Deja Vu (1858-1961) The Vietnam War

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

RAPID GUNFIRE

HELICOPTER WHIRS

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,

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.

Ssh, 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.

The General Westmoreland strategy is producing results.

The enemy is no longer closer to victory.

No matter how you measure it,

we are 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 send combat troops there.

You have a row of dominoes set up, and you knock over the first one,

and the last one, certainly, it'll go over.

If aggression is successful in Korea,

we can expect it to spread throughout Asia and Europe,

and to this hemisphere.

# Where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

# Oh, where have you been, my darling, young one. #

Victor Franco, 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.

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

# And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall. #

America's involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy.

It ended 30 years later in failure, witnessed by the entire world.

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 neighbouring 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 honour and gallantry.

The qualities of cruelty and mercy.

The candour of the American Government.

And what it means to be a patriot.

And those who lived through it have never been able to erase its memory,

have never stopped arguing about what really happened,

why everything went so badly wrong, who was to blame...

..and whether it was all worth it.

The French conquest of Indochina began with an attack

on the ancient Vietnamese port of Da Nang 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.

The Vietnamese people did not take easily to French occupation,

just as they had fought against earlier invasions by the Chinese.

But anyone who dared resist colonial rule risked exile,

prison, or the guillotine.

By the 1920s, nationalism was on the rise,

and a generation of Vietnamese leaders was beginning to emerge.

Including a slender young man named Nguyen Tat Thanh.

During his long shadowy career he would adopt some 70 different

pseudonyms, finally settling on the most enlightened one,

Ho Chi Minh.

Ho Chi Minh was a man who succeeded in projecting an image

of somebody who was totally dedicated to freeing his country

and his people from foreign domination.

To the point that he sacrificed his own wellbeing, his own life,

not having a family of his own.

To the Vietnamese, that's a

big sacrifice because, to us,

everybody needs a family.

Ho Chi Minh was born in 1890,

the son of a minor official in the French regime.

After taking part in a demonstration against the puppet emperor

and the Frenchmen who pulled his strings,

Ho was expelled from school and marked for arrest.

He left Vietnam in 1911, and remained in exile for 30 years.

He served as a cook's helper, aboard a French liner,

and visited New York and Boston, where he worked for a time

as a pastry chef at The Parker House.

He shovelled 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 criticised for being a nationalist first,

a communist second, and then was dispatched to China

to organise 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.

In 1940, much of the world was at war.

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.

The time had come, Ho said, to rally patriots of all ages and all types.

Peasants, workers, merchants and soldiers, to defeat the Japanese

and the collaborationist French.

In February of 1941, after three decades away from his homeland,

Ho Chi Minh slipped back across the Chinese border into Vietnam

and set up headquarters near the remote village of Pac Bo,

in a limestone cave at the side of a mountain he named for Karl Marx,

overlooking a jungle stream he named for his hero, Lenin.

There he founded a revolutionary movement

which he called the Vietnam Independence League.

The Viet Minh.

To build and lead a fighting force for his revolution,

Ho called upon Vo Nguyen Giap, a one-time teacher of French history

who had instructed the children of Hanoi's elite.

Giap was an early convert to communism,

whose lifelong hatred for the French intensified

when his wife died in a French 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 army,

Giap said, would be everywhere and nowhere.

The reason Vietnamese had always resorted to guerrilla warfare

was because we were a small country, and it was just a way to fight,

the weak against the strong.

Don't fight unless you're sure you can win,

and surprise is a big element.

Choose your own battle.

I had about 26 guys that day, out of 45.

We were always somewhat

understrength, and this day we were

quite understrength.

And, all of a sudden, 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.

RAPID GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

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, I said, "Holy shit,

"can I take that prayer back?"

By the spring of 1945, more than three years

after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,

the United States government was looking for allies

behind the lines in Vietnam.

The Americans were hoping to find a way to undermine Japanese forces

there when they were contacted by Ho Chi Minh.

And so it was decided to drop an OSS team in to meet

with the Viet Minh leadership.

Paul Hoagland was the medic on their 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 whiskered,

skinny man lay on a bundle of straw, desperately ill.

And that was Ho Chi Minh.

The OSS, the secret wartime precursor of the CIA,

supplied Ho's ragtag guerrillas with arms.

And marvelled 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.

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 re-establish their old colonial regime.

They did, in cities and towns across the country.

On September 2nd, 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.

HE ADDRESSES THE CROWD IN VIETNAMESE

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 inalienable rights,

"and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

APPLAUSE

Ho Chi Minh had great hopes that the

US would support the Vietnam desire

for independence,

not necessarily by intervening,

but by doing what it could to support an independence movement.

President Franklin Roosevelt had promised a post-war world

that would respect the rights of all peoples.

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 further into Iran,

Turkey and the Mediterranean.

A new Cold War had begun.

French President Charles de Gaulle

warned that if the United States insisted on independence

for her colonies, France might have no choice

but to fall into the Russian orbit.

The United States must do nothing to undercut the restoration

of France's empire, including Vietnam.

There were hardly any Americans in Vietnam, you know,

State Department people, council officials, a few businessmen.

Hardly anyone from this country

knew where Vietnam was located.

George Wickes was part of a seven-man OSS mission

sent to Saigon - the largest city in the south.

The United States was officially neutral,

hoping the French and Viet Minh could reach some peaceful solution

on their own.

But in the fall of 1945, fresh French troops began arriving

in Saigon.

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.

He did not want to fight the French as an enemy of America.

And, in fact, I saw the letters

he wrote to President Truman

saying, we believe in the same things you believe.

Those letters, I saw in the CIA files.

They had never been given to President Truman.

In June 1946, Ho Chi Minh returned to Paris

in a fruitless attempt to get the French to live up to a promise

they had made of increased autonomy for his country.

While Ho was away,

General Giap began consolidating Communist control of the revolution.

He conducted a merciless purge

of members of rival Nationalist parties,

and people he called reactionary saboteurs.

Landlords and moneylenders, Trotskyites and Catholics,

men and women accused of collaborating with the French.

Hundreds were shot, drowned, buried alive.

On December 19th, 1946, after months of building tension,

fighting broke out in Hanoi between the Viet Minh and the French.

The Viet Minh proved no match for French firepower.

Ho, Giap and their comrades

slipped out of the city and returned to their mountain stronghold

far to the north.

"Those who have rifles will use their rifles,"

Ho declared in a radio address

calling for a nationwide guerrilla war.

"Those who have swords, will use swords.

"Those who have no swords, will use spades, or sticks."

But the country Ho Chi Minh hoped to unite was itself bitterly divided.

Families were being torn apart.

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.

Despite her father's position in the French government,

her sister felt compelled to answer Ho's call.

My older sister, Thang, was married to a man who had great sympathy

for the Viet Minh.

So my sister and her husband trekked all the way from Hanoi to the base,

in order to join the resistance against the French.

So the Vietnam War was really a Civil War, down to the family level.

France poured thousands of men into Vietnam.

French regulars, European mercenaries,

and colonial troops from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Senegal,

who fought alongside an army of Cambodians, Laotians,

and anti-Communist Vietnamese.

French forces managed to occupy most of the large towns

and province capitals,

and established hundreds of isolated outposts.

The 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.

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.

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."

I had the opportunity to call my mother, you know.

And I was telling my mother what was happening over there.

I was telling her she shouldn't believe what she sees

in the newspaper, and what she sees on television,

because we're losing the war.

I said, you'll probably never see me again,

because everybody in my unit is dying.

And my mother said, "No, you're coming back."

She said, "I talk to God every day, and you're special.

"You're coming back."

And I said, "Ma, everybody's mother thinks that they're special.

"You know, I'm putting pieces of special people in bags."

President Truman's dramatic announcement

that Russia have the atom secret caused State Departments

all over the world to stir uneasily.

We were very aware that there was a Cold War, and that we had an enemy,

and that enemy was the Soviet Union.

The United States stood at one pole,

and the Soviet Union stood at the other pole.

It was kind of a Manichaean dynamic

that there was evil and there was good,

and we were good and the other side was evil.

It wasn't morally ambiguous.

Just a few weeks after Russia became a nuclear power,

there was more stunning news.

Communist forces under Mao Zedong seized control of China.

Separate Communist insurrections were also underway

in the British colonies of Burma and Malaya.

In January 1950, Mao formally recognised Ho Chi Minh's insurgency

and agreed to provide the arms, equipment, and military training

he had been seeking.

The Soviets recognised 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 programme for the French, in Vietnam.

The United States was no longer neutral.

In July, one month after Communist North Korea invaded South Korea,

the Truman administration quietly dispatched transport planes,

and a shipload of Jeeps to Vietnam.

35 military advisers 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 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%.

Here is Indochina.

If Indochina falls, Thailand is put in an 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,

I was there, right on the battlefield, or close to it,

and it's a bloody war. And it's a bitter one.

By 1953, the French had been fighting for seven years.

They had suffered over 100,000 casualties,

and failed to pacify the countryside.

Six commanders had come and gone.

Nevertheless, the seventh commander, General Henri Navarre,

assured his countrymen that victory was near.

Now we can see it clearly, he said,

like the light at the end of the tunnel.

Meanwhile, large parts of the French population were horrified

by reports of French brutality.

And the widespread use of napalm,

gelatinised petroleum that burned foliage, homes and human flesh.

When returning French troops disembarked at Marseille,

members of the Longshoremen's Union pelted them with rocks.

Parisian Leftists began to call the conflict La Sale Guerre -

The Dirty War.

The camera was a close up.

It was over the shoulder of a storm trooper, who had a kid

by the scruff of his shirt. And he smacks him.

At that moment in time, I realised

that anybody who really cared

for America and was sent halfway

around the world chasing some ghost

in the jungle, in the meantime, my country was being torn apart.

So I saw somebody who looked like my dad hitting somebody who looked like

me. Whose side would I be on?

In July of 1953,

the Korean War ended in a negotiated settlement

in a still divided peninsula.

American policymakers saw it as proof that Communism in Asia

could be contained.

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 north-western 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 13th, 1954, Viet Minh artillery on the hillsides

began raining down 50 shells a minute on the French troops

huddled below.

The airstrip was destroyed.

The besieged troops could only be reinforced

and resupplied by airdrop.

The French artillery commander who had underestimated his enemy

committed suicide.

The French Government begged President Eisenhower to intervene.

He refused to act without support from European allies.

Britain said no.

And the Congress would not support unilateral action.

The Communists under Ho Chi Minh are able to claim

that they are fighting for independence,

and the French appear to be fighting for a 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.

The people must support the struggle.

Without consulting Congress,

the president had secretly sent more American transport planes,

their markings painted over and flown by civilian contractors

to help resupply the desperate French troops at Dien Bien Phu.

Everyone understood that, in and of itself,

Vietnam didn't mean very much.

But they believed, I believed, if we lost it,

that the rest of Asia would tumble to Communism.

On the afternoon of May 7th, 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.

We should have seen it as the end of the colonial era in Southeast Asia,

which it really was, but instead we saw it in Cold War terms,

and we saw it as a defeat

for the free world that was

related to the rise of China.

And it was a total misreading of a pivotal event...

..which cost us very dearly.

The day after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, diplomats

from nine nations gathered in Geneva to settle the future of Vietnam.

Despite their victory, Ho Chi Minh and General Giap

could not keep fighting without more support from China

and the Soviet Union.

Both of Ho Chi Minh's Communist patrons urged him to agree

to a negotiated settlement.

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 and 90,000 Viet Minh

were to regroup to the North.

The two halves would be separated by a demilitarised zone,

until an election could be held to reunify North and South Vietnam.

An election everyone knew Ho Chi Minh would win.

The United States hoped to encourage the building of a legitimate

government in the South.

That government was now headed by Ngo Dinh Diem,

both a Roman Catholic and a Confucian

in a largely Buddhist country,

he was a celibate bachelor who had once planned to be a priest.

The war, for us, really started when we became the partner,

or I would say the victim, of President Diem.

We were going to help him turn South Vietnam into a democracy.

That's what he said he wanted to do.

And we believed him.

Like Ho Chi Minh, Diem was a veteran politician,

whose loathing for the French was matched only by his hatred

for the Communists, who had imprisoned him and buried alive

his eldest brother and his nephew.

Diem was aloof, autocratic, mistrustful of anyone

much beyond his own family.

He also proved to be shrewd, resourceful and skilled

at exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents.

When Diem's forces won a two-day battle on the streets of Saigon

against a French-led crime syndicate,

the French finally withdrew completely from South Vietnam,

ending nearly a century of occupation.

Diem became wildly popular

because he seemed to embody the nationalist cause in the South.

He succeeded in getting the French out of Vietnam, all the way,

and Ho Chi Minh had only got them

out of the northern half.

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 26th, 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem named himself the first president

of the brand-new Republic Of Vietnam.

The election to reunify the North and South that had been promised

at Geneva would never be held.

He became our ally, or rather, our master,

because the goal of preventing the Communists from taking over

the South was so strong that we couldn't afford for him to lose.

So Diem started to boss us around.

And this was the typical relationship.

You need any ally you believe to be the centrepiece

of your foreign policy, they understand that right away,

and the tail wags the dog.

Meanwhile, in North Vietnam,

Ho Chi Minh was focused on rebuilding his country,

devastated by more than a decade of war.

The Communists imposed brutal land reforms,

modelled 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 cautioned his comrades in the South

to put their faith in political agitation, and avoid violence.

That message rang hollow among embattled southern revolutionaries

struggling to survive under Diem's increasingly harsh regime.

Diem had imprisoned tens of thousands of citizens without trial,

and ordered the executions of hundreds more.

Now the Communists took matters into their own hands

and began attacking South Vietnamese officials.

As violence in South Vietnam intensified,

new leaders emerged in Hanoi.

Ho Chi Minh would remain the face of the revolution around the world,

but he now began to share power with men who were growing impatient

with his caution.

Men about whom Americans knew almost nothing.

The most important proved to be a carpenter's son

from Quang Tri Province in

the South named Le Duan.

He had helped found the Indochinese Communist Party,

survived nearly ten years in a French prison,

and proved himself a shrewd political infighter

as he rose to become First Secretary of the party.

By 1959, Le Duan and his hardline allies were gaining influence

within the North Vietnamese Politburo

and beginning to change its policy.

They now argued that Hanoi should do everything within its power

to help Southern revolutionaries remove Diem by force.

Now bands of 40 to 50 armed Viet Minh began slipping back home

into South Vietnam, following jungle paths hacked

through the Laotian mountains that the Americans

would soon call the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

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,

it's breadth of opportunity,

its range of alternatives,

can compete with the single-minded advance of the Communist system.

On November 8th, 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.

Six weeks after Kennedy's election,

representatives of Southern revolutionary groups met

to form a new organisation 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 organisation would be called

the National Liberation Front,

the NLF.

The armed wing of the NLF was called the

People's Liberation Armed Forces,

but its enemies in Saigon

and Washington preferred a more

disparaging term. In their eyes,

the revolutionaries were

Communist Traitors to the Vietnamese Nation,

the Viet Cong.

Let every nation know,

whether it wishes us well or ill,

that we shall pay any price, bear any burden,

meet any hardship, support any friend,

oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

MUSIC: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall By Bob Dylan