Hell Come to Earth (January 1964-December 1965) The Vietnam War

MUSIC: With God On Our Side by Bob Dylan

# Oh, my name, it ain't nothin'... #

Well, I wanted to name him after his dad, Denton Winslow Crocker.

So, that was the name we chose.

He was a colicky little baby

and so we were up night and day with him...

..and my husband was a wonderful dad and very loving and attentive,

and he'd walk the floor with him,

and then he said one day, he is a regular little mogul,

the way he rules our lives.

So, that's where the name came from.

We called him Mogie.

Mogie Crocker was born June 3rd, 1947,

the oldest of four children.

His father was a biology teacher,

and Mogie was raised in college towns.

Ithaca, Amherst, and finally Saratoga Springs,

to which the family moved in 1960 when he was 13.

My mother read books to all of us.

My brother was definitely the one who probably gravitated towards that

more than I did. He really feasted on books.

Mogie was an unusual boy -

intelligent, independent-minded

and too near-sighted to do well at team sports.

He loved books about American history and American heroes.

At 12, he started a diary in which he kept track of Cold War events -

"I hate Reds," he wrote -

and he admired most those who proved willing to sacrifice themselves

for a cause.

One evening, when I was reading to Denton before he went to sleep,

I chose a passage from Henry V.

Which is, "He today that sheds his blood with me,

"Shall be my brother...

"And gentlemen in England now abed

"Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

"And hold their manhood cheap while any speaks

"That fought with us upon St Crispin's Day."

I think that it was that sort of thing

that made Denton want to be part of something important...

..and brave.

I just stayed awake last night thinking about this thing.

It's just worries the hell out of me.

I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of there with

once we're committed.

I don't think it's worth fighting for,

and I don't think we can get out and it's just the biggest damn mess.

It is. It's an awful mess.

I just thought about ordering all those kids in there,

and what in the hell am I ordering them out there for?

It damned easy to get in a war

but it's going to be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself.

-It's very easy...

-I'd like to hear Walter and McNamara

-evaluate this thing.

-All right.

What's a possible time?

Tragedy had brought Lyndon Johnson to the presidency

in November of 1963,

and he would not feel himself fully in charge

until he had faced the voters the following year.

Publicly, Johnson pledged

that, "This nation will keep its commitments

"from South Vietnam to West Berlin,"

but, privately, Vietnam filled him with dread.

"It's going to be hell in a handbasket out there,"

his ambassador told him.

"I want the South Vietnamese to get off their butts

"and get out into those jungles

"and whip the hell out of some communists," the President said,

"and then I want 'em to leave me alone

"because I've got some bigger things to do right here at home."

Johnson had opposed the military coup that had overthrown

and murdered South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem,

fearing it would make a bad situation worse.

It had.

The National Liberation Front, the Vietcong,

was making coordinated attacks throughout the countryside -

some 400 of them in just two weeks.

An estimated 40% of the South Vietnamese countryside,

and more than 50% of the people,

were effectively in the hands of the Vietcong.

Between January 1964 and June of 1965,

there would be eight different governments.

All of their leaders were so close to the Americans

that they were seen as puppets.

One weary Johnson aide suggested

that the national symbol of South Vietnam

should be a turnstile.

At the ninth party plenum that began in Hanoi on November 22nd, 1963,

the day President Kennedy was killed in Dallas,

the politburo had argued over how best to proceed in the war.

North Vietnam's two Communist patrons, the Soviet Union and China,

were giving them conflicting advice.

In two weeks of sometimes bitter debate, Ho Chi Minh,

who favoured the Soviet strategy,

was outmanoeuvred by party First Secretary Le Duan,

who sided with the Chinese.

Le Duan believed that it was time to move quickly in 1964.

He proposed a two-phase plan for victory in South Vietnam.

The first phase would destroy Arvin forces

through big, decisive battles.

The second, an attack on the cities, Le Duan believed,

would then set off popular revolts within them.

Party leaders and others suspected of having opposed the plan

were denounced as revisionists, demoted, dismissed, imprisoned.

Hundreds were sent to re-education camps.

"Uncle Ho wavers," Le Duan said,

"but I have only one goal - final victory."

-RECEPTIONIST:

-Secretary McNamara on 9-0.

-Bob...

-Yes, Mr President.

-..I hate to bother you...

-No trouble at all.

..but tell me, have we got anybody that has got a military mind

that can give us some military plans of winning that war?

Let's get some more of something, my friend,

because I'm going to have a heart attack

-if you don't get me something.

-We're losing.

What I want is somebody to lay out some plans to trap these guys

and whup hell out of them. Kill some of them.

That's what I want to do.

I'll try and bring something back that will meet that objective.

OK, Bob.

Johnson increased the number

of American military personnel

from 16,000 to more than 23,000 by the end of the year.

He replaced Henry Cabot Lodge,

making General Maxwell Taylor his ambassador,

and selected 49-year-old General William Westmoreland,

a decorated commander from World War II and Korea

to lead the American military effort.

The President hoped to force Hanoi to abandon its support

for the guerrilla struggle in the South

by gradually escalating military pressure.

He authorised American pilots to bomb North Vietnamese troops

and installations in the neighbouring country of Laos...

..and he directed the military to oversee South Vietnamese shelling

of North Vietnamese islands and raids on coastal bases.

All of it was to be conducted in secret.

The American people were not to be told.

It was an election year.

Johnson felt he did not yet have the political capital

to take further action in Vietnam -

but he asked his aide, William Bundy,

to draft a congressional resolution

authorising him to use force if needed

to be sent to Capitol Hill when the time was right.

On July 30th, 1964, South Vietnamese ships,

under the direction of the US military,

shelled two North Vietnamese islands in the Gulf of Tonkin.

The tiny North Vietnamese navy was put on high alert.

On August 2nd, the destroyer USS Maddox

was moving slowly through international waters in the Gulf

on an intelligence-gathering mission.

The commander of the North Vietnamese torpedo boat squadron

moved to attack the Maddox.

The Americans opened fire and missed.

North Vietnamese torpedoes also missed...

..but carrier-based US planes

damaged two of the North Vietnamese boats

and left a third dead in the water.

Back in Washington, the White House issued a warning

about the grave consequences that would follow

what it called "any further unprovoked attacks",

even though Johnson knew the attack had been provoked

by the South Vietnamese raids on North Vietnam's islands.

Both sides were playing a dangerous game.

On August 4th, American radio operators

mistranslated North Vietnamese radio traffic,

and concluded a new military operation was imminent.

No second attack ever happened -

but at the time, anxious American sonar operators

aboard the Maddox and Turner Joy,

convinced themselves one had.

The attack was, "probable but not certain", Johnson was told,

and since it had probably occurred,

the President decided it should not go unanswered.

"Aggression by terror against the peaceful villagers of South Vietnam

"Has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas...

"..against the United States of America.

"Yet our response, for the present,

"will be limited and fitting.

"We still seek no wider war."

If that came to be where we would be called upon

to carry out our responsibilities,

and having been well-trained for this,

I never really gave it much thought.

It was part of my duty.

Lieutenant Everett Alvarez, from Salinas, California,

was aboard the USS carrier Constellation.

His squadron of Skyhawk A-4 planes

was ordered to attack torpedo boat installations and oil facilities

near the port of Hon Gai.

For the first time, American pilots

were going to drop bombs on North Vietnam.

I remember my knees shaking

and I was saying. "Holy smokes, I'm going into war."

"This is war."

I was a bit scared.

Once we went in and they started firing at us...

..the fear went away.

Everything became smooth, deathly quiet in the cockpit...

..and then I got hit.

Coastal militiamen captured Alvarez

and turned him over to the North Vietnamese military.

He assumed he would be treated as a prisoner of war.

They quickly reminded me that there was no state of war,

no declaration of war...

..so I could not be considered a prisoner of war.

I recall thinking about it and I says, "You know what?

"They're right."

Everett Alvarez was the first American airman

to be shot out of the sky over North Vietnam,

and the first to be imprisoned there.

Now the President sent up to Capitol Hill the resolution

he had asked his aide William Bundy to draft two months earlier.

On August 7th, 1964, by a vote of 88 to two,

the Senate passed what came to be called the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

In the house, not a single congressman opposed it.

Support for Johnson's handling of the war jumped overnight

from 42% to 72%.

Le Duan and his comrades in Hanoi resolved to step up their efforts

to win the struggle in the South before the United States

escalated its presence by sending in combat troops.

For the first time,

Hanoi began sending North Vietnamese regulars into the South,

down the network of paths they had hacked out of the Laotian jungle -

the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

On election day, Lyndon Baines Johnson

won the presidency in his own right,

and he won it by a landslide.

Within a month, the President would approve

what was called a graduated response.

Limited air attacks on the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos,

and tit-for-tat retaliatory raids on North Vietnamese targets.

In private, Johnson doubted that air power alone would ever work,

and believed that he would eventually have to

send in ground troops -

though he was not yet willing publicly to say so.

In the fall of '64, Denton was 17,

and he was determined to go into the service.

Mogie Crocker had been restless since the summer.

After the Gulf of Tonkin incident,

he had confided to his sister that he wanted to join the Navy,

but he knew his parents would not sign the consent form

that would've allowed a 17-year-old to enlist.

Monday morning he left for school and I watched him leave...

..but that night he didn't come in for supper and he hadn't called.

The day that my brother ran away has to be one of the most...

..bizarre experiences of my life.

I eventually happened to look in my piggy bank,

and he had taken the money I had and left a note for me.

He had promised he would pay me back.

He was gone about four months

and said that he would not come home unless we agreed to sign for him...

..and he wouldn't be 18 until June.

But we did agree, and he did come home.

My husband felt it was an honour-bound agreement.

I was hoping that I could change his mind.

Nguyen Van Tong was a political officer

in the newly-created Vietcong 9th division,

one of perhaps 2,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops

who had for weeks been quietly filtering into Phuoc Tuy,

a supposedly pacified province less than 40 miles south-east of Saigon.

The target for Tong and his comrades

was the strategic hamlet of Binh Gia,

home to some 6,000 Catholic anti-Communist refugees.

Their plan was to seize the hamlet and then annihilate the forces

Saigon was sure to send to retake it.

Before dawn, on December 28th, Vietcong advance units

easily overwhelm the village militia and occupy Binh Gia.

When two crack South Vietnamese Ranger companies

were helicoptered in the next day,

they were ambushed and shot to pieces.

On the morning of the 30th, Philip Brady,

his friend, Tran Ngoc Toan, and the 4th Marine battalion

were flown in to relieve and reinforce the Rangers.

It was as if you'd turned a soundtrack of shooting.

It just went... "Raaa."

Just like that. All of a sudden, it came out of nowhere.

We used what little air strikes we had left,

with helicopters calling in the strikes on our position...

..to slow it down.

There was no way.

What we did was we tried to get out.

26 of us broke through, 11 ultimately made it.

When it was all over, five Americans had died at Binh Gia.

32 Vietcong bodies had been left on the battlefield.

200 South Vietnamese were killed.

200 more were wounded.

What it really said

was they were capable of marshalling this kind of force.

The Vietnamese officers I talked to in the Marine Corps

figured they had six months...before the end.

Hanoi was exultant.

Ho Chi Minh called it a little Dien Bien Phu.

Le Duan was convinced his strategy was working.

"After the Battle Of Ap Bac two years ago,

"the enemy knew it would be difficult to defeat us," he said.

"After Binh Gia, the enemy realises

"that he is in the process of being defeated by us."

On February 10th, 1965, the Vietcong blew up a hotel in Quy Nhon,

Killing 23 Americans and pinning 21 more beneath the rubble.

Johnson immediately approved an air strike.

Anxiety about what seemed to be happening spread around the world.

France, which had spent nearly a century in Vietnam,

now called for an end to all foreign involvement there.

The British Prime Minister urged restraint.

On March 2nd, 1965,

the United States began a systematic bombardment

of targets in North Vietnam,

codenamed Operation Rolling Thunder.

"It was meant to be a mounting crescendo of air raids,"

Ambassador Taylor wrote,

"intended to bolster morale in the South

and destroy morale in the North."

The thesis behind Rolling Thunder, as I understood it,

was that as we ratcheted up the tempo and the volume

of this effort against the North Vietnamese,

sooner or later, they would cry uncle...

..and there'd be a pause

and we'd begin to negotiate our way out of the situation.

This became an article of faith...

..and this article of faith was a fallacious assumption.

They weren't going to give up.

They read us better than we read them.

The President insisted on strict secrecy.

The American people were not to be told that the administration

had changed its policy from retaliatory air strikes

to systematic bombing - that he had, in fact, widened the war.

They jointly agreed that joint retaliatory action was required...

General Westmoreland asked for two battalions of Marines,

3,500 men, to protect the Da Nang Air Base,

from which fighter-bombers were hitting the North.

In March of 1965,

Johnson finally took the action he had managed to avoid for so long.

He was putting American ground troops in Vietnam.

The Government of South Vietnam was not even consulted.

The United States of America had larger considerations.

Clearly we saw it in terms of the Cold War.

Assistant Secretary Of Defense John McNaughton said...

he said our interests there were 70% to avoid humiliation,

20% to contain China

and 10% to help the Vietnamese.

I guess we've got no choice,

but it scares the death out of me.

I think everybody's going to think we're landing the Marines,

we're off to battle.

What do you think?

Well, it scares the life out of me, but I don't know how to back up now.

It looks to me like we just got in this thing

-and there's no way out.

-I don't know.

The great trouble I'm under -

a man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere,

but there ain't no daylight in Vietnam. There's not a bit.

On March 8th, 1965,

Dr Phan Huy Quat,

Prime Minister of South Vietnam, called his Chief Of Staff, Bui Diem.

They were prepared to fight their way ashore.

They did not need to.

What struck me was how beautiful Vietnam was to look at.

There were just these endless acres of these jade green rice paddies,

and these lovely villages

inside these groves of bamboo and palm trees...

..and way off in the distance these bluish jungle mountains -

and it looked like Shangri-La.

So, it was really quite striking,

but a little unsettling, cos how could a place like this,

so beautiful and so enchanting, be at war?

The first protest I went to against the war in Vietnam

was a protest at a Dow Chemical facility.

Dow was manufacturing napalm,

they were dropping napalm on villages in Vietnam.

It was a very disappointing experience

because only 40 people came

and we seemed very out of place and very ineffectual,

impotent, standing outside with 40 people.

Most Americans understood little about Indochina,

rarely knew anyone actually involved in the fighting,

saw no reason to question the Government's assertion

that the United States had vital interests 8,000 miles from home.

Still, there was a small but growing number of people

who had begun to oppose the war for any number of reasons...

..because they thought it unjust or immoral,

believed it was unconstitutional

or simply not in the national interest.

The demonstrations is called a "teach-in",

because the idea originated with a group of university professors.

There were teach-ins on most major university campuses.

The teach-ins were really raucous affairs.

A lot of contention.

..we want to discuss is wrong with the Vietnam War...

The bombing of the North and the Marines' arrival

also drew protesters to Washington that spring.

I didn't want to go, because I didn't want to be disappointed

in the same way again - and go all the way to Washington

and stand outside the White House with 40 people.

25,000 people attended that rally...

..and that suddenly told me

and others I was working with at the time

that it might be possible to build an anti-war movement.

It was quite astounding

to think that he had that degree of commitment,

and it made sense in what we knew of him, as drastic as it was.

Mogie wanted to become a paratrooper and get into combat.

His parents finally, reluctantly, agreed to let him go,

and on March 15th, a week after the first Marines landed at Da Nang,

Denton Crocker Jr entered the United States Army.

So, Denton bounced down the steps one morning and was off to Fort Dix.

It was, in a way, a sort of relief, actually,

that the conflict and the anxiety

over whether he would or would not go was done,

and he was happy, and we just tried to believe

that this was the right thing for him to do.

Le Minh Khue was orphaned as a small girl -

her parents victims of the brutal land reforms

the Communists had imposed.

She was raised by her aunt and uncle,

who encouraged her to read American literature.

She was 16 when Operation Rolling Thunder began.

Khue was assigned to an organisation called

the Youth Shock Brigades Against The Americans For National Salvation

and, along with thousands of other young people,

was sent south to work, keeping open the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

As Johnson had feared, it quickly became clear

that the bombing campaign alone was not working.

Troops and supplies continued steadily to filter down

the Ho Chi Minh trail.

You can't just be a neutral witness

to something like war.

It crawls down your throat.

It eats you alive, from the inside and the out.

It's not something that you can stand back

and be neutral and objective.

It doesn't work that way.

The growing presence of American combat troops in Vietnam

attracted flocks of journalists.

It was dangerous work.

More than 200 journalists and photographers would die

covering the fighting in Southeast Asia.

In South Vietnam, things were steadily growing worse.

In May, the Vietcong,

supported now by four regiments of North Vietnamese regulars -

approximately 5,000 men -

were destroying the equivalent

of a South Vietnamese battalion every week.

# Don't play with me cause you're playing with fire... #

South Vietnam now seemed only weeks from complete collapse.

Desperate, General Westmoreland requested tens of thousands

of more American troops right away...

..but neither the continuing bombing nor the growing likelihood

of full-scale American intervention seemed to intimidate Hanoi.

Le Duan, having failed to win the war

before the United States sent in ground troops,

was now persuaded the American public,

like the French public before them,

would eventually weary of a costly, bloody war

being waged so far from home.

"By contrast," he said, "the North will not count the cost."

"We will fight," Le Duan promised,

"whatever way the United States wants."

In June of 1965...

..Secretary McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, came out to Saigon.

There were a lot of captains and majors and lieutenants...

..and every person said to Mr McNamara,

"The situation is so dire.

"We must bring in United States forces."

So whatever doubts we may have had,

whatever people may say after the fact,

I recall distinctly, at the time,

telling the Secretary Of Defense that I thought we needed

to bring troops in there.

For three weeks, the President and his advisers

argued over how to respond

to Westmorland's urgent request for more troops.

Differing mostly over how many should be sent, how fast.

In the end, Johnson sent Westmoreland 50,000 men...

..but he pledged another 50,000 by the end of 1965 -

and still more, if they were needed.

We're on the outskirts of the village of Cam Ne

with elements of the 1st Battalion...

CBS correspondent Morley Safer and his crew

went on patrol with Marines near Da Nang.

Their orders were first to search a cluster of four villages

for caches of arms and rice meant for the enemy...

..and then to destroy them all.

This is what the war in Vietnam is all about.

The old and the very young,

the Marines have burned this old couple's cottage

because fire was coming from here.

The day's operation burned down 150 houses,

wounded three women, killed one baby,

wounded one Marine and netted these four prisoners.

Today's operation is the frustration of Vietnam in miniature.

There is little doubt that American firepower

can win a military victory here -

but to a Vietnamese peasant

whose home...means a lifetime of backbreaking labour,

it will take more than presidential promises to convince him

that we are on his side.

After the operation,

Safer interviewed some of the Marines who had burned Cam Ne.

Do you ever have any private thoughts about,

any private regrets about,

some of these people who you are leaving homeless?

I feel no remorse.

I don't imagine anybody else does.

You can't expect to do your job and feel pity for these people.

"Dear Mum and Dad.

"What is taking place in America?

"We who are in Vietnam find these protests very hard to comprehend,

"and many people here are quite bitter about them.

"The belief I have in our present policy has been completely confirmed

"by what I have seen here.

"My chief worry is that these pacifist bleatings

"might affect even a small change in Government policy

"at a time when we appear close to success."

CLAMOUR, WHISTLE BLOWS

As Vietnam began to be more and more chaotic...

..I certainly wondered very much whether we should be there -

but I never expressed that to him.

That is one of those conflicts that is just too difficult to bring up.

Or at least it was for me.

We were all excited about the arrival

of the 1st Cavalry Division.

They were moving their artillery by helicopter,

jumping it, leapfrogging troops.

Chasing the enemy, driving him crazy.

This is something new,

and it's going to change the way we do war.

On the morning of November 14th, 1965,

1st Cavalry helicopters belonging to the 1st Battalion

of the 7th Regiment,

George Armstrong Custer's old outfit,

flew west along the Ia Drang towards the Chu Pong massif,

looking for the enemy.

Their commander, Kentucky-born Korean War veteran

Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore,

had been told there was a large enemy base camp

somewhere on its slopes.

His orders were to take his understrength outfit,

29 officers and just 411 men, find the enemy and kill him.

Within minutes, Moore's men captured a deserter.

Terrified and trembling,

he said there were three battalions of soldiers on the mountains.

1,600 men.

They wanted very much to kill Americans, he said,

but so far had been unable to find any.

Moore quickly set up a command post

behind one of the huge termite mounds

that dotted the clearing.

It would take until mid-afternoon for all of his men to be ferried in.

That night, Joe Galloway managed to talk his way onto a chopper

taking ammunition and water to the besieged Americans.

And I could see these little pinpricks of light

coming down the mountain...

..and the next morning, all of a sudden, the bottom fell out.

RAPID GUNFIRE

The noise is horrendous.

Unimaginable.

They were trying to overrun us...

..and they came close. They came close.

RAPID GUNFIRE CONTINUES

But we had two things going for us.

We had a great commander and great soldiers,

and we had air and artillery support out the ying-yang.

We had it, and they didn't.

But using that air and artillery support could be dangerous.

Each of Moore's units carefully marked its position with smoke

to keep from being mistaken for the enemy by American airmen overhead.

The forward air controller called for every available aircraft

in South Vietnam to come and help.

Warplanes, including B-52 long-range strategic bombers,

were stacked at 1,000 foot intervals above the battlefield

from 7,000 to 35,000 feet,

impatiently awaiting targets to strafe or bomb or burn.

"By God," Moore said,

"they sent us over here to kill communists

"and that's what we're doing."

I looked up and there were two jets

aiming directly at our command post.

He's dropped two cans of napalm

and it's coming toward us - loblolly - end over end...

..and these kids, two or three of them, plus a sergeant,

had dug a hole or two over on the edge, and I looked...

..as the thing exploded...

..and two of them were dancing in that fire...

..and there's a rush, a roar...

..from the air that's being consumed and drawn in...

..as this-this...

..hell come to earth is burning there...

..and as that dies back a little, then you can hear the screams...

..and someone yells, "Get this man's feet!"

And I reach down and...

..the boots crumble...

..and the flesh is cooked off of his ankles,

and I feel those bones in the palms of my hands.

I can feel it now.

He died two days later.

Kid named Jim Nakayama, out of Rigby, Idaho.

By ten o'clock that morning,

American air power had beaten back the enemy assault.

On the morning of the next day,

enemy soldiers hurled themselves

against the same sector of Moore's line four more times

and were obliterated by artillery and machinegun fire.

The surviving North Vietnamese and Vietcong withdrew into the forest,

leaving behind a ghastly ring of their dead

surrounding the landing zone.

634 corpses - shot, blasted, blackened by fire.

Please convey to the American people

what a tremendous fighting man we have here.

He's courageous, he's aggressive, and he's kind.

You must excuse my emotions, here,

but when I see some of these men go out,

the way they have...

I haven't...

I can't tell you how highly I feel for them.

Hal Moore had been the first of his men to step onto landing zone X-ray,

and he made sure he was the last to leave it.

The North Vietnamese suffered terrible losses

in the Ia Drang Valley,

and many of the survivors were traumatised.

The units were enveloped in an atmosphere of gloom,

a North Vietnamese colonel remembered.

Some men would not leave their rope hammocks.

Some refused to wash.

One soldier wrote a poem expressive of their plight.

"The crab lies still on the chopping block

"Never knowing when the knife will fall."

I don't anticipate that

this conflict will end any time soon...

..and we could find that we have more difficult days ahead.

Certainly, we must be prepared for this.

# The eastern world it is explodin'... #

When Senator Fritz Hollings visited Saigon

shortly after the Ia Drang battles, General Westmoreland told him,

"We're killing these people at a rate of ten to one."

Hollings warned him,

"Westy, the American people don't care about the ten,

"they care about the one."

Westmoreland, who had said he could win the war in three years,

now sent an urgent cable to Washington

asking for 200,000 more troops.

The message came as a shattering blow, Robert McNamara remembered.

He offered Johnson two options.

Try to negotiate a compromise with Hanoi

or accede to Westmoreland's request for more men,

though the chances of victory, the Secretary of Defense said,

might be no better than one in three.

And then they all sat down and voted for option two.

You read that, you know, McNamara knew by '65,

that was just three years before I was there,

that the war was unwinnable.

That's what makes me mad.

Making a mistake, people can do that -

but covering up mistakes,

then you're killing people for your own ego.

And that makes me mad.

Tens of thousands of American troops continued to prepare to deploy

to Vietnam from all over the country,

and General Westmoreland and his commanders drew up plans

for major offences in the new year of 1966.

Meanwhile, Johnson agreed to stop the bombing on Christmas Eve.

"If it achieved nothing else," he said,

"it would show the American people

"that before he committed more of their sons to battle,

"we have gone the last mile."

Well, Christmas always meant a great deal in our family.

Then a neighbour mentioned to me

that she heard a local television station

was offering free tapes to be made to send to a soldier overseas.

The idea was that we would each just say something

about what we were doing and wish him well.

It was a horrible day for me.

It made it so real that he was far away.

Well, here we are.

It's...

Let's see, what day is today?

-Here it is. Saturday.

-November 13.

November 13 -

and station WTEN's given us a chance to talk to you.

We all wish you merry Christmas, to start out with.

Merry Christmas, darling.

We've sent your packages and there's one that's waiting for you at home.

It's a record of fife and drum music that we got for you at Williamsburg.

Mandy?

My teacher isn't very nice and she always is crabby,

and I don't like school at all.

Now I'm a Brownie.

Merry Christmas.

Happy Christmas, Mogie. I think I'm getting new skis for Christmas,

so when you get home, let's get together sometime.

We do all wish you a very merry Christmas,

and we'll be thinking of you on Christmas Day.

We miss you, sweetheart.

# Me and my drum. #

MUSIC: Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season) by The Byrds