The Man in the Net

MAJOR SUPPORT FOR "THE VIETNAM WAR"

WAS PROVIDED BY MEMBERS OF THE BETTER ANGELS SOCIETY,

INCLUDING JONATHAN AND JEANNIE LAVINE,

DIANE AND HAL BRIERLEY,

AMY AND DAVID ABRAMS,

JOHN AND CATHERINE DEBS,

THE FULLERTON FAMILY CHARITABLE FUND,

THE MONTRONE FAMILY,

LYNDA AND STEWART RESNICK,

THE PERRY AND DONNA GOLKIN FAMILY FOUNDATION,

THE LYNCH FOUNDATION,

THE ROGER AND ROSEMARY ENRICO FOUNDATION,

AND BY THESE ADDITIONAL FUNDERS.

MAJOR FUNDING WAS ALSO PROVIDED

BY DAVID H. KOCH...

THE BLAVATNIK FAMILY FOUNDATION...

THE PARK FOUNDATION,

THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES,

THE PEW CHARITABLE TRUSTS,

THE JOHN S. AND JAMES L. KNIGHT FOUNDATION,

THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION,

THE ARTHUR VINING DAVIS FOUNDATIONS,

THE FORD FOUNDATION JUSTFILMS,

BY THE CORPORATION

FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING,

AND BY VIEWERS LIKE YOU.

THANK YOU.

BANK OF AMERICA PROUDLY SUPPORTS

KEN BURNS' AND LYNN NOVICK'S FILM "THE VIETNAM WAR"

BECAUSE FOSTERING DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES

AND CIVIL DISCOURSE AROUND IMPORTANT ISSUES

FURTHERS PROGRESS, EQUALITY,

AND A MORE CONNECTED SOCIETY.

(helicopter blades beating, indistinct voices)

Coming home from Vietnam

was close to as traumatic as the war itself.

For years, nobody talked about Vietnam.

We were friends with a young couple

and it was only after 12 years that the two wives were talking.

Found out that we both had been Marines in Vietnam.

Never said a word about it.

Never mentioned it.

And the whole country was like that.

It was so divisive.

And it's like living in a family with an alcoholic father.

: "Shh, we don't talk about that."

Our country did that with Vietnam.

It's only been very recently that, I think,

that, you know, the baby boomers are finally starting to say,

"What happened?

What happened?"

("A Familiar Taste" by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross playing)

What we need now in this country

is to heal the wounds and to put Vietnam behind us.

The killing

in this tragic war must stop.

General Westmoreland's strategy

is producing results.

The enemy is no longer closer to victory.

ROBERT McNAMARA: No matter how you measure it,

we're better off than we thought we would be at this time.

You have been less than candid

as to how deeply we are involved in Vietnam.

We have increased our assistance

to the government, its logistics.

We have not sent combat troops there.

You have a row of dominoes set up

and you knock over the first one

and the last one, certainly it will go over.

If aggression is successful in Korea,

we can expect it to spread throughout Asia and Europe

and to this hemisphere.

("A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" by Bob Dylan playing)

Viktor Frankl, who survived the death camps in World War II,

wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning.

You know, "To live is to suffer.

To survive is to find meaning in suffering."

And for those of us who suffered because of Vietnam,

that's been our quest ever since.

America's involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy.

It ended, 30 years later, in failure,

witnessed by the entire world.

It was begun in good faith by decent people

out of fateful misunderstandings,

American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation.

And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through

than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions,

made by five American presidents,

belonging to both political parties.

Before the war was over,

more than 58,000 Americans would be dead.

At least 250,000 South Vietnamese troops died

in the conflict, as well.

So did over a million North Vietnamese soldiers

and Viet Cong guerrillas.

Two million civilians, north and south,

are thought to have perished,

as well as tens of thousands more in the neighboring states

of Laos and Cambodia.

For many Vietnamese, it was a brutal civil war;

for others, the bloody climactic chapter

in a century-old struggle for independence.

For those Americans who fought in it,

and for those who fought against it back home,

as well as for those who merely glimpsed it on the nightly news,

the Vietnam War was a decade of agony,

the most divisive period since the Civil War.

Vietnam seemed to call everything into question...

the value of honor and gallantry;

the qualities of cruelty and mercy;

the candor of the American government;

and what it means to be a patriot.

And those who lived through it

have never been able to erase its memory,

have never stopped arguing about what really happened,

why everything went so badly wrong, who was to blame,

and whether it was all worth it.

(Silk Road Ensemble playing "People and Fighters Unite")

The French conquest of Indochina began with an attack

on the ancient Vietnamese port of Danang in 1858.

It took 50 years to lay claim to the whole region...

Laos and Cambodia, as well as the 1,200-mile-long area

that would come to be called Vietnam.

All of it was ruled by a French governor-general

from his palace in Hanoi.

The French largely lived on plantation estates,

and in cities, like Saigon, made to look as much as possible

like those at home.

Most did not even bother to learn the language

spoken by their subjects.

Instead they installed a series of puppet emperors

and employed a network

of French-speaking Vietnamese officials... mandarins...

willing to carry out their wishes.

The French put their subjects to work building roads and canals,

railroads and bridges.

The Vietnamese people did not take easily

to French occupation,

just as they had fought against earlier invasions

by the Chinese.

By the early 20th century, nationalism was on the rise.

But anyone who dared resist colonial rule risked exile,

prison, or the guillotine.

TRAN NGOC TOAN (speaking English):

My hatred for them was pure.

Pure.

I hated them so much.

And I was so scared of them.

Boy, I was terrified of them.

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

I was an 18-year-old Marine rifleman with the ink still wet

on my high school diploma.

I didn't want to shame myself in front of my buddies.

But I was so scared.

I felt like I was hanging onto my honor by my fingernails

the whole time I was there.

In the spring of 1919,

as the victorious Allied Powers met in Paris

to rebuild a world shattered by the Great War,

President Woodrow Wilson headed the American delegation

housed in the Hotel Crillon.

One day, a tall, slender, 29-nine-year-old man

appeared with a petition for the president

he and other Vietnamese nationalists had written.

Inspired by Wilson's declaration

that the interests of colonial peoples should be given

equal weight with those of their European rulers,

the man was asking that this principle be applied

to his homeland.

The president's secretary promised to show it to Wilson,

but there is no evidence that he ever did.

His name was Nguyen Tat Thanh,

but he was now living under an alias, Nguyen Ai Quoc...

"Nguyen the Patriot."