...you got through! Did you pass Chee on the road?
No. Where are the children?
Kansas found a shelter for them.
Get down, everybody!
JOAN FUREY: My older sister and I one time
uh, we're watching the movie So Proudly We Ha il on TV.
Listen, we still have a few minutes!
FUREY: That's a story about the nurses
who were trapped on Bataan and Corregidor during World War II.
(explosion)
It was the first, probably, time in my life that...
I, uh...
I realized that women could do brave and courageous things.
It wasn't just something men could do.
(helicopter blades whirring)
♪
NARRATOR: Second Lieutenant Joan Furey
had wanted to be a nurse ever since she was a small child.
She attended nursing school,
and, when a high school classmate was killed during Tet,
joined the Army to do what she could for the wounded.
Furey was assigned to the 71st Evacuation Hospital
at Pleiku, in the heart of the Central Highlands.
Nothing had prepared her for what she saw and did
over the next 12 months.
(indistinct chatter)
(grunts)
Wounded men were choppered in
at all times of the day and night.
So were Viet Cong and NVA soldiers,
who sometimes spat at the medical personnel
trying to save their limbs or lives.
(explosions)
Whenever the hospital came under mortar fire,
Furey stayed with the most seriously wounded men
in the ICU.
(distant explosions)
We had flak vests and helmets,
and we crawled around on the floor.
(explosion, clattering, men shouting)
I mean, you really,
you just could not leave them unattended.
(explosion)
We just kind of had to swallow your own fear.
NARRATOR: A triage officer made the grim decisions
as to who might be saved
and those for whom there was no hope.
FUREY: One of the things that initially was so difficult
was what we called "expected" patients.
And these were patients that would be brought in
from the battlefield and it was determined
they had no chance to survive.
But they weren't dead yet.
They brought in a...
a young soldier who had a head injury,
and they said, "He's expected."
I kind of freaked out, uh,
and I decided that, no, they were wrong,
and I was gonna take care of this patient.
I told the corpsman to get me blood.
And he's saying, "Well, Lieutenant,
the patient is expected."
I said, "Get me blood."
So, I take off the dressing, and...
the whole back of his head had been gone.
When that happened,
all the blood I had been giving him came out.
A friend of mine who came over just walked me out of there.
And a few minutes later, you walk right back in...
...and you get back to doing it.
(amplified heartbeat)
("Dazed and Confused" by Led Zeppelin playing)
♪ Been dazed and confused
♪ For so long, it's not true... ♪
NARRATOR: Richard Nixon had taken office as president
in January of 1969,
pledged to restore law and order
and end the war with honor.
(gunfire) Things were calmer at home,
but in Vietnam, peace was no closer.
("Dazed and Confused" continues)
American soldiers still died pursuing guerrillas
who appeared and disappeared like phantoms.
Americans still died capturing hills
only to give them up and have to take them back again.
Men and materiel were still flowing into the south
despite the controversial bombing of Cambodia.
Through it all, Hanoi remained immovable.
The communists insisted there could be no peace
until the Saigon government was replaced
and the United States withdrew from Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the American public was losing patience.
♪
(men shouting)
(gunfire fades)
Privately, Nixon knew that military victory was impossible,
that things would have to be settled
at the bargaining table in Paris.
He had to find a way
to extricate Americans from Vietnam
without seeming to surrender.
Nixon also believed
his reputation as an implacable anti-communist
could work to his advantage with Hanoi.
"We'll just slip the word to them," he said,
"you know, 'Nixon's obsessed about communism.
"'We can't restrain him when he's angry,
"and he has his hand on the nuclear button,'
"and Ho Chi Minh will be in Paris in two days
begging for peace."
But Ho Chi Minh was old and ailing now.
And Le Duan and the other men
who had been calling the shots in Hanoi for years
had no intention of giving up their goal
of uniting their country under communist control.
("While My Guitar Gently Weeps" by the Beatles playing)
Richard Nixon, having promised a swift end to the war,
would, like all the presidents who came before him,
end up widening it.
In the process, he would re-ignite opposition to the war
on American campuses
that threatened to tear the country apart again.
♪ I look at you all
♪ See the love there that's sleeping ♪
(crowd clamoring)
♪ While my guitar
♪ Gently weeps
♪ I look at the floor...
MERRILL McPEAK: The late '60s
were a kind of confluence of several rivulets.
BEATLES: ♪ Still my guitar...
McPEAK: There was the antiwar movement itself...
♪
...the whole movement towards racial equality,
the environment...
the role of women.
And the anthems for that counterculture
were provided by the most brilliant rock-and-roll music
that you can imagine.
BEATLES: ♪ And I notice...
I don't know how we could exist today as a country
without that experience.
With all of its warts and ups and downs,
that produced the America we have today,
and we are better for it.
(gunfire) ♪ Surely be learning...
McPEAK: And I felt that way in Vietnam.
♪ Still my guitar...
McPEAK: I turned the volume up on all that stuff.
That represented what I was trying to defend.
♪
(gunfire, artillery fire, shouting)
(explosion)
♪ Oh, oh
(fading): ♪ Ooh, ooh, oh, oh...
HAL KUSHNER: I never prayed
the whole time I was in the P.O.W. camp,
but I had, like, a mantra.
Every night when I went to sleep,
after a certain point, I would say,
"I'll be here when the morning comes."
And I felt if I could just live one more day,
then I could live one more day, and then one more day.
NARRATOR: At the peace talks in Paris,
the Nixon administration had introduced a new demand--
U.S. troops would not withdraw
until all American prisoners had come home
and Hanoi had provided a strict accounting
of those missing in action.
No one knew how many prisoners there were.
Most were airmen held in or around Hanoi,
but a handful of others, like Hal Kushner,
were struggling to survive in makeshift jungle camps
in South Vietnam.
Hanoi would not reveal the names of the men they held,
because they still insisted they were not prisoners of war,
but war criminals.
They subjected many to brutal torture,
extracted "confessions,"
and refused to permit inspections
by the International Red Cross.
The Johnson administration had generally downplayed the issue,
hoping quiet diplomacy might bring the men home.
The Nixon administration
launched a "go public" campaign instead,
meant to put the plight of American prisoners
and those missing in action
at the center of things.
It also provided a rebuke
to those in the antiwar movement
who seemed more sympathetic
to North Vietnamese civilians who had been bombed
than they were to U.S. airmen
who had been shot down doing that bombing.
Sybil Stockdale, whose husband, Commander James Stockdale,
was the highest-ranking prisoner in Hanoi,
formed the National League of Families
of Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia,
and led delegations of wives to Paris
to confront North Vietnamese negotiators.
Five million Americans began wearing tin or copper bracelets
engraved with a missing man's name
and date of loss.
More than 50 million P.O.W./M.I.A. bumper stickers
would be sold over the next four years.
Despite what their jailers had told them,
the prisoners had not been forgotten by their country.
Eventually, one journalist wrote,
many "people began to speak
"as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans
and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them."
At the same time, the Saigon government of Nguyen Van Thieu
was holding prisoners of its own.
There would eventually be
some 40,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers
in four crowded camps.
Another 200,000 South Vietnamese civilians
would also be held, many without trial.
NGUYEN TAI:
JAMES GILLAM: There are certain rules to tunnel warfare.
Don't turn on the light
unless you're really, really, really sure you're alone.
Use your senses.
Do your first killing as quietly as you can.
That means don't shoot.
I chased somebody into a tunnel,
met them at a bend in the corner, in the dark.
I thought I was alone
and then I smelled their breath.
And we had a wrestling match in the dark.
And I got the upper hand
and crushed this person's trachea,
held him down while he died...
...and then got out.
I beat and strangled someone to death
in a tunnel
in the dark.
Um...
But that wasn't the only casualty.
The other casualty was the civilized version of me.
(gunfire)
(gunfire continuing)
(shouting)
NARRATOR: April 1969
marked the high point of American military commitment
to South Vietnam.
543,482 men and women were now in country,
and tens of thousands more were stationed
at airbases and aboard ships beyond its borders.
40,794 had died.
And more than $70 billion had been spent.
(explosion in distance)
That spring, a new battle
caught the attention of the American public,
a struggle to take still another numbered hill--
Hill 937 on military maps.
CHET HUNTLEY: For nine days,
American and South Vietnamese troops have been trying
to take a mountain near the Laotian border,
and ten times they have been thrown back.
(booming, shouting)
(gunfire)
(shouting over radio)
The casualties have been so high--
50 Americans and 250 North Vietnamese killed--
that the mountain has come to be known as "Hamburger Hill."
Today, another 600 allied troops were thrown into the battle.
(helicopter blades whirring)
(gunfire)
(explosion, screaming)
NARRATOR: A weary G.I. told a reporter
that his battalion commander
"won't stop until he kills every damn one of us."
(explosion, gunfire)
After 11 days of fighting,
the Battle for Hamburger Hill ended.
56 Americans died.
420 more were wounded.
A week later, the Americans abandoned the hill,
just as they had abandoned so many other hills
they had taken at great cost over the years in Vietnam.
General, could you explain for us again the strategy involved
in the decision to withdraw American troops
after they had taken Hill 937, or Hamburger Hill?
No piece of ground, as such,
is important to us.
HUNTLEY: In the United States Senate,
Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts delivered
a brief speech criticizing what he called
a "senseless and irresponsible military pride
"in which American men are sent to their deaths
in pointless battles like this one for Hamburger Hill."
Kennedy called upon President Nixon
to issue new orders to commanders in Vietnam
to halt such actions
and he charged that they contradict
the president's stated intentions
of seeking a negotiated peace.
NARRATOR: There had been more deadly weeks during the war,
costlier battles, larger numbers of casualties.
But more and more Americans seemed to have had enough.
The following month, Li fe magazine
published the names and photographs
of all 242 Americans
who had died in combat in just one week.
For the first time, in a national publication,
casualty statistics came with human faces.
The only way they could measure success in Vietnam
was, was was kill ratios--
how many of them versus how many of us.
Well, the only thing that's important
to the American people is the "us."
You know, if there's three us dead, that's the number.
Not 30, you know, Vietnamese dead.
And, so, politically, an attrition strategy
just can't last very long.
We don't care what the ratio is,
we just want the absolute number
of how many American kids died.
NARRATOR: A Gallup poll now found that most Americans
believed Vietnam had been a mistake.
Richard Nixon knew he needed to signal to the public
that an end was in sight.
The National Security Council had warned Nixon
that the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
the secretaries of state and defense,
the C.I.A., and the U.S. Embassy in Saigon
all privately agreed that without U.S. combat troops,
the South Vietnamese
"cannot now, or in the foreseeable future,
"stand up to both Viet Cong
and sizeable North Vietnamese forces."
Nonetheless,
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird said,
the war was now to be "Vietnamized."
Saigon's troops would gradually take over responsibility
for engaging the enemy.
It would be General Creighton Abrams' task
to ready the ARVN for that role,
and to make sure that American casualties
were held down in the interim.
("The Letter" by The Box Tops starts playing)
Meanwhile, American troops would start to go home.
♪ Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane ♪
♪ Ain't got time to take a fast train ♪
DUONG VAN MAI ELLIOTT: When Nixon came in
and he announced the phase withdrawal,
turning over the fighting to the Vietnamese,
which was something the French had tried before.
They call itjaunissement--
yellowizing the war.
We knew that the Vietnamese Army was not up to fighting this war.
If they couldn't do it with the Americans,
how were they going to do it without the Americans?
♪ Lonely days are gone
NARRATOR: Although Washington planned to vastly increase
military support of the South Vietnamese Army,
General Abrams knew that Vietnamization alone
could never defeat the enemy.
But he had his orders.
McPEAK: The reason I was ordered home early
was because Nixon... President Nixon
announced the policy of Vietnamization.
Now, Vietnamization was a lie,
but it had an element of truth in it.
We were leaving, okay?
And that sealed the South's fate.
I knew it.
And I think anybody who was conscious
and could see what was going on
knew it.
NARRATOR: Nixon then flew to Midway Island
to meet with South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu.
He had not dared invite Thieu to Washington
for fear of sparking mass demonstrations.
♪ Lonely days are gone
President Thieu informed me
that the progress of the training program
and the equipping program
for South Vietnamese forces
had been so successful, uh, that he could now recommend
that the United States begin to replace
U.S. combat forces with Vietnamese forces.
(speaking Vietnamese)
NARRATOR: Thieu had said no such thing
but felt he had to go along.
"There is nothing I can do," he told a friend.
"Just as we could do nothing about it
"when Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson
decided to come in."
"We were clearly on the way out of Vietnam,"
National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger remembered,
"by negotiation if possible,
by unilateral withdrawal if necessary."
He and the president were redefining
what victory would look like.
TOM VALLELY: Nixon and Kissinger...
They...
Their job is to clean up.
They're, they're...
The war's over, okay?
When Nixon and Kissinger, when they come, they're...
they're not gonna win the war.
("Taps" playing) So they develop
a secret strategy.
They surrender without saying they surrendered.
This is not a bad strategy, this is the only strategy.
("Circle for a Landing" by Three Dog Night starts playing)
(indistinct announcement over P.A.)
NARRATOR: As American soldiers began leaving South Vietnam,
American weaponry and materiel poured in.
♪ Circle for a landing
♪ Get your feet back on the ground ♪
More than a million M16 rifles,
40,000 grenade launchers, thousands of wheeled vehicles--
so many, one congressman complained,
that it seemed as if the United States taxpayer
was being asked to "put every South Vietnamese soldier
behind the wheel."
NEIL SHEEHAN: It didn't make any sense, of course,
because we tried that in 1962 and '63.
The people hadn't changed.
They were just giving 'em more furniture.
NGUYEN THOI BUNG:
NARRATOR: South Vietnamese armed forces were expanded
from 850,000 men to over a million.
But nothing could alter the fact
that rampant corruption
continually eroded their effectiveness.
DON WEBSTER: The way it works is this:
a man makes a deal with his commanding officer,
perhaps to pay the officer his full salary.
In exchange, you never have to show up for duty,
except perhaps once a week at the ceremony.
So while you're theoretically in the Army,
you can hold a full-time civilian job.
LAM QUANG THI:
(gunfire)
NARRATOR: Many ARVN units did fight well.
They had borne the brunt of the fighting
during the Tet Offensive,
and, by the middle of 1969,
90,000 of them had been killed in combat.
Their bravery was often overlooked by Americans.
VALLELY: We were disdainful of them.
We overstated their incompetence
because we wanted to overstate our importance.
(booming in distance)
(men shouting, gunfire)
Part of going to war in Vietnam I, I enjoyed.
If you survive it, it's, it's quite thrilling.
It's the history of the world.
It's hard to survive.
I mean, in, where I was, survival is an issue.
I would have loved to have been in the National Guard.
Period.
("Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival playing)
I knew the core issue
of what was acceptable in war and what wasn't.
I knew that.
I didn't need to get that from the Marine Corps.
I got that from Sunday school.
NARRATOR: Thomas John Vallely was born in Boston,
the son of a judge,
and brought up in the suburb of Newton.
Undiagnosed dyslexia kept him from doing well in school.
By 1969,
Vallely was a radio operator in the Marine Corps,
part of a massive search-and-destroy mission
in Quang Nam Province in the northern part of South Vietnam.
(men shouting, gunfire)
On August 13,
his company was ambushed
and came under heavy machine gun fire.
(gunfire)
VALLELY: It was a "grab 'em by the belt" type of situation.
And we lost a lot of people.
So did they.
Lot of people laying around.
(gunfire, explosion)
NARRATOR: Vallely radioed for reinforcements.
Then he picked up a rifle and ammunition
from a wounded Marine,
and, firing as he went, took up a position
just ten feet from an enemy machine gun.
He hurled a smoke grenade to mark their position.
And then, as enemy fire swept back and forth
across the field,
he moved from Marine to Marine,
pointing out targets among the trees
and encouraging his comrades.
For his conspicuous gallantry,
Tom Vallely was awarded the Silver Star.
VALLELY: You want to tell your grandchildren
it has a lot to do with courage,
uh, but it, it's really quite reactive.
It's survival.
Either you're...
It's, it's...
There's no choice here.
You react or you're not gonna have grandchildren.
COUNTRY JOE McDONALD: Give me an "F"!
CROWD: "F"!
McDONALD: Give me a "U"!
CROWD: "U"!
McDONALD: Give me a "C"!
"C"! Give me a "K"!
"K"!
What's that spell?!
NARRATOR: Two days after the battle
in which Tom Vallely distinguished himself,
and while half a million Americans
were still in Vietnam,
half a million Americans gathered
on a dairy farm in upstate New York
for a music festival: Woodstock.
♪ Way down yonder in Vietnam
♪ Put down your books and pick up a gun ♪
♪ We're gonna have a whole lot of fun ♪
♪ And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for? ♪
♪ Don't ask me, I don't give a damn ♪
♪ The next stop is Vietnam
♪ And it's five, six, seven
♪ Open up the pearly gates
♪ Well, there ain't no time to wonder why, whoopee ♪
♪ We're all gonna die
("Soul Sacrifice" by Santana playing)
♪
(song ends, crowd cheering)
MAN: Ladies and gentlemen, Santana!
You've been told once, you've been told twice.
That's all-- spread it out!
("Time of the Season" by the Zombies playing)
♪ What's your name?
GILLAM: This guy from Arkansas
told me he would not carry the radio for me.
He said, "I will not follow you like Cheetah follows Tarzan.
It's not gonna happen, Sarge."
And I thought, "Oh, this is gonna be a really long year."
I've got people down there sweeping,
so get 'em down there.
♪ It's the time
GILLAM: He evolved a little bit.
You know, he, he kind of got the idea
that the enemy's bullets are colorblind.
They would shoot anybody, not just me.
NARRATOR: African-Americans had served in every American war
since the revolution.
In the early years of the Vietnam War,
they suffered a disproportionate number
of combat deaths.
When civil rights leaders complained,
the Defense Department made a concerted effort
to right that balance,
and by 1969, it had succeeded.
But behind the lines,
African-American soldiers were still treated differently
from their white counterparts.
("Respect" by Otis Redding playing)
SOLDIER: And here there's all, all these beast motherfuckers
walking around here with their hair
looking like goddamn girls,
and we can't wear our hair
motherfucking three inches long.
The motherfucking regulation is three inches.
And most of the brothers can wear a afro,
the hair gonna be motherfucking two inches.
And why we got to get our hair cut?
That's what I want to know.
♪ Yeah, man, ooh, yeah
WAYNE SMITH: Vietnam was a microcosm.
Everything that was happening in America
was happening in Vietnam, really,
in one way, shape, or form.
In the rear,
there were Confederate flags flying.
SOLDIER 2: I mean, of all things to have over here, man,
why a Confederate flag?
As a matter of fact, I think there ought to be
some goddamn law to fucking outlaw them goddamn flags, man.
The fucking Confederacy is gone, man.
SMITH: When one is in an environment
where everyone has a gun, automatic weapon,
I'll be goddamned if someone's gonna call me a nigger
or give me a bullshit order.
I mean, that was the attitude, to risk my life for what?
REDDING: ♪ Sweeter than honey
ROGER HARRIS: There was all kind of craziness happening,
because white people were still calling, you know, us niggers,
and then there were some black people calling us Uncle Toms.
There were the antiwar folks
who were calling us baby killers, say...
You know, you can say what you want, but you can say it
from over there because if you get in range,
you're gonna get serious damage done to you.
Say what you want from a distance,
but if you get close to me, I'm gonna rip your throat out.
You know?
JUAN RAMIREZ: But when we walked outside that wire,
we went out into the bush, we were tight.
Even with our differences.
Maybe we had threatened each other,
we'd had a fight back in the base,
but when we were out there, you know,
we, we were a, a fighting unit.
And it's almost like an identity crisis.
I was born here, and my parents were born here.
I felt, in a way,
more American than Mexican.
MAN: ...hand and repeat after me...
NARRATOR: The U.S. military did not officially count Hispanics,
but an estimated 170,000 would serve in Vietnam
and more than 3,000 lost their lives.
Like their fathers and grandfathers,
many saw military service as both a patriotic duty
and an opportunity to advance their standing
in the United States.
But as casualties mounted
and with a burgeoning Chicano identity movement
among farm workers and college students,
anti-war sentiment in Hispanic communities grew.
We're protesting against the discriminatory draft laws
that give deferments
to all the Anglo middle-class people of this country
and make the heaviest burdens of the war
fall on the poor, fall on theMexicano.
RAMIREZ: I had learned
about my sister and my mother's antiwar activities
while I was still in Vietnam.
In fact, my sister wrote and said,
"I hope you're okay with this."
And she was honest with me.
She told me what they were doing.
She says, "I'm doing it for you, 'cause I want you to come home."
(indistinct chanting)
(TV clicks on)
In line with our policy of taking a stand
on the pressing issues of the day,
we now present another in our continuing series of editorials.
The subject:
are our draft laws unfair?
Here again, speaking for our program,
is Mr. Patrick Paulsen, vice president.
(applause)
Now, we don't claim the draft is perfect,
and we do have a constructive proposal
for a workable alternative.
We propose a draft lottery
in which the names of all eligible males
will be put into a hat,
and the men will be drafted according to their head sizes.
The tiny heads will go into the military service
and the fat heads will go into government.
SOLDIER (on radio): Roger, 3-1 is on his way.
SOLDIER (over radio): 5-8-1.
VINCENT OKAMOTO: A 19-year-old high school dropout says,
"Why are we here?"
And the, the standard response,
at least on an official level, was,
to prevent international communism
from conquering the world.
The men say, "Hey, that, that's bullshit."
So the other reason put forth,
at least in the latter days of the war,
was to maintain America's international credibility
with our allies, and our enemies.
Uh, no 19, 20-year-old kid wants to die to maintain
the credibility of Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon.
And so, within a relatively short time,
the guys were saying,
"Look, we shouldn't be here, but we are.
"So my only function in life
"is to try and keep you alive, buddy,
"and to keep my precious ass from being killed.
And then to go home and forget about this."
SOLDIER: The grunts, uh,
don't always do what the captain says, you know.
We got, uh-- the captain will stay back,
he'll tell the platoon or something
to go out so many hundred meters, you know.
We don't do it.
We only go as far as we get out of sight,
sit down, and come back in.
JOHN PILGER: What happens to an unpopular officer
out in the field?
Mostly unpopular officers, from what I've heard,
if they, if they mess with a grunt too much,
they get shot at.
NARRATOR: It had always been a part of war.
In Vietnam, it was called "fragging,"
after the fragmentation grenades most often used.
Beginning in the summer of 1969,
as thousands of American troops began going home,
the number of reports of the murder or attempted murder
by enlisted men of their superiors
increased alarmingly.
The Army would investigate nearly 800 cases.
Most took place far from the fighting,
usually the violent outcome of arguments over race
or women or drugs
rather than the war itself.
But there were exceptions.
OKAMOTO: It's a totally different army
than what we sent to Vietnam in 1965.
And the new lieutenant comes in, all gung-ho for body count.
He wants contact, he goes crazy, and says,
"I want a volunteer for this."
(rapid gunfire)
That new gung-ho officer was a clear and present danger
to the life and limb of the grunts.
They'd have subtle hints, like a little note saying,
"We're gonna kill your ass if you keep this up."
Or instead of a fragmentation grenade,
they may throw a smoke grenade in an officer's hooch or bunker.
And if they didn't correct their behavior and outlook,
yeah, they would frag them.
I saw it happen in a very, uh, strange way.
We were in a base and a Marine started running towards me.
I didn't realize that what he...
what he was doing back in the dark over there
was actually throw a hand grenade
underneath the space that is underneath a hooch.
(explosion)
And when it exploded, I went, "Holy shit."
And I knew right away what he had done.
And he was an African-American Marine.
African-Americans were treated
with disrespect by their superiors.
This was not uncommon.
So in a ways, as bad as this sounds,
maybe that guy had it coming to him.
I don't know.
In Paris, the 29th session of the so-called peace talks
took place.
There was no progress.
In Vietnam, it was announced that 139 Americans
lost their lives last week,
bringing total deaths in our longest war...
NARRATOR: The four-way peace talks in Paris
continued to go nowhere.
To break the logjam, Nixon directed Henry Kissinger
to begin secret talks,
the first in a series of clandestine meetings
with the North Vietnamese alone.
They first met in an apartment building
on the Rue de Rivoli.
The Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese government
were not included.
Hanoi remained immovable.
They would not even admit they had troops in South Vietnam,
let alone discuss withdrawing them.
Now Kissinger warned
that if there were no change in their position by November 1,
the one-year anniversary
of President Johnson's bombing halt,
President Nixon
would "consider steps of grave consequence."
September 2, 1969,
was the 24th anniversary
of Ho Chi Minh's declaration of Vietnamese independence
in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square.
At 9:45 that morning, Ho died.
He was said to be 79, but like so much about him,
the precise date of his birth was shrouded in mystery.
He had been "Uncle Ho" for decades,
the living embodiment of the struggle against the Japanese,
the French, the Saigon government,
and then the Americans.
♪
In a speech to the National Assembly,
Le Duan, the First Secretary of the Communist Party,
who had been the architect
of North Vietnamese military policy
for a decade,
promised to fulfill what he said was Ho's vision:
the reunification of the country on communist terms.
Nothing had changed.
ROBERT FRISHMAN: Hanoi has given the false impression
that all is wine and roses and it isn't so.
NARRATOR: The same day Ho Chi Minh died,
an unusual press conference was held
at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center.
Two ailing prisoners of war,
Robert Frishman and Douglas Hegdahl,
who had recently been released by the North Vietnamese,
spoke in public for the first time
about the severe treatment
they and their fellow prisoners had received.
I don't think solitary confinement,
forced statements, living in a cage for three years,
being put in straps, not being allowed to sleep or eat,
removal of fingernails, being hung from a ceiling,
having an infected arm which was almost lost,
not receiving medical care,
being dragged along the ground with a broken leg,
or not allowing exchange of mail to prisoners of war
are humane.
NARRATOR: Douglas Hegdahl was quiet, self-effacing,
and so apparently clueless,
his North Vietnamese guards
had called him the "stupid one."
But once released,
he was a gold mine of information.
He had memorized the names of more than 200 prisoners
to the tune of "Old McDonald Had a Farm."
Thanks to him, scores of American families
would find out for the first time
that their sons and husbands and fathers were still alive.
Within a few days of the press conference,
Hanoi's treatment of the prisoners began to improve.
"A lot less brutality," one captive remembered,
"and larger bowls of rice."
(explosion)
(men yelling)
(rapid gunfire)
DEVALLIER: All right, who's wounded?
All right, give me some cover!
RICHARD THRELKELD: Devallier is the lone medic in the platoon.
He's scared,
scared from the moment he gets out of the chopper
to the moment it picks him up.
Scared that someday he's going to get killed
picking up a wounded buddy.
(rapid gunfire, men yelling)
WAYNE SMITH: I was the replacement
for a medic who had been killed.
First time out, we were assigned to do a patrol.
MAN: Remember to stop the bleeding!
SMITH: And we stumbled actually into an ambush.
(explosion)
And it was incredibly terrifying.
Guys were screaming and yelling.
There was shooting everywhere.
That first firefight, I remember praying to God,
if He got me through this that I would make a difference.
That I really would make a difference.
MEDIC: Sometimes their lives depend on you, I mean;
you hold it in your hands, as a medic.
It's just hard to say but right then,
you hold life and death in your hand.
NARRATOR: In Vietnam, medics and navy corpsmen
accompanied infantry units on patrols,
search and destroy missions,
and large-scale combat operations.
Nearly 2,000 would lose their lives.
(helicopter whirring)
Unlike in previous wars,
many medics in Vietnam chose to carry weapons,
and when the shooting started,
were willing to use them to protect themselves
and their wounded comrades.
SMITH: I carried an M16,
but I did not know if I could kill.
Part of being a medic was to save lives.
I wondered, if the scenario presented itself, would I?
I did participate in shooting at the enemy.
We killed a lot of people.
I feel that responsibility.
I feel blood on my hands.
When you kill someone for your country,
all things change.
("Come Ye" by Nina Simone playing)
♪ Come ye
♪ Ye who would have peace...
SAM BROWN: We believed it's possible
to create a substantial majority in this country
and that's what we're about in the long run.
In November, we'll be back again,
in December, we'll be back again.
And we intend to build the movement,
which will make it imperative
that the United States withdraw from Vietnam.
REPORTER: The organizers of the moratorium do not aim
at confrontation or scuffles with the police.
Instead, they want to involve the most people possible
in some gesture of protest, however modest,
so as to show the administration that a large bloc of Americans
care not about winning or losing the war,
but only about ending it.
♪ Ye who have no fear
Thank you.
NIXON: Now, I understand
that there has been and continues to be
opposition to the war in Vietnam on the campuses
and also in the nation.
Uh, we expect it.
However, under no circumstances
will I be affected whatever by it.
NARRATOR: Hoping to undercut support for the moratorium,
Nixon canceled the draft calls
for the months of November and December 1969.
And he instituted a random lottery system
based on the date of a young man's birth,
intended to treat rich and poor alike
and do away with unfair deferments.
It was good policy and a brilliant political maneuver.
(siren wails)
On the line, brothers and sisters.
On the line now.
("Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Bob Dylan playing)
NARRATOR: As people across the country organized
for the peaceful moratorium,
members of a radical faction
of the Students for a Democratic Society--
the "Weathermen"--
took more direct action.
♪ The man in a trench coat
NARRATOR: Less interested in ending the war
than in sparking a violent revolution,
they staged what they called four "Days of Rage" in Chicago.
DYLAN: ♪ You better duck down the alleyway ♪
MAN: We no longer simply resist the pigs.
We no longer trap ourselves
so that the only possible motion
is in response to pig attacks.
We have gone on the offensive.
It is we who call the shots now.
NARRATOR: "Kill all the rich people,"
one of their leaders said.
"Break up their cars and apartments.
"Bring the revolution home.
"Kill your parents.
That's really where it's at."
MAN: Weathermen takes its name from a line
in a Bob Dylan song which says,
"You don't need a weatherman
to know the way the wind blows."
DYLAN: ♪ Wash the plain clothes
♪ You don't need a weatherman
♪ To know which way the wind blows ♪
NARRATOR: The Weathermen assumed
thousands would rally to their cause.
Only 600 did.
They blew up a statue honoring slain policemen,
ran through the streets wielding chains and pipes,
smashing windows and windshields
and charging police barriers.
Six were shot.
250 were jailed.
75 policemen were injured;
a city attorney was paralyzed for life.
(siren wails)
The Black Panthers denounced the Weathermen
as "anarchistic, opportunistic...
Custeristic."
BILL ZIMMERMAN: Probably 1969 was the year
in which most of us were more alienated
and felt more like revolutionaries.
And it led to a lot of crazy responses.
I wanted the country to undergo a radical transformation,
a redistribution of wealth and power.
But to try to bring that about
through armed struggle in the United States
was insane.
These were all infantile fantasies
that people came to out of the frustration
of not having a workable strategy
for ending the war.
REPORTER: What do you think people ought to do, governor,
who are genuinely opposed to the war
but not in favor of the Viet Cong?
Well, I think that we have had... experiences before
of people who have been opposed to wars,
and I think they deal through their own representatives,
and it's dealt with in government channels.
But once the killing starts,
the very difficult thing then is,
how do you register these protests
without lending comfort and aid to the enemy,
without strengthening his resistance
and his will to fight
and thus killing more of our men?
And most Americans in the past have always respected it.
You see, the people in this country
aren't fighting a Vietnam War.
The government's fighting it.
Well, the government is, uh,
the government is the people, supposedly, No.
but in this instance, it is not. Not anymore, it's not.
No, I agree with you, it is not.
Not in this situation, it's not.
Shouldn't I let my government know
that I think they're crazy?
I think they are insane, really.
This is an insane thing we're doing.
As a matter of fact,
Nixon said he will not listen to us
and that he will not be dictated to
from the people in the streets.
The people in the streets are me.
(chanting "peace now")
NARRATOR: The moratorium on October 15,
held all across the country,
was the largest outpouring of public dissent
in American history.
("Blackbird" by the Beatles playing)
♪ Blackbird singing in the dead of night ♪
♪ Take these broken wings and learn to fly ♪
♪ All your life
♪ You were only waiting for this moment to arise ♪
NARRATOR: It was peaceful, middle-class,
carefully focused on ending the war.
"It's nice," one marcher said,
"to go to a demonstration
without having to swear allegiance to Chairman Mao."
♪ All your life
FRANK McGEE: Surely this is a day unique in our history.
Never have so many of our people publicly
and collectively manifested opposition
to this country's involvement in a war.
It is unlikely we will remain unchanged.
Hundreds and hundreds of thousands
in cities from New York, with its eight million people,
to Dubois, Wyoming, with its 800 people,
have sought to impress upon the president
their opposition to the war.
(bell rings)
CAROL CROCKER: The first large protest march I went to was in Baltimore.
I'd never been with that many people at one time.
Just the energy of the crowd itself was tremendous.
I wondered if everybody was in it
for the right reasons.
I wasn't there to drink or smoke pot.
Not in those situations.
These, to me, were serious business.
This was the business of living life.
This was not a party.
I didn't just want to be with the crowd.
I didn't just want to make noise.
I wanted to make a difference.
And I in no way wanted to dishonor my brother.
♪ For this moment to arrive
QUINN: For most of the government today,
it was business as usual.
But at noon on the Capitol steps,
a thousand young congressional staff employees
stood in silence for 45 minutes.
♪ Blackbird singing in the dead of night ♪
NARRATOR: The children of several of the president's closest aides
and cabinet members
took part in the national moratorium.
Vice President Agnew's 14-year-old daughter
wanted to march,
but he wouldn't let her.
Coretta Scott King,
the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
led thousands of silent demonstrators
streaming past the White House, where Nixon sat alone,
writing notes to himself on a yellow pad.
"Don't get rattled. Don't waver.
Don't react."
On November 3,
the president sought to seize back the initiative.
Good evening, my fellow Americans.
NARRATOR: He went on national television and called for patience
and asked Americans to rally behind him.
NIXON: To you,
the great silent majority of my fellow Americans,
I ask for your support.
I pledged in my campaign for the presidency
to end the war
in a way that we could win the peace.
The more support I can have from the American people,
the sooner that pledge can be redeemed;
for the more divided we are at home,
the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris.
("Okie From Muskogee" by Merle Haggard playing)
Let us be united for peace.
♪ We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee ♪
NARRATOR: The speech was a triumph.
Nixon's approval rate soared to 68%.
MAN: All that's in the news
is the fact that the moratoriums are meeting,
that our country's sick...
sick of this and sick of that.
It's young people are all the ones that are standing up.
And there is a silent majority, which is no longer silent.
We're the people who are wanting to show
that man deserves freedom no matter where he is.
♪ A place where even squares can have a ball ♪
Many brave men died in this country to make it free...
I believe that.
and let you... and let you have everything.
SPIRO AGNEW: Senator Fulbright said some months ago
that if the Vietnam War went on much longer,
the best of our young people would be in Canada.
Indeed, as for these deserters,
malcontents, radicals, incendiaries,
the civil and the uncivil disobedience
among our young,
SDS, PLP,
Weatherman one, Weatherman two,
the Revolutionary Action Movement,
Panthers, lions, hippies,
yippies, tigers alike.
I'd rather swap the whole damn zoo
for a single platoon of the kind of young Americans
I saw in Vietnam.
(applause)
NARRATOR: "We've got the liberal bastards on the run now,"
Nixon told his aides,
"and we're going to keep them on the run."
("My Son" by Jan Howard playing)
♪ My son, my son
JAN HOWARD: My doorbell rang,
and it was this guy standing there,
and he said, "Ms. Howard, we're marching in Memphis
in protest of the Vietnam War."
I said, "Really?"
He said, "And we figured in view of what happened..."
I said, "Yeah, my son's death."
He said, "Well, we thought you'd like to join us."
I said, "One of the reasons he died
"was so you have the right.
"In this country, you have a right.
"Go right ahead and demonstrate.
Have at it."
I said, "But no, I won't be joining you."
I said, "But I'll tell you what.
"If you ever ring my doorbell again,
I will blow your damn head off with a .357 Magnum."
TIM O'BRIEN: Well, I was stationed in Vietnam
at a province called Quang Ngai.
Even back during the time of the French,
it was a very heavily Viet Minh area,
and, when I arrived, heavily Viet Cong.
NARRATOR: No province suffered more during the American war
than the coastal province of Quang Ngai.
(artillery fire)
More than 70% of its villages had been shelled by Navy ships,
bombed, bulldozed, or burned to the ground,
and more than 40% of its people
had been forced into refugee camps
before Tim O'Brien from Worthington, Minnesota,
got there in 1969.
O'BRIEN: It was a province that was viewed
much as I guess many Americans might view,
you know, sort of redneck America.
Sort of country bumpkins.
And they may have been country bumpkins,
but they were fiercely independent.
NARRATOR: Private O'Brien served in Alpha Company,
3rd Platoon, 5th Battalion, 23rd Americal Division,
headquartered at a landing zone called Gator,
"30 or 40 acres of almost-America,"
O'Brien remembered,
with hot showers and cold beer.
O'BRIEN: There was no sense of mission.
There was no sense of daily purpose.
We didn't know why we were in a village
or what we were supposed to accomplish.
So we'd kick around jugs of rice
and search houses and frisk people,
and not knowing what we were looking for
and rarely finding anything.
And somebody might die,
one of our guys, and somebody might not.
Then we'd come back to the same village a week later
or two weeks later, do it all over again.
It was like chasing ghosts.
(helicopter blades whirring)
NARRATOR: An American APC
accidentally crushed one man from O'Brien's company.
An enemy grenade skittered off O'Brien's helmet and exploded,
wounding a G.I. standing a few feet away.
But mines and booby traps were the greatest menace.
O'BRIEN: Somewhere around 80% of our casualties
came from land mines of all sorts.
In Vietnam, for me, just to get up in the morning
and look out at the land and think,
"In a few minutes I'll be walking out there,
"and will my corpse be there or there?
Will I lose a leg out there?"
I'd always thought of courage as charging enemy bunkers
or standing up under fire.
But just to walk through Quang Ngai,
day after day, from village to village,
and through the paddies and up into the mountains,
just to make your legs move was an act of courage
that if, say, you were living in Sioux City,
it wouldn't be courageous
to walk to the grocery store or down Main Street,
you know, just to have your legs go back and forth.
But in Vietnam, for me,
just to walk felt incredibly brave.
I would sometimes look at my legs as I walked,
thinking, "How am I doing this?"
BAO NINH:
NARRATOR: Bao Ninh was 17
when he was drafted into the North Vietnamese Army
to fight the Americans,
just as his father had fought the French.
His war would take place in the Central Highlands
of South Vietnam.
It was American firepower
that Bao Ninh and his fellow soldiers feared the most.
(explosion)
BAO NINH:
(explosion)
(birds chirping, squawking)
NARRATOR: Back in the spring,
Tim O'Brien's outfit had been sent into an area of operations
the Americans called "Pinkville,"
clusters of villages
that included a hamlet they called My Lai.
O'BRIEN: We hated going there.
When we'd get the word, "You're headed for Pinkville,"
one guy would say to another, "Somebody's gonna die,"
or, "Somebody's gonna lose a leg."
We were terrified of the place.
It was littered with land mines.
The villagers were...
The expressions on their faces,
including the children of, say, six or five years old,
had a mixture of hostility and terror.
I can't say many of the villagers
came with open arms to us,
but this place was special.
And I remember talking to fellow soldiers,
thinking, "What is it with this place?"
And then about three-quarters of the way
through my tour in Vietnam,
the story of the My Lai Massacre broke in the States.
NARRATOR: On November 12, 1969,
the Dispatch News Service in Washington
moved a story by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
It was soon followed by the publication
of graphic photos taken by Army photographer Ronald Haeberle.
The story and the pictures stunned the country.
HUNTLEY: Charges have been made
that troops of the Americal Division
killed as many as 567 South Vietnamese civilians
during a sweep in March 1968.
NARRATOR: 20 months earlier,
on the morning of March 16, 1968,
105 men from a rifle company
belonging to the Americal Division,
and led by Captain Ernest Medina
and Lieutenant William Calley,
had been ordered to helicopter into the village of My Lai 4.
Since arriving in Vietnam, they had lost 28 men
to mines and booby traps and unseen snipers.
Two days earlier, a popular squad leader had been killed.
They had been told a unit of main-force Viet Cong
was waiting for them,
and they were eager for revenge.
But they received no hostile fire,
encountered no enemy soldiers.
Instead, over the next four hours,
Medina, Calley, and their men murdered
407 defenseless old men, women, children, and infants.
Many of the women and girls were raped
before they were shot.
There would have been still more slaughter
had a helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson, Jr., not landed
between the men and some of their intended targets
and ordered his crew to open fire on their fellow Americans
if they did not stop shooting civilians.
At the same time, just a mile or so away,
another company murdered 97 more villagers.
O'BRIEN: And suddenly it was like a window shade going up,
and then there's light,
and we understood what had engendered
this horror in these kids' faces
and fear and the... and the hatred.
Hundred and some American soldiers in four hours or so
butchering innocent people,
in all kinds of ways-- machine-gunning them
and throwing them in wells and scalping them
and killing them in ditches
and taking a lunch break and then doing it some more.
Systematic homicide.
MIKE WALLACE: What kind of people?
Men, women, children?
PAUL MEADLO: Men, women, children.
WALLACE: Babies? MEADLO: Babies.
Uh, Lieutenant Calley came over and said,
"You know what to do with them, don't you?"
And, uh, I said, "Yes."
So l took it for granted that he just wanted us to watch them.
And he left and came back
about ten or... ten or 15 minutes later,
and said, "How come you ain't, uh, killed them yet?"
You killed how many at that time?
Well, I fired my automatic, so, uh...
you can't, uh... you just spray the area on them,
so you really can't know how many you killed
because it comes out so doggone fast.
So I, I might've killed about, uh, ten or 15 of them.
Men, women, and children?
Men, women, and children.
And babies? And babies.
Why did I do it?
Because I felt like I was ordered to do it.
And it seemed like, uh...
Well, at the time, I felt like I was doing the right thing.
I really did.
Because, uh, like I said, I lost buddies,
I lost... I lost a good...
damn good buddy-- Bobby Wilson--
and it was on my conscience, and it was on...
So after I done it, I felt good.
But later on that day, it was getting to me.
It's so hard, I think, for a good many Americans
to understand that young, capable,
brave American boys
could line up
old men, women, children, and babies
and shoot them down in cold blood.
How do you explain that?
I wouldn't know.
(low, distant chatter)
NARRATOR: The killing of civilians has happened in every war.
In Vietnam, it was not policy or routine,
but it was not an aberration, either.
Still, the scale and deliberateness and intimacy
of what happened at My Lai
was different.
SHEEHAN: It was different
because they were killing Vietnamese point-blank
with rifles and grenades.
They were murdering them directly.
They weren't doing it with bombs and artillery.
If they'd been doing it with bombs and artillery,
nobody would have said a word,
because it was going on all the time.
NARRATOR: Not every soldier
participated in the killings that day.
Some led villagers away to safety.
But a failure of military leadership
at nearly every level had created the conditions
that made the massacre possible.
The My Lai story might have shocked the American public,
but it was not news to the Army.
It had occurred almost two years before,
just after the Tet Offensive.
Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot
who had tried to stop the massacre,
reported what he had seen,
but no one in the chain of command
was willing to act.
The slaughter was covered up.
Later, an ex-corporal named Ronald Ridenhour,
who had heard about what had happened
from several men who had been there,
wrote letters to the president of the United States,
the secretary of defense,
and more than two dozen other high-ranking officials.
STAN ATKINSON: Personally, what decision-making process
did you go through before you decided to take your action?
I guess I just wrestled with my own conscience
to try to decide what action to take.
I felt that I had to take some action.
I had to do something.
I couldn't just...
just rest with this knowledge for the rest of my life
that I couldn't... I couldn't live with myself if I did.
NARRATOR: President Nixon's first reaction
was to investigate those who reported the slaughter.
"It's those dirty rotten Jews from New York
who are behind it,"
he told an aide.
Eventually, Lieutenant General William R. Peers,
a veteran of 30 months as a troop commander in Vietnam,
was assigned to head a panel
to look into what had really happened.
Peers found that 30 persons,
including the division commander,
General Samuel W. Koster,
had either committed atrocities
or had conspired to cover them up.
Peers had wanted to call My Lai a "massacre."
His superiors made him use the phrase,
"a tragedy of major proportions."
In the end, the Army indicted 25 officers and men,
including the platoon leader, Lieutenant William Calley.
VALLELY: Calley's a killer.
Calley's a murderer
and a... a sick person.
I'm not gonna be in any, you know, uh,
propaganda movie for the United States Marine Corps,
but we didn't have that guy.
We had individuals who, who...
who committed war crimes, of course.
And, um, you know, I wanted to kill them.
I sometimes wish I did kill 'em.
But... I was afraid to kill 'em.
♪ Two, one, two, three, four
("Give Peace a Chance" by The Plastic Ono Band plays)
(loud crowd chatter)
♪ Everybody's talking about...
ZIMMERMAN: I never considered the Vietnamese our enemy.
They had never done anything
to threaten the security of the United States.
They were off 10,000 miles away,
minding their own business,
and we went there to their country,
told them what kind of government
we wanted them to have.
JAMES WILLBANKS: Well, when I see the war protesters,
I react on a couple of levels.
Intellectually, I certainly understand their right
to the freedom of speech.
But I will tell you
that when I see them waving NLF flags,
the enemy that I and my friends had to fight,
and some of my friends had to die fighting,
that doesn't sit very well with me.
♪ All we are saying...
NARRATOR: On November 15, 1969,
half a million citizens turned out
against the war in Washington, again.
♪ Everybody's talking about revolution... ♪
NARRATOR: This time, buses provided an impenetrable wall
around the White House.
President Nixon claimed he was too busy
watching football on television
to pay attention,
but he did suggest that Army helicopters might be used
to blow out the marchers' candles.
♪ All we are saying...
(car horns honking)
NARRATOR: Hundreds of thousands of others demonstrated
in San Francisco and New York.
(indistinct shouting)
(cheering and whistling, indistinct shouting)
The most striking antiwar protest
of this Thanksgiving Day
occurred not in this country, but in Vietnam,
though its form was uniquely American.
About 100 American soldiers
stationed at a hospital in Pleiku
refused to eat their traditional turkey dinner.
They described their fast as a passive protest against the war.
("Born Under a Bad Sign" by Booker T. and the M.G.'s plays)
The Army did what the Army does.
Every year, you know, for Thanksgiving,
they make a big deal.
They're gonna bring in turkey,
they're gonna bring in mashed potatoes,
and apple pie and whatever.
And by this point, I think,
a lot of us were very, very cynical about the war
and what was going on.
But we weren't gonna make a big deal about it.
We knew there were gonna be TV people there.
And a couple of the organizers were looking for people to talk.
They came to me, I said, "No."
I said, "Look, I'm gonna fast and do my thing."
I said, "But I, I really don't want
to be involved with any media thing."
NARRATOR: That Thanksgiving Day, Lieutenant Furey was on duty
when one of her patients took a sudden turn for the worse.
FUREY: Some patients, they just get into your heart.
And this kid, I think he was 18.
His name was Timmy.
It was unlikely he was gonna survive.
And I just got so angry.
I just lost it.
I remember walking out of the O.R.,
I ripped off the gown, and I ripped off the mask,
I walked outside, I said, "Where are those reporters?"
I mean, you know, you don't demonstrate against the war
in a war zone.
By that time, of course, you, you had the attitude,
"What are they gonna do?
Send me to Vietnam?"
(loud, overlapping chatter and shouting)
(indistinct chanting)
JOHN MUSGRAVE: Let's just say that being a Marine combat veteran
on a college campus in 1969 and 1970--
it wasn't a real good thing to be
if you wanted to get dates and be popular.
When I came home, it seemed like
I didn't have anything to give to anybody else.
NARRATOR: Marine Corporal John Musgrave had very nearly died
in combat below the DMZ in the autumn of 1967.
Wounded in the jaw and shoulder,
his ribs shattered, lung pierced, nerves cut,
he had spent 17 months in Navy hospitals.
He was now studying at Baker University
in Baldwin City, Kansas.
(indistinct chanting and shouting)
But wherever he went, the war was never far away.
MUSGRAVE: And the peace movement, for a while, got real nasty,
calling veterans baby killers.
It did more than piss us off.
It broke our hearts.
What were they thinking?
You don't turn your backs on your warriors.
I didn't trust anybody anymore.
Just my family.
NARRATOR: Musgrave was so hurt
by the way some people treated him
that he volunteered to return to Vietnam.
Because of his injuries, the Marines turned him down,
and asked him to help recruit men instead.
He did for a time,
but when students asked him questions about the war
he couldn't answer,
he also began to read
about how and why it was being fought.
MUSGRAVE: I had friends in country on a second tour,
and, you know, I, I was still... considered myself a Marine.
and... and the more I read,
the less I found to be able to defend our presence there.
So then, I, I just stopped talking to everybody.
(dog barking)
NARRATOR: Musgrave gradually felt as if he were being torn in two.
And he was still haunted by the memory of those Marines
who had died while he had lived.
MUSGRAVE: I was dating my .45 in those years, you know.
Coming home at night after drinking,
and pressing it up against my temple,
or putting it under my chin,
wondering if this was gonna be the night
I was gonna have the guts to do it.
I'd had a round chambered, and I'd taken the safety off.
Same kind of pistol I carried in Vietnam.
And I thought, "I'm really gonna do it tonight."
You know, like, "Whew, I'm really gonna do it," you know.
And my dogs... I'd let my dogs out.
I had two dogs.
And they jumped on the front door
and scratched on the front door.
They wanted in.
And I put the safety back on the pistol
and set it down and went and let 'em in.
And they were so open in their love for me
that I literally said out loud,
"Whoa, if I really want to do this, I can do this tomorrow."
And I went back in the room,
and I put the pistol in the drawer, and...
and I... I think that was the closest I came.
I think maybe I would have killed...
k-k-killed myself that night.
But something as simple
as my dogs wanting back in...
stopped that thought, you know.
I'm really glad that it didn't happen.
But at the time, it just made so much sense.
NARRATOR: Richard Nixon's troop withdrawals
finally turned Musgrave against the war.
"If it ain't worth winning," he said,
"it ain't worth dying for."
His loyalty to the Marines
would not yet let him openly say that,
but he told a campus antiwar meeting
that they should stop acting as if they didn't give a damn
about the men who had been asked to fight,
and received a standing ovation.
JACK TODD: The turning point for me, I think,
was one evening I spent with my friend Sonny Walter,
who had been, uh... just been discharged from the Army,
and had come home and spent an evening
before I went in pleading with me not to go.
He even offered to drive me to Canada.
He was showing me some horrible pictures of Vietnam
from his own service there.
I think everything that happened after it
had its seeds in that evening.
("The Thrill is Gone" by B.B. King playing)
NARRATOR: While attending the University of Nebraska,
Jack Todd had undergone Marine officer training,
but bad knees had forced him to drop out
and he believed that exempted him
from having to take part in a war
he had come to see as immoral.
He began work as a reporter onThe Miami Herald.
But in the autumn of 1969 he received a draft notice
from the Army anyway.
KING: ♪ The thrill is gone
TODD: So I went into my physical
and I showed them my discharge from the Marine Corps
and I actually remember a sergeant,
or whoever I was talking to, saying,
"But, uh, you were discharged from an officer program.
We're drafting you as a private."
(electric buzzing)
NARRATOR: In late November 1969,
Todd reported for basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington.
KING: ♪ You know you done me wrong
TODD: Morale just could not have been worse.
And-and it seemed to include
even the sergeants and the officers.
Nobody wanted to go. Nobody wanted to go.
America just seemed to have shifted from the Woodstock high
of the summer to this...
this sort of bitter Nixonian low.
NARRATOR: Jack Todd and another member of his unit
began to talk at night about what it meant
to be true to one's conscience.
("Farewell, Angelina" by Bob Dylan playing)
Some 170,000 men
were granted conscientious objector status
during the Vietnam era.
But because Jack Todd
questioned the existence of God,
that avenue was closed to him.
There were really two choices.
It was go to jail or go to Canada.
And, for me, going to jail was just...
That one, I couldn't face.
So I went to Canada.
DYLAN: ♪ Farewell, Angelina
♪ The bells of the crown
TODD: I remember that last beautiful drive,
from Seattle to Vancouver,
all the towering Douglas firs along the road.
And I remember, after we crossed the border--
it was a breeze, they just sort of waved us through--
and just looking in the rearview mirror, thinking,
"Man, there goes my country.
I'll never see it again."
DYLAN: ♪ But farewell, Angelina
♪ The night is on fire
♪ And I must go
I get called a coward all the time.
It took me a long time
not to feel that what I had done
was-was cowardly, because I still had
that military ingrained feeling inside.
That was the bravest thing I ever did.
It was the bravest thing I ever did.
NARRATOR: Jack Todd eventually found work as a reporter,
which allowed him to gain "landed immigrant status,"
a step toward Canadian citizenship.
Only a quarter of the estimated 30,000 Americans
who crossed into Canada managed to do so.
DYLAN: ♪ The sky is erupting
♪ And I must go where it is quiet. ♪
NARRATOR: At the same time, some 30,000 Canadians
would volunteer to fight in Vietnam.
(birds chirping in distance)
KUSHNER: I thought about...
my parents and my siblings
and my wife and my little girl.
And one of the things that bothered me, is that I...
I couldn't really remember what they looked like after a while.
I remembered what their pictures looked like.
And when I imaged them in my mind's eye
I would image a picture, a photograph.
REPORTER: Valerie Kushner arrived on the...
NARRATOR: Hal Kushner's wife, Valerie,
had heard virtually nothing of her husband
since his capture by the Viet Cong in 1967,
and she had traveled to the Far East
to try to improve conditions for him.
I think my period of greatest frustration
was just before and just after the birth of our son.
He was born in April of 1968
and my husband was captured in November of 1967.
So my husband does not yet know of his birth.
DON FARMER: With their father gone, the Kushner children
rely heavily on their mother and their grandparents.
Young Mike has never seen his father,
but six-year-old Toni-Jean remembers.
And the remembrances of Major Kushner
are everywhere in their house.
Toni, however, knows only that he's away,
that he's been captured, that grandfather fills in
until Dad comes home.
The Kushners worry, but they do not grieve.
Don Farmer, ABC News, reporting.
(siren wailing in distance)
NARRATOR: In February 1970,
in a house in an industrial suburb of Paris,
Henry Kissinger began a new series
of secret negotiations-- talks so secret
even the secretary of state was not told about them.
His negotiating partner
would be Le Duan's close political ally, Le Duc Tho,
a veteran of 40 years of revolutionary warfare
and party intrigue-- shrewd, implacable,
and openly scornful of Vietnamization.
If the United States could not win
with half a million of its own troops, he asked Kissinger,
"How can you succeed when you let your puppet troops
do the fighting?"
The American admitted he had no answer.
Despite the impasse in Paris,
Nixon's first year had been a triumph.
He had withdrawn 115,000 troops from Vietnam.
American casualty figures were down.
Reduced draft calls
and the president's new lottery system
had blunted some opposition to the war.
And the violent actions of some revolutionaries
were tarnishing the antiwar cause itself.
Between September 1969 and May 1970,
there would be hundreds of bombings--
banks and courthouses,
induction centers and ROTC buildings.
("Psychedelic Shack" by The Temptations starts playing)
One police officer was killed.
Three would-be bombers
accidentally blew themselves up in Greenwich Village.
TEMPTATIONS: ♪ Well, well
NANCY BIBERMAN: The antiwar movement split apart.
And there were people who felt that the only way
we were ever gonna end the war was by becoming more violent.
You know, that we had to match violence with violence.
How that was gonna happen wasn't spoken about openly.
But there was just this undercurrent.
This is a plumbing pipe
completely full of gunpowder.
TEMPTATIONS: ♪ Music so high you can't get over it ♪
NIXON: My fellow Americans,
we live in an age of anarchy,
both abroad and at home.
We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions,
which have been created by free civilizations
in the last 500 years.
Even here in the United States,
great universities are being systematically destroyed.
If, when the chips are down,
the world's most powerful nation,
the United States of America,
acts like a pitiful, helpless giant,
the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy
will threaten free nations and free institutions
throughout the world.
NARRATOR: On April 30, 1970,
President Nixon shocked the world
by announcing that he had sent 30,000 American troops
storming into Cambodia.
The previous month, Prince Norodom Sihanouk
had been overthrown in a coup.
For years, he had allowed the North Vietnamese
to keep sanctuaries in his country,
but he had not protested
when American planes bombed them.
The new president, Lon Nol,
was an anticommunist, backed by the United States.
Nixon now felt he could do
what American generals had been wanting to do for years--
pursue the enemy beyond the borders of South Vietnam.
The 30,000 American troops
were joined by 50,000 ARVN soldiers.
The objective was to attack
North Vietnamese base camps and supply lines
and to buy time for the South Vietnamese Army
as it got ready to fight on its own.
Nixon told the public
he had ordered an "incursion," not an "invasion,"
intended only to protect American boys in South Vietnam
and in response to North Vietnamese "aggression."
GILLAM: I wasn't worried about political conflict.
I was worried about, "Am I gonna be alive
in the next ten minutes?"
We were on the Western edge of the invasion.
We went as far as anybody went in Cambodia.
(gunfire)
And it was a hot LZ.
I got holes shot in my backpack.
I was laying on my face
and they were shooting holes in my backpack,
which means they missed my head by maybe four inches.
I really didn't think I would see the end of that week.
(gunfire)
(indistinct chatter on radio)
NARRATOR: The sight of American troops crossing the border
into Cambodia reignited the antiwar movement.
Come on, let's go!
NARRATOR: If the troops were coming home,
if the war was winding down,
why had Nixon decided to widen it?
How could invading another country
help bring peace to Southeast Asia?
HUNTLEY: The reaction on the campuses
was swift and predictable.
The students and many of their teachers
were against the president.
Princeton students called for a nationwide student strike.
Antiwar rallies were planned at Harvard, MIT, Indiana,
Purdue Universities and other colleges.
NARRATOR: On Monday morning, May 4, 1970,
some 2,000 students gathered on the commons
at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.
Some were simply moving from class to class.
Others planned to attend a rally called to protest
Nixon's widening of the war
and the presence of the Ohio National Guard on campus.
Governor James Rhodes had called in the guardsmen
two days earlier
after a mob set the old wooden ROTC building on fire
and then prevented the fire department
from putting out the flames.
Rhodes had compared protestors to Nazi brownshirts
and promised to use "every weapon to eradicate
the worst sort of people we harbor in America."
(bell clanging)
The guardsmen's weapons were loaded with live ammunition,
though no one in the crowd knew it.
MAN: Why do you have to have a gun?! I don't understand!
MAN (on megaphone): Leave this area immediately!
NARRATOR: The students were ordered to disperse.
They stood their ground.
(shouting)
Tear gas scattered some of them.
(shouting)
The guardsmen seemed to fall back.
But then members of Troop G wheeled around and opened fire
on students gathered in and around a parking lot.
(distorted gunshots echoing)
PROTESTOR: Somebody call for an ambulance!
(others shouting)
There's people dying down here! Get an ambulance up here!
(indistinct shouting)
NARRATOR: 67 rounds in 13 seconds
killed two young women and two young men...
Including an ROTC scholarship student
who had simply been an onlooker.
SAM HYNES: That dead child on the ground
was one of ours.
If we could kill our own students,
uh, what had happened to our country?
NARRATOR: Nine more students were wounded,
one of whom was permanently paralyzed.
Several hundred angry, grieving students sat down
and demanded to know why the guardsmen
had fired on their friends.
MAN: Sir, you've got a couple hundred students...
NARRATOR: An officer ordered them
to "disperse or we will shoot again."
How long will you give us? You've got five minutes.
GLENN FRANK: Please listen to me right now!
NARRATOR: Only the anguished pleas
of geology professor Glenn Frank averted further tragedy.
STUDENT: Talk, Dr. Frank. Talk.
(indistinct voices)
MIKE HEANEY: That just symbolized for me
what this war was doing to our culture.
These were kids on both sides,
young National Guard boys
who had very little training and probably scared,
and not well led
and-and young men and women on the other side
protesting the war out there
for, you know, idealistic reasons.
And look at what happens
when we let things get as bad as they got.
("Woodstock" by Joni Mitchell playing)
NARRATOR: According to one national poll,
58% of the American people
thought the killings justified.
The parents of the dead ROTC student
received a flood of hate mail,
suggesting that they should be grateful their boy was dead
since he'd been "just another communist."
(man speaking indistinctly over megaphone)
During the days that followed, all across the country,
more than four million college students
demonstrated against the war
and what had happened at Kent State.
MITCHELL: ♪ I came upon a child of God
♪ He was walking along the road ♪
♪ And I asked him
♪ Where are you going?
♪ And this he told me
NARRATOR: 448 campuses closed down,
and the National Guard was called out in 16 states.
MITCHELL: ♪ Band
♪ I'm gonna camp out
NARRATOR: At Jackson State University in Mississippi,
state police opened fire on a dormitory.
Two students died.
12 more were wounded.
Jackson State, those were my people.
Those were black kids.
And they died.
MITCHELL: ♪ Back to the garden
NARRATOR: Army private Tim O'Brien
was now back home in Minnesota.
O'BRIEN: There was a huge march
after the Kent State shootings in St. Paul,
and I joined the march.
I just wanted to put my body amidst these 100,000 people,
that word "no" being uttered by my body, if not by my mouth,
by just making that march.
That same march I was doing in Vietnam
that seemed senseless and purposeless
and without direction,
here it felt sensible and purposeful
and with direction, heading for that state capital
to say no.
And, boy, did it feel good.
(chanting "Peace now")
NARRATOR: Marine Corporal Bill Ehrhart
was a student at Swarthmore College
near his hometown in eastern Pennsylvania.
EHRHART: And here's this very famous photograph.
And I just looked at this thing.
And I came unglued.
I don't know how long I sat down on the curb,
and I don't know if I was there for 15 minutes
or an hour and a half.
Just had a breakdown.
Just crying, sobbing uncontrollably.
All I could think was, "It's not enough to send us
"halfway around the world to die.
"Now they're killing us in the streets of our own country.
I have to do something."
And I finally...
whenever I finally cried myself out,
I got up and I joined the antiwar movement.
MUSGRAVE: I remember when the kids were killed at Kent State,
and I thought,
"My God, we're killing our own children now.
We've really gone mad."
And I wasn't...
That's when I was hiding from things.
I wasn't in anybody's movement then.
I was just drinking.
But that was one of the things that told me
America needed a wake-up call.
("Ohio" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young playing)
♪ Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming ♪
♪ We're finally on our own
♪ This summer I hear the drumming ♪
♪ Four dead in Ohio
♪ Got to get down to it
♪ Soldiers are cutting us down
♪ Should have been done long ago ♪
♪ What if you knew her
♪ And found her dead on the ground? ♪
♪ How can you run when you know? ♪
♪
♪ La la-la-la, la la la la ♪
♪ La la-la-la, la la la ♪
♪ La la-la-la, la la la la ♪
♪ La la-la-la, la la la ♪
♪ Got to get down to it
♪ Soldiers are cutting us down
♪ Should have been done long ago ♪
♪ What if you knew her
♪ And found her dead on the ground? ♪
♪ How can you run when you know? ♪
♪
♪ Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming ♪
♪ We're finally on our own
♪ This summer I hear the drumming ♪
♪ Four dead in Ohio
♪ Four
♪ Four dead in Ohio
♪ Four ♪ Four dead in Ohio
♪ How could they? ♪ Four dead in Ohio
♪ How many more? ♪ Four dead in Ohio
♪ Why? ♪ Four dead in...
ANNOUNCER: LEARN MORE ABOUT THE FILM
AND FIND ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AT PBS.ORG/VIETNAMWAR
AND JOIN THE CONVERSATION USING HASHTAG VIETNAMWARPBS.
"THE VIETNAM WAR" IS AVAILABLE
ON BLU-RAY AND DVD.
THE COMPANION BOOK, SOUNDTRACK,
AND ORIGINAL SCORE FROM THE FILM
ARE ALSO AVAILABLE.
TO ORDER, VISIT SHOPPBS.ORG
OR CALL 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
EPISODES OF THIS SERIES ALSO
AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD
FROM iTUNES.
ANNOUNCER: BANK OF AMERICA PROUDLY SUPPORTS
KEN BURNS' AND LYNN NOVICK'S FILM "THE VIETNAM WAR"
BECAUSE FOSTERING DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES
AND CIVIL DISCOURSE AROUND IMPORTANT ISSUES
FURTHERS PROGRESS, EQUALITY,
AND A MORE CONNECTED SOCIETY.
GO TO BANKOFAMERICA.COM/ BETTERCONNECTED TO LEARN MORE.
ANNOUNCER: MAJOR SUPPORT FOR "THE VIETNAM WAR"
WAS PROVIDED BY MEMBERS OF THE BETTER ANGELS SOCIETY,
INCLUDING JONATHAN AND JEANNIE LAVINE,
DIANE AND HAL BRIERLEY,
AMY AND DAVID ABRAMS,
JOHN AND CATHERINE DEBS,
THE FULLERTON FAMILY CHARITABLE FUND,
THE MONTRONE FAMILY,
LYNDA AND STEWART RESNICK,
THE PERRY AND DONNA GOLKIN FAMILY FOUNDATION,
THE LYNCH FOUNDATION,
THE ROGER AND ROSEMARY ENRICO FOUNDATION,
AND BY THESE ADDITIONAL FUNDERS.
MAJOR FUNDING WAS ALSO PROVIDED
BY DAVID H. KOCH...
THE BLAVATNIK FAMILY FOUNDATION...
THE PARK FOUNDATION,
THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES,
THE PEW CHARITABLE TRUSTS,
THE JOHN S. AND JAMES L. KNIGHT FOUNDATION,
THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION,
THE ARTHUR VINING DAVIS FOUNDATIONS,
THE FORD FOUNDATION JUSTFILMS,
BY THE CORPORATION
FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING,
AND BY VIEWERS LIKE YOU.
THANK YOU.