A WAR WE’D NEVER WIN
Ken Burns’ 18-hour documentary on fear, futility & politics of Vietnam
AWAR that is never formally declared, that is fought on the other side of the world, largely by our minorities and poor — who are sent into battle by rich white men who’d dodged combat or never served — in hostile, unfamiliar terrain where our full military might means nothing and where they are humbled by dug-in natives who fight from caves and tunnels and vow to carry on until we leave. And even as we fail and can no longer articulate an end goal, presidents from both parties send more and more soldiers to fight and die, over decades, rather than admit defeat. Sound familiar? There are many reasons we’ve never gotten over Vietnam: To really examine that war is to admit that America isn’t always right or good and, in fact, is capable of great brutality for self-serving reasons. Vietnam was our nation’s first global humiliation. The ugly treatment our Vietnam veterans were given by their fellow Americans upon returning home and the resulting alienation of those veterans led to an epic schism in the American psyche, one that’s never even begun to heal.
For all the Hollywood movies made about that war, Vietnam has remained a largely unexplained and misunderstood era in American history. And we know what they say about those who don’t understand history.
Today, nearly 16 years after the US invaded Afghanistan and 14 years after Iraq, the original sin of that war has never been more with us. To watch Ken Burns’ 18-hour documentary, “The Vietnam War,” premiering Sunday on PBS, is to finally experience and confront Vietnam. Never before has so much combat footage been so carefully and vividly assembled. Never before have so many veterans of that war spoken so plainly of the atrocities they suffered and inflicted — and it’s clear that what they’re willing to share is a fraction of what actually happened.
Never before have so many brave and exceptional veterans admitted how terrified they were, just boys barely out of high school sent to fight and die for reasons they could never understand. It’s often extremely hard, emotional viewing. Every American should watch it.
“We were probably the last kids of any generation that actually believed our government would never lie to us,” says vet John Musgrave, of Missouri, in Episode 2.
If there’s one terrible gift the Vietnam War gave us, it’s that.
‘WE DON’T HAVE A PRAYER”
Most people probably don’t realize our involvement in Vietnam began in 1954, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower secretly sent 12 US Air Force planes and 24 pilots to assist the French, who’d colonized parts of Vietnam in 1887 and were a year out from being expelled.
In the early days of the Cold War, with South Vietnam a burgeoning republic and the North a growing communist stronghold, our soft presence in Vietnam was successfully sold as insurance against “the domino effect” — the spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia.
In private, however, every American president who prosecuted and escalated this war would contemporaneously admit it was an epic failure with no hope of victory. In conversations recorded for history and heard in Burns’ documentary, the cynicism remains astonishing. It’s worse when juxtaposed with the testimonials of those soldiers who came back.
In May 1961, President John F. Kennedy intensified US presence from an advisory role to a military one, sending 400 Special Forces to train the South Vietnamese. By October of that year, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara advised Kennedy to send 200,000 troops.
“We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam,” Kennedy confided to a friend in April 1963. “Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point. But I can’t give up that territory to the communists and get the American people to re-elect me.”
On Labor Day 1963, Kennedy sat for an interview with Walter Cronkite. “It’s their war,” Kennedy said, “but we shouldn’t withdraw.”
Two months later, Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon B. Johnson took office. By May 1964, he privately reached the same conclusion Kennedy had.
In a recorded phone conversation with McGeorge Bundy, his special assistant for national security affairs, Johnson said of Vietnam, “I don’t think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess that I ever saw ... I just thought about ordering all those kids in there. And what in the hell am I ordering them out there for? What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country?”
Three months after that conversation, on Aug. 5, 1964, US Navy pilot Lt. Everett Alvarez Jr. was shot down in a post-Gulf of Tonkin operation and captured by the North Vietnamese. Alvarez was told thatt because the United States had never formally declared war, he was technically not a prisoner of war and they would not be abiding by the Geneva Convention. “You know what?” Alvarez thought to himself. “You’re right.” He tells us just some of the torture he endured over his 8 ¹ /2 years in captivity.
“My arms turned black . . . and they didn’t let me die. They just kept [up] the pain.”
By now, the US had executed Operation Rolling Thunder, an aerial bombardment of the North. Johnson also sent 50,000 ground troops to Vietnam, guaranteeing another 50,000 by year’s end. This was all done without consulting the South Vietnamese and without telling the American people.
In a memo dated March 24, 1965, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton writes to his
boss, McNamara, that America’s end goal is “70 percent” to avoid humiliation. Veterans would learn of this betrayal upon the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times in 1971.
“You read that McNamara knew by ’65, just three years before I was there, that the war was unwinnable,” says Karl Marlantes, who served in the Marines. His tone is measured, his eyes dulled by decades of righteous rage. These decisions, he notes, were not mistakes “made with noble hearts . . . You’re just killing people for your own ego. ”
‘IHATED THEM SO MUCH. AND I WAS SO SCARED OF THEM.’ As American losses piled up — by the end of 1965, nearly 2,000 troops had been killed in combat — Gen. William Westmoreland in- sisted he could win the war. He just needed more troops.
Every soldier on the ground knew different. They had encountered a tenacious enemy in exceptional terrain: triple-canopied jungles filled with disease-bearing animals, Viet Cong hiding in caves and moving through linked tunnels, tracking unwitting American soldiers by their cigarette butts; bamboo so tall and thick — “three times the size of a man,” one veteran says — it could take hours to cover a quarter of a mile; monsoons that left the ground so sticky that soldiers couldn’t run in combat boots; the lack of fast and lethal weaponry.
“The M16 was a piece of s--t,” Musgrave says in the documentary. The rifle would jam and need to be cleaned in the middle of firefights, which officials back in DC didn’t seem to care about or realize. Nor were they concerned with what was happening to these troops psychologically, being ordered into the field as bait to draw gunfire or to burn the homes of civilians, killing children and babies, having to somehow live with what they’d done.
“My hatred for [the Viet Cong] was pure,” Musgrave says. “I hated them so much. And I was so scared of them. Boy was I terrified of them.” To cope with the guilt of his first kill, Musgrave thought of the Vietnamese as the military trained him: gooks. Gooks were animals.
We also meet Denton Crocker Jr., an idealistic teen from upstate Saratoga Springs, who begged his parents to let him enlist. Crocker — known to his family as “Mogie” — became a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne. In letters home, he reassured his family he was fine. In a letter to a high-school friend, he was more truthful. Crocker admitted his worst experience “was being pinned down by two Chinese light machine guns firing 900 rounds per minute and having my best friend killed more or less beside me.” Crocker was killed in action on June 4, 1966, one day after his 19th birthday.
By mid-1966, nearly 500,000 American troops were in Vietnam, and at this point in the documentary, as a viewer, it’s impossible to figure out why we were ever there. It is pointless carnage on an epic scale, and to Burns’ credit, he includes the testimony of Vietnamese on both sides of the war.
“Americans tend to talk about Vietnam — when they talk about it, they only refer to themselves,” Burns told the Los Angeles Times last week.
“We thought it would be more helpful to understand a better di- mensional portrait with perspective . . . told within the relationship to an American narrative.”
By the time North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive in January 1968 — basically an attempt to take over the country — we see men and women cradling their burned and dead babies, crouching behind cars amid endless gunfire. Meanwhile, Marines were getting slaughtered, the US was meddling in South Vietnam’s election, and LBJ called anti-war protesters at home “mentally disabled.” Speaking to Jack Horner of The Washington Star, Johnson told him that the press was lying, that the war was going well and that a devastating attack on the US Embassy in Saigon was “a major dramatic victory.”
One Marine and four Army military police were killed in that attack, while Viet Cong assassination squads roamed through Saigon, indiscriminately killing soldiers and civilians alike.
‘WE ARE IN A WAR WE CANNOT WIN”
In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, Cronkite aired a special report. “To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence the optimists who have been wrong in the past,” he said on Feb. 27, 1968. “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.”
The apocryphal story has Johnson watching live in the White House, turning to an adviser and saying, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced he would not run for re-election that November, although he spent the rest of his term ignoring advice from Cabinet members — including Clark Clifford, his new secretary of defense.
“We are in a war we cannot win,” Clifford told Johnson. The president, now stuck in a feedback loop of perpetual near-victory, disagreed.
The US would fight in Vietnam another seven years, the war finally ending on April 30, 1975. According to the National Archives, 58,220 Americans were killed there. It’s believed 304,000 were wounded.
Matt Harrison, who fought in the Battle of Dak To, believes that little-known episode was a microcosm of the entire war: He and his men were ordered to take what the US called Hill 875.
“There was no reason to take that hill,” Harrison says. “I doubt there’s been an American on that hill since November 23, [1967]. We accomplished nothing.”