A Sea of Fire (April 1969-May 1970) The Vietnam War

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

There are certain rules to tunnel warfare.

Don't turn on the light,

unless you're really, really, really sure you're alone.

Use your senses.

Do your first killing as quietly as you can. That means, don't shoot.

I chased somebody into a tunnel.

I thought I was alone, and then I smelled their breath.

And we had a wrestling match in the dark.

And I got the upper hand and crushed this person's trachea...

..held him down while he died...

..and then got out.

I beat and strangled someone to death in a tunnel..

in the dark.

But that wasn't the only casualty.

The other casualty was the civilised version of me.

MUSIC: Dazed And Confused by Led Zeppelin

Richard Nixon had taken office as President in January of 1969,

pledged to restore law and order and end the war with honour.

Things were calmer at home, but in Vietnam, peace was no closer.

American soldiers still died pursuing guerrillas

who appeared and disappeared like phantoms.

Americans still died capturing hills,

only to give them up and have to take them back again.

Men and material were still flowing into the South,

despite the controversial bombing of Cambodia.

Through it all, Hanoi remained immovable.

The Communists insisted there could be no peace until

the Saigon government was replaced, and the United States withdrew

from Vietnam.

Meanwhile, the American public was losing patience.

Privately, Nixon knew that military victory was impossible,

that things would have to be settled at the bargaining table in Paris.

He had to find a way to extricate Americans from Vietnam,

without seeming to surrender.

Nixon also believed his reputation as an implacable,

anti-Communist could work to his advantage with Hanoi.

"We'll just slip the word to them," he said.

"You know, Nixon's obsessed about Communism.

"We can't restrain him when he's angry,

"and he has his hand on the nuclear button."

"And Ho Chi Minh will be in Paris in two days, begging for peace."

But Ho Chi Minh was old and ailing now,

and Le Duan and the other men who had been calling the shots in Hanoi

for years had no intention of giving up their goal of uniting

their country under Communist control.

Richard Nixon, having promised a swift end to the war, would,

like all the presidents who came before him, end up widening it.

In the process, he would reignite opposition to the war

on American campuses that threatened to tear the country apart again.

MUSIC: While My Guitar Gently Weeps by The Beatles

The late '60s were a kind of confluence of several rivulets.

There was the anti-war movement itself...

..the whole movement towards racial equality...

..the environment...

..the role of women,

and the anthems for that counterculture were provided

by the most brilliant rock and roll music that you can imagine.

I don't know how we could exist today as a country,

without that experience.

With all of its warts and ups and downs,

THAT produced the America we have today, and we are better for it.

GUNFIRE

And I felt that way in Vietnam.

I turned the volume up on all that stuff.

That represented what I was trying to defend.

GUNFIRE

LOUD EXPLOSIONS

I never prayed, the whole time I was in a POW camp.

But every night when I went to sleep, I would say,

"I'll be here when the morning comes."

I felt if I could just live one more day,

then I could live one more day, and then one more day.

At the peace talks in Paris,

the Nixon administration had introduced a new demand -

US troops would not withdraw until all American prisoners had come home

and Hanoi had provided a strict accounting

of those missing in action.

The North Vietnamese would not reveal the names of the men

they held, because they still insisted they were not

prisoners of war, but war criminals.

They subjected many to brutal torture,

extracted confessions,

and refused to permit inspections by the International Red Cross.

The Johnson administration had generally downplayed the issue,

hoping quiet diplomacy might bring the men home.

The Nixon administration launched a go public campaign instead,

meant to put the plight of American prisoners

and those missing in action at the centre of things.

It also provided a rebuke to those in the anti-war movement,

who seemed more sympathetic to North Vietnamese civilians

who had been bombed, than they were to US airmen

who had been shot down doing that bombing.

At the same time, the Saigon government of Nguyen Van Thieu

was holding prisoners of its own.

There would eventually be some 40,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong

soldiers in four crowded camps.

Another 200,000 South Vietnamese civilians would also be held,

many without trial.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

April 1969 marked the high point of American military commitment

to South Vietnam.

543,482 men and women were now in country...

..and tens of thousands more were stationed at air bases

and aboard ships beyond its borders.

40,794 had died.

And more than 70 billion had been spent.

A Gallup poll now found that most Americans believed Vietnam

had been a mistake.

Richard Nixon knew he needed to signal to the public

that an end was in sight.

The National Security Council had warned Nixon

that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretaries of state and defence,

the CIA, and the US Embassy in Saigon all privately agreed

that without US combat troops the South Vietnamese cannot now,

or in the foreseeable future,

stand up to both Vietcong and sizeable North Vietnamese forces.

Nonetheless, Secretary of Defence Melvin Laird said

the war was now to be "Vietnamized".

Saigon's troops would gradually take over responsibility

for engaging the enemy.

Meanwhile, American troops would start to go home.

MUSIC: The Letter by The Box Tops

When Nixon came in and he announced the phased withdrawal...

..turning over the fighting to the Vietnamese,

which was something the French had tried before,

they called it jaunissement.

"Yellowising" the war.

We knew that the Vietnamese army was not up to fighting this war.

If they couldn't do it with the Americans,

how were they going to do it without the Americans?

The reason I was ordered home early was because

Nixon, President Nixon, announced the policy of Vietnamization.

Now, Vietnamization was a lie.

But it had an element of truth in it.

We were leaving, OK.

And that sealed the South's fate.

I knew it.

And I think anybody who was conscious

and could see what was going on knew it.

Nixon and Kissinger...

..they... Their job is to clean up.

The war's over.

"LAST POST" PLAYS ON TRUMPET

OK? Nixon and Kissinger, when they come,

they're not going to win the war.

So they develop a secret strategy.

They surrender without saying they surrender.

This is not a bad strategy. This is the only strategy.

MUSIC: Circle For A Landing by Three Dog Night

As American soldiers began leaving South Vietnam,

American weaponry and material poured in.

More than a million M-16 rifles, 40,000 grenade launchers,

thousands of wheeled vehicles.

"So many," one congressman complained,

"that it seemed as if the United States taxpayer was being asked

"to put every South Vietnamese soldier behind the wheel."

It didn't make any sense, of course, because we tried that

in 1962 and '63. The people hadn't changed.

We were just giving them more furniture.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

You've been told once, you've been told twice, that's all.

Spread it out!

MUSIC: Time Of The Season by The Zombies

This guy from Arkansas told me he would not carry the radio for me.

He said, "I will not follow you like cheetah follows Tarzan.

"It's not going to happen, Sarge."

And I thought, "Oh, this is going to be a really long year."

I've got people down there. Get them down there.

He evolved a little bit.

You know, he kind of got the idea that the enemy's bullets

are colour-blind. They would shoot anybody, not just me.

African-Americans had served in every American war

since the Revolution.

In the early years of the Vietnam War,

they suffered a disproportionate number of combat deaths.

When civil rights leaders complained, the defence department

made a concerted effort to right that balance,

and by 1969, it had succeeded.

But behind the lines, African-American soldiers

were still treated differently from their white counterparts.

MUSIC: Respect by Otis Redding

I hear there's all these beast motherfuckers,

walking around here with their hair looking like goddamn girls,

and we can't wear our hair motherfucking three inches long.

The motherfucking regulation is three inches.

And most of us, we can wear an Afro,

the hair going to be motherfucking two inches.

Why we got to get our hair cut? That's what I want to know.

Vietnam was a microcosm.

Everything that was happening in America was happening

in Vietnam, really, in one way, shape or form.

There was all kinds of craziness happening.

White people were still calling us niggers

and then there was some black people calling us Uncle Toms.

Whatever the anti-war folks were calling us, baby killers.

So, you know, you say what you want, but you say it

from over there, because if you get in range,

you're going to get serious damage done to you.

Say what you want from a distance, but if you get close to me,

I'm going to rip your throat out. You know?

A 19-year-old high school dropout says, "Why are we here?"

And the standard response, at least on an official level, was,

"To prevent international Communism from conquering the world."

The men say, "Hey, that's bullshit."

So, the other reason put forth, at least in the latter days

of the war, was to maintain America's international credibility

with our allies and our enemies.

No 19, 20-year-old kid wants to die to maintain the credibility

of Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon.

So, within a relatively short time the guys are saying,

"Look, we shouldn't be here, but we are.

"So, my only function in life is to try and keep you alive, buddy...

"..and to keep my precious ass from being killed.

"And then to go home, and forget about this."

Beginning in the summer of 1969, as thousands of American troops

began going home, the number of reports of the murder

or attempted murder by enlisted men

of their superiors increased alarmingly.

What happens to an unpopular officer, out in the field?

Mostly, an unpopular officer, from what I heard,

if they mess with a grunt too much, they get shot after that.

In Paris, the 29th session of the so-called peace talks took place.

There was no progress.

In Vietnam, it was announced that 139 Americans lost their lives

last week, bringing total deaths...

The four-way peace talks in Paris continued to go nowhere.

To break the logjam, Nixon directed Henry Kissinger

to begin secret talks,

the first in a series of clandestine meetings

with the North Vietnamese alone.

They first met in an apartment building on the Rue de Rivoli.

The Vietcong and the South Vietnamese government

were not included.

Hanoi remained immovable.

They would not even admit they had troops in South Vietnam,

let alone discuss withdrawing them.

Now Kissinger warned that if there were no change in their position

by November 1st,

the one-year anniversary of President Johnson's bombing halt,

President Nixon would consider steps of grave consequence.

September 2nd, 1969 was the 24th anniversary

of Ho Chi Minh's declaration of Vietnamese independence

in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square.

At 9.45 that morning, Ho died.

He was said to be 79, but like so much about him,

the precise date of his birth was shrouded in mystery.

He had been Uncle Ho for decades,

the living embodiment of the struggle against the Japanese,

the French, the Saigon government, and then the Americans.

In a speech to the National Assembly, Le Duan,

the first secretary of the Communist Party,

who had been the architect of North Vietnamese military policy

for a decade, promised to fulfil what he said was Ho's vision -

the reunification of the country on Communist terms.

Nothing had changed.

MUSIC: Come Ye by Nina Simone

We believe it's possible to create a substantial majority

in this country for withdrawal from Vietnam,

and that's what we're about, in the long run.

In November, we'll be back again, in December, we'll be back again,

and we intend to build a movement which will make it imperative

that the United States withdraw from Vietnam.

The organisers of the moratorium do not aim

at confrontation or scuffles with the police.

Instead, they want to involve the most people possible

in some gesture of protest, however modest,

to show the administration that a large block of Americans

care not about winning or losing the war, but only about ending it.

Thank you.

Now, I understand that there has been, and continues to be,

opposition to the war in Vietnam on the campuses,

and also in the nation.

We expect it, however, under no circumstances will I be affected

whatever by it.

Hoping to undercut support for the moratorium,

Nixon cancelled the draft calls for the months

of November and December 1969.

And he instituted a random lottery system based on the date

of a young man's birth, intended to treat rich and poor alike,

and do away with unfair deferments.

It was good policy and a brilliant political manoeuvre.

I'm alive, brothers and sisters, I'm alive now!

As people across the country organised

for the peaceful moratorium, members of a radical faction

of the Students For A Democratic Society,

the Weathermen, took more direct action.

MUSIC: Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan

Less interested in ending the war than

in sparking a violent revolution,

they staged what they called Four Days Of Rage, in Chicago.

-REPORTER:

-Weatherman takes its name from a line in a Bob Dylan song,

which says, "You don't need a weatherman to know

"the way the wind blows."

BOB DYLAN: # You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. #

The Weathermen assumed thousands would rally to the cause.

Only 600 did.

They ran through the streets, wielding chains and pipes,

smashing windows and windshields, and charging police barriers.

Six were shot, 250 were jailed, 75 policemen were injured.

Probably, 1969 was the year in which most of us were more alienated

and felt more like revolutionaries,

and it led to a lot of crazy responses.

I wanted the country to undergo a radical transformation

of redistribution of wealth and power.

But to try to bring that about through armed struggle

in the United States was insane.

These were all infantile fantasies that people came to out

of the frustration of not having a workable strategy

for ending the war.

Still, the moratorium on October 15th, held all across

the country, was the largest outpouring of public dissent

in American history.

MUSIC: Blackbird by The Beatles

It was peaceful, middle-class, carefully focused on ending the war.

"It's nice," one marcher said,

"to go to a demonstration without having to swear allegiance

"to Chairman Mao."

-REPORTER:

-Surely, this is a day unique in our history.

Never have so many of our people publicly and collectively

manifested opposition to this country's involvement in the war.

It is unlikely we will remain unchanged.

Hundreds and hundreds of thousands,

in cities from New York, with its eight million people,

to Dubois, Wyoming, with its 800 people,

have sought to impress upon the President

their opposition to the war.

The first large protest march I went to was in Baltimore.

Just the energy of the crowd itself was tremendous.

I wondered if everybody was in it for the right reasons.

I wasn't there to drink, or smoke pot...

..not in those situations.

These, to me, were serious business.

This was the business of living life, this was not a party.

I wanted to make a difference.

And I, in no way, wanted to dishonour my brother.

The children of several of the President's closest aides

and cabinet members took part in the national moratorium.

Vice President Agnew's 14-year-old daughter wanted to march,

but he wouldn't let her.

On November 3rd, the President sought to seize back the initiative.

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

He went on national television and called for patience

and asked Americans to rally behind him.

The great silent majority of my fellow Americans,

I ask for your support.

I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war,

in a way that we could win the peace.

The more support I can have from the American people,

the sooner that pledge can be redeemed.

For the more divided we are at home,

the less likely the enemy is to negotiate in Paris.

Let us be united for peace.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Bao Ninh was 17 when he was drafted into the North Vietnamese army

to fight the Americans, just as his father had fought the French.

His war would take place in the central highlands of South Vietnam.

It was American firepower that Bao Ninh and his fellow soldiers

feared the most.

LOUD EXPLOSIONS

I was stationed in Vietnam in a province called Quang Ngai.

Even back during the time of the French, it was

a very heavily Vietminh area,

and when I arrived, heavily Vietcong.

Tim O'Brien, from Worthington, Minnesota, served in Alpha Company,

Third Platoon, 5th Battalion, 23rd Americal Division.

Back in the spring of 1969,

they had been sent into an area of operations the Americans

called Pinkville - clusters of villages that included

a hamlet they called My Lai.

We hated going there.

We were terrified of the place.

The villagers were... The expressions on their faces...

...had a mixture of hostility...

..and terror.

And I remember talking to fellow soldiers, thinking,

"What is it with this place?"

And then, about three quarters of the way through my tour in Vietnam,

the story of the My Lai massacre broke in the States.

On November 12, 1969, the Dispatch news service in Washington

moved a story by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

It was soon followed by the publication of graphic photos

taken by army photographer Ronald Haeberle.

The story and the pictures stunned the world.

20 months earlier, on the morning of March 16th, 1968,

105 men from a rifle company belonging to the Americal Division,

and led by Captain Ernest Medina and Lieutenant Colonel William Calley,

had been ordered to helicopter into the village of My Lai four.

Since arriving in Vietnam, they had lost 28 men to mines

and booby traps, and unseen snipers.

Two days earlier, a popular squad leader had been killed.

They had been told a unit of main force Vietcong was waiting for them,

and they were eager for revenge.

But they received no hostile fire...

..encountered no enemy soldiers.

Instead, over the next four hours, Medina, Calley and their men

murdered 407 defenceless old men, women, children and infants.

Many of the women and girls were raped, before they were shot.

There would have been still more slaughtered,

had a helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson Junior

not landed between the men and some of their intended targets,

and ordered his crew to open fire on their fellow Americans if they did

not stop shooting civilians.

At the same time, just a mile or so away,

another company murdered 97 more villagers.

And suddenly, it was like a window shade going up and there's light,

and we understood what had engendered this horror

on these kids' faces, and the fear, and the hatred.

100 and some American soldiers in four hours or so,

butchering innocent people,

in all kinds of ways - machine gunning them and throwing them

in wells, scalping them, killing them in ditches,

then taking a lunch break and doing it some more.

Systematic homicide.

Lieutenant Calley came over and said,

"You know what to do with them, don't you?

And I said, "Yes." So I took it for granted that

he just wanted us to watch them.

And he left and came back about ten or 15 minutes later and says,

"How come you ain't killed them yet?"

You killed how many at that time?

Well, I fired them on automatic, so you can't...

You just spray the area on them,

so you really don't know how many you killed because

it comes out so doggone fast.

So I might have killed about ten, 15 of them.

-Men, women and children?

-Men, women and children.

-And babies?

-And babies.

It's so hard, I think, for a good many Americans

to understand that young, capable, brave American boys...

..could line up...

..old men, women, children and babies...

..and shoot them down in cold blood.

How do you explain that?

I wouldn't know.

The killing of civilians has happened in every war.

In Vietnam, it was not policy or routine,

but it was not an aberration either.

Still, the scale, deliberateness and intimacy

of what happened at My Lai was different.

It was different because they were killing Vietnamese point-blank,

with rifles and grenades.

They were murdering them directly.

They weren't doing it with bombs and artillery.

If they'd been doing it with bombs and artillery,

nobody would have said a word, because it was going

on all the time.

The My Lai story might have shocked the American public,

but it was not news to the Army.

It had occurred almost two years before,

just after the Tet Offensive.

Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who had tried to stop the massacre,

reported what he had seen,

but no-one in the chain of command was willing to act.

The slaughter was covered up.

Later, an ex-corporal named Ronald Ridenhour,

who had heard about what had happened from several men

who had been there, wrote letters to the President of the United States,

the Secretary of Defence,

and more than two dozen other high-ranking officials.

President Nixon's first reaction was to investigate those

who reported the slaughter.

"It's those dirty, rotten Jews from New York who are behind it,"

he told an aide.

Eventually, the Army did indict 25 officers and men.

But only the platoon leader,

Lieutenant William Calley,

was found guilty of murder, and sentenced to life in prison.

After just three-and-a-half years under house arrest, he was paroled.

Who's responsible?

The human beings who did this.

These are war crimes.

The individual human beings who put a rifle muzzle up

against a baby's head and shot the brains out of that baby?

Nothing happened to them.

Nothing!

Let's just say that being a Marine combat veteran

on a college campus in 1969 and 1970,

it wasn't a real good thing to be if you wanted

to get dates and be popular.

When I came home...

..it seemed like I didn't have anything to give to anybody else.

Marine Corporal John Musgrave had very nearly died in combat

below the DMZ in the autumn of 1967.

He had spent 17 months in Navy hospitals.

He was now studying at Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas.

And the peace movement, for a while,

got real nasty.

Calling veterans baby killers.

It did more than piss us off, it broke our hearts.

What were they thinking?

Musgrave was so hurt by the way some people treated him,

that he volunteered to return to Vietnam.

Because of his injuries, the Marines turned him down

and asked him to help recruit men instead.

I had friends in country, on a second tour, and, you know,

I still considered myself a Marine.

And the more I read, the less I found to be able

to defend our presence there.

So then I just stopped talking to everybody.

Musgrave gradually felt as if he were being torn in two

and he was still haunted by the memory of those Marines

who had died while he had lived.

I was dating my 45 in those years, you know.

Coming home at night after drinking,

pressing it up against my temple or putting it under my chin.

Wondering if this was going to be

the night I was going to have the guts to do it.

I'd had it round chambered, and I'd taken the safety off.

Same kind of pistol I carried in Vietnam.

And I thought, "I'm really going to do it tonight."

You know, like, "I'm really going to do it."

And my dogs... I'd let my dogs in.

I had two dogs,

and they jumped on the front door and scratched on the front door,

they wanted in.

And I put the safety back on the pistol, set it down,

and let them in.

And they were so open in their love for me

that I literally said out loud,

"Whoa, if I really want to do this, I can do this tomorrow."

And I went back in the room, and I put the pistol in the drawer, and...

I think that was the closest I came.

I think maybe I would have killed myself that night.

But something as simple as my dogs wanting back in...

..stopped that thought, you know.

I'm really glad it didn't happen.

But, at the time, it just made so much sense.

Richard Nixon's troop withdrawals finally turned Musgrave

against the war.

"If it ain't worth winning," he said, "it ain't worth dying for."

His loyalty to the Marines would not yet let him openly say that,

but he told a campus anti-war meeting that they should stop acting

as if they didn't give a damn about the men who had been asked to fight,

and received a standing ovation.

The turning point for me, I think,

was one evening I spent with my friend, Sonny Walter, who had been,

just been discharged from the Army and had come home

and spent an evening before I went in, pleading with me not to go.

He even offered to drive me to Canada.

In late November 1969, Jack Todd reported for basic training

at Fort Lewis, Washington.

Morale just could not have been worse.

And it seemed to include even the sergeants and the officers.

Nobody wanted to go. Nobody wanted to go.

Todd and another member of his unit began to talk at night

about what it meant to be true to one's conscience.

Really, two choices, it was - go to jail, or go to Canada.

And for me, going to jail was just not...

That one I couldn't face.

So, I went to Canada.

MUSIC: Farewell, Angelina by Bob Dylan

And I remember, after we crossed the border, it was a breeze.

They just sort of waved us through,

looking in the rear-view mirror thinking, "There goes my country.

"I'll never see it again."

I get called a coward all the time.

It took me a long time...

..not to feel that what I had done was cowardly,

because I still had that military ingrained feeling inside.

That was the bravest thing I ever did.

It was the bravest thing I ever did.

Jack Todd eventually found work as a reporter,

which allowed him to gain landed immigrant status,

a step towards Canadian citizenship.

Only a quarter of the estimated 30,000 Americans

who crossed into Canada managed to do so.

At the same time, some 30,000 Canadians

would volunteer to fight in Vietnam.

President Nixon's first year had been a triumph.

He had withdrawn 115,000 troops from Vietnam.

American casualty figures were down.

Reduced draft calls and the President's new lottery system

had blunted some opposition to the war.

If, when the chips are down...

..the world's most powerful nation, the United States of America...

..acts like a pitiful, helpless giant...

..the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations

and free institutions throughout the world.

On April 30th, 1970, President Nixon shocked the world

by announcing that he had sent 30,000 American troops

storming into Cambodia.

The objective was to attack North Vietnamese base camps

and supply lines, and to buy time for the South Vietnamese Army

as it got ready to fight on its own.

Nixon told the public he had ordered an incursion, not an invasion,

intended only to protect American boys in South Vietnam

and in response to North Vietnamese aggression.

I wasn't worried about political conflict.

I was worried about, "Am I going to be alive in the next ten minutes?"

We were on the western edge of the invasion.

We went as far as anybody went in Cambodia.

I got holes shot in my backpack.

I really didn't think I would see the end of that week.

The sight of American troops crossing the border into Cambodia

reignited the anti-war movement.

If the troops were coming home, if the war was winding down,

why had Nixon decided to widen it?

How could invading another country help bring peace

to Southeast Asia?

The reaction on the campuses was swift and predictable,

the students and many of their teachers were against the President.

On Monday morning, May 4th 1970,

some 2,000 students gathered on the Commons at Kent State University

in Kent, Ohio.

Some were simply moving from class to class,

others planned to attend a rally called to protest Nixon's widening

of the war and the presence of the Ohio National Guard on campus.

The guardsmen's weapons were loaded with live ammunition.

Though no-one in the crowd knew it.

The students were ordered to disperse.

They stood their ground.

Tear gas scattered some of them.

The guardsmen seemed to fall back...

..but then, members of troop G wheeled around

and opened fire on students gathered in and around a parking lot.

HEAVY GUNFIRE

GUNFIRE FADES OUT

Get them to call another ambulance!

There's people dying down here, get an ambulance up here!

PANICKED SHOUTS

SCREAMING

67 rounds in 13 seconds killed two young women and two young men.

Including an ROTC scholarship student

who had simply been an onlooker.

That dead child on the ground was one of ours.

If we could kill our own students...

..what had happened to our country?

Nine more students were wounded, one of whom was permanently paralysed.

According to one national poll,

58% of the American people thought the killings justified.

The parents of the dead ROTC student received a flood

of hate mail, suggesting that they should be grateful

their boy was dead,

since he'd been just another Communist.

During the days that followed, all across the country,

more than four million college students demonstrated

against the war and what had happened at Kent State.

MUSIC: Woodstock by Joni Mitchell

448 campuses closed down.

And the National Guard was called out in 16 states.

At Jackson State University in Mississippi,

state police opened fire on a dormitory.

SIRENS BLARE

Two students died.

12 more were wounded.

Jackson State, those are my people. Those are black kids...

..and they died.

Army private Tim O'Brien was now back home in Minnesota.

There was a huge march after the Kent State shootings

in Saint Paul and I joined the march.

I just wanted to put my body amidst these 100,000 people.

That word, "No," being uttered by my body, if not by my mouth,

by just making that march, that same march I was doing in Vietnam,

it seemed senseless and purposeless, and without direction.

Here, it felt sensible, purposeful and with direction.

Heading for the state capital to say, "No."

And boy, did it feel good.

I remember when the kids were killed at Kent State.

And I thought,

"My God, we're killing our own children now.

"We've really gone mad."

And I wasn't... That's when I was hiding from things.

I wasn't in anybody's movement then.

I was just drinking.

But that was one of the things that told me...

..America needed a wake-up call.

# By the time we got to Woodstock

# We were half a million strong

# And everywhere there was song and celebration

# And I dreamed I saw the bombers

# Riding shotgun in the sky

# And they were turning into butterflies

# Above our nation. #