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