don't want to go to Roxbury."
They don't see me as a soldier.
You know, they see me as a nigger coming home here
and I live in Roxbury.
You know?
I'm thinking, "I'm a Marine.
I'm a Marine," you know.
"I just fought for my country 13 months in the combat zone.
And I can't get a cab to get home."
ROBERT KENNEDY: I have some very sad news for all of you,
and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens,
and people who love peace all over the world;
and that is that Martin Luther King was shot
and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
(crowd screaming in disbelief)
In this difficult day,
in this difficult time for the United States,
it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are
and what direction we want to move in.
NARRATOR: Over the next week, African Americans--
grieving, frustrated, angry--
poured into the streets of more than 100 towns and cities,
including New York and Oakland, Newark and Nashville,
Chicago and Cincinnati and Baltimore,
and in Washington, D.C.,
where fires came within two blocks of the White House.
STOKELY CARMICHAEL: When they killed Dr. King they just opened up the eyes
of a lot of black people who were afraid to pick up guns.
Now they will pick up those guns.
JESSE JACKSON: We're living in a sick world.
This racist society in which we live
is that that really pulled the trigger.
ROBERT KENNEDY: Violence breeds violence, repression breeds retaliation,
and only a cleansing of our whole society
can remove this sickness from our souls.
NARRATOR: Tens of thousands of National Guardsmen,
regular Army troops and the Marines,
including Roger Harris's stateside unit,
were ordered to patrol American streets.
HARRIS: And I was ready to go.
Until I saw what they were giving out.
I thought they were going to give us billy clubs
and I thought we were going to stand in front of buildings,
you know, and protect, you know, businesses.
And they were passing out flak jackets, helmets,
M-16s with live ammunition.
You know, same things we had in Vietnam.
And when I saw that I said... I said, "I'm not going.
I'm not going."
I said, "I got family in Washington, D.C."
And my company commander said, "Get on the truck, Marine."
I said, "I'm not going."
I didn't make sergeant because I refused to go.
NARRATOR: Forty-six Americans died, 2,600 were injured,
20,000 were arrested.
Later that same month,
antiwar students seized several buildings
at Columbia University in Manhattan.
The occupation lasted a week,
the first time in American history that students forced
a major university to shut down.
Policemen eventually drove the demonstrators
out of the buildings
and sent more than 100 students to the hospital.
The United States now appeared to be more divided
than at any time since the Civil War.
That spring, protestors also took to the streets of London,
Paris...
Berlin...
Prague...
Rio...
Jakarta.
The world seemed to be coming apart.
(shouting, sirens wailing)
(static)
President Johnson's partial bombing halt
had had the desired effect.
Hanoi agreed, for the first time, to talk with Washington.
Negotiators began meeting at the Hotel Majestic in Paris.
But the communists had now adopted a new double policy.
They called it
"talking while fighting, fighting while talking."
MAN: Incoming!
NARRATOR: On May 5, they launched another offensive
that Le Duan hoped would somehow achieve
what the Tet Offensive had not.
The enemy hit 119 targets in what came to be called Mini-Tet.
There was new fighting in the streets of Saigon.
Half the city was now leveled.
But the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army failed again.
They were still no closer
to overthrowing the South Vietnamese government,
and they had suffered some 36,000 more casualties.
For the United States, May of 1968 proved the bloodiest month
of the Vietnam War.
2,416 Americans lost their lives
in places whose names Americans back home
would have a hard time remembering:
Dai Do, Phu Lam, Kham Duc,
Cholon, and the Plain of Reeds.
ROBERT KENNEDY: A total military victory is not within sight
and is not around the corner;
that, in fact, it is probably beyond our grasp.
NARRATOR: For a time that spring,
it looked as if Robert Kennedy might win
the Democratic nomination for president.
He pledged to bring the war to an end and seemed to embody
the hope of bridging the growing gulf
between black and white Americans.
(panicked shouting)
But in June, after defeating Eugene McCarthy
in the California primary, he too was assassinated.
MAN: Oh, God damn! Why?
(Jacqueline Schwab performs "We Shall Overcome")
CAROL CROCKER: People were stunned, and people were scared.
The people we'd looked up to were being taken away from us.
It definitely put those of us who were heading off on our own
on a path that felt uncertain.
KUSHNER: When Martin Luther King was assassinated
and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated,
they made a big huge deal about that.
They said that was part of the struggle of the American people
against their government.
And that there were riots in the streets.
And the camp commander actually told us,
"You can kill ten of us to one of you,
"but your people will turn against this.
"And we will be here for ten years or 20 years or 30 years,
"as long as it takes.
"And unless you kill every one of us,
we're gonna win this war."
And on July the Fourth,
we recognized it was July the Fourth.
And they would not let us sing patriotic songs.
But sometimes we would softly sing at night.
(voice breaking): And...
(clears throat)
we understood that despite different backgrounds
and different socioeconomic backgrounds,
different races, different religions,
that we were Americans.
("A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum playing)
NARRATOR: The American people would be choosing new leadership
that fall, and everyone seemed to agree,
a British correspondent wrote,
"that whoever captures the presidency this November
"will be obliged to end the conflict
"within a matter of months.
"How this is to be done or what concessions are to be made
is very much a matter of detail."
Before those details were finally worked out,
almost seven more years would pass.
And 27,184 more Americans,
and hundreds of thousands more Laotians, Cambodians,
and Vietnamese-- North and South-- would have to die.
♪ We skipped the light fandango ♪
♪ Turned cartwheels 'cross the floor ♪
♪ I was feeling kinda seasick
♪ But the crowd called out for more ♪
♪ The room was humming harder
♪ As the ceiling flew away
♪ When we called out for another drink ♪
♪ The waiter brought a tray
♪ And so it was that later
♪ As the miller told his tale
♪ That her face, at first just ghostly ♪
♪ Turned a whiter shade of pale ♪
(music continues)
♪ And although my eyes were open ♪
♪ They might just as well've been closed ♪
♪ And so it was that later
♪ As the miller told his tale
♪ That her face, at first just ghostly ♪
♪ Turned a whiter shade of pale. ♪
(music continues)
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