Doubt (January 1966-June 1967) The Vietnam War

Sometimes, I would hear a car crunch up in the snow,

and I'd think maybe it would be somebody coming to give us bad news,

which was not good for me to think.

It was an underlying anxiety that I really think was there all the time.

Denton Crocker Jr, known as Mogie, wanted to serve in Vietnam so much,

he'd pressured his parents into granting their permission

for him to join the army before he was 18.

He was eager for combat,

and pleased when he was assigned to the 1st Brigade

of the celebrated 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles,

who had led the way on D-Day.

But he was quickly disappointed

to find himself attached to battalion headquarters

repairing weapons, making lists, keeping records.

It was boring, he wrote home.

"I think, perhaps, you will understand my disappointment

"when you see that there is little sense in being over here

"unless one faces the main objective -

"the destruction of the VC.

"Certainly, one feels no sense of accomplishment

"when one's friends are facing all the dangers."

What's your thinking these days? I haven't talked to you.

What's happening to our polls?

See, I think you'll find some foreign leaders

will criticise you if you resume bombing.

As a matter of fact,

no other intelligence source that I've seen

indicates that Hanoi is even considering

moving toward negotiation in order to lead us to extend the pause.

# Now, masters of war

# You build all the big guns... #

As they continued to escalate the war,

Johnson and McNamara were frustrated that American commanders in Vietnam,

who had come of age during World War II and Korea,

were having a hard time making sense of what was happening on the ground.

In the months and years to come, as the American presence grew,

Hanoi would escalate, too,

sending more and more soldiers south,

strengthening its own air defences and recruiting more fighters

from the alienated South Vietnamese countryside.

The Johnson administration was desperately trying

to prop up the government in Saigon,

and at the same time,

help that government to somehow win the loyalty of its own people.

Johnson had tried to forge an international coalition

to defend South Vietnam,

but only five other countries would ever send combat troops -

Australia and New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines and South Korea.

America's most important allies - Britain, France, and Canada -

refused to take part

and were calling, instead, for peace talks.

And more and more Americans,

including some of the country's most respected foreign policy experts,

were beginning to question the way the war was being fought,

whether it could ever be won,

and if the United States should be in Vietnam at all.

As 1966 began,

2,344 Americans had died in Vietnam,

nearly 200,000 were stationed there,

and more were on their way.

Those soldiers would quickly discover

that the war they were being asked to fight

was not their father's war.

We tend to fight the next war in the same way we fought the last one.

We are prisoners of our own experience.

And many of the things that we learned that worked in World War II

were not applicable to the war in Vietnam.

We simply thought we'd go in with a sledgehammer

and knock things down, clean them up and it would be all over.

It was kind of an oversimplification of the problem.

Combined with our overconfidence,

it caused us, I think, to be arrogant.

And it's very, very difficult to dispel ignorance

if you retain arrogance.

On January 31st, President Johnson had decided

to resume the bombing of targets in North Vietnam.

The 37-day pause that had begun on Christmas Eve 1965

had yielded no hint of Hanoi's willingness

to come to the negotiating table.

In South Vietnam, Viet Cong guerrillas

were now believed to control nearly three-quarters of the country.

But General William Westmoreland, the American commander,

thought his most urgent task was to destroy

the North Vietnamese regular army units

Hanoi was sending south.

To do that, he would ask for more and more American soldiers.

The strongest impression I had from my class, and my classmates,

was they were guys who just were idealists.

And I think guys drawn from little towns

all across the United States had that in common.

It was a time before the questions about American exceptionalism.

We didn't question.

We believed in what this country stood for,

and we believed that people who had the ability to lead soldiers

should do that.

Roger Harris dreamed of going to college on a football scholarship,

but was not big enough to play for his team in high school.

And so I enlisted in the Marine Corps,

and I felt that it was a win-win,

because, one, if I died,

then my mother would be able to receive

the 10,000 insurance policy.

I thought that was a lot of money and so my mother would be rich.

"If I die, you know, she'll be rich.

"If I live, then I'll be a hero,

"you know, and I can come back and get a job."

Naive, dumb, you know.

John Musgrave was from the Fairmount neighbourhood

of Independence, Missouri.

I was 17,

and my best friend and I went down and enlisted in the Marine Corps.

I always dreamed of being a Marine.

And...

..well...

..I knew I wasn't going to be a man right away,

but I was going to be a Marine, and that was enough.

I'd be doing something mature,

and I'd be doing something that was important.

And there was a war on,

and I wanted a piece of it.

I grew up in segregated neighbourhoods all my life,

so I'd never met a black person till I arrived at boot camp.

Never stood next to a black person, or a Hispanic,

or anyone who was Jewish.

Just...they didn't mix, where I grew up.

So, that was just eye-opening.

But when I got to talking to everybody,

we were all the same - we were all working-class and poor,

and we all wanted to be Marines real bad.

The tendency for a great power is to use what it's greatest at,

namely, its firepower, destructive power -

dropping a lot of bombs and shooting a lot of artillery at a distance.

You save lives.

You kill a lot of them. You don't lose a lot of us.

The central coastal province of Binh Dinh

was home to more than half a million people.

For decades, it had been a guerrilla stronghold,

and in early 1966,

the Viet Cong had been augmented by North Vietnamese regulars,

some 8,000 men in all.

General Westmoreland sent 20,000 American, South Vietnamese

and South Korean troops storming across the province

in pursuit of the enemy and their sources of supply.

They first dropped leaflets and broadcast from loudspeakers

to warn villagers of the terrible fate

that awaited anyone who fired on their helicopters,

urged them to leave their homes,

promised safe passage to any Viet Cong who wished to surrender.

Then they called in air strikes and artillery,

and blew the hamlets to bits.

It was the first large-scale search and destroy campaign of the war.

GUNFIRE

The offensive lasted 42 days.

The army reported 2,389 enemy soldiers killed.

Westmoreland was pleased.

But the operation would drive

more than 100,000 civilians from their homes.

Similar search and destroy and bombing campaigns -

17 large-scale US offensives in 1966 alone -

would produce a total of more than three million homeless people

all across the country -

roughly one-fifth of South Vietnam's population.

Since there was no front in Vietnam,

as there had been in the First and Second World Wars,

since no ground was ever permanently won or lost,

the American military command in Vietnam, MACV,

fell back more and more

on a single grisly measure of supposed success -

counting corpses, body count.

The problem with the war, as it often is, are the metrics.

It is a situation where,

if you can't count what's important,

you make what you can count important.

So, in this particular case,

what you could count was dead enemy bodies.

If body count is

the measure of success,

then there's a tendency to count

every body as an enemy soldier.

There's a tendency to want to pile up dead bodies,

and, perhaps, to use less discriminate firepower

than you otherwise might

in order to achieve the result

that you're charged with trying to obtain.

Just think about the problem from the North's point of view.

They had to supply the South.

I'm talking about bringing in people,

equipment, supplies and so forth.

They started from nothing

and pushed a road through that...

..through an area the size of Massachusetts,

and then maintained it.

For years, Hanoi had smuggled

most of its arms and supplies to the South

aboard an improvised fleet of junks,

trawlers and freighters.

But when the US Navy effectively blockaded the southern coastline,

the North Vietnamese would be forced to move

almost all of their supplies overland,

through Laos and Cambodia -

neutral countries Hanoi considered part of the greater battlefield.

Americans called it the Ho Chi Minh trail.

The North Vietnamese called it Route 559,

after the men and women of the 559th Army Corps

who were turning it from a braided web of footpaths

into 12,000 tangled miles of jungle roadways

down which men and materials streamed south.

When they had fought the French,

the Viet Minh had depended on tens of thousands of porters,

then on legions of bicycles.

Now, to offset the growing American presence,

the North Vietnamese used more mechanised transport -

relays of six-wheeled, Russian-built trucks

travelling under cover of darkness.

MACV reasoned that if the Ho Chi Minh Trail

could somehow be sufficiently damaged,

the enemy would be unable to sustain itself.

Three million tonnes of explosives would eventually be dropped

on the Laos portion of the trail alone -

a million more tonnes than fell on Germany and Japan

during all of World War II.

As many as 230,000 teenagers, many of them volunteers,

worked to keep the roads open and the traffic moving.

More than half of them were women.

Le Minh Khue, who had left her home in the north

with a novel by Ernest Hemingway in her backpack,

observed her 17th birthday on the trail.

Thousands died on the trail from starvation and accidents,

fevers and snakebite and sheer exhaustion,

as well as from the relentless bombing.

# Oh-oh, smokestack lightnin'... #

Mogie Crocker had spent most of his boyhood reading about war,

but nothing had prepared him for what he would experience

in Quang Duc province on the Cambodian border.

He had deliberately fouled up his work

at battalion headquarters so badly that he had finally been reassigned

to what he wanted most - a combat unit.

# Whoa-oh, tell me, baby

# What's the matter with you?

# Why don't you hear me crying?

# Ooh-ooh... #

Not hearing, in those days, was so difficult.

There'd be at least eight to ten days, usually,

between letters.

So, knowing he was in action,

you just didn't know what, you know, might be going on.

Mogie's battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Emerson,

known as the Gunfighter,

was courageous, implacable, relentless.

A few months before Mogie got there,

he had offered a case of whisky to the first of his men

to bring in the hacked-off head of an enemy soldier.

They did.

When Colonel Emerson learned that four companies of North Vietnamese

were preparing an ambush, he decided to ambush the ambushers.

On May 11th, he ordered his men to attack,

backed by massive air and artillery strikes.

Before the fighting ended,

some 2,000 shells had slammed into the enemy positions.

Blood was everywhere - pooled on the ground,

smeared on leaves and grass and bamboo.

There were scores of corpses,

torn to pieces or blown into the earth,

hidden in thickets, half buried in scooped-out graves.

The earthshaking concussions

had blown the eyeballs of some of them from their heads.

In the midst of the fighting,

Mogie's squad was moving along a narrow path

when two enemy machine guns opened up on them.

GUNFIRE

His closest friend was fatally wounded.

Mogie crouched in front of him, radioed for suppressive fire,

and then, as both machine guns continued shooting,

he carried his dying friend off the battlefield.

For his courage, he would be awarded the Army Commendation Medal.

# Oh, Sergeant, I'm a draftee And I've just arrived in camp

# I've come to wear the uniform And join the martial tramp... #

The war, by 1966, began to impact the middle class

because the draft calls had to be enlarged.

They couldn't get enough people to volunteer,

or draft people out of the working class.

They started drafting people out of college,

and that's when the anti-war movement

shifted from a moral movement to a self-interest movement,

driven by people who didn't want to go to war,

and their loved ones, who didn't want them to go to war.

# And I know that it won't matter That I've never killed before. #

The draft was a consuming issue

for young men of Bill Zimmerman's generation.

By 1966, 30,000 men were being called up each month.

But more than half of the 27 million American men

who came of age during the war

avoided military service

through exemptions and deferments.

A million young men served in the Reserves, or National Guard,

with the expectation they would never be sent into combat.

Reservists and guardsmen were almost always white,

generally better educated, better connected,

and better paid than draftees.

"If you've got the dough," GIs said, "you don't have to go."

The result was an army heavily skewed

toward minorities and the underprivileged.

# Mr Backlash, Mr Backlash

# Just who do you think I am?

# You raise my taxes freeze my wages

# And send my son to Vietnam... #

For a time, African-Americans,

though they represented only 12% of the population,

suffered a disproportionate number of casualties.

Resentment began to grow.

We've got to build so much strength in building our community

that if they come to get one person,

they're going to have to mess with us all.

That's what we've got to do.

-That's what we've got to do.

-APPLAUSE

We've got to build so much strength

inside our community,

so that when LBJ says,

"Come here, boy," to my boy, we say,

-"Hell, no, we ain't going."

-CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I'm not going to help nobody get something my Negroes don't have.

If I'm going to die, I'll die now, right here, fighting you.

If I'm going to die, you're my enemy.

My enemy is the white people,

not the Viet Cong or Chinese or Japanese.

You're my opposer when I want freedom.

You're my opposer when I want justice.

You're my opposer when I want equality.

And you want me to go somewhere and fight,

but you won't even stand up for me here at home!

But a majority of Americans,

old and young, supported the war.

# Glory, glory, hallelujah

# His truth is marching on. #

I was brought up to believe that the Communists were

people who destroyed the family, destroyed religion.

And people who had no allegiance to our country,

but to international communism.

My mother would describe them as...

..which means that these are people

with the head of a water buffalo and the face of a horse,

meaning that they were subhumans and they were brutal.

But on the other hand, I thought, "They also include

"people like my sister, Thang, and a lot of my cousins."

I couldn't quite reconcile the two images.

But, of the two, I think the other image was much stronger,

because I was so scared of them.

I thought, "These people must be really, really horrible people."

That was the frame of mind I had

when I started doing research into the communist movement.

Duong Van Mai was the daughter of an official

in the South Vietnamese government,

and was now married to an American, David Elliot.

Back in 1964, she had gone to work for the RAND Corporation in Saigon.

The think tank had been commissioned by Robert McNamara

to do a study of enemy prisoners to find out who are the Viet Cong,

and what makes them tick?

I remember my first interview.

I was by myself, I was very young,

and I was going to this pretty grim prison

to interview this high-ranking cadre who had been captured.

I went in thinking, "I'm going to meet this beast."

You know, this guy with the head of a water buffalo

and the face of a horse.

But here was a man who had devoted all his life

to fight for what he called the just cause -

to free his country of foreign domination,

to reunify the country under just government.

So, he really, totally believed in it,

to the point that he'd sacrifice his whole life to this cause.

So, when I left, I was very impressed with him.

When the RAND report was presented

to McNamara's top deputies at the Pentagon,

describing the Viet Cong as a dedicated enemy

that could only be defeated at enormous cost,

one senior official said,

"If what you say is true, we're fighting on the wrong side -

"the side that's going to lose this war."

GUNFIRE

Most of the fighting in Vietnam was small-scale, close up,

and initiated by the elusive enemy.

The military called it contact.

"War is hell," grunts like to say, "but contact is a mother."

Six months into his tour,

Lieutenant Mike Heaney from Basking Ridge, New Jersey,

undertook what he and his men thought

would be an easy assignment -

climb a slope not far from their base at An Khe,

and drive a small enemy mortar unit off a ridgeline.

As soon as we started out, we started to get some bad vibes.

And all of a sudden, the very point man -

the first guy in the column, Sergeant Mayes -

without saying anything, just put his M16 up to his shoulder,

and fired off a round.

Then he turned around, and he said, "VC on the trail. VC on the trail."

Before I had a chance to digest this,

he went down - shot right through the chest.

Boom.

And all of a sudden,

what was a very well-laid ambush erupted.

Heaney's radio operator, Private Terry Carpenter,

got the company commander on the line.

"We've run into something bad," Heaney said.

At that moment, a bullet hit Carpenter in the head.

I knew Terry was down. I knew Sergeant Mayes was down.

I had asked the first machine-gun crew to come up

and start laying down machine-gun fire.

They got blown away pretty quickly.

At that point, there wasn't anybody left

in my forward unit.

Every one of them had been taken down except me.

Every one.

Every one had been killed, or mortally wounded at that point.

Night fell.

What was left of Heaney's company braced for the assault

they assumed would come at dawn.

Then the enemy began to lob mortar shells

among Heaney's men.

I felt like somebody had taken a bat and hit me on my calf -

my right calf - as hard as he could.

I was so stunned by the shock of being hit,

and I just...drew in a deep breath of air

in terrible pain.

I couldn't speak.

Right after the ambush happened -

and I knew I'd lost a bunch of guys -

I said a prayer to God, saying, basically,

"If you need any more guys from my platoon, take me.

"Don't take any more of my men."

As soon as I said it, I freaked myself out.

I said, "Holy shit. Can I take that prayer back?"

But it was too late. I'd said it.

And as it turns out, not one more man

on my platoon died after that prayer.

The students are angry now, and the word has passed

to gather at Saigon's main Buddhist pagoda after dark.

Through all these years, the Vietnamese have learned

to live with crises and war,

but they haven't learned yet to live as a nation.

On May 15th, 1966, the government of South Vietnam,

the country for which so many Americans were risking their lives,

again seemed on the brink of collapse.

The ascendancy of Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky

had dealt a severe blow to activist Buddhists,

who had been demanding representative government,

and a negotiated end to the war, since 1963.

Ky was an unguided missile, according to one US diplomat.

He once told a reporter that what Vietnam really needed

was five Hitlers.

He was a charlatan.

The man not only has no training, has no education,

but doesn't seem to be interested in being educated,

and proud of his ignorance.

When Ky suddenly fired a rival general,

a popular Buddhist commander,

demonstrators poured into the streets of Hue and Da Nang.

But from his command post on a hilltop outside the city,

an American Marine Lieutenant had watched in disbelief

as two battles unfolded simultaneously.

In the west, his fellow Marines were fighting the Viet Cong.

In the east, the South Vietnamese Army

seemed to be at war with itself.

"May 16th, 1966.

"Dear Mom and Dad,

"our operation here on the Cambodian border has been quite a success.

"No doubt you will hear about it on the news.

"Whether I will go out again soon, I don't know,

"but don't plan on steady mail.

"Tell Randy I'm looking forward to seeing his new dog.

"I may take a 15-day leave to Tokyo to keep from cracking up."

It was a lovely spring day,

and I opened the letter that said that,

and I was just really devastated, because, by that time,

Vietnam was in total chaos.

There was a continuing changeover of people in authority,

of the government in South Vietnam,

and there were protests of the Buddhist monks and others that...

There were anti-American demonstrations.

I just thought, "Why? Why are we there?"

To an old high-school friend, Mogie was even more forthcoming.

"Dear Duff,

"since I last wrote, which is several months,

"a number of exciting but terribly unpleasant events have occurred,

"the worst of which was being pinned down

"by two Chinese light machine guns firing 900 rounds per minute

"and having my best friend killed more or less beside me.

"Someday, I may tell you the whole story

"if my nerves aren't completely gone by then.

"Actually, the latter is just wishful thinking

"in false hope they will take me off the line.

"I was fantastically religious for a while...

"..sending up various and sundry prayers,

"mainly concerned with trying to stay alive...

"..but I am once again an atheist...

"..until the shooting starts."

GUNFIRE

June 3rd, 1966, was Mogie's 19th birthday.

His company was involved in yet another campaign

aimed at finding and killing North Vietnamese troops

filtering into the Central Highlands from Laos.

As night fell, Mogie and his squad were ordered to move up

toward the crest of a hill overlooking a besieged ARVN outpost,

so that artillery could be brought up

and positioned to shell the enemy in the morning.

They moved slowly, wearily, up the slope.

Mogie was the point man.

Out of the darkness, a machine gun opened up.

Denton Crocker Jr never made it to the top of the hill.

# Down the street the dogs are barking

# And the day is a-getting dark... #

It was just a lovely day to be out in our garden.

But shortly after lunchtime, I stepped out on the porch.

I saw two men in uniform coming to the house...

..and I knew something terrible had happened.

And I ran down the steps, and I just grabbed hold of one of them,

and said, "Don't tell me.

"Don't say it. Not my beautiful boy."

And he just said yes.

I suddenly heard my mother screaming for my father.

Like in a movie, here came the priest, up the stairs,

with a soldier and she was going, "Oh, no."

And she was calling my dad.

My reaction was to leap up off the couch,

race out the back door.

My dad was standing there

and I fell into his arms, and I said...

.."Don't let it be true, Dad.

"Is it true?"

And he said yes.

I just...I remember sitting on the couch,

and I put my arms around them and I said,

"We'll love each other and we'll be all right."

But I don't know how far it carried.

You know, we all tried.

Carol said to me one day

very shortly after Denton was killed,

probably that very day,

"How can you believe in God?"

And I said, "Because we had Mogie...

"..and I think that his life was a real gift.

"It was a privilege to have him."

A friend wrote to me, "Our children are really only on loan to us,"

which I guess is true.

We all wish the war would end.

We all wish the troops would come home.

There is no human being in all this world

who wishes these things to happen, for peace to come to the world,

more than your President of the United States.

The military claimed to have killed some 57,000 enemy soldiers

in the first six months of 1966.

But, privately, the administration worried

that General Westmoreland's crossover point -

the moment when more enemy soldiers had been killed

than could be replaced - seemed no nearer.

From the first, the joint chiefs had urged the President

to be more aggressive,

to permit troops to pursue the enemy into Laos and Cambodia

and to expand the target list for bombing in North Vietnam.

Johnson still would not allow borders to be crossed

by regular ground troops, for fear of bringing China,

or even the Soviet Union, into the war,

and he was wary of heavier bombing, fearful of hitting more civilians.

But despite his concern, the President now agreed

to intensify the bombing campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder.

He approved attacks on oil facilities

all over North Vietnam,

including some sites adjacent to the cities of Haiphong and Hanoi.

His commanders assured him that this would be a mortal blow to the enemy,

sure to force the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table.

Tens of thousands of sorties were flown.

Many bombs hit their intended targets,

but many missed and fell on residential neighbourhoods instead,

just as the President had feared.

Things are going reasonably well in the south, aren't they?

Yes, I think so. We think we're taking a heavy toll out of them,

but it just scares me to see what we're doing here,

with God knows how many aeroplanes and helicopters and firepower,

and going after a bunch of half-starved beggars.

That's what's going on in the south.

And the great danger is that

they can keep that up almost indefinitely.

The only thing that'll prevent it, Mr President,

is their morale breaking. There's no question.

But what the troops in the south - the VC and North Vietnamese...

They know that we're bombing in the north.

We just have a free rein.

When they see they're getting killed in such high rates in the south,

and they see that the supplies

are less likely to come down from the north,

I think it'll just hurt their morale a little bit more.

And, to me, that's the only way to win,

because we're not killing enough of them

to make it impossible for the North to continue to fight,

but we are killing enough

to destroy the morale of those people down there

if they think this is going to have to go on forever.

All right. Go ahead, Bob.

People talk about collateral damage, but it means something.

You don't want to do collateral damage.

You want to do the damage you want to do.

That's the winning way to do this.

SHE SHOUTS IN VIETNAMESE

Even though I was in a cell by myself,

and others were by themselves, we weren't alone.

We were together. In this old French prison,

gradually, I began to realise this could go on a long time.

A long time to me was, like, maybe a year or two.

I never dreamed it would be eight and a half years.

By the summer of 1966, Lieutenant Everett Alvarez,

the first American pilot to have been shot down over North Vietnam,

had been a captive for nearly two years,

and had been joined, in and around Hanoi,

by more than 100 other downed airmen.

The men were forbidden to communicate with one another,

forced to bow to their jailers,

and told that their country had forgotten them.

They were subjected to isolation, beatings,

and hour upon hour of torture,

all aimed at forcing them to admit their guilt

and record statements denouncing the war.

When that cell door would open,

when they would say, "You, your turn,"

you know, the bottom just fell out of you,

and you knew that you may not come back.

The manacles, the ropes, the beatings.

They broke bones. They did everything.

And they didn't let me die. They just kept the pain.

The bombing continued,

and more American planes were shot down.

The North Vietnamese took pride in capturing American airmen.

Even children were expected to do their part.

CHILDREN REPEAT COMMANDS

-"Hands up!"

-Hand up!

-"Hands up!"

-Hands up!

Hands up!

The bombing around Hanoi and Haiphong

that resulted in so many of our people being POWs

for a long period of time was fought out of the White House basement

with the President himself picking targets

and deciding that, "We're going to attack now,

"and then we're going to pause for a while."

Air power was being misused big time.

Operation Rolling Thunder did destroy

most of North Vietnam's oil storage facilities.

But the North Vietnamese shifted most of their oil

to underground tanks,

and more arrived every day from China and the Soviet Union.

The bombing was stepped up anyway.

Throughout the north,

enough crude air shelters were fashioned from concrete pipe,

buried 5ft beneath the ground,

to accommodate some 18 million people -

virtually the entire population.

Over a million people were said to be working around the clock

to undo what American bombs had done.

When key bridges were destroyed,

they fashioned pontoon bridges overnight to keep traffic moving.

Crews waited along the roads with heaps of gravel and stone

and stacks of wood to fill bomb craters.

They worked under the slogan, "The enemy destroys, we repair.

"The enemy destroys, we repair again."

Rolling Thunder was the dumbest campaign

ever devised by a human being, because what's irrational to us

is totally rational to the other side

if you've decided that you are going to reunify the Vietnams,

no matter what it takes, no matter how many casualties.

A lot of the military we talked to shared our concerns

about how the war was being fought and whether or not it could be won.

But when it came to an official position,

it was, "What we know well

"and we can win this war, and we're doing it right.

"We just need more - more troops, more bombing."

Dr Martin Luther King Jr

had been agonising about the war for months,

but he had been reluctant to break openly with Lyndon Johnson,

who had done so much for civil rights.

Now he could no longer stay silent.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight

because my conscience leaves me no other choice.

A time comes when silence is betrayal.

That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

11 days later, King joined perhaps half a million other protesters

at a massive demonstration in Central Park

organised by a new coalition -

the National Mobilisation To End The War In Vietnam.

# I said, "Hold it, Doc A World War passed through my brain"

# He said, "Nurse, get your pad The boy's insane"

# I said that... #

Stop the bombing!

Let us save our national honour.

Stop the bombing and stop the war.

Let us save American lives and Vietnamese lives.

Let us take a single, instantaneous step

to the peace table.

Stop the bombing.

The anti-war movement was growing in numbers and militancy.

"We are no longer interested in merely protesting the war,"

an organiser said,

"We are out to stop it."

Meanwhile, some in the Johnson administration

became convinced the anti-war movement

was a communist conspiracy directed by Moscow.

The FBI and the CIA,

which was barred by statute from operating within the United States,

began infiltrating the movement, wiretapping its leaders,

even inciting violence in order to undercut their appeal.

At that time, people who supported the war were fond of saying,

"My country, right or wrong",

"America, love it or leave it",

or, "Better dead than red."

Those sentiments seemed insane to us.

We don't want to live in a country

that we're going to support whether it's right or wrong.

We want to live in a country that acts rightly,

and doesn't act wrongly.

And if our country isn't doing that, it needs to be corrected.

So, we had a very different idea of patriotism.

So, we began an era in which two groups of Americans,

both thinking that they were acting patriotically,

went to war with each other.

Over 200,000 communist sympathisers in that park this morning

tried to burn this flag, but they didn't succeed.

Behind the scenes,

Robert McNamara, the chief architect of American strategy in Vietnam,

had grown less and less confident in its ultimate success

and in the repeated calls for more men and more bombing

made by the military he oversaw.

Robert McNamara was the embodiment of intellect and self-confidence.

If there was a problem, there had to be an answer,

and that was his fatal flaw.

The startling thing is that this man,

who never seemed to doubt anything he said,

actually began to doubt profoundly what he was doing in Vietnam,

but we didn't know about it.

In a private memorandum to the President,

McNamara told Johnson

that the picture of the world's greatest superpower

killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week

while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission

on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed

is not a pretty one.

He urged the President to limit troop levels, not raise them,

and to declare an unconditional end

to all bombing north of the 20th parallel.

"The war in Vietnam is acquiring a momentum of its own

"that must be stopped," McNamara wrote.

"Dramatic increases in US troop deployments

"and attacks on the North are not necessary

"and are not the answer.

"The enemy can absorb them or counter them,

"bogging us down further

"and risking even more serious escalation of the war."

In the end, Johnson tried to find a middle ground.

He expanded the list of bombing targets,

but he refused to mine the harbours,

and he agreed to send Westmorland only 47,000 more troops,

which would bring the total of US forces in the country

to more than half a million men.

That June, 1st Lieutenant Matthew Harrison

got his orders to join the 173rd Airborne.

I really felt as though I was uniquely qualified

to lead American soldiers.

But I think, the first day I was there,

some guy showed me what looked like a bunch of apricots

on a leather thong.

Turns out they were ears - dried, desiccated.

I understood, theoretically, what it meant to be in a war,

but, of course, no-one can really understand it until they've done it.

Harrison was a platoon leader in Charlie Company.

They were helicoptered into the heart of the Central Highlands,

near Dak To, where North Vietnamese regulars

were said to be threatening a Special Forces camp.

GUNFIRE

By dawn, the enemy had melted away.

Of the 137 men of Alpha Company, 76 lay dead.

43 had been shot in the head at close range.

Ears had been cut from some,

eyes gouged out, ring fingers missing.

23 more men were wounded.

This was my introduction to war.

This was my welcome to Vietnam.

We spent the rest of the day putting those bodies into body bags

and getting them out of there.

Charlie Company found just nine or ten North Vietnamese bodies.

Harrison and his men were ordered to search the nearby hillsides

for more enemy dead,

who commanders assumed had been killed by US artillery.

MACV needed its body count.

We never located them, and I believe, today,

that we didn't locate them because they weren't there.

I think we just took a terrible loss on June 22nd.

To admit that a rifle company in the 173rd

had been wiped out by the North Vietnamese

was not something our leaders were prepared to do.

An officer told a reporter that the shattered rifle company

had killed 475 enemy soldiers.

When another officer suggested to General Westmorland

that the figure seemed too high to be believable,

he replied, "Too late. It's already gone out."

By then, I had more than just a suspicion

that this was the fairy tale, that Westmorland was wrong,

and I didn't know whether he knew he was wrong,

or whether he believed what he was being told,

and wanted to believe.

But this was the first time that I had to come to grips with the fact

that the leadership was either out of touch or was lying.

# Hello, darkness, my old friend

# I've come to talk with you again

# Because a vision softly creeping

# Left its seeds while I was sleeping

# And the vision that was planted in my brain

# Still remains

# Within the sound of silence. #