Sometimes I would hear a car crunch up in the snow,
and I'd think maybe it would be somebody coming
to give us bad news.
Which was not good for me to think.
It was an underlying anxiety
that I really think was there all the time.
All his young life, Denton Crocker, Jr.-
known as "Mogie" to his family...
had dreamed of serving his country,
of putting his own life on the line
in defense of what he called "individual freedom."
He'd wanted to serve in Vietnam so much
he'd pressured his parents into granting their permission
for him to join the Army before he was 18.
He was eager for combat and pleased when he was assigned
to the 1st Brigade of the celebrated 101st Airborne,
the "Screaming Eagles" who had led the way on D-Day.
But he was quickly disappointed to find himself attached
to battalion headquarters, repairing weapons, making lists,
keeping records.
It was "boring," he wrote home.
I think perhaps you will understand my disappointment
when you see that there is little sense in being over here
unless one faces the main objective,
the destruction of the VC.
Certainly one feels no sense of accomplishment
when one's friends are facing all the dangers.
I had a map on the back of the living room door.
And I put pins in it every time Denton Jr. Moved.
And he moved a lot.
And I knew those names at one time
as well as any area of our own world.
Well, how'd you have a good weekend?
Yeah, I did, Mr. President.
I hope you did too.
What's your thinking these days?
I haven't talked to you.
What's happening to our pause?
What are our generals saying?
See, I think you'll find some foreign leaders
will criticize you if you resume bombing.
As a matter of fact, no other intelligence source
that I've seen indicates that Hanoi is even considering
moving toward negotiation
in order to lead us to extend the pause.
Intelligence information...
As 1966 began, the president of the United States
was just learning the name of the man
who was the most powerful member of the Politburo in Hanoi...
Le Duan.
First Secretary of the Communist Party,
a man named Le Duan... L-E capital D-U-A-N...
who today is putting considerable pressure
on Ho Chi Minh and others to ensure continuing a war
that he thinks they either are winning or can win.
As they continued to escalate the war,
Johnson and McNamara were frustrated
that American commanders in Vietnam, who had come of age
during World War II and Korea,
were having a hard time making sense
of what was happening on the ground.
In the months and years to come, as the American presence grew,
Hanoi would escalate too,
sending more and more soldiers south,
strengthening its own air defenses,
and recruiting more fighters
from the alienated South Vietnamese countryside.
The Johnson administration was desperately trying
to prop up the government in Saigon and, at the same time,
help that government to somehow win the loyalty
of its own people.
Johnson had tried to forge an international coalition
to defend South Vietnam.
But only five other countries would ever send combat troops...
Australia and New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines,
and South Korea.
America's most important allies, Britain, France and Canada,
refused to take part and were calling instead for peace talks.
And more and more Americans,
including some of the country's most respected
foreign policy experts,
were beginning to question the way the war was being fought,
whether it could ever be won,
and if the United States should be in Vietnam at all.
As 1966 began, 2,344 Americans had died in Vietnam.
Nearly 200,000 were stationed there,
and more were on their way.
Those soldiers would quickly discover
that the war they were being asked to fight
was not their father's war.
We tend to fight the next war
in the same way we fought the last one.
We are prisoners of our own experience.
And many of the things that we learned that worked
in World War II
were not applicable to the war in Vietnam.
We simply thought we'd go in with a sledgehammer
and knock things down, clean them up,
and it would be all over.
It was a kind of an oversimplification
of the problem
combined with our overconfidence that caused us,
I think, to be arrogant.
And it's very, very difficult to dispel ignorance
if you retain arrogance.
In early February of 1966,
President Johnson got more bad news.
His old friend, J. William Fulbright,
the powerful chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
planned to hold hearings on the Vietnam War,
and the television networks intended to cover the hearings
from gavel to gavel.
Fulbright, who had once supported the war,
now opposed it.
LBJ was alarmed.
His own advisers had been giving him conflicting advice
about Vietnam for years.
But a public debate about how he was running the war
in front of millions of Americans filled him with dread.
As the hearings got underway,
the president tried to deflect attention
by suddenly announcing he was going to a military conference
in Honolulu, to meet for the first time the two generals
who now headed the Saigon government.
It is a meeting without precedent,
and is designed to strengthen United States determination
to pursue to the end the drive against communist domination
in South Vietnam.
General Nguyen Van Thieu was the chief of state,
but real power lay with Thieu's bitter rival,
the former head of the South Vietnamese Air Force,
Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky.
Ky was "an unguided missile," according to one U.S. diplomat,
known for his flamboyant uniforms,
his gaudy private life, and his public pronouncements.
He once told a reporter that what Vietnam really needed
was "five Hitlers."
How could we allow and accept that to happen?
He was a charlatan.
The man not only has no training,
has no education, but doesn't seem to inter...
be interested in being educated, and proud of his ignorance.
President Johnson spent most of his time in Honolulu
urging Ky to focus on pacification...
earning the support of the South Vietnamese people
by undertaking economic and social reforms
Americans had been calling for for more than a decade.
Johnson wasn't interested in "high-sounding words"
about progress, he said.
He wanted genuine achievements...
what they called in Texas, "coonskins on the wall."
Well, nobody understood what does it mean "coonskin."
And people the Vietnamese at the delegation they ask me,
"You understand what it is?"
And myself I said, "Well, I don't understand."
I have to ask some Americans to explain to me.
And some American friends, they explain to me later on
and only by then the Vietnamese understood.
I happen to hold the point of view
that it isn't going to be too long
before the American people, as a people,
will repudiate our war in Southeast Asia.
That, of course, is good news
to Hanoi, Senator.
Oh, I know that
that's the smear artist that you militarists give to those of us
that have honest differences of opinion with you.
But I don't intend to get down in the gutter with you
and engage in that kind of debate, General.
Johnson's trip to Honolulu had not distracted
the American public.
They were riveted to the hearings.
And I also think that great countries,
especially this country,
is quite strong enough to engage in a compromise
without losing its standing in the world,
without losing its prestige as a great nation.
On the contrary, I think it would be
one of the greatest victories for us and our prestige
if we could-could be ingenious enough and magnanimous enough
to bring about some kind of a settlement
of this particular struggle.
Fulbright invited the respected diplomat George Kennan
to testify.
For two decades, his doctrine of containment...
stopping Soviet expansion...
had been the basis of American foreign policy,
and had in some ways been the justification
for leading the United States into its proxy war in Vietnam.
The first point I would like to make
is that if we were not already involved as we are today
in Vietnam,
I would know of no reason
why we should wish to become so involved,
and I could think of several reasons
why we should wish not to.
You have referred to containment here.
How... how can we contain in Vietnam?
We would do better if we really would show ourselves
a little more relaxed and less terrified of what happens
in the...
certainly in the smaller countries of Asia and Africa,
and not jump around like an elephant frightened by a mouse
every time these things occur.
Johnson was relieved when, at the last moment,
instead of airing Kennan's testimony,
CBS showed reruns of The Real McCoys,
The Andy Griffith Show and I Love Lucy.
But NBC kept the cameras running.
This is not only not our business,
but I don't think we can do it successfully.
And I take it by this you mean that
this is simply not a practicable objective,
as I understand it, in this country.
We can't achieve it even with the best of will.
This is correct, and I have a fear
that our thinking about this whole problem is still affected
by some sort of illusions about invincibility on our part.
Just before the hearings began,
the president had decided to resume the bombing of targets
in North Vietnam.
The 37-day pause that had begun on Christmas Eve 1965
had yielded no hint of Hanoi's willingness
to come to the negotiating table.
In South Vietnam, Viet Cong guerrillas were now believed
to control nearly three-quarters of the country.
But General William Westmoreland,
the American commander, thought his most urgent task
was to destroy the North Vietnamese regular army units
Hanoi was sending South.
Westmoreland's target for the next two years
would be reaching what he called the "crossover point"-
the point at which U.S. and ARVN forces
were killing more enemy troops than could be replaced.
It would be a war of attrition.
But that would require still more American soldiers.
They came from every corner of the country.
I was born at West Point when my dad was on the faculty there.
From my earliest recollection,
West Point was what I wanted to do,
not even particularly because I had an inkling
or a strong desire for a military career.
It's just...
West Point was kind of the height of my ambition.
The son of a colonel who had served in World War II,
Matt Harrison had grown up on Army bases around the world.
For him and his four siblings,
the military was always at the center of their lives.
You addressed parents "sir" and "ma'am,"
and you said "yes" and not "yeah."
And you answered the phone, "Colonel Harrison's quarters."
We got up every Saturday morning and we dusted the house.
My dad would put on the West Point marching band
and my sister and I would dust around the living room.
It seemed to Matt's parents
that he could do no wrong.
He was the embodiment of the values they had hoped to instill
in all their children: duty, honor, and country.
The strongest impression I have from my class
and my classmates was they were guys who just were idealists.
And I think guys drawn from little towns
all across the United States had that in common.
It was a time before the questions
about American exceptionalism.
We didn't question.
We believed in what this country stood for,
and we believed that people who had the ability
to lead soldiers should do that.
I wanted to go with the gladiators.
I wanted to go with the tough guys.
I was born in Boston, in the Roxbury section of Boston.
There were those who would recruit you for gangs
and try to entice you to do things
that-that weren't in the best interest of society.
Let's put it like that.
Roger Harris dreamed of going to college
on a football scholarship, but was not big enough
to play for his team in high school.
And so I enlisted in the Marine Corps.
And I felt that... that it was a win-win
because, one, if I died, then my mother would be able
to receive the $10,000 insurance policy.
I thought that was a lot of money,
that my mother will be rich if I die.
You know, she'll be rich.
If I live, then I'll be a hero, you know,
and I can come back and get a job.
Naive, dumb, you know?
John Musgrave was from the Fair-mount neighborhood
of Independence, Missouri.
I was 17 and my best friend and I
went down and enlisted in the Marine Corps.
I had always dreamed of being a Marine.
And...
Well, I knew I wasn't going to be a man right away
but I was going to be a Marine, and that was enough.
I'd be doing something mature.
And I'd be doing something that was important.
And there was a war on and I wanted a piece of it.
I grew up in Perkasie, Pennsylvania.
And every Memorial Day
all that generation of World War II would dress up
in their American Legion uniforms and parade around.
And I'd put red, white, and blue crepe paper on my bicycle.
And the kids could ride behind the parade.
Bill Ehrhart would sign up in part because his father,
a pastor, had not served.
Ehrhart was a gifted student
and in his senior year in high school
was accepted by four colleges.
Had he attended any one of them,
he would have been deferred from the draft.
It all came down to this notion
of I was going to serve my country and be a hero
and have that gorgeous Marine Corps uniform.
And the girls would just be draped around my neck
and nobody would beat me up again.
But at the same time
I would really be serving my country.
It was my chance to be...
one doesn't want to trivialize it, but it was my chance to be
the star of my own John Wayne movie.
It was my chance to do what that World War II generation had done
and seemed to be so proud of.
Now I had my turn.
Wherever they came from,
whatever their reasons for joining the military,
training transformed them.
For about the first five weeks at Parris Island,
I was convinced that I was going to die there.
The drill instructors said they were going to kill me.
And they certainly sounded serious.
I grew up in segregated neighborhoods all my life.
So, I'd never met a black person till I arrived at boot camp.
Never stood next to a black person or a Hispanic
or anyone who was Jewish.
I just... they didn't mix where I grew up.
So that was just eye opening.
But when I got to talking to everybody, we were all the same.
We were all working class and poor.
And we all wanted to be Marines real bad.
By the time I graduated,
I felt like I was king of the world.
I was God.
I could do anything.
On that day I became a Marine.
You know, the Marine Corps trains you to be a fighter.
They train you to fight, they train you to kill.
They used to say that if you're a Marine, you can't die
until you kill three Vietnamese.
And I said, "Well, I'm from Roxbury.
If the expectation is three, I'll do ten."
You know, craziness.
The tendency for a great power is to use
what it's greatest at...
namely its firepower, destructive power.
Dropping a lot of bombs and shooting a lot of artillery
at a distance.
You save lives.
You kill a lot of them, you don't lose a lot of us.
The central coastal province of Binh Dinh
was home to more than half a million people.
For decades, it had been a guerrilla stronghold,
and in early 1966,
the Viet Cong had been augmented by North Vietnamese regulars,
some 8,000 men in all.
General Westmoreland sent 20,000 American,
South Vietnamese and South Korean troops
storming across the province in pursuit of the enemy
and their sources of supply.
They first dropped leaflets and broadcast from loudspeakers
to warn villagers of the terrible fate
that awaited anyone who fired on their helicopters,
urged them to leave their homes,
promised safe passage to any Viet Cong
who wished to surrender.
Then they called in airstrikes and artillery
and blew the hamlets to bits.
It was the first large-scale search-and-destroy campaign
of the war.
The offensive lasted 42 days.
The Army reported 2,389 enemy soldiers killed.
Westmoreland was pleased.
But commanders on the scene were concerned
that despite all the American firepower brought against them,
most of the North Vietnamese regulars had still managed
to escape back into the Central Highlands.
The operation would drive more than 100,000 civilians
from their homes.
Similar search-and-destroy and bombing campaigns...
17 large-scale U.S. offensives in 1966 alone...
would produce a total
of more than three million homeless people
all across the country,
roughly one-fifth of South Vietnam's population.
Since there was no front in Vietnam,
as there had been in the first and second World Wars,
since no ground was ever permanently won or lost,
the American military command in Vietnam...
fell back more and more on a single grisly measure
of supposed success:
counting corpses.
Body count.
The problem with the war,
as it often is, are the metrics.
It is a situation where if you can't count what's important,
you make what you can count important.
So, in this particular case what you could count
was dead enemy bodies.
You don't get details with a body count.
You get numbers.
And the numbers are lies, most of 'em.
If body count is your success mark,
then you're pushing otherwise honorable men, warriors,
to become liars.
If body count
is the measure of success,
then there's the tendency to count every body
as an enemy soldier.
There's a tendency to want to pile up dead bodies
and perhaps to use less discriminate firepower
than you otherwise might
in order to achieve the result
that you're charged with trying to obtain.
Just think about the problem from the North's point of view.
They had to supply the South.
I'm talking about bringing in people, equipment, supplies,
and so forth.
They started from nothing and pushed a road through that...
through an area the size of Massachusetts.
So this is not a trivial amount of real estate
that they took over, built a road on,
and then maintained it.
For years, Hanoi had smuggled most of its arms and supplies
to the South aboard an improvised fleet of junks,
trawlers and freighters.
But when the U.S. Navy effectively blockaded
the Southern coastline,
the North Vietnamese would be forced to move
almost all of their supplies overland,
through Laos and Cambodia,
neutral countries Hanoi considered
part of the greater battlefield.
Americans called it the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The North Vietnamese called it Route 559,
after the men and women of the 559th Army Corps,
who were turning it from a braided web of footpaths
into 12,000 tangled miles of jungle roadways
down which men and materiel streamed south.
When they had fought the French,
the Viet Minh had depended on tens of thousands of porters,
then on legions of bicycles.
Now, to offset the growing American presence,
the North Vietnamese used more mechanized transport...
relays of six-wheeled Russian-built trucks
traveling under cover of darkness.
MACV reasoned that if the Ho Chi Minh Trail
could somehow be sufficiently damaged,
the enemy would be unable to sustain itself.
Three million tons of explosives would eventually be dropped
on the Laos portion of the trail alone...
a million more tons than fell on Germany and Japan
during all of World War II.
Some key choke-points were hit so many times
the workers gave them names... "the Gate of Death,"
"Fried Flesh Hill" and "the Gorge of Lost Souls."
To expose enemy traffic,
other aircraft dropped chemical defoliants,
including Agent Orange,
that destroyed thousands of acres of jungle
and turned the earth into what one American pilot called
"bony, lunar dust."
We'd punch a hole in the road and say,
"Ha ha, they'll never get around that one."
And the next day you'd come up, and the hole wouldn't be there;
and there'd be dust on the trees back, you know, 50 meters
in both directions, saying, heavy traffic all night.
As many as 230,000 teenagers, many of them volunteers,
worked to keep the roads open and the traffic moving.
More than half of them were women.
Le Minh Khue, who had left her home in the North
with a novel by Ernest Hemingway in her backpack,
observed her 17th birthday on the trail.
Thousands died on the trail from starvation and accidents,
fevers and snakebite and sheer exhaustion,
as well as from the relentless bombing.
But in this kind of war you never know.
You have to be constantly alert
because you can't tell friends from enemies.
Relax for a moment and your reward may be a grenade
or a hail of bullets.
I couldn't watch the news.
My parents would be sitting in front of the television
and I would hide in the kitchen.
Of course you don't tell anybody, but it was too much.
I really didn't want to know.
Mogie Crocker had spent most of his boyhood
reading about war.
But nothing had prepared him for what he would experience
in Quang Duc Province on the Cambodian border.
He had deliberately fouled up his work
at battalion headquarters so badly
that he had finally been reassigned
to what he wanted most... a combat unit.
Not hearing in those days was so difficult.
There'd be at least eight to ten days usually between letters.
So knowing he was in action, you just didn't know what,
you know, might be going on.
Mogie's battalion commander,
Lieutenant Colonel Henry Emerson,
known as "The Gunfighter,"
was courageous, implacable, relentless.
A few months before Mogie got there,
he had offered a case of whiskey to the first of his men
to bring him the hacked-off head of an enemy soldier.
They did.
For nine days in early May of 1966,
Mogie and his outfit battled nothing but the terrain.
They struggled through a labyrinth of elephant grass
and thorn bushes,
bamboo taller than three men
and triple-canopied jungle so thick
it sometimes took an hour to move 100 feet.
The monsoon had begun.
Sunlight rarely reached the forest floor.
Finger-long black leeches
caused wounds that quickly became infected.
When Colonel Emerson learned that four companies
of North Vietnamese were preparing an ambush,
he decided to ambush the ambushers.
On May 11, he ordered his men to attack,
backed by massive air and artillery strikes.
Before the fighting ended,
some 2,000 shells had slammed into the enemy positions.
Blood was everywhere, pooled on the ground,
smeared on leaves and grass and bamboo.
There were scores of corpses,
torn to pieces or blown into the earth, hidden in thickets,
half-buried in scooped-out graves.
The earth-shaking concussions
had blown the eyeballs of some of them from their heads.
In the midst of the fighting,
Mogie's squad was moving along a narrow path
when two enemy machine guns opened up on them.
His closest friend was fatally wounded.
Mogie crouched in front of him, radioed for suppressive fire,
and then, as both machine guns continued shooting,
he carried his dying friend off the battlefield.
For his courage,
he would be awarded the Army Commendation Medal.
In his letters home, Mogie told his family
nothing of what he'd seen or done.
One day when I was at the post office mailing something,
I asked the clerk, "How do they let you know
if your son is wounded?"
It was very hard for me to form those words.
But I just felt I've got to know.
I just felt so suspended in space, in anxiety.
And the man said, "Now, don't ask that.
Don't think about that."
I said, "Well, I have to know."
And he said, "Don't worry, they'll tell you."
I didn't like the war protesters whatever.
I kind of felt that they were privileged, spoiled kids
who may have been protesting because they didn't want to go.
So they leave it to some guy
that maybe got through two years of high school
to go do it for 'em.
The war by 1966
began to impact the middle class
because the draft calls had to be enlarged.
They couldn't get enough people to volunteer
or draft people out of the working class.
They started drafting people out of college.
And that's when the antiwar movement shifted
from a moral movement to a self-interest movement
driven by people who didn't want to go to war
and their loved ones who didn't want them to go to war.
Bill Zimmerman was a graduate student
at the University of Chicago in May of 1966.
The son of Eastern European refugees,
he'd worked for civil rights in Mississippi
and had been opposed to American involvement in Vietnam
since 1963.
The draft was a consuming issue
for young men of Zimmerman's generation.
Since 1942, every male citizen of the United States
had been required to register at age 18.
But of the nearly 27 million American men
who came of age during the Vietnam War,
more than half avoided military service
through exemptions and deferments.
Nearly 500,000 Americans applied
for conscientious objector status
on religious or moral grounds,
six times as many as in World War II.
In all, 170,000 were allowed to perform alternative service
in hospitals, homeless shelters, and schools.
Some were trained as medics and sent to Vietnam.
At least two were killed;
both received the Congressional Medal of Honor.
A million young men served in the Reserves or National Guard
with the expectation they would never be sent into combat.
Reservists and Guardsmen were almost always white,
generally better educated, better connected,
and better paid than draftees.
Interrupting their lives, President Johnson felt,
would have increased opposition to the war.
"If you've got the dough," GIs said, "you don't have to go."
The result was an Army heavily skewed
toward minorities and the underprivileged.
For a time, African Americans,
though they represented only 12% of the population,
suffered a disproportionate number of casualties.
Resentment began to grow.
We've got to build so much strength
in building our community,
that if they come to get one person,
they going to have to mess with us all.
That's what we got to do!
That's what we go to do.
We've got to build so much strength inside our community,
so that when LBJ says, "Come here, boy, to my war,"
we say, "Hell no, we ain't going."
I'm not going to help nobody
get something my Negroes don't have.
If I'm going to die, I'll die now,
right here fighting you, if I'm going to die.
You my enemy, my enemy is the white people, not Viet Congs,
or Chinese, or Japanese.
You my opposer when I want freedom.
You my opposer when I want justice.
You my opposer when I want equality.
And you want me to go somewhere and fight,
but you won't even stand up for me here at home.
At first, 10,000 draftees were called up each month,
but in 1966, the growing demand for fresh troops in Vietnam
raised that number to 30,000.
Now, thousands of college students
could no longer expect a deferment.
And if your rank fell below a certain threshold,
you were yanked out of college.
And the worst that could happen to you is you would be killed
in Vietnam.
So we protested at the University of Chicago
that the university was complicit with this war
by agreeing to supply those rankings to the draft board.
We thought for the first time, you know,
we're really having an impact.
But a majority of Americans, old and young, supported the war.
The Young Americans for Freedom,
created by the conservative writer William F. Buckley,
held counter-demonstrations on campuses across the country.
I was brought up to believe that the communists were people
who destroy the family, destroy religion,
and people who had no allegiance to our country
but to international communism.
My mother would describe them as,
which means that these are people
with the head of a water buffalo and the face of a horse,
meaning that they were subhumans, and they were brutal.
But on the other hand I thought they also include people
like my sister Thang and a lot of my cousins.
I couldn't quite reconcile the two images.
But of the two, I think the other image was much stronger
because I was so scared of them.
I thought these people must be really, really horrible people.
That was the frame of mind I had
when I started doing research into the communist movement.
Duong Van Mai was the daughter of an official
in the South Vietnamese government and was now married
to an American, David Elliott.
Back in 1964, she had gone to work
for the RAND Corporation in Saigon.
The think tank had been commissioned
by Robert McNamara to do a study of enemy prisoners
to find out "Who are the Viet Cong?
And what makes them tick?"
I remember my first interview.
I was by myself.
I was very young and I was going to this pretty grim prison
to interview this high-ranking cadre who had been captured.
I went in thinking I'm going to meet this beast, you know,
this guy with the head of a water buffalo
and the face of a horse.
He walked in and he was very surprised to see me.
Just as surprised as I was to see him.
Here was a man who had devoted all his life to fight
for what he called a just cause
to free his country of foreign domination,
to reunify the country under just government.
So he really totally believed in it
to the point that he sacrificed his whole life to this cause.
So I left, I was very... I was very impressed with him.
When the RAND report was presented
to McNamara's top deputies at the Pentagon,
describing the Viet Cong as a dedicated enemy
that "could only be defeated at enormous cost,"
one senior official said, "If what you say is true,
"we're fighting on the wrong side,
the side that's going to lose this war."
The overall myth of an American army running roughshod
by policy, by strategy, by tactics to terrorize and murder
and victimize the innocent population of South Vietnam,
that image is the...
it-it doesn't do justice to the young men and women
who served over there.
It's certainly not an accurate depiction
of what our army was about.
From the first, the Johnson administration understood
that the war could not be won
without convincing poor farmers living in the countryside
that the government in Saigon, not the Viet Cong,
had their best interests at heart.
In addition to the military,
many American aid organizations were at work
in Vietnamese villages.
They dug wells and built windmills,
started schools, introduced improved rice,
provided medical care,
and electrified much of the countryside.
Under pressure from Robert McNamara,
MACV struggled to find ways to measure the progress
of pacification in South Vietnam's 44 provinces,
220 districts and 13,000 hamlets,
and finally came up with the Hamlet Evaluation System.
Soon some 220 U.S. district advisers
were required to produce some 90,000 pages
of data every month... a mountain of information so daunting
no one could make sense of it.
Everything can be quantified.
So you can literally say, "How pacified is this village?"
"It's 37.5% pacified."
Well, what does that mean?
An American would tell you,
"You know, we haven't had an incident in this village
or this province," whatever.
"The incident rate's going down, and therefore we're winning."
But we would point out that certain troubled areas
in the provinces that we were working in,
we would say simply that it's not pacified
unless you want to consider it pacified by the other side.
To the extent that pacification was succeeding,
schools were being built, wells were being cleaned.
And then one fine night
here comes 400 North Vietnamese soldiers into the village,
executes the village chief, kidnaps 12 of the young people
for, you know, service in the revolutionary armed forces,
and the people look at the government and say,
"You promised us you'd protect us, but you didn't stay."
I was over there early.
I was with a really good unit, who believed in Army traditions,
they believed in honor,
they believed even in treating your enemy humanely
once he was a POW.
Lieutenant Mike Heaney from Basking Ridge, New Jersey,
was a platoon leader in the 1st Cavalry Division.
He'd arrived late in 1965
and was assigned to a densely populated section
of central Vietnam,
where he found himself surrounded
by North Vietnamese infiltrators
and villagers whose loyalties were unclear.
We never really figured out
how to determine who the enemy was.
Being normal, decent American boys,
you don't just put your rifle up and take a shot at a guy
and try to kill him
unless you're pretty sure this is an enemy.
And if he wasn't armed,
or wasn't menacing you in any way, we wouldn't shoot him.
We'd go through a village
in which there would be no people we could identify
as enemy soldiers, and we'd find a big cache of rice.
So the standing instructions were blow that up, burn it,
destroy it, poison it, whatever.
We really didn't want to do that because it...
You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to look around
and see these people are depending on this.
This is their food.
We were told sometimes to burn thatched dwellings.
And guys would unenthusiastically
try to light a roof.
And as soon as the flame burned out,
they weren't going to try again.
Our hearts really weren't in trying to destroy
civilian food, civilian homes.
It gave us an uneasy feeling about,
"What is this war is about?"
Most of the fighting in Vietnam
was the kind Mike Heaney was about to see...
small-scale, close-up, and initiated by the elusive enemy.
The military called it "contact."
"War is hell," grunts liked to say, "but contact is a mother."
The job of an infantry platoon usually is to try to scare up
enemy infantry and take it down.
Really, the tactic was we were acting as bait.
And at some level we knew that.
You know, go walk in the woods and draw fire.
Six months into his tour,
Heaney undertook what he and his men thought
would be an easy assignment:
climb a slope not far from their base at An Khe
and drive a small enemy mortar unit off a ridge line.
As soon as we started out, we started to get some bad vibes.
We found some boot prints in the mud
at the edge of this landing zone,
and a nice trail, a well-used trail going up the ridge.
I remember talking to one of my squad leaders about this.
And we were both sitting there, "Well, shit, this sucks."
And all of a sudden the very point man,
the first guy in the column, Sergeant Mays,
without saying anything just put his M16 up to his shoulder
and fired off a round.
And he turned around and he 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.
Boom!
And all of a sudden
what was a very well-laid ambush erupted.
And it was so loud and so unexpected
I was stunned for... for a little bit, you know.
"What the fuck is going on?"
Heaney's radio operator, Private Terry Carpenter,
got the company commander on the line.
"We've run into something bad," Heaney said.
At that moment, a bullet hit Carpenter in the head.
I knew Terry was down.
I knew Sergeant Mays was down.
I had asked the first machine gun crew to come up
and start laying down machine gun fire.
They got blown away pretty quickly.
They never really had a chance to lay down much fire.
At that point there wasn't anybody left
in my forward unit.
Every one of them had been taken down except me.
Every one.
Every one had been killed
or mortally wounded at that point.
Night fell.
What was left of Heaney's company braced
for the assault they assumed would come at dawn.
I was lying there on the perimeter.
I was right next to a dead enemy soldier.
It was kind of my face and his feet
and I kept looking back at him,
because I couldn't see any wounds on him.
And, you know, the strange things you think,
"This guy's going to kill me.
"He's faking it.
"He's waiting until the assault,
then he's going to jump up and kill me."
And I almost shot him again.
Just to make sure he was dead.
Then the enemy began to lob mortar shells
among Heaney's men.
I felt like somebody had taken a bat
and hit me on my calf, my right calf, as hard as he could.
I was so stunned by the shock of being hit,
and I just drew in a deep breath of air in terrible pain.
I couldn't speak.
Right after the ambush happened,
and 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?"
But it was too late.
I'd-I'd said it.
And as it turns out,
not one more man in my platoon died after that prayer.
American artillery finally zeroed in on the enemy.
The survivors of Heaney's company stumbled down the hill
to safety.
He was carried to a hospital.
I was lying on my bed sobbing.
And this nurse came over.
She bent over and said, "Lieutenant...
"You... the-the your men are all over the place.
You've gotta stop crying."
And at that point my platoon sergeant,
huge black guy from Detroit whom I loved dearly,
Sergeant Sam Hunt, he came over and he sat down next to me
and he took my hand
and he said to this nurse,
"Ma'am, this here lieutenant
don't have to stop doing anything."
The students are angry now.
And the word is passed
to gather at Saigon's main Buddhist pagoda after dark.
After all these years,
the Vietnamese have learned to live with crises and war.
But they haven't learned yet to live as a nation.
Now, Dean, what are we going to do?
Are we moving to the point where it would be difficult for us
to ask people to continue to die out there,
this kind of stuff going on every two or three months?
I think not yet, sir, by any means.
I think that this is still a minority problem.
But political talk is not going to be able to get anywhere
if they don't maintain the elements of order.
On May 15, 1966,
the government of South Vietnam, the country for which
so many Americans were risking their lives,
again seemed on the brink of collapse.
The ascendancy of Prime Minister Ky had dealt a severe blow
to activist Buddhists, who had been demanding
representative government and a negotiated end to the war
since 1963.
When Ky suddenly fired a rival general,
a popular Buddhist commander,
demonstrators poured into the streets of Hue and Danang.
They shut down the port
through which U.S. supplies had been flowing.
Some South Vietnamese soldiers, loyal to the dismissed general,
abandoned the struggle against the communists
and headed for the city.
Angry crowds burned American jeeps.
Signs reading "Peace!" and "Americans Go Home!"
appeared everywhere.
President Johnson was so concerned,
he asked his advisors to ready a fallback position
if the Ky government fell.
If necessary, he said, the U.S. should be prepared
to get out of Vietnam and perhaps
make a stand against communism in Thailand instead.
Ky ordered South Vietnamese soldiers
to surround and subdue Danang,
where they exchanged fire with their former comrades.
As Ky's forces stormed Buddhist pagodas in Danang,
his warplanes strafed dissident troops
occupying the central market.
The rebellion was crushed.
Washington was relieved.
Ky seemed to be back in control.
But from his command post on a hilltop outside the city,
an American Marine lieutenant had watched in disbelief
as two battles unfolded
in the west, his fellow Marines were fighting the Viet Cong;
in the east, the South Vietnamese army
seemed to be at war with itself.
May 16, 1966.
Dear Mom and Dad...
Our operation here on the Cambodian border
has been quite a success.
No doubt you will hear about it on the news.
We keep getting more and more operations thrown at us
so that nothing is very sure.
Whether I will go out again soon I don't know,
but don't plan on steady mail.
Tell Randy I'm looking forward to seeing his new dog.
I may take a 15-day leave to Tokyo
to keep from cracking up.
It was a lovely spring day,
and I opened the letter that said that.
And I was just really devastated
because by that time Vietnam was in total chaos.
There was a continuing changeover
of people in authority at the government in South Vietnam.
And there were protests of the Buddhist monks and others
that...
there were anti-American demonstrations.
I just thought, "Why? Why are we there?"
I think that letter when my brother
showed a kind of despair
is probably the first time he'd expressed that openly
to the whole family.
It echoed back to the day he'd said to me,
"I don't want to go back."
To an old high school friend,
Mogie was even more forthcoming.
Dear Duff,
Since I last wrote, which is several months,
a number of exciting but terribly unpleasant events
have occurred, the worst of which was being pinned down
by two Chinese light machine guns
firing 900 rounds per minute
and having my best friend killed more or less beside me.
Someday I may tell you the whole story
if my nerves aren't completely gone by then.
Actually the latter is just wishful thinking,
in false hope they will take me off the line.
I was fantastically religious for a while,
sending up various and sundry prayers mainly concerned
with trying to stay alive,
but I am once again an atheist until the shooting starts.
I really believed
that we had to stop the communist expansion.
I also believed that we were on the side of the angels.
Just as France had provided us with support
during our revolution, we were providing the South Vietnamese
with support during their revolution.
Matthew Harrison was among the 300 graduates
of the class of 1966 who volunteered to go to Vietnam.
Rangers!
- All the way! - All the way!
But first, he went to Florida to become a Ranger
and endured nine weeks of the most demanding training
the Army had to offer.
Airborne daddy gonna take a little trip!
The man in charge was Major Charles A. Beckwith-
Chargin' Charlie...
hero of the siege of Plei Me the year before.
"If a man is bloody stupid," he told each group of newcomers,
"his mother will receive a telegram and it will say,
"'Your son is dead because he's stupid.'
"Let's hope your telegram only reads, 'Your son is dead.'
"With the training we're going to give you here,
"maybe your mother won't receive any telegram at all.
So pay attention."
To make it through,
Harrison and his fellow trainees had to survive
days without sleep; were deprived of food and water,
forced to march up mountains until their feet bled
and patrol through swamps that harbored copperheads
and cottonmouths;
had to learn how to detect booby traps
and outmaneuver veterans masquerading as Viet Cong.
"Expect the unexpected," Beckwith told his trainees
again and again.
"Life is unfair."
Once he'd become a Ranger, Harrison was eager
to get to Vietnam and put into action
the survival and leadership skills he'd been absorbing
for five years.
I remember discussing with my classmates
how horrible it would be to serve in the Army
if everybody just a year ahead of us had served in combat
and we didn't have the opportunity to do that.
I was afraid we were going to win the war too quickly
and I wouldn't have a chance to experience it.
June 3, 1966, was Mogie Crocker's 19th birthday.
His company was involved in yet another campaign,
aimed at finding and killing North Vietnamese troops
filtering into the Central Highlands from Laos.
As night fell, Mogie and his squad were ordered
to move up toward the crest of a hill
overlooking a besieged ARVN outpost
so that artillery could be brought up
and positioned to shell the enemy in the morning.
They moved slowly, warily up the slope.
Mogie was the point man.
Out of the darkness, a machine gun opened up.
Denton Crocker, Jr. Never made it to the top of the hill.
It was just a lovely day to be out in our garden.
Candy, our little girl, went to a birthday party.
And the other children were just around the house, I guess.
But shortly after lunchtime, I stepped out on the porch.
I saw two men in uniform coming to the house.
And I knew something terrible had happened.
And I ran down the steps.
And I just grabbed hold of one of them and said,
"Don't tell me. Don't say it.
Not my beautiful boy."
And he just said, "Yes."
I was sitting on the couch in the living room.
I suddenly heard my mother screaming for my father.
Like in a movie, here came the priest up the stairs
with a soldier, and she's going, "Oh no."
And she's calling my dad.
My reaction was to leap up off the couch,
race out the back door
and I grabbed my little brother's hand
and I just started walking.
I said, "You have to come with me."
I said, "I have something to show you."
I have no idea where I was going.
I just said to myself, "No.
This isn't going to happen."
And something made me turn around
and I walked up to the back of the house from the alley.
And my dad was standing there.
And I fell into his arms and I said,
"Don't let it be true, Dad.
Is it true?"
And he said, "Yes.".
I somehow knew that things had changed forever.
That my mom as my mom and my dad as my dad,
it was never going to be quite the same again.
I just, I remember sitting on the couch
and I put my arms around them and I said,
"We'll love each other and we'll be all right."
But I don't know how far it carried.
You know?
We all tried.
Carol said to me one day
very shortly after Denton was killed,
probably that very clay, "How can you believe in God?"
And I said, "Because we had Mogie."
And I think that his life was a real gift.
It was a privilege to have him.
A friend wrote to me,
"Our children are really only on loan to us,"
which I guess is true.
Ten clays later, an Army captain escorted Mogie's body
to Dick Stone's funeral home.
The family priest had suggested
that Mogie be buried in Saratoga Springs
so that his parents could easily visit his grave.
But they chose Arlington National Cemetery instead.
"A corner of my heart knew," his mother remembered,
"that if he were buried near us,
I would want to claw the ground to retrieve the warmth of him."
I hear my friends say,
"I am troubled," and "I am confused,"
and "I am frustrated,"
and all of us can understand those people.
Sometimes I almost develop a stomach ulcer myself,
just listening to them.
And we all wish the war would end.
We all wish the troops would come home.
There is no human being in all this world
who wishes these things to happen,
for peace to come to the world,
more than your president of the United States.
The military claimed to have killed
some 57,000 enemy soldiers in the first six months of 1966.
But privately the administration worried
that General Westmoreland's "crossover point"...
the moment when more enemy soldiers had been killed
than could be replaced... seemed no nearer.
From the first, the Joint Chiefs had urged the president
to be more aggressive...
to permit troops to pursue the enemy into Laos and Cambodia
and to expand the target list for bombing in North Vietnam.
Johnson still would not allow borders to be crossed
by regular ground troops for fear of bringing China
or even the Soviet Union into the war.
And he was wary of heavier bombing,
fearful of hitting more civilians.
But despite his concern,
the president now agreed to intensify the bombing campaign
called Operation Rolling Thunder.
He approved attacks on oil facilities
all over North Vietnam,
including some sites adjacent to the cities
of Haiphong and Hanoi.
His commanders assured him
that this would be a mortal blow to the enemy,
sure to force the North Vietnamese
to the bargaining table.
Tens of thousands of sorties were flown.
Many bombs hit their intended targets.
But many missed
and fell on residential neighborhoods instead,
just as the president had feared.
Things are going reasonably well in the South, aren't they?
Yes, I think so.
Because we think we're taking a heavy toll of them,
but it just scares me to see what we're doing there
with God knows how many airplanes and helicopters
and firepower and going after a bunch of half-starved beggars.
This is what's going on in the South.
And the great danger is that,
that they can keep that up almost indefinitely.
The only thing that'll prevent it, Mr. President,
is their morale breaking.
There's no question but what the troops in the South,
the VC and North Vietnamese,
they know that we're bombing in the North.
And we just have a free rein.
And when they see they're getting killed
in such high rates in the South,
and they see that the supplies are less likely to come down
from the North, I think it will just hurt their morale
a little bit more.
And to me that's the only way to win
because we're not killing enough of them
to make it impossible for the North to continue to fight.
But we are killing enough to destroy the morale
of those people down there
if they think this is going to have to go on forever.
All right.
Go ahead, Bob.
People talk about collateral damage, but it means something.
You don't want to do collateral damage.
You want to do the damage you want to do.
That's the winning way to do this.
Even though I was in a cell by myself
and others were in by themselves, we weren't alone.
We were together in this old French prison
halfway around the world from the United States.
Gradually I began to realize this could go on a long time.
A long time to me was like maybe a year or two.
I never dreamed it would be eight-and-a-half years.
By the summer of 1966, Lieutenant Everett Alvarez,
the first American pilot to have been shot down
over North Vietnam, had been a captive for nearly two years
and had been joined in and around Hanoi
by more than 100 other downed airmen.
Even though the North Vietnamese considered them all
"aggressors,"criminals," and "air pirates"
rather than prisoners of war deserving of humane treatment,
Alvarez and the others had been treated relatively well
at first.
But that hadn't lasted long.
The men were soon forbidden to communicate with one another,
forced to bow to their jailers,
and told that their country had forgotten them.
They were subjected to isolation, beatings,
and hour upon hour of torture,
all aimed at forcing them to admit their guilt
and record statements denouncing the war.
When that cell door would open, when they would say,
"You, your turn," you know, the bottom just fell out of you,
and you knew that you may not come back.
The manacles, the ropes, the beatings, they broke bones.
They... they did everything.
My arms turned black
from the cuffs that cut off all circulation.
And they didn't let me die.
They just kept the pain.
That's when I realized that I was not a superhuman.
The first time I broke and gave them something, I felt so low.
I felt so little.
Some of the men who were forced to record statements
did their best to make their true feelings known back home.
Commander Jeremiah Denton blinked his eyes to spell out
"torture" in Morse code.
On July 6, just one week after American bombs
had first fallen on Hanoi and Haiphong,
jailers rounded up Alvarez and 51 other prisoners,
and, while cameras rolled,
marched them through downtown Hanoi,
past the angry citizens of the city.
I could hear the crowd being whipped up.
And as I passed this one fellow with the megaphone,
he looked at me and he yelled to the crowd.
"Alvarez, Alvarez, son of a bitch, son of a bitch!"
People started pressing in, throwing things...
bottles, shoes.
But the guards by this time were having a hard time
keeping the people away.
The North Vietnamese had hoped to rally
international support for trying the prisoners as war criminals.
It backfired.
People everywhere, even many of those who opposed the war,
sympathized with the stumbling, helpless men.
Plans for public trials were canceled.
The bombing continued, and more American planes were shot down.
The North Vietnamese took pride in capturing American airmen.
Even children were expected to do their part.
Hands up! Hand up!
Hands LIP!
The bombing around Hanoi and Haiphong
that resulted in so many of our people being POWs
for a long period of time
was fought out of the White House basement,
with the president himself picking targets,
and deciding that we're going to attack now,
and then we're going to pause for awhile.
Airpower was being misused, big time.
Operation Rolling Thunder did destroy
most of North Vietnam's oil storage facilities.
But the North Vietnamese shifted
most of their oil to underground tanks,
and more arrived every day from China and the Soviet Union.
The bombing was stepped up anyway.
Throughout the North,
enough crude air shelters were fashioned
from concrete pipe buried five feet beneath the ground
to accommodate some 18 million people-
virtually the entire population.
Over a million people were said to be working around the clock
to undo what American bombs had done.
When key bridges were destroyed,
they fashioned pontoon bridges overnight
to keep traffic moving.
Crews waited along the roads with heaps of gravel and stone
and stacks of wood to fill bomb craters.
They worked under the slogan "The enemy destroys, we repair.
The enemy destroys, we repair again."
Rolling Thunder was the dumbest campaign
ever devised by a human being.
The normal human thing to do
is to think that your enemy thinks like you.
There's the old story, apocryphal,
that when McNamara wants to know
what Ho Chi Minh is thinking, he interviews himself.
What the problem then becomes is
that you keep trying to send messages that are rational
based upon your judgment of rationality,
but have nothing to do with the definition of rationality
on the other side.
So what's irrational to us
is totally rational to the other side
if you've decided that you are going to reunify the Vietnams
no matter what it takes, no matter how many casualties.
Hanoi did all it could to publicize the damage
American bombs were doing to civilians.
Most Americans dismissed the reports as communist propaganda.
But when Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times
traveled to North Vietnam and reported on Christmas Day, 1966,
what he had seen,
public doubts about the morality of the war grew.
A lot of the military we talked to
shared our concerns about how the war was being fought,
and whether or not it could be won.
But when it came to an official position,
it was what we know well,
namely, "We can win this war and we're doing it right.
We just need more... more troops, more bombing."
I recall on one instance after I had returned from Vietnam,
I went by to see McNamara.
He was saying, "Well, how is our strategic bombing program
affecting the course of the war?"
I said, "It is not gaining us anything.
Indeed, it is counterproductive."
He said, "What do you mean?"
"Mr. Secretary, the sledgehammer approach is not working.
"These people know that at some point
"we're going to get tired of killing them.
And they think they can outlast us."
And he said, "Why don't people tell me these things?"
I said, "Mr. Secretary, you don't ask."
I think every father and son
struggles in the course of their lives together.
And I don't think my dad and I were exempt from that.
The interesting thing for me is
the space to talk about Vietnam was never created.
And that was clearly a decision on my father's part.
Craig McNamara, the son of the Secretary of Defense,
was a student at St. Paul's School
in Concord, New Hampshire,
where a teach-in about the war was to be held.
I remember calling my father from a phone booth and saying,
"Dad, we're going to have this experience
"and if there's any support materials
that you think I should present, please let me know."
The support materials didn't come.
I think my father really wanted lovingly to protect me
from the Vietnam experience to the best of his ability.
Well, we know you can't do that.
Things bleed through and it just doesn't happen that way.
Probably, he realized at that time
that the support materials... weren't there.
Today I can tell you that military progress
in the past 12 months has exceeded our expectations.
The Viet Cong have been unable to mount
the offensive that they had planned
designed to cut the country in half at its narrow waist.
The military pressure,
which forces have brought against them,
have prevented them from mounting that offensive
and have inflicted very heavy casualties on them.
No matter how you measure it,
we're better off than we thought we would be at this time.
Certainly when I arrived, I'm thinking
I'm involved in a winning enterprise.
I mean, America doesn't lose.
We never lose.
I had sort of not really known much about the War of 1812,
which was... pretty much of a draw,
or the Civil War in which half of America lost,
and the Korean War where we won the first half
and lost the second half.
But I'd been taught America never loses.
The Marines had been the first American combat troops
to fight in Vietnam.
And they were expected to fight longer
than their Army counterparts... 13 months instead of 12.
Marine privates Bill Ehrhart,
John Musgrave, and Roger Harris all arrived at Danang
in early 1967.
The first thing that assaulted my nose was the foreign smells.
And watching people relieve themselves
by the side of the road
and seeing animals I'd never seen before...
the big water buffaloes.
You know, it was like being on Mars,
because it was totally foreign to me.
But I honestly, in my dumb Missouri kid kind of way,
I thought, "Look at all those foreigners."
And it didn't dawn on me for a little while
that the only foreigner in that area was me.
The feeling was that we were going over to rescue folks.
And that the communists were taking over this country
and they needed help.
But then when we got there we realized that...
that it wasn't exactly like that, you know.
Many of the Vietnamese, they would spit at our trucks
and they'd tell us to go back to America.
And then, you know, we began questioning ourselves,
you know, why are we here?
These people don't want us here.
Roger Harris was assigned to G Company, 2nd Battalion,
9th Regiment of the 3rd Marine Division at Phu Bai,
outside of Hue.
John Musgrave was first stationed
with the 1st Marine Division at the Danang Airbase.
And Bill Ehrhart joined the 1st Regiment
of the 1st Marine Division near the city of Hoi An.
Private Ehrhart was given a desk job,
collating snippets of information
for the daily intelligence summary.
Three days after he got to Hoi An,
a group of civilian detainees was brought into the compound.
These two amtracs come in the back gate.
The Marines up top start pushing them off.
Their hands are tied, their feet are tied,
they have no way to break their fall.
You literally can hear bones snapping, shoulders dislocate.
And I grab Corporal Sal,
and he says in the absolute flattest, hollowest voice
I've ever heard,
"Ehrhart, you better keep your mouth shut and your eyes open
"till you understand what's going on around here.
"Those trackers, they're hitting mines out there
"on the sand flats every day.
"They're getting killed; they're getting maimed.
"And these people know where those mines are.
"You treat these people nice in front of the trackers
"and those trackers
"will rearrange your head and ass for you
and walk away laughing."
Well, at that point, three days into Vietnam,
I'm thinking, "Whoa.
What the hell is going on here?"
I think it is destroying the good name
and the leadership of the United States.
Furthermore, I believe that the war is militarily unwinnable.
I believe that thousands of American young men
are being asked to die to save Lyndon Johnson's face.
He must know by now that this war is unwinnable,
but he does not know how to give up.
Therefore, I believe that young men are not only justified
but to be thanked if they point this out
by refusing to take part in such an outrageous war any longer.
Dr. Benjamin Spock was the best-loved pediatrician
of his time;
millions of American parents had consulted his bestseller,
Baby and Child Care.
In early 1967, he wrote the preface to an article
in the leftist magazine Ramparts
on the impact of American napalm on South Vietnamese children.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was among those who had read it.
He had been agonizing about the war for months.
But he had been reluctant to break openly
with Lyndon Johnson, who had done so much for civil rights.
Now he could no longer stay silent.
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight
because my conscience leaves me no other choice.
A time comes when silence is betrayal.
That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
Eleven days later, King joined Dr. Spock
and perhaps half a million other protestors
at a massive demonstration in Central Park
organized by a new coalition,
the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam.
That was the biggest crowd any of us had ever been in
in our lives.
And when the front of the march got down to the United Nations,
the back of the march had not yet left Central Park.
That's how many people we were.
Not all of the people on that march were students.
And as a result, we all felt we have a chance now.
You know, there's a path that we could see to ending the war.
Stop the bombing.
Let us save our national honor.
Stop the bombing, and stop the war.
Let us save American lives and Vietnamese lives.
Let us take a single instantaneous step
to the peace table.
Stop the bombing.
The antiwar movement was growing
in numbers and militancy.
"We are no longer interested in merely protesting the war,"
one organizer said, "we are out to stop it."
Meanwhile, some in the Johnson administration became convinced
the antiwar movement was a communist conspiracy
directed by Moscow.
The FBI and the CIA, which was barred by statute
from operating within the United States,
began infiltrating the movement, wiretapping its leaders,
even inciting violence in order to undercut their appeal.
At that time, people who supported the war
were fond of saying "My country right or wrong's
"America, love it or leave it."
Or "Better dead than Red."
Those sentiments seemed insane to us.
We don't want to live in a country
that we're going to support whether it's right or wrong.
We want to live in a country
that acts rightly and doesn't act wrongly.
And if our country isn't doing that, it needs to be corrected.
So we had a very different idea of patriotism.
So we began an era in which two groups of Americans,
both thinking that they were acting patriotically,
went to war with each other.
Over 200,000 communist sympathizers
in that park this morning tried to burn this flag,
but they didn't succeed.
I would put it this way...
there's a monstrous myth abroad,
a myth which Hanoi creates and which it believes,
and that is that the United States is so divided
that if they just hang on that they will win in Washington,
and in the United States the victory that our fighting men
are denying them in field.
As I have said before,
in evaluating the enemy strategy it is evident to me
that he believes our Achilles' heel is our resolve.
Two weeks after the Manhattan protest,
General Westmoreland addressed a joint session of Congress,
the first general ever to be called home from a battlefield
by his president to do so.
Backed at home by resolve, confidence, patience,
determination, and continued support,
we will prevail in Vietnam over the communist aggressor.
Behind the scenes,
neither Westmoreland nor the administration he served
was confident the United States would prevail.
Westmoreland reported to the president
that according to the latest statistics,
the crossover point had finally been reached that spring,
except in the military sector just south of the DMZ.
But, he warned, the United States was doing little better
than holding its own.
If he were given 200,000 additional troops
and allowed to go into Laos and Cambodia,
he could cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail
and end the war in two years.
But "When we add divisions," Johnson asked,
"can't the enemy add divisions?
Where does it all end?"
Westmoreland had no answer.
Instead, he and the Joint Chiefs asked the president
to permit them to bomb sites just below the Chinese border,
and to mine the harbors of North Vietnam
to keep Hanoi's Soviet ally from resupplying her by sea.
Meanwhile, Robert McNamara, the chief architect
of American strategy in Vietnam,
had grown less and less confident
in its ultimate success
and in the repeated calls for more men and more bombing
made by the military he oversaw.
Robert McNamara was the giant of Washington, D.C.
He was the embodiment of intellect and self-confidence.
If there was a problem, there had to be an answer.
And that was his fatal flaw.
The startling thing is
that this man who never seemed to doubt anything he said,
actually began to doubt profoundly what he was doing
in Vietnam.
But we didn't know about it.
In a private memorandum to the president,
McNamara told Johnson that
"the picture of the world's greatest superpower
"killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week,
"while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission
"on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed
is not a pretty one."
He urged the president to limit troop levels, not raise them,
and to declare an unconditional end to all bombing
north of the 20th parallel.
"The war in Vietnam is acquiring a momentum of its own
that must be stopped," McNamara wrote.
"Dramatic increases in U.S. troop deployments
"and attacks on the North are not necessary
"and are not the answer.
"The enemy can absorb them or counter them,
"bogging us down further
and risking even more serious escalation of the war."
In the end, Johnson tried to find a middle ground.
He expanded the list of bombing targets,
but he refused to mine the harbors
and he agreed to send Westmoreland
only 47,000 more troops,
which would bring the total of U.S. forces in the country
to more than half a million men.
On June 17, 1967, Robert McNamara placed a call
to his military assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gard.
My phone rang and the little light showed
it was the secretary on the line.
And I picked it up and said, "Yes, Mr. Secretary?"
And Mr. McNamara said,
"Bob, I want a thorough study done of the background
of our involvement in Vietnam," and hung up the phone.
Leslie Gelb, a 30-year-old member
of the International Security Affairs staff,
was named to oversee the top-secret analysis
of how key decisions had been made, going all the way back
to the Truman administration.
McNamara gave us full access to his closet,
in his office, which was like a room.
But all his private papers were there.
And I was picking out the memos,
a lot of which I helped to write.
But there were others in there that I had never seen.
In these memos you began to see Robert McNamara communicating
with the president, alone, his doubts.
It stunned me.
I had thought that we were mostly fighting a guerrilla war.
I didn't know that we were going to be fighting guys like us,
that I had a doppelganger out there
who was leading a rifle platoon, who knew what he was doing,
who was as fully prepared to kill me as I was to kill him.
That June, First Lieutenant Matthew Harrison
finally got his orders to join the 173rd Airborne,
an elite unit ready to rush anywhere they were needed.
They called themselves General Westmoreland's Fire Brigade.
Harrison's arrival at Bien Hoa was a reunion of sorts.
He and seven others from the West Point class of 1966
all found themselves serving in the 2nd Battalion,
including two especially close friends:
Donald Judd and Richard Hood.
As young lieutenants, as 22-year-olds,
we really were idealists and we really were Boy Scouts.
I really felt as though I was uniquely qualified
to lead American soldiers
and that there was nothing more important
than what I was going to be doing.
But when I joined the 173rd,
I think the first day I was there some guy showed me
what looked like a bunch of apricots on a leather thong.
Turns out they were ears, dried, desiccated.
I understood theoretically what it meant to be in a war.
But, of course, no one can really understand it
until they've done it.
Harrison was a platoon leader in Charlie Company.
His West Point classmates served with Alpha Company.
Within a few days,
they were helicoptered into the heart of the Central Highlands
near Dak To, where North Vietnamese regulars
were said to be threatening a Special Forces camp.
They were all airlifted into landing zones
hacked out of the steep, jungle-blanketed slope
of a mountain the Americans called Hill 1338
for its height in meters, with orders to hunt down the enemy.
They walked for two days,
following a well-worn enemy trail,
constantly on the lookout for booby traps or ambushes.
On the evening of June 21,
Harrison's Charlie Company settled in for the night
while his friends in Alpha Company set up camp
a little less than two miles to the south,
along the same slippery jungle path.
No one knew that an entire North Vietnamese battalion...
perhaps 500 men...
was encamped on the other side of a ridgeline,
just a few hundred yards away.
At 6:58 the next morning,
a patrol from Alpha Company stumbled into a squad
of North Vietnamese.
The Americans withdrew
and struggled to establish a perimeter.
Within minutes, they were under attack
from relentless AK-47 automatic fire.
The enemy mounted attack after attack,
drawing closer each time.
Alpha Company radioed for air and artillery support,
but the triple-canopy jungle blocked the spotter's view.
At around noon, Harrison's unit was ordered to rescue
the trapped men of Alpha Company.
It was mountainous terrain.
We were carrying two bodies
along with a bunch of engineer equipment.
And we could not push down the couple of hundred meters
to where the most of the fighting had taken place.
The going was steep and slippery.
North Vietnamese troops,
now entrenched along both sides of the trail,
prevented Matt Harrison and his men from reaching Alpha Company.
At dusk, the shooting died down,
and they dug in at the top of a ridge
and did their best to sleep.
So we lay there on the night of June 22
and we could hear the screams of the wounded down the hill
as the North Vietnamese went around and shot them.
By dawn, the enemy had melted away.
Harrison and his platoon crept down the hillside
and reached what was left of Alpha Company.
Out of 137 men, 76 lay dead along the path.
Forty-three had been shot in the head at close range.
Ears had been cut from some; eyes gouged out;
ring fingers missing.
Twenty-three more men were wounded.
Harrison found his classmates, Donald Judd and Richard Hood,
among the dead.
This was my introduction to war.
This was my welcome to Vietnam.
We spent the rest of the day putting those bodies
into body bags and getting them out of there.
Getting-getting killed is forever.
And, um, that was something that I had known theoretically
but I now understood particularly
when I put my two classmates in body bags,
guys that I had gone to school with for four years
and were good friends and who just the week before
we had been drinking beer and ribbing each other
and these guys were now gone.
Charlie Company found
just nine or ten North Vietnamese bodies.
Harrison and his men were ordered to search
the nearby hillsides for more enemy dead,
who commanders assumed had been killed by U.S. artillery.
MACV needed its body count.
We never located them and I believe today
that we didn't locate them because they weren't there.
I think we just took a terrible loss on June 22.
To admit that a rifle company in the 173rd had been wiped out
by the North Vietnamese was not something
our leaders were prepared to do.
So we had to sell ourselves and we had to sell the public
on the idea that we had inflicted casualties
on the North Vietnamese as severe
as they had inflicted on us.
An officer told a reporter that the shattered rifle company
had killed 475 enemy soldiers.
When another officer suggested to General Westmoreland
that the figure seemed too high to be believable,
he replied, "Too late.
It's already gone out."
Within a few days after the battle,
Westmoreland came up to speak
to what we thought of ourselves as his brigade.
And he hopped up on a hood of a jeep in very crisp fatigues
looking every inch the battle commander
and gave us a pep talk and told us how proud he was
and what a magnificent job we had done.
But by then I had more than just a suspicion
that this was a fairy tale, that Westmoreland was wrong
and I didn't know whether he knew he was wrong
or whether he believed what he was being told
and wanted to believe.
But this was the first time that I had to come to grips
with the fact that the leadership
was either out of touch or was lying.
I remember a very difficult conversation I had
with a girl who had really been a best friend of mine.
And the talk turned to Vietnam.
And I remember her looking at me and saying,
"My father says that you can't listen to people
"who've lost someone in the war
"because they're going to support it
to justify that person's death."
I felt like she'd hit me in the stomach.
But I knew at that moment there were some factions developing
and this wasn't going to be an easy path to walk;
that people were going to have opinions
about my brother's death
that in some ways had nothing to do with his death for me.