This Is What We Do (July 1967-December 1967) The Vietnam War

This programme contains some strong language

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

Soldiers adapt. You go over there with one mind-set, you know,

and then you adapt. You adapt to the atrocities of war,

you adapt to killing, dying.

You know?

After a while it doesn't bother you.

Let's just say, it doesn't bother you as much.

When I first arrived in Vietnam there were some interesting things

that happened and I questioned some of the Marines.

I was made to realise that this is war and this is what we do.

And that stuck in my head. "This is war, this is what we do."

And after a while, you embrace that.

GUNFIRE

This evening, I came here to speak to you about Vietnam.

There is progress in the war itself.

Rather dramatic progress considering the situation that actually

prevailed when we sent our troops there in 1965.

The grip of the Vietcong on the people is being broken.

# If you can just get your mind together

# Then come on across to me... #

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1967, the men overseeing the war

in Vietnam remained outwardly optimistic,

whatever private doubts they may have held.

# But first Are you experienced? #

EXPLOSION

# Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have... #

The American military command in Vietnam, MACV,

claimed to have killed 200,000 enemy troops

and had told the President that the all-important crossover point,

the moment when US and ARVN forces were killing more Vietcong and North

Vietnamese troops than the enemy could replace,

appeared to have been reached in almost all of South Vietnam.

But the United States had suffered nearly 75,000 casualties.

By July 4th, 14,624 Americans had died.

And off the record, many officers were much less sanguine

than their commanders.

From Saigon, RW Apple of the New York Times summarised their views.

"Victory is not close at hand," he wrote.

"In fact, it may be beyond reach."

President Johnson had been forced to raise taxes to meet the war's

ever-climbing cost.

His ambitious social programme, his

war on poverty, was in retreat.

# Maybe now you can't hear them... #

That summer, racial unrest would grip American cities.

# If you just take hold of my hand... #

The President would have to send the army into Detroit to end five days

of rioting that left 43 dead and hundreds of buildings razed.

26 more died in Newark, Jersey, demonstrating yet again

how wide a gap remained between black and white Americans.

Only a third of the country saw any sign of progress in Vietnam.

And half of the country now disapproved of the President's

handling of the war.

South Vietnam had been divided into four tactical zones.

By the summer of 1967, American troops were fighting in all four of them.

In IV Corps, the Brown Water Navy patrolled the rivers and canals

and marshes of the densely populated Mekong Delta,

searching for the enemy.

In III Corps,

the army continued to sweep the thick jungles of the Iron Triangle,

the Vietcong's sanctuary near Saigon that was supposed to have been

permanently denied to the enemy by big American operations earlier in

the year.

In II Corps, a series of bloody battles in the central highlands

around Dak To temporarily drove north Vietnamese troops back into

Cambodia and Laos.

But some of the most intense combat would take place in I Corps,

made up of the five northernmost provinces of South Vietnam,

where the Marines would bear the brunt of the fighting.

More than two and a half million people lived there -

all but 2% of them within the narrow rice-growing river valleys along the

South China Sea.

The Marines wanted to eradicate the Vietcong there

and provide security to the people, village by village,

hamlet by hamlet.

The vast, largely empty highlands

that stretched westward all the way to Laos, the Marines argued,

could be left to the enemy.

The real war is among the people,

said Marine Lieutenant General Victor Krulak,

and not among the mountains.

But General William Westmoreland, the American commander,

feared that thousands of North Vietnamese Army regulars, the NVA,

were planning to seize the two northernmost provinces.

Finding and destroying them remained his first goal.

He insisted the third Marine division move north to meet

that challenge, establish a base at Dong Ha

and man strong points at Gio Lihn, Con Thien,

Cam Lo, Camp Carroll, The Rockpile and Khe Sanh.

Khe Sanh overlooked route nine,

the east-west highway that Westmoreland hoped would one day

carry American troops across the border into Laos,

where North Vietnamese men and supplies were streaming south

on the Ho Chi Minh trail.

EXPLOSION

But the thousands of Marines monitoring the border would find themselves

within range of highly accurate North Vietnamese artillery and

rocket launchers hidden within the DMZ.

MUSIC: I'm A Man by Spencer Davis Group

Tell me, you came here full strength?

I had 13 men when I came here.

And it's four days later now, how many are still here?

Six.

The rifles have been jamming, the mud has slowed everything down.

The artillery comes in everywhere.

It just gets pretty futile and frustrating sometimes.

I can't say that I'm scared stiff, but I'm scared.

I mean, after a while, you know it's going to come

and you can't do nothing about it.

And you just look to God.

# Well, my pad is very messy And there's whiskers on my chin... #

Private First Class John Musgrave of Fairmount, Missouri,

who had volunteered to join the 3rd Marine Division, was sent to

the battle-scarred countryside around Con Thien,

a few kilometres south of the DMZ.

EXPLOSION

For the Marines in northern I Corps in the 3rd Marine Division,

in the spring and summer of 1967, we called the DMZ the dead marine zone.

Musgrave's 1st Battalion had already suffered so many casualties in a

series of bloody sweeps that it was believed to be a hard-luck outfit.

They were called the walking dead.

I joined the Marine Corps to be in the Varsity...

..and I felt like I wasn't varsity

unless I was up North fighting the NVA.

I have never regretted that decision.

There were times when we were under artillery fire...

..where I thought, you know, "What were you thinking?"

Every major contact I remember with the NVA was initiated by them

ambushing us.

They wouldn't hit us unless they outnumbered us.

And we were fighting in their yard.

They knew the ground, we didn't.

They were just really good.

The North Vietnamese carried Soviet-made

seemingly indestructible AK-47s.

The Marines had to fight with newly issued M16 rifles that had,

for a time, a potentially fatal design flaw.

They needed constant cleaning

and often jammed in the middle of firefights.

Their rifles worked, ours didn't.

The M16 was a piece of shit.

You can't throw your bullets at the enemy and have them be effective.

And that rifle malfunctioned on us repeatedly.

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

My hatred for them was pure.

Pure. I hated them so much.

And I was so scared of them.

Boy, I was terrified of them.

And the scareder I got, the more I hated them.

I only killed one human being in Vietnam.

And that was the first man that I ever killed.

I was sick with guilt...

..about killing that guy and

thinking I'm going to have to do this for the next 13 months

and I'm going to go crazy.

Then I saw a Marine step on a Bouncing Betty mine...

..and that's when I made my deal with the devil, in that I said,

"I will never kill another human being as long as I'm in Vietnam.

"However, I will waste as many gooks as I can find.

"I'll wax as many dinks as I can find,

"I'll smoke as many zips as I can find,

"but I ain't going to kill anybody".

You know?

Turn the subject into an object.

Racism 101.

It turns out to be a very necessary tool when you have children fighting

your wars, for them to stay sane doing their work.

GUNFIRE

The disillusionment for me began when I was going back to fight

at places we'd already fought before.

We had fought, captured, and then left and the NVA came right back.

You don't like getting wounded in places you've already been before.

War is a real-estate business.

We're supposed to take real estate away from the enemy

and then deny the enemy access to that real estate.

NARRATOR: On the morning of July 2nd 1967,

the First Battalion launched yet another sweep of the area north-east

of Con Thien.

When they reached a crossroads called the Marketplace,

barely a mile and a quarter from their base, they were ambushed.

One company was virtually annihilated.

John Musgrave's company rushed to rescue the survivors,

only to be pinned down there, as well.

It was one of the worst days the Marine Corps endured in Vietnam.

53 dead and 190 wounded were carried off the battlefield.

34 more dead had to be left behind.

And when Marines fought their way back two days later to retrieve

their bodies, they found that a number had died because their M16s

had jammed as the enemy closed in.

Many had been executed,

shot in the face or back of the head at close range.

Some bodies had been booby-trapped, others mutilated.

Marine Amphibious Force headquarters was so desperate to get

North Vietnamese prisoners.

Good luck, you know?

Don't you know what we're doing up here?

Do you know we're fighting?

I want to make this clear. We did not torture prisoners.

And we did not mutilate them.

But to be a prisoner, you had to make it to the rear, you know?

If he fell into our hands, he was just one sorry fucker.

I don't know how to explain it that it would make sense.

This is Bao Cu, the day of voting in Vietnam,

and it's a solemn day in the village of Huong Tho Phu and in other

villages throughout the country.

And these people have dressed up in their Sunday best for it.

NARRATOR: South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky had crushed

his Buddhist opponents in 1966.

But he had been forced by the Americans and his political rivals

to make at least tentative moves towards democracy,

election of a National Assembly, a new constitution

and the promise of elections for president and vice president.

But when Ky's old adversary,

Nguyen Van Thieu, declared he wanted to challenge Ky for the top spot,

things in Saigon had threatened to come apart again.

We were watching the rivalry between Thieu and Ky.

And that was a game.

In Vietnam, the country was watching like we were watching a movie.

And Thieu and Ky was watching as to not whoever had the support of the

people, but who had the support of the Americans and the White House.

Thieu emerged on top. He was unassuming and unflappable,

interested largely in accumulating power and personal wealth,

and was thought unlikely ever to embarrass Washington.

Ky would be his vice president.

Some South Vietnamese did believe that a measure of stability had

finally been achieved.

Others were not so sure.

In terms of corruption, yes, they were corrupt.

Both Thieu and Ky, they abused their position.

We pay a very high price for having leaders like Ky and Thieu.

And we continue to pay the price.

My father was in the United States air force.

I grew up out of the country in desegregated settings.

I was usually the only little black girl in the class.

If you look at my class pictures,

I look like the little chocolate chip in the vanilla ice cream.

I was always a good student.

I remember people saying, "Oh, you speak so well."

And the unstated part is "for a black girl" - probably a Negro girl,

or a coloured girl at that point.

Eva Jefferson's father had served a year on air bases in Vietnam

and returned home convinced the United States had no business being there.

But when his daughter entered Northwestern University in the Chicago

suburb of Evanston in September 1967, the war was not uppermost in

students' minds.

The war was not really an issue.

It's like, well, no, the President has our best interests at heart.

He, of course, would only prosecute a war that made sense.

And I think most of America felt that way.

At the University of Nebraska, Jack Todd also supported the war.

He had felt so strongly about it in 1966 that he had signed up for

Marine officer training.

I went into the Marine Corps...

..thinking this was all I wanted to do.

I mean, my goal was to be commander, a platoon commander, in Vietnam.

But as time went by, and the war went on,

Todd and many of his fellow students began to change their minds.

All young people go through changes.

But we were going through astronomical changes

at such a rapid rate.

All the music, the culture, everything that we'd listen to,

everything that we thought was transforming.

And the core of it all was Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam.

Todd attended officer training school at Camp Upshur in Quantico, Virginia.

But doubts about the war followed him there, too.

I guess the emotional things that were happening on the ground,

the photographs that we saw,

the news images and the fact that there was no discernible progress,

it really started to eat away at what we thought.

In the summer of '67 I was at Camp Upshur, you know,

wanting to go kill Vietnamese people.

And in October I was completely against the war.

Westmorland came in last night to me and he says that he has

concentrated more firepower in bombing in the last week

on the DMZ, and they've concentrated more on us, than has ever been

concentrated in any equivalent period in the history of warfare.

And it would just be suicide if we stopped the bombing, as these idiots

are talking about. If we stop bombing, without any reciprocity

-on their part, it just means we kill more Americans. That's all.

-Yeah.

Neither the ongoing bombing of the North,

nor the concentrated bombing around the DMZ,

nor the behind-the-scenes offers

made by President Johnson to stop it,

had any discernible effect on Le Duan

and the other men who ran North Vietnam.

But many North Vietnamese civilians were weary of the war

and of the bombing that had disrupted their lives

and destroyed so much of their infrastructure.

The country's most revered figures,

Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, were urging patience.

Continuing to wage a war of attrition

they still believed would pay off in the end.

To silence his critics and break the stalemate,

Le Duan began to devise and promote a new and riskier version

of the plan for victory he had tried in 1964.

He called it the General Offensive, General Uprising.

North Vietnamese and Vietcong units would launch scores of coordinated

attacks on South Vietnamese cities and towns and military bases.

That offensive, Le Duan believed,

would ignite a mass civilian uprising.

These simultaneous blows would destroy the Saigon regime

and leave Washington with no choice but to withdraw.

We talk about our own hubris,

there's some hubris on their side, as well.

And once they had convinced themselves that this was going to be

a great success, it is what some wags have called

drinking your own bath water.

They decided it's going to be a victory,

even though there are people in the south saying,

"Hey, this is not a great idea."

But these people are charged with subjectivism

and basically are told to shut up and keep rolling.

Le Duan neutralised those who opposed his plan.

Members of General Giap's staff were arrested,

so was Ho Chi Minh's secretary.

Hundreds of less prominent figures - journalists, students,

even highly decorated heroes of the French war - were also rounded up.

Many were locked up in the old

French prison that the American POWs,

also confined there, called the Hanoi Hilton.

The date eventually chosen for the attack would be January 31st 1968,

the first day of the Vietnamese lunar New Year celebration,

known as Tet.

Hundreds, then thousands, of North Vietnamese regulars in civilian clothes

began slipping southwards to join tens of thousands of Vietcong already in place.

In preparation for the coming offensive,

the North Vietnamese hoped to lure American and South Vietnamese forces

away from cities and big military bases.

To do that, they would mount a series of assaults on remote outposts near

Cambodia, Laos and the DMZ.

Con Thien would be the first.

EXPLOSIONS

The big question really seems to be whether or not the North Vietnamese

intend to overrun Con Thien.

The Marines have tripled the number of troops guarding the outpost

and they've moved up more battalions to be ready to reinforce.

You spend your day filling up sandbags, trying to create barriers,

and you just put another layer on, put another layer on.

A lot of mud, blood...

..and artillery.

It's just red clay up there. And it's real sticky and it could

just grab on to you and pull your boots off.

It's hard to run in that stuff and running -

when you're in a place where they're firing heavy artillery at you -

running's pretty important.

EXPLOSIONS

Like almost, like, every hour, there'd be a barrage.

People getting blown to bits, literally blown to bits.

You'd find a boot with a leg in it and so, is the leg white or black?

So who was the white Marine that was here?

Who was the black? So then you try to remember and you tag it and put that in a green bag

and that's what goes back, you know, as Marine Lance Corporal so-and-so,

but sometimes you're not even sure

because the body has literally been blown to bits

and the only thing that's left is a foot.

Or a piece of an arm.

I carried a wall calendar from Clifford Forlow Insurance.

He was my dad's insurance agent, and I marked off each of the days

religiously, and then in October, we went up to Con Thien again.

I just stopped. Because I thought...

.."This is pointless. I'm not going to go home.

"I'm not going to make it home.

"What's the point?" So I just quit marking them off.

I had the opportunity to call my mother.

I said, "You'll probably never see me again

"because we're the most northern outpost that the Marines have.

"Everybody in my unit's dying.

"I probably won't be coming back."

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

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

"You're coming back."

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

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

And I was feeling that my mother's in denial.

She just doesn't want to face the fact that her only son is going to

die in Vietnam.

And she said, "You're not going to die. You're not going to die."

The last thing she said to me was, "God has a plan for you."

And I said, "Yeah, right." And I hung up.

EXPLOSION

Mr Stout, during what period of time were you in Vietnam?

I was in Vietnam from September 1966 to September 1967.

-And with what unit?

-With the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne.

During the time that you were in Vietnam, did you personally witness

any atrocities on the part of American troops?

Yes, I did.

Dennis Stout from Phoenix, Arizona had enlisted in the Army at 20

and served nine months in combat.

Wounded three times, he became an Army reporter covering the

327th Regiment of the 101st Airborne.

He would spend most of his time with a unique commando platoon called

Tiger Force -

small, hand-picked teams capable of remaining in the jungle

for weeks at a time.

Fast-moving and deadly.

Intended to out-guerrilla the guerrillas.

Tiger Force fought in six different provinces,

repeatedly suffering heavy losses.

In the summer of 1967, Tiger Force

was sent to the fertile Song Ve Valley.

The valley had officially been declared a free-fire zone.

And Tiger Force's officers took that literally.

"There are no friendlies," one Lieutenant told his men.

"Shoot anything that moves."

Over a seven-month period, they killed scores of unarmed civilians.

These atrocities were committed by soldiers of units I was assigned to

as a reporter for the Army newspapers.

Tiger Force was not the only platoon

Dennis Stout covered that crossed the line.

One such incident was the rape and killing of a Vietnamese girl.

She was captured, kept for interrogation.

Over a two-day period she was raped, then on the morning of the

-third day she was killed.

-Was she raped by more than one person?

Yes, all but the medic and myself

and possibly one other man from the platoon.

Did you protest? Did you try in any way to have them stopped?

Yes, after the rape incident I complained

to the battalion Sergeant Major

and his response was that this type of thing happens in all wars

and that I was not to mention it - it was a common occurrence.

And then he told me to keep quiet,

that I did not have to return for the next operation.

Years later, another soldier came forward with more allegations of war

crimes. And an army investigation would find probable cause to try 18

members of Tiger Force for murder or assault.

But no charges were ever brought.

The official records were buried in the archives.

They should have all gone to jail.

They were guilty of murder. Period.

At the same time, I felt like that incident,

which I think was an aberration, not the norm,

tarred all veterans and there are hundreds of thousands of veterans

who went and did their duty, as honourable as they possibly could,

and they were tarred with the same brush.

One of the things that I learned in the war is that we're not the top

species on the planet because we're nice.

We are a very aggressive species.

It is in us and people talk a lot about how the military

turns kids into, you know, killing machines and stuff

and I'll always argue that it's just finishing school.

What we do with civilisation is that we learn to inhibit and

rope in these aggressive tendencies.

And we have to recognise them.

I worry about a whole country that doesn't recognise it

because I think of how many times we get ourselves in scrapes

as a nation because we're always the good guys.

Sometimes I think if we thought that we weren't always the good guys,

we might actually get in less wars.

Mr Rubin, how do you realistically expect to shut down the Pentagon?

The Pentagon represents the murder of people throughout the world

and the American people have no control over what their government

is doing. The only thing to do with the Pentagon is to shut it down.

# It was back in 1942, I was a member of a good platoon

# We were on manoeuvres in Louisiana one night by the light of the moon... #

There was a major demonstration, either in New York or in Washington,

every fall and every spring.

We decided that we would try to do something more militant than simply

stand around and make speeches opposing the war,

which is what these demonstrations had become.

And when the time came to lead people away

from the Lincoln Memorial

toward the Pentagon, 50,000 people marched.

# We were neck deep in the Big Muddy

# The big fool says to push on. #

Bill Zimmerman, now an assistant professor of psychology at Brooklyn

College, had been against the war since the beginning.

And we found, when we got there, concentric defence perimeters

that had been set up around the Pentagon

to keep us at a distance from the building.

We pushed against them, we tore down their fences.

I was working that weekend day.

The secretaries who were working in my area were frightened to hell...

..what these Vietnam protesters would do.

They thought they were going to come into the building and rape them.

Some of them actually came over the walls.

It was a sense of revolution.

# Waist deep in the Big Muddy

# The big fool says to push on

# Waist deep in the Big Muddy

# The big fool says to push on. #

God knows what we were going to do when we got in the building.

Some people wanted to commit vandalism in the building,

other people wanted to distribute anti-war literature in the building.

Talk to people.

Just the idea of getting into the headquarters

of the United States military.

It was the first time that anti-war demonstrators had confronted

active duty and military personnel.

We didn't consider them the enemy.

We considered them victims of the war.

But we began to see our own government...

..as the enemy.

# When the truth is found

# To be lies

# And all the joy

# Within you dies

# Don't you want somebody to love

# Don't you need somebody... #

I didn't hear the word hippie until I was at Con Thien

and we got a Playboy in the mail,

which was obviously very important to us.

And there was an article on Haight-Ashbury

and pictures of the girls running around without their tops, you know,

free love, and they were hippies.

And we thought it was hip-pie because it had two Ps.

You know, I'm going to go and be one of these hip-pies

because the girls don't wear no clothes, you know,

and they'll go to bed with anybody, you know, even I could score!

But the only information I had of the peace movement came from

Stars And Stripes. And that wasn't a real objective newspaper.

So I hated them before I ever even knew anything about them.

NARRATOR: The monsoon rains continued to make life miserable

for John Musgrave and the other Marines at Con Thien.

But by early November, the worst of the shelling had ended.

American air strikes, artillery and Navy fire had taken a fearful toll

on the besieging enemy.

Before dawn on November 7th,

two companies of Musgrave's outfit were sent half a mile into

the countryside north-west of the base to sweep the area again.

In the clear area, we had three NVA show themselves and start, just,

spraying 30 rounds out of their AKs and then bookin'.

The company commander himself said,

"I want their bodies, bring me their bodies.

"Everything's about body count.

"Right?"

We said, "Man, this is as old as Custer.

"These guys are showing themselves to draw us into an ambush.

"Lieutenant, don't do this."

You know? "Please, these guys are bait."

The skipper says, "We've got to go. We've got to go."

And...

..we went.

And I can't tell you a whole lot about the ambush.

I was one of the first people to be shot.

One round put me down.

And my grenadier was down and we were trying to get him back and...

..Marines, from the first day in boot Camp,

you learn that Marines don't leave their dead.

And they never, never leave their wounded.

And that's why I'm alive today.

The first guy that came for me, I was lying on my face.

He reached down and stuck his arms under my shoulders and lifted me up

and the machine gun wasn't very far, it was maybe...

..nine feet, ten feet at the most away from me.

This is a very intimate ambush, it's a brawl.

And he fired a burst into my chest, it blew me out of the Marine's

arms that was holding me and then he was shot.

Another very brave, young Marine, this 18-year-old...

..from Louisiana, his first firefight, had seen what happened,

and still came for me.

And he reached for me and he was shot, I think, in the forearm.

And he was laying beside me

and I've got a hole in my chest big enough to stick your fist through.

And I'm dying and I know it.

And I heard this horrible screaming going on

and I was trying to figure out...

..who was screaming like that because it sounded so...

And then I realised it was me.

And they flew me to Delta Med at Dong Ha and I thought, OK, I've made it this far.

And this doctor comes over and looks at me and I'm conscious.

I'm lucid.

And he checks a couple of things and I've got this huge hole

and he looks at me right in the eye and he says,

"What's your religion, Marine?" I said, "Well, I'm a Protestant."

He says, "Let's get a chaplain over here, I can't help this man."

And then he walked away.

Another surgeon walks by...

..and he looked at me and I was raised to be...

..to always be nice to people.

And when he looked at me, I smiled at him and nodded.

And he said, "Why isn't somebody helping this man?"

And inside, I'm going, "Yeah, why isn't somebody helping this man?"

When they put me to sleep, I thought, boy, this is really it.

You know and it was, kind of,

"OK, God, into your hands I deliver my spirit."

And I thought that was it.

And when I woke up in the surgical intensive care ward,

which was a hut, I thought, holy mackerel!

I just couldn't... I couldn't believe it.

Yesterday, over Hanoi, three American planes were shot down

and at least two of their pilots captured.

One of them was Lieutenant Commander John McCain III,

the son of the US Naval Commander in Europe.

NARRATOR: Hanoi was so pleased to have captured the son

of an American Admiral that

they allowed a French journalist to interview McCain in the hospital.

He had just had his broken bones set

without even an aspirin for the pain.

-What is your name?

-Lieutenant Commander John McCain.

In which circumstances have you been shot down?

I was on a flight over the city of Hanoi...

..and I was bombing

and it was hit by either a missile or aircraft fire.

I'm not sure which.

And the plane continued straight down.

I ejected...

..and broke...

..my leg and both arms.

And went into a lake...

..parachuted into a lake.

And I was picked up by some North Vietnamese.

And taken to the hospital.

Where I almost died.

I would just like to tell...

..my wife...

..I-I'm going to get well...

..and I love her.

I hope to see her soon.

After the interview,

McCain was beaten for not expressing sufficient gratitude to his captors.

All through the fall of 1967,

the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong continued their series of

border battles in preparation for their surprise offensive,

still months away.

In early November, reports reached MACV that five North Vietnamese

regiments and a Vietcong Battalion - some 7,000 men in all -

had begun massing in the Central Highlands

around the US Special Forces camp at Dak To.

Among the North Vietnamese regulars was Nguyen Thanh Son,

who had been so eager to fight that he, too, had filled his pockets

with rocks to pass his physical.

As the NVA deployed their troops, Westmoreland sent his to Dak To -

exactly what the enemy wanted him to do.

Among the Americans were the men of the elite 173rd Airborne.

Westmorland's Fire Brigade.

On Sunday morning, November 19th 1967,

the men of the elite 173rd Airborne were ordered to take Hill 875.

Matt Harrison had been wounded in an earlier fight

and was not permitted to accompany his men.

He anxiously followed their progress over the radio.

Back home, the battle led the nightly news.

The battle of Dak To is now in its 19th day

and it already ranks amongst the bloodiest campaigns

of the Vietnam War. There's no sign yet of any let-up.

Over the weekend, the three companies of the 173rd Airborne

Brigade moved down this river valley,

up which North Vietnamese normally infiltrate,

until they got down here by Hill 875.

Then they came under heavy fire from the hill,

two of the three companies charged the hill,

the others stayed back as a rear-guard.

By early afternoon, the three companies had basically been decapitated.

The company commanders were dead.

Most of the officers and most of the NCOs were dead.

American bombs and napalm pounded enemy positions until it grew almost

too dark to see.

The following day, Matt Harrison was able to chopper in.

It was chaos.

It was collections of guys who had tunnelled and dug down behind trees.

And then all around were bodies.

Guys who had been shot and blown up.

It was the third circle of hell.

On November 23rd, two fresh battalions of the 173rd

finally made it to the top of the hill.

But the night before, the surviving North Vietnamese troops

had slipped down the other side

and disappeared into Cambodia and Laos.

107 Americans had died taking Hill 875.

Another 282 were wounded.

Ten more were missing.

The number of North Vietnamese casualties is unknown,

but their losses are thought to have been staggering.

The battle for Hill 875 was, in my thinking today,

a microcosm of what we were doing and what went wrong in Vietnam.

There was no reason to take that hill.

We literally got to the top of the hill about midday on November 23rd

and sat there for, I don't know, half an hour, an hour,

and I doubt that there's been an American on Hill 875

since November 23rd. We accomplished nothing.

As Matt Harrison and his men fought for Hill 875,

the Johnson administration was in the midst of a PR campaign aimed at

shoring up support for the war and the way it was being waged.

MACV released a new - and surprisingly low -

estimate of enemy forces

to show how much damage the United States had done to them.

It was only two thirds of the total suggested by the CIA

because, after a bitter and prolonged debate behind the scenes,

Westmoreland had chosen to exclude from it the part-time guerrillas,

farmers, old men, women, even children who helped place the mines,

grenades and booby traps that accounted for more than a third of

all American casualties.

Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker joined the chorus,

using a metaphor first used 13 years earlier by the French commander in

Vietnam, not long before their great defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

Now beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel.

Mr Ambassador, you talk about...

LBJ's PR campaign succeeded.

The number of Americans who believed the United States was making real

progress in the war grew.

Secretary of defence Robert McNamara

did not take part in the public-relations campaign.

He had become so disillusioned with the war he'd done so much to plan

and prosecute that he wrote another secret memo to the President,

advising Johnson to freeze American troop levels,

turn over ground operations to the South Vietnamese

and halt the bombing of North Vietnam in order to bring about

negotiations.

"There was no reason to believe," McNamara wrote,

"that the prolonged infliction of grievous casualties,

"or the heavy punishment of air bombardment, will suffice to break

"the will of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong.

"The continuation of our present course of action in Southeast Asia

"would be dangerous, costly in lives,

"and unsatisfactory for the American people."

Johnson never responded.

Instead, he arranged for McNamara

to become the President of the World Bank.

McNamara would keep silent about the doubts he had harboured since

the beginning of the ground war for the next 28 years.

His successor as Defence Secretary would be Clark Clifford,

a prominent Washington lawyer and trusted counsellor to Democratic

presidents, whom Johnson was sure would be supportive of the war.

By the end of 1967, 20,057 Americans had died in Vietnam.

The time had come, General Westmorland said,

for an all-out offensive on all fronts.

But the enemy was just a month away

from launching an all-out offensive of its own.

MUSIC: Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones

# I see a red door

# And I want it painted black

# No colours any more

# I want them to turn black

# I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes

# I have to turn my head until my darkness goes... #