Things Fall Apart (January 1968-June 1968) The Vietnam War

..We have been sighted, we're unaided at the present time....

Roger.

ROTOR BLADES SLOW

Good job. I saw you splatter one right in the middle...

Helicopters are phenomenal machines.

You can float in the air.

You can be like God.

This programme contains some violent scenes, and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

I flew below 500 feet.

Above 500 feet was a kill zone.

You'd better be below 200 feet. The lower the better.

My job was to get shot at.

My job was to draw enemy fire.

I was a duck, a decoy.

I got shot at a lot.

I engaged the enemy a lot.

GUNFIRE

You're just screaming as loud as you can

to try to cover up the sound of the incoming bullets.

Because when they pass by your ear, you can hear the popping sound.

You don't hear the gunshot.

You've got a 50 calibre just opened up on you,

shooting a half-inch piece of lead, flying at you, and there you are...

You're flying. You're 90 degrees the other way,

and you're shooting yourself down.

You've got the rotor blades right in front of you.

You're trying to keep your gun from jamming.

You're running around like this...

Then, if your gun jams, you're done.

Vietnam was the first real helicopter war.

Helicopter pilots flew more than 36 million sorties.

Their crews scattered propaganda leaflets over the enemy

and poured lethal fire into their positions.

Carried troops and supplies and artillery into battle...

..and lifted the wounded off the battlefield so swiftly

that most reached a field hospital within 15 minutes.

Ron Ferrizzi, a policeman's son from North Philadelphia,

got to Vietnam in November of 1967.

He was a crew chief in a scout helicopter

with the 1st Air Cavalry,

flying out of Landing Zone Two Bits in the Central Highlands.

One day, after returning from a combat mission,

he was approached by a journalist.

There was this, uh...

There was a beautiful woman, you know, round-eyed woman, statuesque,

round-eyed woman with nice hair.

And she looked...pretty.

"Well," she said. "Can I ask you a couple of questions?

"What was it like out there?"

How does it feel that a 50 calibre just opened up,

shooting a half-inch piece of lead at you?!

It's hard to...describe.

It's shitty.

I mean, isn't it apparent what it's like?

You want to know what it's like? Go look at it.

Go out there, go see the bodies.

And I was ready to whack her.

I wanted to blast her. I was ready... Whoa!

You want to know what it's like?

BOOM! There it is! I'll give it to you, right now.

You want to feel it? You want to see it?

I'll give it to you! That's what you want?

Is that what you want?

I don't want to tell you what it's like, because I don't want to remember it.

That's the insanity that it brings out.

MUSIC: Summertime by Big Brother & The Holding Company

The enemy has been defeated in battle after battle.

He continues to hope that America's will to persevere can be broken.

Well,

he is wrong.

1968 would prove to be a watershed year

in the history of the Vietnam War, and the world.

As the year began, there were 485,600 American troops in Vietnam

and American leaders promised that victory was finally in sight.

That there really was light at the end of the tunnel.

But then North Vietnam would mount a massive offensive

that would result in a terrible defeat for them that,

in the long run, would turn out to have been a still greater victory.

America itself would be convulsed by assassinations

and battles in the streets over the war and civil rights.

An American president,

a master politician used to getting things done,

would continue to find himself

besieged by problems he could not solve.

Robert Kennedy, the brother of the slain president

who had escalated American presence in Vietnam

wrote an editorial that year that seemed to speak for many.

"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," he said,

quoting the poet William Butler Yeats.

"Things fall apart.

"The centre cannot hold."

General Westmoreland, when you said that you've never been

more encouraged in the four years you've been in Vietnam,

some critics, on the other hand, have never been more DIScouraged.

I wonder if you could detail one or two, or three things

that cause you to be so encouraged.

I find an attitude of confidence and growing optimism.

It prevails all over the country.

And, to me, this is the most significant evidence I can give you

that constant, real progress, is being made...

INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER

MAN SPEAKING VIETNAMESE

TAPE CLICKS

On the evening of January 1st 1968,

Ho Chi Minh broadcast a poem over Radio Hanoi.

Communist commanders took this to mean that the ultimate battle,

the general offensive and general uprising

they had been planning for months, was imminent.

Party First Secretary Le Duan, who had insisted on the offensive

and had purged those opposed,

believed it would finally bring about an end to the war.

Vietcong units supported by North Vietnamese troops

were to simultaneously attack cities and bases all over the South.

Le Duan promised those troops that when the fighting started

the people of South Vietnam would rise up

and overthrow the Saigon government,

just as the Vietnamese had risen up

against the Japanese in August of 1945.

With Saigon defeated,

the Americans would have no choice but to withdraw from Vietnam.

The surprise attacks would begin at the end of the month,

at the start of the lunar New Year celebration called Tet.

The Vietcong were already infiltrating

scores of cities and towns.

Tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops were now in place

in South Vietnam.

Tonnes of smuggled Chinese and Soviet-made weapons

had been spirited towards intended targets

in sampans and flower carts and false-bottomed trucks.

More than 10,000 American military and civilian intelligence officers

were at work in South Vietnam.

And here and there,

hints of what was to come filtered up the chain of command.

Captured enemy reports described coming attacks on different cities.

11 agents were caught in the city of Qui Nhon,

carrying pre-recorded tapes

calling on the local people to rise up against the Saigon government.

All of these things were saying to us, something's going to happen,

but we don't know exactly what.

General Westmoreland thought he knew.

"I believe that the enemy will attempt

"a countrywide show of strength just prior to Tet," he cabled Washington,

"with Khe Sanh being the main event."

Some 30,000 North Vietnamese troops had gathered near Khe Sanh,

the westernmost strong point below the DMZ

that was being held by just 6,000 Marines.

Westmoreland believed North Vietnam wanted to isolate and annihilate the US forces there,

just as the Viet Minh had done to the French at Dien Bien Phu

14 years earlier.

Enemy attacks elsewhere,

Westmoreland was sure,

would only be a diversion.

On January 21st,

the North Vietnamese began shelling Khe Sanh.

EXPLOSIONS

When he learned of the attack on Khe Sanh, Lyndon Johnson made

the Joint Chiefs sign a pledge that the base would never fall.

"I don't want any damn Dien Bien Phu," he said.

The President had a scale model of the battlefield

installed in the White House,

so that he could follow the fighting there, hour by hour.

But Westmoreland and Johnson's basic assumption was wrong.

Khe Sanh was the sideshow.

The attacks on cities and towns that were about to begin

throughout South Vietnam would be the main event.

But First Secretary Le Duan's basic assumptions

were about to be tested, too.

For the coming offensive to succeed,

the South Vietnamese army,

the ARVN, would have to collapse

and the people of the South would have to join the revolution.

By January 30th, an informal 36-hour truce for Tet was in effect.

Thousands of ARVN troops had gone home for the holidays.

The enemy had not.

That same day,

Marine Corporal Roger Harris was scheduled to fly out of Vietnam.

His 13-month tour was over.

But he and his unit were still hunkered down

under constant shelling at

Camp Carroll, just south of the DMZ.

When I got my orders, you know, I said goodbye to all my friends and...

I went over to the landing zone until the helicopters came in.

And we put the body bags on helicopter

and I got on with the bodies.

We landed in Dong Hoa, which was the division headquarters...

..and about 200 metres from the air strip...

..the air strip started getting hit.

I'm just thinking, personally, that God realises that he made a mistake,

because some of the guys that got killed with me were good Christians,

that never had sex, didn't swear...

..you know, I'd been a sinner.

And I'm thinking God realises he's made a mistake,

and killed the Christians,

and I got away.

And so now death is following me.

Then they told us that in another hour or so

a plane was going to come in.

When it came in, then the artillery started coming in.

We jumped on and took off.

And it landed in the night, and then the sun came up,

and we went to the airstrip,

and we boarded aeroplanes, we were sitting there,

everybody was giving each other pounds, slapping thighs, we made it.

-And then, all of a sudden...

-HE IMITATES SHELLFIRE

..Da Nang airstrip starts getting hit.

The artillery's coming in.

And I'm thinking,

"It's all coming after me.

"It's all about me."

You know, God doesn't want me to make it out of here.

In the early morning hours of January 31st, 1968,

84,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops attack 36 of South Vietnam's

44 provincial capitals, dozens of American and ARVN military bases,

and the six largest cities in the country, including Hue, Da Nang,

and Saigon.

Their goal, their commanders told them,

was to crack the sky and shake the earth.

Vietcong soldiers spread out to attack specific targets

in and around the capital.

The war had come to the streets of Saigon.

We heard gunfire...

..and our first reaction was, it must be another coup d'etat.

And then we heard that the Vietcong had attacked Saigon,

and were still attacking.

It came as a total shock, because we always thought Saigon was safe.

The safest place in all of South Vietnam.

One Vietcong squad made it all the way to the presidential palace,

but was stopped by South Vietnamese tanks.

The survivors holed up in a building across the street,

and were shot by ARVN troops and American MPs.

All over Saigon, nothing was going according to plan.

Vietcong units were taking heavy losses from US troops

and determined South Vietnamese forces.

GUNFIRE AND SHOUTING

This is the main Vietnamese-language radio station in Saigon.

Right now there are an undisclosed number of VC inside,

occupying the station.

The Vietcong managed to seize South Vietnam's national radio station

and prepared to broadcast a taped message from Ho Chi Minh,

calling upon the people to rise up.

But a technician radioed to the transmitting tower to cut them off,

and broadcast Viennese waltzes and Beatles songs instead.

MUSIC: Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles

# Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream

# It is not dying

# It is not dying

# But listen to the colour of your dreams

# It is not living

# It is not living... #

EXPLOSION

In the first few hours of the fighting,

19 specially-trained commandos had blasted their way into

the sprawling compound of the United States embassy.

There's a rush, they are rushing the embassy.

That's fire coming from the other side of the street now.

Outside the embassy.

It's across the street, you can see the tracer bullets going past.

It's the side of the embassy.

Roger, can you get in the gates now?

The gate's open.

Can you take a force in there and clean out that embassy right now?

Apparently, the Vietcong are trapped in the basement of this side building.

An incredible situation.

Incoming and outgoing.

EXPLOSION

This is ABC News at the US Embassy in Saigon.

All of the intruders were eventually killed or captured.

What a sight.

A small frog hopping through a pool of blood that's issuing

from the head of a Vietcong,

lying on the green grassy lawn of the US Embassy.

An American Marine and four Army MPs were killed at the embassy.

General, how would you assess yesterday's activities and today's?

What is the enemy doing? Are these major attacks or...?

EXPLOSION

That's EOD, setting off a couple of N79 duds, I believe.

The enemy, very deceitfully,

has taken advantage of the Tet truce...

..in order to...

...uh...

..create max...maximum consternation.

In my opinion, this is diversionary...

Early wire service dispatches reported incorrectly

that the Vietcong had made it inside the embassy itself...

Embassy ID cards were found on some of the Vietcong.

..and the first television footage

did little to reassure the American public.

Is Saigon secure right now?

Saigon is secure as far as I know.

There's no more fighting?

There may be some on the outskirts, still, I'm not sure.

I can't be sure of that, no.

Saigon was far from secure.

Vietcong assassination squads,

some guided by North Vietnamese spies,

moved through the streets with orders to kill

what they called "blood enemies of the people".

SCREAMING

Bureaucrats,

intelligence officers,

ARVN commanders,

and ordinary soldiers home on leave

and their families.

On the second day of the fighting, a Vietcong agent named Nguyen Van Lem

was brought before Nguyen Ngoc Loan,

the head of the South Vietnamese national police.

As an AP photographer and an NBC cameraman watched,

Loan ordered another officer to shoot the captive.

When he hesitated, Loan did the job himself.

The chief of South Vietnam's national police force,

Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, was waiting for him.

Good morning, Mr President.

Hi, Jack.

We need guidance this morning, Sir.

Guidance, is that all you want?

Yes, sure. Your press is lying like drunken sailors every day.

First thing I wake up this morning,

was trying to figure out after seeing CBS, watching the networks,

reading the morning papers, was how can we win,

possibly win and survive as a nation and have to fight the press' lies?

I'm trying to protect my country, and they're all whipping me.

Not a son of a bitch said a word about Ho Chi Minh.

They're talking about us bombing.

Yet, these sons of bitches come in and bomb our embassy,

and 19 of them tried to raid on, all 19 get killed.

And yet they blame the embassy!

I don't understand it.

We think we've killed 20,000, we think we've lost 400.

We think, of course, it's bad, to lose anybody, any one of the 400,

but we think that the good Lord has been so good to us

that it is a major dramatic victory.

I think, what would have happened if I'd have lost 20,000,

and they'd lost 400? I ask you that.

That would have been terrible.

It appears that mortar or rocket shells came in.

And all this blood on my pants...

..I guess I'm...I'm hit.

This is the streets of Saigon, and that's where the war is now.

This is Howard Tucker, NBC News.

The American press focused almost entirely on the fighting in Saigon.

But the Tet Offensive was happening almost everywhere.

Most assaults were being quickly beaten back

by ARVN and American forces.

Everywhere, the enemy was suffering terrible losses.

The Americans called in massive air and artillery firepower

to dislodge a Vietcong regiment from the city of Ben Tre

in the Mekong Delta.

Afterwards, a reporter quoted an American major as having said,

"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

The landing zone on this, the south side of the river,

has been under almost constant mortar and small-arms fire.

And today, at any rate, Hue is cut-off.

The longest, bloodiest battle of the Tet Offensive

was being fought in the streets of the former imperial capital, Hue,

where North Vietnamese regulars and Vietcong guerrillas

had taken over both sides of the city.

It would take two weeks for the Marines to fight their way

across the river to support the ARVN,

who had stubbornly kept the enemy from overwhelming

their division headquarters in the citadel.

What's the hardest part of it?

Not knowing where they are. That's the worst of it.

They run into the sewers, the gutters, anywhere.

Could be anywhere.

You're just hoping to stay alive, day-to-day.

I just want to go back home, and go to school. That's about it.

Have you lost any friends?

Quite a few. We lost one the other day, didn't we?

Plenty of them. The whole thing stinks, really.

SHOUTING AND GUNFIRE

After 26 days of bitter, bloody fighting,

the flag of South Vietnam flew again above the citadel.

The surviving North Vietnamese and Vietcong were finally permitted

by their commanders to pull out of the city.

Some 6,000 civilians had died in the rubble.

Of the city's 135,000 citizens,

110,000 had lost their homes.

All that was left of Hue, one reporter wrote,

was ruins divided by a river.

The biggest fact is that the stated purposes of the general uprising,

a military victory, or a psychological victory, have failed.

The attack on the radio station started at 2:30 in the morning.

Night after night for weeks,

American television screens had been filled

with images of blood and violence and devastation

the public had rarely seen before.

But it was one photograph that, for many people,

would come to define the Tet Offensive.

It's a devastating thing to see.

I think many Americans began to ask themselves,

are we supporting the wrong guys here?

It's sort of brings home, I think, to the dinner table...

..or the breakfast table if you see it in the papers,

the brutality of this war,

and the fact it looks like it's never going to end.

But what we know is the price we pay for that picture.

It was a turning point.

Because that put the Americans to a position to say, hey, look,

we want to spend money and the lives of our young people,

to protect such a system?

In early March, after Hue had finally been recaptured,

Second Lieutenant Phil Gioia of the 82nd Airborne Division

led his platoon along the Perfume River

looking for weapons that might have been buried by the retreating enemy.

Gioia's Sergeant, Reuben Torres,

saw something sticking up from the sandy soil.

It was an elbow.

So, to us, it seemed as though this was going to be a grave,

where the enemy had buried some of his own people

on withdrawal from Hue.

We found the first body. It was a woman.

She was wearing a white blouse and black trousers.

She had her hands tied behind her back

and she'd been shot in the back of the head.

Next to her was a child, who had also been shot.

The next person coming up was another woman.

At that point it was clear that this wasn't

enemy North Vietnamese or Vietcong.

Before they abandoned the city,

the Communists had systematically executed

at least 2,800 people they called hooligans and reactionaries.

Hanoi would always deny that any innocent civilians had been killed.

WAILING

President Johnson insisted that the Tet Offensive had been a devastating

defeat for the Communists.

Militarily, he was right.

The basic assumptions on which the North Vietnamese mounted their

offensive had all proved to be wrong.

Hanoi's leaders had assumed the ARVN would crumble,

that South Vietnamese soldiers would come over to their side.

Instead, not a single unit defected.

The civilian populace Hanoi expected to rise up

may have been unhappy with their Government,

but they had little sympathy for communism.

And when the fighting began,

they had hidden in their homes to escape the fury in the streets.

North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap,

who had opposed the offensive from the beginning,

later remembered that Tet had been

"a costly lesson, paid for in blood and bone".

Of the 84,000 enemy troops who are estimated to have taken part

in the Tet Offensive, more than half -

as many as 58,000 men and women, most of them Vietcong -

are thought to have been killed or wounded, or captured.

The American military command

celebrated the Tet Offensive as a victory.

You know, they finally came at us, and we blew them away,

which was basically true.

But the administration had been telling the American public

for most of the end of '67 and for the first month of 1968,

that the war was being won.

The Tet Offensive has forced our generals to re-evaluate.

So when Tet hit,

it contradicted everything that the administration

and the Saigon country team

had been telling the American public

through its journalists for the previous four or five months.

John Laurence, CBS News, Saigon.

And then, the most ferocious possible argument erupted

inside the US government.

Because the hawks on the war were saying

Tet was North Vietnam's last gasp.

It was their last shot at winning the war, and they failed.

We beat them, and that's the end of them.

And we said, after all these years of war,

if that's what they're able to do,

we ought to learn some lessons about their commitment

to this war, as well, and the cost to us.

On March 10th, The New York Times reported that

the army was requesting 206,000

additional troops for Vietnam.

Walter Cronkite, the respected anchor of the CBS evening news,

had come home from covering the Tet Offensive

convinced victory was no longer possible.

To say that we are closer to victory today

is to believe, in the face of the evidence,

the optimists who have been wrong in the past.

To suggest we are on the edge of defeat

is to yield to unreasonable pessimism.

To say that we are mired in stalemate

seems the only realistic yet unsatisfactory conclusion.

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter

that the only rational way out then would be to negotiate -

not as victors, but as an honourable people

who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy

and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Goodnight.

President Johnson was facing an unexpected challenge

in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary.

The most recent poll has suggested

he would beat Eugene McCarthy two to one.

But Johnson won just 49.6% of the vote,

against 41.9% for his opponent.

Johnson knew he was in trouble.

..for the presidency of the United States...

And there was more to come.

I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man...

Just four days after the New Hampshire Primary

Robert F Kennedy declared HIS candidacy for the presidency...

The country is on a perilous course...

..and polls suggested he was more popular than Lyndon Johnson.

I run because it is now unmistakably clear...

..that we could change these disastrous, divisive policies,

only by changing the men who are now making them.

President Johnson ultimately agreed to send just 13,500 more troops -

not the 206,000 the generals had requested -

and decided to recall William Westmoreland to Washington

as Chief of Staff of the Army,

replacing him with his deputy, General Creighton W Abrams.

His face was a mask of exhaustion and defeat.

It was very sad to see the man.

He was broken by it.

On March 30th, Gallup reported that 63% of the public disapproved

of Johnson's handling of the war - the lowest point of his presidency.

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

Tonight I want to speak to you...

..of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

Johnson announced that he had decided to stop bombing

the densely populated areas around Hanoi and Haiphong

in the hope that North Vietnam

would finally be willing to come to the negotiating table.

Only the southern half of the country

would continue to be targeted.

Then, he stunned the country, and the world.

I do not believe...

..that I should devote an hour or day of my time

to any personal partisan causes,

or to any duties other...

..than the awesome duties...

..of this office.

The presidency...

..of your country.

Accordingly...

..I shall not seek...

..and I will not accept...

..the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

I land in Boston,

and I'm feeling good.

Because I survived and, you know, I fought for my country.

And I got off the plane, I stepped out there,

and I'm just happy to be home.

And, um, I had my uniform on.

And I walked up to the kerb, and the cabs just kept going by me.

Kept going by me.

And there was a state trooper that was standing there, and

I didn't realise what was happening.

He stopped the cab, and he says, you have to take this man.

You have to take this soldier.

And the driver looked over at me, and he said,

I don't want to go to Roxbury.

They don't see me as a soldier, you know, they see me as a nigger.

And I live in Roxbury.

You know.

I'm thinking, I'm a Marine.

I'm a Marine. You know,

I fought for my country, 13 months in a combat zone.

And I can't get a cab to get home.

I have some very sad news for all of you,

and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens,

and people who love peace all over the world.

And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight.

SCREAMING

In this difficult day...

..in this difficult time for the United States,

it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are...

..and what direction we want to move in.

Over the next week, African Americans,

grieving, frustrated, angry,

poured into the streets of more than 100 towns and cities...

..including New York and Oakland,

Newark and Nashville,

Chicago and Cincinnati,

and Baltimore.

And in Washington, DC,

where fires came within two blocks of the White House.

When they killed Dr King, they just opened up our eyes, and thought,

the amount of black people who were afraid to pick up guns.

Now they will pick up those guns.

We are living in a sick world, this racist society in which we live,

is that that really pulled the trigger.

Violence breeds violence.

Repression breeds retaliation.

And only a cleansing

of our whole society...

..can remove this sickness...

..from ourselves.

Tens of thousands of National Guardsmen, regular army troops,

and the Marines - including Roger Harris's Stateside unit -

were ordered to patrol American streets.

You know, I was ready to go.

Until I saw what they were giving out.

They were passing out flak jackets, helmets, M16s with live ammunition.

The same things we had in Vietnam.

And when I saw that, I...

..I said, ah, I said I'm not going.

I'm not going.

I said I've got a family in Washington, DC...

..and my company commander said,

"Get on the truck, Marine."

I said, I'm not going.

I didn't make Sergeant because I refused to go.

46 Americans died,

2,600 were injured.

20,000 were arrested.

Later that same month,

anti-war students seized several buildings

at Columbia University in Manhattan.

The occupation lasted a week -

the first time in American history

that students forced a major university to shut down.

Policemen eventually drove the demonstrators out of the buildings,

and sent more than 100 students to the hospital.

The United States now appeared to be more divided

than at any time since the Civil War.

That spring, protesters also took to the streets of London...

..Paris,

..Berlin...

..Prague, Rio,

Jakarta.

The world seemed to be coming apart.

For a time that Spring it looked as if Robert Kennedy might win

the Democratic nomination for president.

He pledged to bring the war to an end,

and seemed to embody the hope of bridging the growing gulf

between black and white Americans.

But in June, after defeating Eugene McCarthy in the California Primary,

he, too, was assassinated.

SOBBING

People were stunned. People were scared.

The people we've looked up to were...

..being taken away from us.

It definitely put those of us who were heading off on our own...

..on a path that felt...uncertain.

MUSIC: A Whiter Shade Of Pale by Procol Harum

# We skipped a light fandango... #