IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG, Reel 3

[Music] well Search and Destroy uh is an attempt to as the the first word would indicate to uh find the enemy to search out where he would be and then to destroy him in his [Music] habitat okay west of the stream and uh east of the road Roger [Music] how much race do you think is actually in there oh jeez I don't know about 20 tons 10 tons how far back does it go it's about 30 by 15 anyways about 12 ft deep come on how do you destroy this this much rice yeah the demo man usually blows it up you're going to blow it up are you they can't get it out they'll blow it up it's uh it's on milled rice theet here's all the attachment consists of two double rotor shinook helicopters the Chinooks usually are cargo or troop carriers but not these they're [Music] gunships to the prisoners that uh We've captured or have been captured say that this is the most feared weapon Outside The B-52s that is because the amount of ammunition we carry the vary types of weapons and the amount of time we can stay on the station at the present time we have on this a 140 mm grenade launcher 2 20 mm Cannon 5 50 caliber machine guns and two rocket launcher pods consisting of 19 2.75 Rockets uh we usually carry inside two additional M60 machine guns and ammunition for them and occasionally the crew rat holes a few things that they don't tell us about until we're Airborne now we work at it we can un load in about 20 to 25 minutes but we are in danger of burning out barrels which we frequently do I was amazed when I came to this outfit of how accurate to fit the calibers were I figured they would be known more of an area spray weapon but they can actually walk those weapons right down the tree line now the 20 mm is of course very very accurate and has quite a range we can start firing this machine 4,000 M away which is considerable distance the one I fly is known as birth control [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] you look like you enjoy your work why well I've been there for 36 months since I've been in the service and uh just the type of work I enjoy outside moving around but this particular operation the Cedar Falls why are you enjoying this well I think we're benefit by clearing all this area it's the first time they've got a push on like this and hadn't walked off and left is they're completely just going right ahead and pushing on forward instead of walking off where' you find these people uh they live right in this area here in the village of dong L between here and the railroad out to the West why'd you bring them in here we've had so much trouble when we moved through this area been a lot of civilians killed as a result of this and uh as we made our pass through here we these people up and moved them with us into here so that we could make a careful sweep and probe each and every Hut looking for tunnels and caves uh possible VC hiding places know we found a few caves and uh blew them picked up some weapons killed a few VC uh in the meantime we're now going to sweep back through and go to the railroad and move back out to the west and what's going to happen to the people tonight well the people we're going to keep them right here we've got some child farm and some water and we'll feed them and uh you'd be surprised how they can take care of themselves here with h with a minimum of resources and they take care of these children here during the night and uh they huddle real close together and they'll keep warm now how long are you going to hold on to these people well around noon tomorrow as we move back out to the west and uh then these people be released to go back to their to their own Huts to cultivate their rice to harvest their rice and uh continue their normal activity now you got some BC suspects out of this group didn't you uh yes we just uh hella lifted five suspects out of here back to Battalion rear CP to be further interrogated how did you select them these uh Choy people in Vietnamese interpreters that we have with us they've been in this area to they know these people and from talking to them they get some ideas maybe these people know a little more than they telling take them back to get a little higher eon of interrogation down hoan or or Den Bond some of these people come back to us even and we'll put them with our companies to sweep these river banks it's hard to know just who a VC is unless unless he's carrying a weapon or a cartridge belt or some grenades or something a person just walking along you don't know if he's a VC or not might be in this crowd but uh then some of these people that have operated with the VC and if they defect and come over and uh we can use these people as Scouts and they go along the river banks with us and they look just like anybody else but when they have a weapon uh they they a free game how did this man get killed well he threw grenades at the Marines and instead of just one he threw three the marinees spotted him and start shooting at him and that's how he got it two big holes by his eye and throat were done by 30 out6 sniper rifles all the rest of the holes are done by this new type of uh rifle got the M16 now how about all these people who are standing behind me over there do you think any of them know this man yes they do but uh they wouldn't admit it because uh they're afraid that we going to take them back to CP for questioning and uh we detain them under this rvn program where they teach them propaganda for 3 months they hold him for 3 months that's why they won't admit they know this man here we put over about 3 million of them into what I would call a concentration camp they call it a refugee center it's got barb wire around it they can't get out of it taking these people from the graves of their ancestors from their rice patties and we say oh well we've pacified x million people yeah we pacified some more people by putting them in these camps I'll grind us up in a hurry I know many people have said look we've killed innocent people our bombs have killed civilians and babies and mothers and I suppose there is truth to that there have been people that have been killed but your government has not bombed civilians your government has not bombed Open Cities your government has sent its bombers in after targets military targets that have been placed in an area surrounded by civilians the unfortunate thing is that the enemy is quite frequently located in areas that have people who are not part of the military structure in an immediate sense they may be sympathizers they may be uh uh supporting through their efforts their work and the like but what occurs when you engage in a certain destroy is the destruction the needless destruction of innocent human innocent civilians now you might say that they're all part of the the entire communist apparatus but the feature is that if we are going to prevent this war from degenerating into a genocidal activity then our attempt would be to to rehabilitate or to to wean those folks away from the Communist rather than to destroy them this is what Search and Destroy becomes in a very practical sense and of course uh they're the subject of our constant concern because they're such a magnificent group of fighting men their morale is extremely high they always have a smile I was at a very kind of sobering thing last night a memorial service for four men who were killed the other day one of them being a medic and and uh the place was just packed and we sang Three hymns and had a nice prayer I turned around and looked at their faces and they were I was just proud my my uh feeling for America just soared because of their the the way they look they look determined and and and reverent at the same time but still they're a bloody good bunch of killers when a captive is taken by United States are free world forces he is follow he is following interrogation uh turned over to Vietnamese authorities these prisoners are not being mistreated they are being handled in accordance with the provisions of the Geneva conventions the prisoners were were executed in uh our off it as a as a standard policy we were told by our CEO after our first battle that from then on we weren't going to take any prison my name is John Toler I'm a sergeant in US Army Special Forces known as the green beray I'm in route to Vietnam however I'm deserting the Army because I protesting the US involvement in the Vietnamese conflict today your soldiers Sailors Airmen Marin and Coast Garden are better educated than before are better informed have traditional American Ingenuity and inititive or better physical specimen have high morale and understand what the war is all about as I mentioned before about changing the minds of the apathetic populace the key is the communication and most of the the American soldiers that I know can't communicate they don't really understand the Vietnamese way of life and and it's it's goal and uh the only way they can communicate is through money or with a gun so after a while they they develop this kind of fear and so they a misunderstanding and a non-communication they they mistrust the Vietnamese and they kind of despised them once we got to Vietnam it was an entirely different story The the officer started referring to the Vietnamese as gos they even went so far as to say that uh the only uh good go is a dead go they said you can't trust them you can't trust any of these slant ey bastards because because none of them were no good [Music] actually it looks like this beach has just about everything is there anything that it lacks American Girl well there are girls down the other end of the beach though off limits of me they're gos yeah you know slant hide they're no good same same slope [Music] la [Music] [Applause] [Music] I'm David worful professor of political science at the University of Missouri and a specialist in Southeast Asian politics I've spent about seven years in Asia teaching researching uh studying as a matter of fact I've written particularly about the problem corruption and fraud in elections is that true though that the censorship now is going to be a little more rigorous as soon as the campaign starts no sir I don't think so but uh you have said have you not that the Vietnamese press should not criticize the candidates in the election why is that sir well it's our formal and present policy I don't think it's wise to allow people to use Free Press to you know issue critic criticism it order because it created more confusion more division among the people the elections that were held in 1967 for national office of course in the first place could be participated in only by people living in called secure areas which excluded at least a third of the population that were in areas so thoroughly under the control of the NLF that the government couldn't even pretend to regulate Affairs there that we should call to the attention of the people that the folks that are doing the most to keep us from having a fair and free election in Vietnam today are the vietcom and the North Vietnamese themselves now this is not to say that the campaign or the election in the South will go off without blemish this is only to say that an effort is being made and this strong effort with our very strong support and endorsement to conduct an open election in a nation that's under Fire from gorillas and from terrorists and from aggressors and from Invaders and so President Johnson being true to the origin of the elections in the first place I was very much concerned about how the American people would would interpret these elections and he saw that it was necessary to appoint official Observer team but of course most of the people had never been in Asia before almost none of them had ever been in Vietnam before very few of them even had any contacts in Vietnam and so uh the theoretical opportunity to talk to anybody they wanted to Simply could not be utilized and in fact most of those who talk to anyone except Embassy people uh talked to those Vietnamese introduced UC uh to them by Embassy people voting officials voters everybody were on their good behavior because the American observers were there so for them to have expected that they would see fraud with their own eyes was uh simply absurd furthermore they left Vietnam within 24 hours after the polls closed and in that period after the polls closed they did not speak to a single Vietnamese the possession of a clipped and stamped voting card of course was a very important protection for the Vietnamese peasant it was almost as important as having his registration card and anyone in Vietnam who does not have an official government registration or identity card is in deep trouble he's immediately assumed to be a Viet Kong is taken into the police station for questioning or worse I saw even in Saigon uh in workingclass districts where on Election Day rather early in the afternoon the uh polling place ran out of vote uh ran out of uh ballots and there were people already lined up uh wanting to vote at this polling place when it was announced that they'd run out of ballots the the poor washer women and and workmen were fighting to death oh we we've got to vote we've got to vote we've got to have our clipped uh voting card so uh in Balance we had a a government elected with little more than a third of the vote hailed by United States Johnson Administration as being a a popular and legitimate government nearly two-third of the people voting against it and uh even that 35% of course being to considerable extent result of a fraud and uh [Music] intimidation uh fore [Music] speee spee [Music] it's bad enough for uh the generals to get away with double voting and Ballot Box stuffing but to have the American observers say that they thought it was all fine and dandy made Vietnamese very mad indeed there were efforts to protest election fraud there were student demonstrations and as a matter of fact at one point it almost looked as if the election would be invalidated what I think we've come to and what I think the tragedy of Vietnam clearly demonstrates is that we now find ourselves in a world in which the arrangements of power cannot yet be ignored but in which the instruments of power no longer work this if this lesson has been taught us in Vietnam then the stubborn little gorillas out there who sold off the American Giant at the knees and brought him down almost like David versus Goliath would have done a great service not only to their own cause whatever one may think about it but perhaps to the cause of World Peace and perhaps most particularly to the Colossus himself maybe we needed to be brought up short maybe what we've been doing in Vietnam all along is an exercise in what Senator Fulbright has called the arrogance of power we cannot Retreat from any place and I can tell you that we don't intend a retreat we were asked by the state department to prepare a letter and send it to hoi men through a channel which had been opened and was available to us we were certain would deliver the letter directly to him was a very consiliary letter written and the in the state department in consultation word by word with secretary Bundy secretary katzenbach and others in which we spoke on behalf this was the actual phraseology on behalf of high officials of the state department all of Asia free Asia as well as communist Asia is watching Vietnam and if for example out of this present struggle after making this great great commitment after turning around the psychology in Asia we then agree to a coalition government with the communist or we force the South Vietnamese into a neutralized position a neutralize it as we did LA or if we make any kind of territorial concessions to the vietcan either one of these three courses of action would be interpreted as a retreat and also a defeat not only for South Vietnam but for the United States we had a an extended interview almost 2 hours with hoi men it was perfectly clear in the course of that interview that hoi men was delivering to us certain information he expected us to deliver back to the state department and on the side of H understand that first of all he will bring to the negotiation The Prestige of an unparalleled life of Devotion to his country in the history of this Century he will be the great Patriot and be careful here don't forget that he is a Marxist and don't expect him to turn a traitor to the ideal of his life he was unyielding on the point that the bombing had to Halt before his negotiators would enter into any kind of substitute discussions but I think he was trying to make the point making it repeatedly that after that the agenda was open now there may be those who say well obviously and you haven't offered them enough well it's true that we haven't offered them South Vietnam and it is true that we not agreed to assure them that we will stop the bombing on a permanent and unconditional basis we discovered sometime later when the correspondence was made public by Hanoi that 4 days before our letter could arrive uh in Hanoi a letter arrived there sent over president President Johnson's signature which was a very Hardline letter indeed which restated all the previous conditions regarding censation of the bombing and even added some new ones and which was in our judgment intended to do what it did do which was to break off any possibility of negotiation at that time this letter we subsequently learned had been written two days before ours was written in conjunction with the state department we found to our surprise and shock I might say that Harman was already saying that he proposed to negotiate the settlement by suggesting that there had to be some reciprocal military action in return for the final cessation of the bombing in other words the same point that Johnson had been standing on before he made the speech of March 31st it was almost as though Harman turned off his hearing aid when we told him that this would not work this was not the understanding the North Vietnamese had and they would certainly repudiate it if he attempted to take that position at the bargaining table and this of course is what did happen at Paris in the view of the North Vietnamese the reciprocity means United States is bombing not Vietnam and not Vietnam must bomb United States this in your view is reciprocity since not Viet Vietnam is not bombing the United States the United States should not bomb not Vietnam the general impression that um I came away with and I think here I would speak for my colleague Bill bags was that we were dealing with the state department on a basis of what we have come to call fulbright's law never trust the state department bombing is going on in the south we haven't bombed anybody's Embassy in Hanoi but they've bombed our Embassy in Saigon arms continue to flow men continue to come we've tried in all over the Earth to find an answer to the question what else would stop if the bombing stopped the niceties of the argument about whether there are two vietnams or one Vietnam seem quite inconsequential when you're talking to hoi men it would seem incredible that this man does not speak for most of the Vietnamese not all but most and the idea that there could be some arbitrary Geographic dividing line that would cut off his influence has been proved an absurdity by the figure and determination of the National Liberation Front that fights in his name in the South my name is Olivia Todd I'm a journalist on the non-communist liberal leftwing French Pap observator I first went to South Vietnam when escalation started in 1965 and I first went to North Vietnam at the end of 1967 I'm Harrison Salsbury of the New York Times U assistant managing edits I'm father Daniel beran uh I'm working here at Cornell teaching and helping with the peace movement it's about 1 month since I was in North Vietnam on a project to get the three American Flyers out at the time I went to North Vietnam the communic cas which were being issued by Washington in particular about the American bombing raids on the North gave the impression although they did not say so specifically that we were not killing civilians in any substantial numbers at least in the course of our very heavy bombing offensive uh indeed President Johnson himself said that the targets were Ste and concrete I think almost anyone familiar with war would have been somewhat skeptical of the ability to bomb with such precision and indeed when I got on the spot in North Vietnam I discovered of course that while the bombs presumably had been aimed toward military objectives as best the aviators could aim them they indeed did Kill many civilians demolished large areas of Civilian housing before I left for North Vietnam I was under the impression that it was a small country that was just sort of vaguely fighting back but after seeing many battles against American planes from the banks of the Red River I changed my opinions completely the anti-aircraft in North Vietnam in certain pack pockets as the American Pilots say is absolutely formidable it's a sort of four level Affair you have uh people equipped with submachine guns and rifles shooting at a first level forcing the planes to go up to a second level where there they come Against the Machine Guns a lot of them being Chinese and then they're forced up to a third level which is that of the ordinary guns most of them I would say Russian and after that they go up to a level where they meet the Sams and I would been told these Sams were Antiquated well in fact they're not they're formative powerful during one week in October I saw at least 11 planes in 5 days being shot by the North Vietnamese anti-aircraft defense when you walk about the streets of Hanoi you are struck by the fact that you constantly see civilians going about in trucks uh with guns in their arms or even walking down the streets with guns St to their back it's unusual to see so many people with guns in their hands and it's most unusual to see this in a time in this country one evening on the road to Hong we were bombed 300 yard from where we were and with my interpreter we immediately went uh onto the side road I was very frightened I was terribly frightened but as soon as we bumped into a Machine Gun Nest fear disappeared and the government has understood this and I think this is one of the reasons why it has armed most of the population we went into the countryside and we saw great evidence in the cities as well that the people are generally armed the civilian militia is very large the women share for instance the burden of anti-aircraft gunfire defense of the city we saw large numbers of men and women on the roofs of buildings preparing uh in the early stages of air alarms for the B bombardment itself and they said to us quite openly on several occasions look one of the most practical evidences of the truth that this government speaks for us is that the government has armed us to the point where if we wanted we could bring the government down in a day and they themselves know this at the time that I was in North Vietnam there obviously had not been any breaking of the morale of the people either in the cities or as far as I could observe out in The Villages although they had been subjected to an extremely heavy bombardment at that time it was reaching the levels of World War II and of course since that time has been much much strengthened the people of North Vietnam are young for the most part and the war effort is largely on the backs of teenagers not because they're running out of Manpower but because this is is a young country there is nothing that has not been attacked there is no thread that has not been tried to be burned or frayed or broken by us and yet none of it has happened or it's been repaired in the night altogether I think one can say objectively that there isn't a town left standing apart from Hong and Hanoi so that there are hospitals there are schools there are there is a trusted government and there are there there are political leaders whom they don't hesitate to call loved and admired which is to say the war is not working it's a very simple judgment too simple for the complexities of our power uh perhaps in a deeper spiritual sense too too tough to face because it means the end of the giant it means the last days of Superman it means that for those with the capacity of Overkill kill is not enough um the real thing required is to live in the real world as berer says it is to be able to imagine the real world and imagine human beings and as long as the dinosaur couldn't do it he ended up on the museum shelf and as long as Superman can't do it he can Raven and Destroy but he cannot give life and he cannot even truly as we know so bitterly he cannot live himself the North Vietnamese always insist that they are winning this war that they are not simply resisting and when I talked to prime minister fandong he said we are not under bombing we are facing the bombs and at first I thought that this was mere propaganda but seeing the North Vietnamese fighting in the country and in the towns I think that psychologically it is true I was most interested to find that when I got to Hanoi the uh authorities uh put no restrictions on what I wanted to send out prime minister F vong has stressed in his talk with me the parallel between the ancient struggles of the Vietnamese people against the Chinese and Manu and the Mongols and their contemporary struggles for Independence which began of course under the French many years ago were continued without interruption through World War II then resumed again against the French and are now being carried on against the Americans prime minister fam Van Dun turned to me at one point and and said Mr Salsbury how long do you want to fight would you like to fight for 10 years 20 or 30 you pick the term of yours we're ready to accommodate you a rather bold statement and maybe it was had some bravado in it but this is again in accordance with the spirit of the Vietnamese people there's no one in that Society who doesn't remember hunger in his own Lifetime and it was interesting that from The Peasants to the young intellectuals when you pose the very same question that is to say what has the revolution meant first of all to you you'll get the same answer we now have enough to eat as simple as that so that when the North Vietnamese government makes it it's pledge of Honor that The Rice Bowl will be filled this is so great a thing that we can hardly conceive of it it just seems to be off our radar I I think you know for them the question is first of all a very very concrete one that statement is literally true and then again it it it begins to to move into the larger areas the the circumference of the bowl expands and and you knowe that the revolution has meant a passion for Education a passion for Grassroots involvement in their own future their own social structures their own politics and that at the other end of that power which they are trying to move upward after so many many years of colonial powerlessness at the other end of that power is standing a man who also has a rice bowl in his hand and whose poverty is equ equivalent whose power has not separated himself from the fate of the majority who can move in the same cheap cotton clothing and with dignity among them and whose power is not an inferior back room game or a game of marked cards under a table or a corrupt double talk such as we've gotten so used to in the in the chanceries of the West yet there is one light of Hope and this is that throughout Vietnamese history they had catastrophe they had Chinese Mongolians invasions where whole provinces were destroyed course you know you are not the first people who destroy villages in Vietnam unfortunately and so they are used to that and it's a great tradition that the village is not lost even when it disappears from the surface of the ground because the village is down below down below with the tradition down below with the people the ancestors who have made the country literally the country is handmade there is not one square foot I would say a square thumb of the earth that has not been built as it is by the peasantry in the past and this survives and when wear it after 100 years a village comes back the descendants of a village back to the Village they find the village and the village starts again [Music] [Applause] [Music] the for