Chasing Ghosts (June 1968-May 1969) The Vietnam War

This programme contains very strong language and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

# Catch a boat to England, baby

# Maybe to Spain

# Wherever I have gone

# Wherever I've been and gone

# Wherever I've gone

# The blues run the game... #

I grew up in a small farming community in southern Minnesota, called Worthington.

Everybody knows everyone else.

Their business, their faults, and

what's happening in their marriages, and where the kids have gone wrong.

I remember the day my draft notice arrived. It was a summer afternoon.

Maybe June of '68.

And I remember taking that envelope into the house,

and putting it on the kitchen table,

where my mom and dad were having lunch.

They didn't even read it.

They just looked at it, they knew what it was.

And the silence of that lunch, I didn't speak, my mom didn't speak,

my dad didn't speak.

There was just that piece of paper, lying at the centre of the table.

It was enough to make me cry, to this day.

Not for myself, but for my mom and dad.

Both of them had been in the Navy during World War II,

had believed in service to one's country, and all those values.

Consider all civilians potential enemies.

On the one hand, I did think the war was less than righteous.

On the other hand, I loved my country, and I valued

my life in a small town, and my friends and family.

And so the summer of '68, when I wrestled with what to do, was,

for me at least, more torturous and devastating, and emotionally

painful than anything that happened in Vietnam.

In the end, I just capitulated.

But it wasn't a decision, it was a forfeiture of a decision.

Turning a switch in my conscience, just turning it off.

So it wouldn't keep barking at me, saying you're doing a bad, and evil,

and stupid, and unpatriotic thing.

Last week's casualty figures in the Vietnam War released today

showed 299 Americans killed, the lowest...

MUSIC: Revolution 1 by The Beatles

# You say you want a revolution

# Well, you know

# We all want to change the world

# You tell me that it's evolution

# Well, you know

# We all want to change the world

# But when you talk about destruction

# Don't you know that you can count me out? #

By June of 1968, the spirit of revolution,

over the Vietnam War,

over injustice, over human rights, seemed to have spread everywhere.

The pressure to bring an end to the war was building.

President Lyndon Johnson had already decided not to run again.

Assassinations and unrest had staggered the nation,

and the country was preparing to choose a new president.

Meanwhile, American and North Vietnamese diplomats in Paris were getting nowhere.

The Communists insisted there could be no substantive negotiations until

the United States stopped all bombing of North Vietnam.

The new secretary of defence, Clark Clifford,

begged the President to call a total halt.

"We can only hope for success at the bargaining table," he told Johnson.

"We are in a war we cannot win."

The President refused to stop the bombing.

Over the following months, the war against the war intensified back home...

..pitting classes and generations against one another,

spreading distrust of political leaders who seemed unable,

or unwilling to bring the fighting to an end.

The coming summer of 1968 would be one of the most consequential in American history.

We were told very succinctly,

we need to rack up as much body count as we can.

How many gooks did you kill today?

And the kill ratio determined whether or not

you called it a victory or a loss.

So, if you killed 20 North Vietnamese and lost only two people,

you declared a great victory for that particular firefight.

Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto was born during World War II in

a Japanese-American internment camp at Poston, Arizona.

The seventh son of Japanese immigrants.

He was a platoon leader with Bravo Company 2nd Battalion 27th Regiment,

25th Infantry Division, based at Cu Chi,

some 20 miles north-west of Saigon,

an area honeycombed with miles of Vietcong tunnels.

I had rice, literally, every day of my life

until I went into the military.

So we were conducting a cordon and search of a village.

Didn't find any weapons, didn't find any communist literature,

or whatever, and my RTO, my medic, and I,

went into this particular house,

and there were three women, and a babe in arms, and a kid,

about four years old.

And she was cooking rice.

Here's Okamoto. This is Okamoto's son that hasn't had rice now,

hot steamed rice for months.

I'm looking at it and I say, "That looks pretty good to me."

So I get my interpreter and say, "Hey, tell this woman, the grandma,

"that I'll give her a pack of cigarettes, my C ration,

"turkey loaf, and a can of peaches

"for some of that steamed rice and fish and vegetables."

It was great. I asked for seconds.

My RTO says, "Damn, ain't these people poor enough without you eating their food?"

I said, "You know, hell, they've got enough rice here

"to feed a dozen men."

And then it just dawned, they DID have enough rice

to feed a dozen men.

So I had my interpreter ask the woman, who is all this rice for?

"I don't know. I don't know."

So we started looking around again, and we found a tunnel mouth.

I was given a grenade...

After the smoke cleared we pulled, I think,

seven or eight bodies to the town square.

And we wanted to see who would cry over these people,

and then we had more people to question.

The women,

that lived in that house, I had eaten their rice,

they were all squatting down, wailing.

You couldn't identify these, they were just charred bodies.

I think that was the first time I knew that I, personally,

had killed people.

It wasn't something that you could say had glory in it,

or you felt a real sense of accomplishment.

Over that summer, Okamoto was wounded two times,

and made 22 helicopter assaults,

four of them as commander of Bravo Company.

I just knew for sure I was going to die.

Okamoto was not going to make it out of here.

And that's liberating. When you know you're going to die, you don't...

The fear leaves.

At least in my case, I was no longer afraid.

I was just mad. Because, all of these little guys,

trying to kill my ass,

and if that's the case...

then I'm going to make it as tough on them as I possibly can

before I go down.

Before his tour of duty ended he would become the most

highly decorated Japanese-American to survive the Vietnam War.

You know what...

..the real heroes are the men that died.

19, 20-year-old high school dropouts.

They didn't have escape routes that

the elite and the wealthy and the privileged had.

And that was unfair.

And so they looked upon military service as...

..like the weather, you had to go in, and you do it.

But to see these kids who had the least to gain...

..there wasn't anything to look forward to.

Never going to be rewarded for their service in Vietnam...

..and yet, their infinite patience, their loyalty to each other,

their courage under fire...

..was just phenomenal.

And you would ask yourself...

..how does America produce young men like this?

At first, Radio Hanoi had portrayed the Tet Offensive as a series of

tremendous victories,

in which hundreds of thousands of people have risen up

and destroyed enemy positions.

"But after a couple of weeks," one North Vietnamese remembered,

"We didn't hear any more news.

"The Saigon regime was still there,

"and the US planes were still bombing.

"It was obvious the radio wasn't telling the truth."

Casualty figures were never revealed,

but to North Vietnamese citizens secretly listening to reports on

the BBC and Radio Saigon it was clear that they had been heavy.

In late August 1968, Le Duan and the North Vietnamese leadership launched

still another offensive.

The result was the same as Tet and Mini-Tet.

They lost 17,000 more men.

Thousands of fresh recruits had to be ordered south to replace them.

"The war began to seem like an open pit,"

one North Vietnamese remembered.

"The more young people were lost there, the more they sent."

The sons of some party officials and their friends were sent abroad

to escape the draft.

University students were exempted.

People with money bribed recruiters to overlook their offspring,

or paid physicians to declare them unfit to serve.

Most draftees were poor people from the countryside,

especially receptive to the slogans and promises of the revolution.

Thousands of replacements made their way down the Ho Chi Minh Trail,

past burned-out vehicles and military graveyards.

The stones neatly marked with the names of the dead,

and the date each had died.

They encountered small groups of wounded men

moving in the other direction.

"Everyone was frightened,"

a political officer remembered.

"Especially when we met those men.

"It was like looking at our future selves."

When the strongest nation in the world can be tied down for

four years in a war in Vietnam, with no end in sight...

Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon had been a prominent,

and controversial figure in American politics for more than two decades.

He'd been a congressman and senator,

best known for his fierce anti-communism.

Nixon made the case for himself as the man who could bring a fractured

America together and bring an honourable end to the war.

And when the President of the United States cannot travel abroad,

or to any major city at home without fear of a hostile demonstration,

then it's time for new leadership for the United States of America.

CHEERING

Good evening from Chicago,

where the 35th National Democratic Convention opens tomorrow

with the promise of turmoil inside this hall,

and a threat of violence without.

Both sides moved in their troops on a balmy Sunday morning for

the confrontation of Chicago.

Some 6,000 crack Army troops, riot trained and ready for action.

The army soldiers moved out to

secret locations around the city after one

of the largest troop movements in domestic history.

Some 15,000 protesters had gathered in Chicago,

most to register their anguish over the war.

Some bent on disrupting the convention.

12,000 Chicago policemen were on alert.

In addition to the 6,000 US Army troops

there were 6,000 more armed National Guardsmen

and 1,000 intelligence agents from the FBI, the CIA,

and the military.

Mayor Richard J Daly cordoned off the Chicago Amphitheatre,

where the convention was being held,

and denied the protesters permits to march or to sleep in the city's parks.

In the name of security, the freedom of the press,

freedom of movement, perhaps as far as the demonstrators themselves are

concerned, even freedom of speech, have been severely restricted here.

A Democratic convention is about to begin in a police state.

There just doesn't seem to be any other way to say it.

Will the delegates please be seated.

Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the front runner.

But many delegates,

and most of the demonstrators outside the convention hall backed

his anti-war rival, Senator Eugene McCarthy.

The delegates wearing bands of black crepe on their arms,

have joined New York in this extraordinary demonstration of

anti-war sentiment on the convention floor.

The demonstrators resisted when police attempted to arrest

a young man who tried to rip down an American flag.

Don't turn your back on these fuckers!

The cops were all, they were guys from the neighbourhoods, Italians,

Polish guys, Irish guys.

Probably, some of them had been in Vietnam and if they hadn't been,

they certainly had cousins or brothers who were.

INDISTINCT SHOUTING

So, all of a sudden,

the streets are filled with these kids who don't look like

college kids are supposed to look, in the cops' view.

And some of them were committing vandalism, and yelling obscenities.

And I think a lot of policemen saw that as abusing the privileges that

they had, and scorning them.

They are provoking us.

But we do not want to confront them now. Move back, please.

CHANTING

That's a report on film, from Grand Park, downtown Chicago.

Thousands of demonstrators,

barred from getting anywhere near the convention,

were marching towards Democratic party headquarters

in the Hilton hotel on Michigan Avenue instead.

I turned on the TV, there was a close up,

it was over the shoulder of this storm trooper

who had a kid by the scruff of his shirt,

and he smacks him with his bat.

There's blood, and everything, and all this jumble.

And then the camera pans out, and it's far away, and there's

riots, and fighting going on.

And I thought, "Oh, my God,

"the Russians have invaded Czechoslovakia."

And then ditto, ditto, ditto, Chicago Democratic convention,

United States of America.

And I said, you know what, at that moment, I was politicised.

# There's something happening here

# What it is ain't exactly clear... #

At that moment in time I realised that anybody who really cared for

America was halfway around the world chasing some ghost in the jungle.

Killing somebody else's grandmother for no reason at all.

And in the meantime, my country is being torn apart.

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

looked like me. Oh, my God. Whose side would I be on?

# There's battle lines being drawn

# And nobody's right if everybody's wrong

# Young people speaking their minds

# Getting so much resistance from behind

# It's time we stop... #

In the end, Humphrey won the nomination on the first ballot.

But in a Gallup poll,

56% of Americans approved of

the way the police had handled the demonstrators.

And when Richard Nixon chose to open his campaign with a motorcade

through the Chicago Loop,

nearly half a million Chicagoans turned out to cheer him.

The villagers have been assembled in the village school yard

where teams of government interrogators are trying to pick out

from among them the members of the Vietcong who live here.

This sort of Phoenix exercise is a weekly event in districts throughout South Vietnam.

The Phoenix programme was premised

on the fact that the North Vietnamese

coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, when they went into South Vietnam,

they were strangers just like the Americans.

They didn't know the terrain, they didn't know the people.

So in order for them to function operationally,

they needed the Vietcong infrastructure.

And so the project was to eliminate those guys,

and I think it made a great deal of sense.

After being wounded, Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto

became an intelligence officer in the Phoenix programme,

created by the CIA to eradicate the Vietcong power base in the countryside.

Americans served in an advisory capacity,

most of the day-to-day enforcement was left to the South Vietnamese

provincial reconnaissance units, the PRUs,

who sometimes were more interested in settling old scores

than in rooting out communists.

It was scary because it was subject to abuse, and was abused.

Again, the geniuses in Saigon would use their computers

to come up with a blacklist.

You get the list, and you check with other intelligence officers

in the district, and you try to pool that information.

Next night or a couple of nights later,

a bunch of cowboys from the PRUs would go out there, and, you know,

knock on the door.

"April fool, motherfucker," and boom.

There wasn't any real accountability.

Later, the director of the Phoenix programme admitted to Congress that

no-one knew how many of the more than 20,000 who had been killed were innocent.

I would stop the bombing of the North,

as an acceptable risk for peace.

Because I believe it could lead to success in the negotiations,

and thereby shorten the war.

This would be the best protection for our troops.

On September 30th, Hubert Humphrey broke with Johnson and called for

a total halt to the bombing of North Vietnam.

Then, on October 31st, just five days before the election,

the President himself made a surprise announcement.

He was stopping all bombing of North Vietnam.

There had been real progress in Paris, he said.

Hanoi had agreed for the first time to talk with Saigon,

and the United States had agreed to include the Vietcong.

It suddenly looked as if peace were possible.

Humphrey was jubilant.

His poll numbers rose overnight,

he was confident he would now be able to overtake Nixon.

But then, on November 2nd,

with just three days to go until Americans went to the polls,

President Thieu suddenly announced that the South Vietnamese government

would not attend the proposed talks after all.

Hoping to throw a monkey wrench into the peace process, Richard Nixon had

instructed an intermediary to secretly contact Thieu

and urge him to stay away from the talks,

promising Saigon that, if elected,

Nixon would drive a harder bargain with Hanoi than Humphrey.

Thanks to a CIA bug planted in Thieu's Saigon office,

and an FBI wiretap on the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington,

Johnson got wind of what had happened.

I'm reading their hand, Everett.

I don't want to get this in the campaign.

-That's right.

-And they oughtn't to be doing this.

-This is treason.

-I know.

-I know this.

And it's a damn bad mistake.

-Mr President?

-Yes.

-This is Dick Nixon.

-Yes, Dick.

I just wanted you to know that I feel very, very

strongly about this and any rumblings around about somebody

trying to sabotage the Saigon government's attitude,

certainly has absolutely no credibility

as far as I am concerned.

I'm very happy to hear that, Dick. Because that is taking place.

My God, I would never do anything to encourage Saigon

not to come to the table.

Because, basically, that was what you got.

Well, that's good, Dick...

We got to get this goddamned war off the plate.

The quicker the better and the hell with the political credit.

-Believe me.

-Thank you, Dick.

Nixon was lying and Johnson knew it.

But he was unwilling to reveal the methods by which he had learned of

the Republican candidate's duplicity.

Nixon's secret was safe.

The American public was never told that the regime for which 35,000

Americans had died had been willing to boycott peace talks to help elect

Richard Nixon, or that he had been willing to delay,

an end to the bloodshed, in order to get elected.

At 10.45 this morning, Eastern Standard Time....

On election day, Richard Milhous Nixon

won the presidency with 43.4% of the vote.

Hubert Humphrey received 42.7%.

The Nixon campaign's secret manoeuvring may have helped him win

the election, but the President-elect's fear

that that manoeuvring might someday be exposed

would be part of his undoing.

In the fall of 1968, that was probably the toughest time we had.

Four people died within...

..a month. And then two more died very shortly after that.

13 Americans would die during Captain Hal Kushner's

time in jungle prison camps in South Vietnam.

He was a doctor, but had no medications,

no antibiotics or saline solution with which to treat his comrades.

All he could do was bury each in a bamboo coffin,

and make sure the spot was marked with a heap of stones daubed with Mercurochrome.

We had nothing to eat.

And I thought that I was just going insane.

And we saw the camp commander's cat, who had free rein of the camp.

And we were starving to death.

So someone suggested, let's eat the cat.

So we killed the cat.

And we cut the head off, and we cut the paws off,

and we had this little carcass of about 2lb.

And one of the guards came down,

and then he looked around, and someone had neglected to bury one of

the paws. He saw the paw,

and he knew instantly that it was the camp commander's cat.

And things got very serious.

They lined us up, and they said, "Who did this?"

Nobody said anything.

I thought they were going to kill us all, just execute us.

And one of the people who was the ringleader in this said he did it.

And I said that I did it, also, and we all said we did it.

I am Spartacus, you know.

So they called that person and me out, and the guard kicked him,

and beat him to the ground, and just beat him unmercifully.

And they hit me in the face with fists,

and didn't beat me as badly as they beat him.

And then tied me with wire, very tightly to a hooch,

and left me for a day.

And with the carcass of the cat draped around my neck.

And I was so crazy I thought,

maybe they're going to let me eat this cat.

But I had to bury it.

So the fellow that they beat very badly died two weeks later.

But, to me, the tragedy of it was we didn't get the cat.

For the capital of a nation at war

Saigon abounds with a phenomenal number

of young men of draft age in sharp civilian clothes.

Saigon Cowboys, they are called.

It's a war profiteer's economy,

fanned by the forced draught of American money.

They count it a good year in Saigon when the prices only go up by 25%.

Years of American presence and the tens of billions of US dollars that

came with it had transformed much of South Vietnam,

creating a false economy that was utterly dependent on that presence becoming perpetual.

Who benefits from the financial aspects of the war?

Generals.

Don't deny that!

Then they get the money,

then they become richer.

We have a term, and I call it,

war profiteers.

From Thieu and Ky, down to every level.

The Vietnamese had a saying, "A house leaks from the roof on down."

HE SPEAKS VIETNAMESE

And that was, of course, their way to elliptically refer to

the ever-present, nagging problem of corruption.

In just one year, the black market cost the US military 2 billion.

The impact of the war has disrupted the ancient patterns of Vietnamese

life, the cities are crowded to bursting point with people uprooted

from the land and the ancestral values of a rural-oriented society,

but who have found nothing to replace them.

Before US troops arrived,

eight out of ten South Vietnamese lived in villages.

By the end of the 1960s, almost half would be crowded into urban areas.

Saigon's population tripled to three million.

Half the refugees had no permanent shelter.

Cholera and typhoid killed thousands.

Hungry children roamed the streets, scavenging, begging,

searching for jobs to do, or pockets to pick.

Tens of thousands of young women left their village homes and came

to Saigon to become bar girls and prostitutes.

But the citizens of Saigon were far freer than the North Vietnamese.

And they held demonstrations denouncing the rampant corruption,

and demanding religious freedom, and better treatment for veterans.

"For all of its problems," one man remembered,

"Saigon was filthy and free."

In the densely populated Mekong Delta,

the commander of the 9th Infantry Division,

General Julian J Ewell, had the job of destroying the remaining Vietcong

south of Saigon.

His operation was called Speedy Express.

"The hearts and minds approach can be overdone," Ewell said,

"In the delta, the only way to overcome VC control and terror

"is by brute force."

Patrols would pursue the enemy around the clock.

The night sky was filled with Cobra gunships.

In areas designated free fire zones,

anyone out after curfew could be shot.

During the day, anyone seen running was targeted.

Colonel Robert Gard was one of Ewell's artillery commanders.

If someone was told that anyone who runs away should be assumed to be

an enemy, I certainly would disagree with that.

That's totally improper.

People run away because they're afraid.

I've seen instances of farmers, when you descend in a helicopter,

suddenly, and they freeze, and they're frightened, and they run.

You can't just make a blanket judgment.

General Ewell boasted of his unit's statistical record.

10,899 Vietcong killed, in six months,

with a loss of only 242 Americans.

An astonishing kill ratio of 45 to one.

To say that we killed only enemy combatants

and to talk about ratios of 40 to one, simply defies my imagination.

The army inspector general would eventually estimate that more than

half of the roughly 11,000 kills

claimed by the 9th Infantry had been unarmed, innocent civilians.

No-one was ever held accountable.

MUSIC: Magic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf

# I like to dream

# Yes, yes, right between my sound machine

# On a cloud of sound I drift in the night

# Any place it goes is right

# Goes far, flies near, to the stars away from here... #

I dropped a bomb one afternoon that must have had a broken fin,

or something, on the bottom. It just went crazy, went over and hit,

you know, a mile away from where I was aiming.

And it started a series of secondary explosions...

..meaning that I had hit an ammunition dump,

or a cache of ammunition or something,

so it cooked off for 15 minutes.

As we were leaving, the thing was still blowing up.

The best result I achieved in a year,

it was the result of a gross miss from what I was aiming at.

That's the exact reverse of how you want to use air power.

Major Merrill McPeak was a crack fighter pilot

when he arrived in Vietnam in late 1968.

At first, he had helped provide air support for the Army,

with a guaranteed number of sorties per day, he remembered,

whether or not they had anything in front of them worth blowing up.

Then McPeak was assigned to a top secret squadron,

seeking to pinpoint men and supplies

moving on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.

He and his fellow pilots called their unit

Misty, after its radio call sign.

I spent four months with Misty.

And that was the best four months of the war, as far as I'm concerned,

because what we were doing was simple, straightforward,

and made sense.

We've got to stop traffic, from A to B, down this dirt road.

That, I can understand.

Somebody in Saigon wasn't saying go bomb trees at such-and-such

a location, we went out and actually found the target.

It was dangerous work.

One out of five pilots was shot down.

Misty put up seven sorties a day from dawn to dusk,

on the lookout for signs of human activity, gardens, encampments,

roadside trees coated with dust,

or wet roads on either side of fords that signalled a truck convoy had

recently passed through.

I have enormous respect for those truck drivers.

They left their homes in the North,

and they weren't drafted for a year or two.

They just left, and didn't know if they were ever going to come back.

Although McPeak and his fellow pilots did not know it,

among the drivers threading their way down the Ho Chi Minh Trail

by night were hundreds of women.

For three years, Nguyen Nguyet Anh drove her section of the Trail.

Ferrying arms and supplies south...

..then heading back north with cargoes of wounded men.

They drove in stages.

So they knew 15, 20 klicks of the road and they drove from A to B,

and back to A.

Then they rested during the daytime, and then the next night,

they drove from A to B, and back to A.

They had, kind of, memorised the road,

which was very important, because they were running without lights at night.

One time I stumbled across a bunch of trucks backed up,

and that was a great morning for me.

Occasionally, one of them would break down in a spot where the

trucks behind it would get trapped, and couldn't back out of there.

So you'd try to strafe the last truck, so that it can't move.

These are one-lane roads.

So once you get the back truck disabled,

then you just call in fighters...

..who are shooting fish in a barrel.

Over 20,000 engineers,

soldiers and truck drivers died along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

72 military cemeteries would eventually be required

to hold their remains.

We dropped more tonnage of munitions than the United States dropped in

World War II,

most of it aimed at the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

We did not stop traffic down the Trail,

and that is a big disappointment for me.

To this day, it irritates me.

The real failures were made at the policy level.

We were fighting on the wrong side.

The South, the government in the south, was corrupt.

And its people knew it.

And we knew it.

I'll tell you something. Those truck drivers fought very well.

I would have been proud to fight with them.

So one of the things you've got to do when you go to war,

is pick the right side, OK? Get the right allies.

The peace we seek to win...

..is not victory over any other people...

..but the peace that comes with healing in its wings,

with compassion for those who have suffered,

with understanding for those who have opposed it,

with the opportunity for all the peoples of this earth

to choose their own destiny.

Like Lyndon Johnson,

Richard Nixon had an ambitious agenda for his presidency.

Easing a quarter of a century of tensions with the Soviet Union,

and opening the door to China,

whose existence the United States had refused to recognise since

the Communists took over in 1949.

But, as it had with Johnson,

the ongoing war in Vietnam threatened all those plans.

37,563 Americans had died there by the time he took the oath of office.

"I'm not going to end up like LBJ, holed up in the White House,

"afraid to show my face on the street," Richard Nixon told an aide,

"I'm going to stop that war, fast."

Nixon's National Security adviser was Henry Kissinger.

A refugee from Nazi Germany, he had taught government at Harvard,

and was already a well-known advocate

of a foreign policy based on pragmatism, not ideology.

In February of 1969, the North launched yet another offensive.

This time, they killed 1,100 Americans in just three weeks.

Nixon did not feel he could retaliate by resuming the bombing of

the North, for fear of provoking the anti-war movement at home.

So in March, he secretly ordered B-52s to begin attacking

the North Vietnamese bases within Cambodia,

which had offered sanctuary to the enemy for years.

The American public was told nothing about the bombing.

Congress was kept in the dark as well.

When the New York Times finally discovered what was happening,

the White House denied any bombing was taking place,

and ordered that illegal wiretaps be placed on the telephones of

17 reporters and government officials

in an effort to find out who had leaked the story.

The war went on.

Keep your head down.

And fire.

It was this, kind of,

maybe thing going on all throughout this training

as Vietnam got closer, closer and closer.

Do you go off and kill people if you're not pretty sure it's right?

And if your nation isn't pretty sure it's right,

if there isn't some consensus?

Do you do that?

I was at Fort Lewis, Washington, and Canada was, what,

a 90-minute bus ride away?

What prevented me from doing it?

I think it was pretty simple and stupid,

it was a fear of embarrassment,

a fear of ridicule and...

humiliation.

What my girlfriend would have thought of me, and, you know,

people in the Gobbler Cafe, and downtown Worthington.

The boys, and the country club boys,

in that small town I grew up in,

the things they'd say about me.

"What a coward." And, "What a sissy."

"Going to Canada."

And I would imagine my mom and dad overhearing something like that.

I couldn't summon the courage to say no to those

nameless, faceless people...

..who, really,

in essence,

this was the United States of America,

and I couldn't say no to them.

And I've had to live with it now for...

..40 years.

That's a long time to live with a failure of...conscience,

and a failure of nerve.

And the nightmare of Vietnam, for me,

is not the bombs and the bullets...

..it's that failure of nerve that I so regret.

# Tell the truth

# Tell the truth, girl, now

# You know you got me goin'

# Everything crazy that you want me to do

# Yes, you have, girl

# Don't you, don't you, don't you know you gotta tell the truth, yeah

# Baby, baby, baby, why don't you tell me the truth now? #