The Vietnam War | Part 3 | Fallout & Recovery | Free Documentary History

[Music] the red is [Laughter] [Music] the vietnam war had already lasted for 13 years may 1968 saw the beginning of the paris peace talks the intention was to stop the fighting between north and south vietnam establish peace and remove the enormous american military presence america had supported the south vietnamese since 1955. presidents john f kennedy and lyndon johnson had escalated america's involvement in the war resulting in more than 500 000 troops in vietnam [Music] in january 1969 richard nixon became president and faced extreme hostility to a war that had raged for so long he assured the american public that he would withdraw the number of u.s troops considerably however he initiated a secret plan and within two months was bombing cambodia on september 2nd 1969 president ho chi minh hero of the revolution dies he had been the father figure of the national liberation front and had played an amazing game of bringing support from the soviet union whilst keeping china at bay in his quest to rid vietnam of the french and then the americans in 1969 ho chi minh died but the policy of hanoi stayed the same they were happy to sit around the table in paris but would essentially agree nothing when the truth is found nixon had campaigned under his banner of peace with honor which was the plan to build up the south vietnamese forces so that they could defend the south against the communist north or vietnamization us troops would be gradually removed the american life the last few years of the war was building up vietnamization they called vietnamization meant creating a south vietnamese army which was going to salvage south vietnam from the north vietnamese evil communists nixon comes to office he's pulling americans out and they're training up the south vietnamese to fight their own battle but a lot of these guys they consider the americans the really good enemy as much as the communist vietnamese do and they don't want to die fighting with their brothers so they're pretty incompetent a lot the south vietnamese army i thought the southern miss had behaved disgracefully during the war and then were treated disgracefully by the united states during the peace treaty i think the south vietnamese were exceptionally badly led from the time of dm onwards news broke out in november 1969 that there had been a massacre at the village of milai where more than 400 villagers had been slaughtered by lieutenant cali and his troops this village was not a stronghold of gorillas it was just an ordinary village there was a village nearby that was a stronghold of the viet cong but lieutenant cali who was in charge of the platoon couldn't read a map they went into this village essentially shot everybody they raped a lot of the young women and then killed them they threw one old man down at a well and dropped a grenadine after him eventually the survivors were herded up into a drainage ditch and everyone just emptied their gun into the pile of bodies there when you put young men in harm's way they lose control they shoot everything anything that moves you know um and then you run at the guys like lieutenant cali who were psychopaths i'd venture to say there were 50 my lies that we never heard about [Music] kelly was sentenced to life he served i think 18 months under house arrest before being discharged you know the americans can't be doing this land of the free and trying to free the south yet they can't be killing the people they're coming here to defend but i have to say that after a few years of being out there back and forth it was pretty commonplace one of the most decisive things that i can remember we met a colonel a very well-educated american he spoke ancient greek uh he got a business degree from harvard everywhere he went he took his thai chef and he took french wine everywhere he went it was just like a movie i mean so much of vietnam is like a movie we interviewed him then he said well gentlemen thank you very much i'm now off to kill kong i see you going on a mission sir he said no no every afternoon when there's nothing happening i get in my bell helicopter and i take my hunting rifle with me and i go and search for kong and if i see somebody in the fields i give him a little bit of a run and then i kill him there you go sarge and i said you identified him he said no no i just killed him so we said goodbye and on the way back to saigon i said to the pio the press information man a young young kid i said he was pulling my plunker wasn't he i mean he was pulling my leg he goes out and shoots kong in the afternoon oh yes sir he says he just takes his hunting rifle and i said with a man's man he's oh no sir not bad but uh you know when you live down there you've got to do something like that in your spare time other wise a man could go crazy thousands of demonstrators opposed to the vietnam war assembled in the nation's capital for a mass protest the paris peace talks are not moving forward with any sense of resolution the american public are disgusted that the cover-up of the milai massacre military police contain the crowd but clashes soon break out huge anti-war demonstrations converge on washington and outside american embassies in european cities the intense secret bombing of cambodia continues president nixon will soon be under even more pressure to end the war a small group of yepis seeking a confrontation marched at night on the south vietnamese embassy washington police used a tear gas to drive them away arrests were made president some americans believe this country is heading for revolution and others believe that crime and dissent and violent demonstrations are leading us to an era of repression this country's not headed for revolution the very fact that we do have the safety valves of the right to dissent the very fact that the president of the united states asked the district commissioners to waive their rule for 30 days notice for a demonstration that fact is an indication that when you have that kind of safety valve you're not going to have revolution which comes from repression as the hostilities in america continue soldiers in vietnam now have draftees amongst them many of whom are voicing their distrust of the war causing unrest in the ranks for my entire tour of duty and i think by and large all of my soldier colleagues felt we were wasting our time but we've been told to do it and we were soldiers and we were good soldiers and so we did it it's a very very very very desperate terrain there once you started to move north you became different of course you had mountains you had uh play cool central highlands but certainly in the south you had vast areas of paddy fields that you had to go through you know that's when you know a war is lost and you're still there you're sort of the the left behinds you have no enthusiasm or any verve because you know that the cause might have seemed appealing five years ago but it's it's gone so what what are you doing in the jungle which is why so many americans got hooked on drugs because there was no mental way out it just didn't make any sense the secrets of atrocities in vietnam and bombing in cambodia break in the press the u.s public is shocked and outraged takes hold [Music] when senate transcripts were made public news of increased u.s involvement in cambodia and laos surfaces this leads to more demonstrations across america when richard nixon announced that his troops were being committed to cambodia the anti-war movement was revived in america huge moratorium marches protesting against the war in cambodia spread to all parts of america and to other places such as australia in some cases the national guard fired on protesters tragedy strikes at kent university ohio in may 1970 several anti-war protesters held rocks at the national guard who opened fire on the crowd killing four students [Applause] now the parents of america are shocked these are nice middle class kids who are shot down by their own people congress gets up in arms and essentially stops funding the war they'll stop increasing the return of u.s troops from south vietnam [Applause] the vietnam war suffers decreasing support in the u.s president nixon is forced into eliminating the use of the draft with ongoing peace talks in paris stalling he introduces another peace plan with a continuing legacy of de-escalation there were fears this was leading to a wider conflict in indo-china the new president of north vietnam leduc though and henry kissinger begin secret talks in an attempt to resolve the situation the case talks were not very successful uh especially under nixon however it was clear that the war could not be ended finally without an agreement and during 1971 the u.s conceded it would not oppose a continuation of the north vietnamese troop presence in the south [Music] in 1971 the new york times publishes the pentagon papers this shows an incredible legacy of deception concerning u.s policy in vietnam president nixon appeals to the supreme court in an attempt to stop the publication of sensitive material however the court rules in favor of the new york times and allows continued publication under pressure from the democrats nixon changes his policy and orders the gradual reduction of 540 000 troops in vietnam what you had was the south vietnamese army essentially fighting backed by american air power and with some american advisers still there the next step was the 1972 north vietnamese offensive which led to a revival in some parts of south vietnam the nlf guerrilla war [Music] vietnamese communists mobilized and used tanks in a much in a conventional war style which they hadn't used before they drove across the demilitarized zone in into south vietnam from north vietnam they captured various towns in the saigon region particular place called an lock and the united states bombing of north vietnam indeed escalated through the year 1972 while the peace talks were going ahead we have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the south vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all u.s combat ground forces president nixon addresses the american public about withdrawing all u.s troops and therefore all involvement with the war in vietnam ongoing secret peace talks are revealed however nixon cannot stop himself from making more onslaughts in cambodia [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] he also wants to force the hand of the north vietnamese to make concessions in these talks so he orders the bombing of fuel storage areas near hanoi and haifang the administration makes it clear to the north vietnamese that no area of vietnam is off limits to bombing raids nixon everything often stopped the bombing of the north to try and encourage them to say something and when they didn't he started bombing them even more and in fact hanoi and haifal and they even mined the harbour at high phone to prevent supplies getting in the famous incident of kim fook the little girl whose picture of her back burning with napalm running naked down the street that was um that was about 45 minutes out of saigon you felt the war you could you could hear the bombing there were rockets coming into saigon from time to time you'd wake up in the middle of the night and it would be a shuddering blast nap farming a village i mean to see a village suddenly destroyed in front of you by a simple napalm bomb it's a pretty devastating thing to watch well a few weeks after i got into the country into my unit up in the side of a mountain we got bushwhacked and the ambush came from above and by the time everything was sorted out a super saber the f-100 came clambering up the valley and dropped its payload up above us and it was napalm and it was you know red fire and black smoke just like in the various orphans you see it was far away not to get singed by it but you could certainly feel the atmosphere change was born henry kissinger and leduc though reach an agreement in principle on various key measures leading to a ceasefire in vietnam however the south vietnamese president chu refuses to agree saying the war in the south is still ongoing president nixon has a bit of a problem because he's coming out to face a new election and he'd promised peace with order and hadn't delivered it um so there's great pressure on him and his national security advisers henrik kissinger to get some peace agreement at this point the communist government in hanoi probably seeing the possibility of an agreement before the election dropped its demand that the two government be replaced and this meant that an agreement was possible and this was announced in october of 1972 its people have suffered much and they will remain there after relief we believe [Music] the americans just wanted to be out of the war and they were finding uh any any way of doing it and peace with honor as they call it they want to get the american army out of south vietnam and then the south vietnamese government will fall then the communists will take over they knew it was going to happen it was just they didn't want it to happen the day after they left the deal that president chu wanted when it was clear that the americans were going to cut a deal with the north vietnamese which would bring the american prisoners back home as well which was a huge issue in america was that president you see that it was very bad deal for south vietnam because he wanted a deal whereby the north vietnamese troops would withdraw and that was the deal that the americans couldn't make the north vietnamese agree to so they put pressure on president xu to sign up to this peace agreement which he did very reluctantly we have ended the longest and most difficult war in our history in a way that maintain the trust of our allies and the respect of our adversaries president chu is finally forced into signing with promises of aid against any further aggression from the north the ceasefire is signed on january 28 1973 then the u.s troops withdrew the north vietnamese handed over the 500 or more prisoners of war who had been held in the north mostly pilots shot down there and the agreement went ahead between hanoi and the united states for the americans the war was over they got their prisoners home they had lost 55 000 americans out of that 55 000 half of them were 17 or 18 year olds it had been a traumatic experience for america so they just wanted to get out when the war ended in 1973 591 prisoners were returned this was only about 12 percent of those requested by the u.s what happened to the other 3109 that were asked for henry kissinger sent a secret letter to the north vietnamese prime minister that the u.s was willing to pay 3.2 billion dollars for the return of the remaining prisoners of war the u.s senate voted against it america i felt just wanted to forget in a way vietnam existed after the signing of the paris police agreement and fighting continued for south vietnamese in south vietnam and a thousand vietnamese were dying a week so in a year's casualties were more than the americans suffered in the entire war the last american combat soldiers leave south vietnam though the military advisors and marines protecting u.s installations remain the u.s draft program is closed [Applause] the nobel peace prize is given to kissinger and leduc though however the north vietnamese president does not accept it as peace has not arrived in vietnam the north is still attacking the south [Music] in america president nixon faces his own crisis in june 1972 a story in the washington post had reported that burglars had been arrested inside the office of the democratic national committee in the watergate complex in washington the reporters woodward and bernstein would investigate the story until they found evidence that a 25 000 check from nixon's re-election campaign had been given to one of the burglars i believe that most anyone who worked at the white house during the past four years can attest to the concern that prevailed regarding any and all leaks the full story of nixon's aides became a huge political scandal they had been running an election campaign employing spying and sabotage i think it is time in this country to quit making national heroes out of those who steal secrets and publish them in the newspapers however more secrets are revealed which will make nixon's presidency untenable in 1974 president chu announces resumption of war against the north vietnamese who have been encroaching on the south in violation of the peace treaty weakened by wave after wave of air attacks from america since 1969 neighboring cambodia is vulnerable to its own rising threat the khmer rouge cambodia is a case completely apart i mean it's never been equal in modern times because it was an attempt by a small country of cambodian communist leaders to turn it into a utopian agrarian society and destroying all of its connections with the outside world once the americans pulled out the comments took over in laos and then the kamehameha rouge who were only a handful of communist guerillas and they're managed to force out the compromised and weakened cambodian and government ending in what two million dead the fallout from the watergate scandal ultimately forces nixon to resign from the presidency before being impeached in leaving it i do so with this prayer may god's grace be with you in all the days ahead [Music] in august 1974 gerald ford jr becomes the 38th president with american troops out of vietnam the press report events there less and less the public has lost interest in the war the vietnam war and it didn't concern americans particularly after all the coverage it had gotten for 10 years um it wasn't that big a story i was on the telex with a foreign editor in new york and i said i'm catching a flight into saigon tomorrow and he said are you volunteering to go to vietnam i don't quite understand what was going on i said i'm booked i'm going in tomorrow i said you're volunteering to go and it's kind of i finally caught on what he was doing was establishing on paper that i was volunteering to go to vietnam that i was not being assigned to go to vietnam so that whatever happened hey he volunteered we didn't make him go we didn't even ask him to go we didn't even suggest that he should go you know how dangerous it is do you uh really want to go are you volunteering so it just went on like that so i kept and eventually i said yeah i'm volunteering i'm what am i in vietnam president chu makes a mistake and withdraws all his troops from the north causing mass panic it's not long before the vietcong communists lay siege to the province just north of saigon there is no response from america the viet cong move in on hui and take the city just a few minutes ago we had confirmation that the city of way had fallen to the communists it looks very much as if the north vietnamese up there allowed these troops and these people to leave the beaches without firing on them giving them a chance to get away before entering the city the north vietnamese gradually built up strength and decided that they would go for broke that the americans were not going to intervene so they launched a lightning offensive and swept up the country taking over provincial terms north of saigon early monday morning a viet cong sapper unit probably no more than 20 or 30 men and women attacked and set fire to an american usaid installation closing the bridge and highway one the south vietnamese army simply cannot hold the line against the north vietnamese who are professional and dedicated well-trained soldiers congress is now trying to wash its hands of the whole thing and is cutting back budget for aid to to the south vietnamese so they've been restricted with their armaments they're getting nothing at all president chu made a huge strategic blunder in withdrawing the remnants of the south vietnamese army from these threatened northern areas and to bring them around to saigon to protect saigon which the result was that the rest of the country fell completely into the communist hands and then it was just a matter of time really president chu resigns reluctantly stating that in the end the south vietnamese had been let down by the americans the north vietnamese army seized the opportunity and closed in on saigon america needed to get as many of its remaining people out from the embassy sending in all available helicopters the vietnamese also sensed the communist advance was close and were desperate to flee panic engulfed saigon i'll tell you one thing which was really interesting which i don't think it's been reported that much in the big parking lot of the embassy there was a beautiful tree and the ambassador graham martin refused to cut down the tree the cia was going to him and saying cut down that tree because this is where the helicopters are going to land will have to land and martin refused the docks on tuesday morning were crammed with thousands of vietnamese desperate to escape from saigon by any means possible i remember filming in saigon where mothers were throwing their babies to strangers on the ship literally throwing them like a bit of like a parcel say save my babies throwing their babies on board you saw soldiers stripping off their uniforms and fighting almost naked to get on boats many people died because their flimsy craft had sunk they were often overloaded they were attacked by pirates who raped and killed and it was a general disaster the americans actually sent some aircraft in to airlift their own vietnamese employees out of their embassies now we had been told by the cia we expect to evacuate within the next 24 hours 36 hours what we don't want is for you guys to panic so we've arranged there'll be a signal broadcast by afn the american forces network they said it'll be bing crosby singing white christmas you imagine it's 115 degrees outside could you think of anything so incredible that bing crosby singing i'm dreaming of a white christmas would be the signal that the evacuation had begun and when they told us in advance a couple of days in advance that this would be it we thought they were joking by that time the embassy is surrounded by thousands of vietnamese all trying to get into the compound and we really had to fight and claw our way through this card to get to the wall people lorries and cars all chasing one american evacuation convoy after the other jams that the vietnamese police tried to clear with their rifles but people were no longer afraid of them there was now so much more to be afraid of when we finally got to the wall marines had to really reach down and pull us up and then you know we see we're being pulled up but all the people around us including lovely kids were not being pulled up but then suddenly we too of 40 or 50 of us in the safety of the coaches had to get out and fight our way to the american compound where the helicopters were landing to fly us in the thousands more out of the country and you had pictures movie pictures of of the americans on the plane punching actually punching people off and you had helicopters flying off with people hanging on the skids and then dropping off they were so desperate to escape we did find we did claw i remember saying in my commentary that we went i wasn't proud of what i did that day but we got to the wall and and the marines were pulling us up punching the vietnamese and pulling us up over the the top he hauled us up kicking and punching vietnamese who were clambering over our bodies [Music] ashamed and exhausted who took our turn in the long crowd of refugees inside the embassy compound and waited for the helicopters to come down for us i've been doing this for 48 years and i think that's number one on my list the last day of saigon the americans losing their first war leaving from the american embassy to go to a ship in the south china sea that was an admission of defeat in the helicopter that took us out it was open in the rear and i was just lying down on my stomach looking out the uh back of the helicopter saying goodbye to saigon and for me i think for all of us who are there and not meaning any disrespect it'll never be ho chi minh city in psycho [Music] 20 years since america first began financing the south vietnamese it was finally out of vietnam in the desperation to get as many people to safety the carriers at sea struggled to cope with the mass of fleeing people the carriers were so full of helicopters they were having to push helicopters that were very expensive over the side so others could land [Music] in the general chaos of the situation the americans did not burn the files secret files in the embassy so when when the north vietnamese army turned up the communists knew exactly who had been working for the americans and of course these people if they weren't killed were sent to re-education camps a former general called big men became president and the communists knew that there was nothing stopping them they were militarily superior the americans weren't going to intervene to stop them taking saigon and they just rolled on relentlessly when a tank turns up at the government house in in saigon it's all over the new interim president is told you can't surrender what you don't have he didn't have any power i didn't have any drinks so it's it's just all over the communist side wins it's a victory for the north vietnam the democratic republic along with its fighters in the south and for a year or so you have the two countries continue to exist side by side in 1976 the countries emerged in to form the socialist republic one country the culmination really of what ho chi minh and the other nationalists had been calling for fighting for ever since 1945 the new socialist republic of vietnam is declared with its new capital in hanoi and saigon is renamed ho chi minh city a very harsh period then happened in south vietnam soldiers ended up in re-education camps all over the country and taken up to north vietnam and put into camps many of them died they tried to impose a hard-line socialist stalinist economic methods on the south and the result is almost starvation when the camaros attack our provinces in the west my heart is with my country and i wrote article they found that in that article there was some kind of fire in there some kind of love in there and they took me the communist took me a decide and they asked me to spy on my colleagues and i cannot do with that and i started to think of running away [Applause] in america jimmy carter is elected president and issues a pardon to all the draft dodgers in 1978 the socialist republic of vietnam invades cambodia and defeats the khmer rouge forcing them back into their jungle refuges on the laos border [Music] the outside world whether it be the united states and europe is fearful of what vietnam intends to do in southeast asia and so they actually condemn and impose sanctions on the vietnamese for getting rid of the khmer rouge china decides to invade vietnam and takes border cities giving the warning the gate to hanoi is open the vietnamese put up a very stirring defense and gave the chinese a bit of a bloody nose and so vietnam is almost completely isolated internationally it's only friends really the soviet union and the soviet bloc from 1979 you know right the way through the 1980s this is a very very tough time in vietnam the ravages of war have destroyed the agricultural base of these societies entire villages have been decimated people forced to abandon their lands from being net exporters of rice many regions of southeast asia have become net importers the pride of self-sufficiency is gone what is left for millions of people is dependency on aid from the outside and the long search for a new life many were desperate to escape the communist government and the terrible conditions they were forced to endure many vietnamese tried to flee on mass in heavily overcrowded boats i pretend to be a chinese i pay the gold to chinese boot master so we treat myself my wife and my baby we went down to the mekong river delta our wooden boat is about 25 meter long it got 650 something people so even when it was still not moving yet people in the booth started to suffer already because we did not have enough air to breathe we were in the sea for just two days when the engine got into trouble every light gone out and in the dark you can hear everyone prayer i put my wife and my daughter in the very dangerous situation but it's too late and i i curse myself the british commercial ship passed by the wife of the captain asked to return to pick us because she saw people from our ship we were lucky and then the ship took all of us to hungary all of us were put into the prison we were there for four weeks at the end we signed a paper with the iocm to borrow from them the money to get these one way tickets from hong kong to england for those vietnamese who didn't get out of vietnam the extremely difficult times continued the report on the devastating effects of agent orange is revealed both in vietnam and to the us veterans involved in the deployment of the toxic mix [Music] [Music] some of the most beautiful countryside in the world was just a desert there were bomb craters where they should have been fields agent orange was causing all sorts of birth defects in children i don't think that when the americans were defoliating areas of vietnam they were intending to leave a long lasting injuries in terms of future generations were going to be malformed as a result of these dioxins these chemicals which have been dropped on them that really wasn't the intention but that in certain parts of vietnam is what has happened paul reuterson had been in contact with agent orange in the vietnam war shortly before his death from abdominal cancer in december 1978 he founded agent orange victims international which fought for compensation for u.s soldiers filing multiple lawsuits against the six chemical companies in the us that produced agent orange most significantly dao and monsanto the class action case was settled in 1984 for 180 million dollars of the 105 000 claims approximately 52 000 vietnam veterans or their survivors received cash payments which average only 3 800 each in 1982 as a tribute to the thousands of u.s soldiers who died in vietnam a veterans memorial opened in washington however the vietnam veterans who survived have never been given the support they deserve after the takeover of the communists vietnam was left with a legacy of extreme war damage unexploded bombs and an impoverished economy america dropped 7.8 million tons of bombs on vietnam more than it unleashed on germany and japan combined we were back there for one of their independence days they had this communist parade down the main street of saigon up to the presidential palace [ __ ] and the others were there the old soldiers the old liberators and when you were on a tight shot you're on them when you widened up behind them on the roofs of buildings or advertisements for sony and sanyo and toyota so communism who won the war there were always were coffee plantations in south vietnam in the central highlands the french had them but the vietnamese did get all the land and build up these coffee plantations vietnam has become the world's second largest coffee producer it took most of the 1980s for the vietnamese to extricate themselves from cambodia re-negotiating their relations with the outside world by gradually allowing more and more freedom at the local economic level the country was able to to feed itself again and get to the position where vietnam is the second largest rice exporter in the world [Music] in recent years vietnam has become one of the fastest growing global economies it is a significant agricultural exporter the third largest oil producer in asia and an important manufacturer of textiles clothing and computer and mobile phone components estimates of its population exceed 92 million even now vietnam remains a communist country despite all the trappings of motorbikes and advertising and all that sort of thing that you see the communist party is still in charge of the organization of the economy and it still sees a big role for the state and it has big agricultural enterprises vietnam has become actually quite successful but there is still a lot of press censorship quite a lot of repression if you get out of line but it's also the economy of south vietnam has been helped by a return of south vietnamese boat people who've gone to america for example so many of the vietnamese who've come to the states have done so well and it was predictable and these weren't the rich vietnamese who who managed to get out six months before the end of the war these were boat people who are now doing so well in this country and have been doing so well in this country for a couple of decades now and they've gone back home to south vietnam and set up businesses there so the country is quite dependent on an enormous amount of money that comes in from the vietnamese diaspora the vietnam we knew during the war had a lot more um reality to it saigon itself has changed enormously a lot of the old french buildings have been torn down and buildings are high rises with marble and glass and louis vuitton shops and prada shops if i asked myself i said you know is this really what these vietnamese communists were fighting for there's no question that as soon as the war was over they began building an economy and look at vietnam today knowing that you lied spake face while i cried still i'd look to find the reason to believe [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Free Documentary - History

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Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, Free Documentary History, History Documentary, The Vietnam War, Vietnam War, Vietnam War Documentary, Vietnam, Viet Cong, US Army Documentary, Saigon, Ho Chi Minh, Indochina, Indochina Documentary, Hanoi, Lê Duẩn, Fall of Saigon, Last Days in Vietnam, Richard Nixon, Watergate, Communism, Cold War, Cold War Documentary, My Lai Massacre, William Calley

Id: aiRo-yHAmOQ

Length: 44min 42sec (2682 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 24 2022