All language subtitles for The Vietnam War (2017) Part01_Deja Vu_1858-1961

KARL MARLANTES: 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.

MAX CLELAND: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

BAO NINH:

BAO NINH:

NARRATOR: 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.

BAO NINH:

NARRATOR: 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.

TRAN NGOC TOAN:

LAM QUANG THI:

JOHN MUSGRAVE: My hatred for them was pure.

Pure. I hated them so much.

And I was so scared of them.

Sshh... 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

DUONG VAN MAI: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

TRAN NGOC TOAN:

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".

DUONG VAN MAI: 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.

MIKE HEANY: I had about 26
guys that day out of 45.

We were always somewhat understrength.
And this day we were quite understrength.

My platoon's on point.

SOLDIER: Go, go, go, go, go!

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?"

NARRATOR: 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.

DONALD GREGG: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

BUI DIEM:

NARRATOR: 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.

DUONG VAN MAI: In those days, 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... and people who
lived through it never... never forgot.

NARRATOR: 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.

DUONG VAN MAI: 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.

NARRATOR: 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."

DONG SI NGUYEN:

GEORGE WICKES: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

GEORGE WICKES: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

GEORGE WICKES: 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.

NARRATOR: Lieutenant Colonel Peter Dewey,

the 28-year-old commander of the OSS
in Saigon, tried to make sense of it all.

GEORGE WICKES: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

GEORGE WICKES: 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.

VINCENT OKAMOTO: 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".

NARRATOR: 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".

LESLIE GLEB: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

LAM QUANG THI:

NARRATOR: 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".

NGUYEN NGOC:

NARRATOR: 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.

DUONG VAN MAI: My older sister
Thang was married to, a...

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.

NARRATOR: 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.

DUONG VAN MAI: 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".

NARRATOR: 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.

LE CONG HUAN:

NARRATOR: 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.

DUONG VAN MAI: 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.

TRAN NGOC HUE:

NARRATOR: 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".

ROGER HARRIS: 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".

NEWS READER: President Truman's
dramatic announcement

that Russia had the atom secret

caused state departments all over
the world to stir uneasily.

HAL KUSHNER: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

SAM WILSON: 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?

NEWS READER: A highly trained and
well-equipped North Korean Army

swarmed across the 38th parallel to attack
unprepared South Korean defenders.

NARRATOR: 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.

TRUMAN: 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.

NARRATOR: 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%.

RICHARD NIXON: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 Guerre"... "The Dirty War".

RON FERRIZZI: 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?

NEWS READER: In Korea,
three years of combat end

as United Nations and communist
negotiators at Panmunjom sign a truce.

NARRATOR: 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.

NEWS READER: And in Washington, a
dramatic evening press conference...

NARRATOR: 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.

NEWS READER: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

JOHN KENNEDY: 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.

NARRATOR: "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.

LESLIE GLEB: 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.

EISENHOWER: 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.

NARRATOR: On the afternoon of May
7, 1954, after 55 days 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.

NGUYEN THOI BUNG:

NARRATOR: Even Duong Van Mai's parents
could not help but be impressed.

DUONG VAN MAI: 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.

NARRATOR: "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".

DONALD GREGG: 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.

NEWS READER: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 Minh would win.

NEGUYEN VAN TONG:

NEGUYEN THOI BUNG:

KARL MARLANTES: 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.

REPORTER: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

DUONG VAN MAI: 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...
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.

NARRATOR: 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.

LESLIE GLEB: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 matcheds
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.

RUFUS PHILLIPS: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

DUONG VAN MAI: Suddenly
in the middle of the day

we heard gunfire and then we saw flames
and the neighborhood was burning.

REPORTER: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

RUFUS PHILLIPS: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

LESLIE GLEB: 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.

NEWS READER: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

LE QUAN CONG:

NARRATOR: 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.

NGUYEN NGOC:

NARRATOR: 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.

BUI DIEM:

NARRATOR: 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 Copperas Cove, Texas, were killed.

They were the first American soldiers to
die from enemy fire in the Vietnam War.

JOHN F. KENNEDY: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

HUY DUC:

JOHN F. KENNEDY: 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.

TIM O'BRIEN: 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?

["A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall"
playing by Bob Dylan]

# Oh, where have you been,
my blue-eyed son? #

# And where have you been,
my darling young one? #

# I’ve stumbled on the side of
twelve misty mountains #

# I’ve walked and I’ve crawled
on six crooked highways #

# I’ve stepped in the middle
of seven sad forests #

# I’ve been out in front of a
dozen dead oceans #

# I’ve been ten thousand miles in
the mouth of a graveyard #

# And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard,
it’s a hard, it’s a hard #

# It’s a hard rain’s a-going to fall #

# Oh, what did you see,
my blue-eyed son? #

# And what did you see, my
darling young one? #

# I saw a newborn baby with
wild wolves all around it #

# I saw a highway of diamonds
with nobody on it #

# I saw a black branch with blood
that kept dripping #

# I saw a room full of men with
their hammers a-bleeding #

# I saw a white ladder all
covered with water #

# I saw ten-thousand talkers whose
tongues were all broken #

# I saw guns and sharp swords in
the hands of young children #

# And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s
a hard, and it’s a hard #

# It’s a hard rain’s a-going to fall #

# And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s
a hard, and it’s a hard #

# It’s a hard rain’s a-going to fall #