This is actually very real.
A lot of the frustration that American soldiers
experience in Vietnam when they're on patrol
is they get hit, but they cannot see the enemy.
My name is Bill Allison.
I'm a professor of history at Georgia Southern University.
I've been a battlefield tour guide in Vietnam,
and also I've written several books on the Vietnam War,
including one on the Mỹ Lai massacre.
I'm back to look at some more Vietnam War movies
and judge how real they are.
So, this is depicting the 101st Airborne Division's assault
on Hill 937 in the A Sầu Valley in 1969.
Became known as Hamburger Hill.
Now, the problem with this particular hill
is it's pretty steep.
And because of its steepness
and that the PAVN guys
are well entrenched on the top and dug in
and also along the edges of it on the slopes,
it made it difficult for aircraft to get in and hit it.
Now, the strategic value of the hill itself,
it's not the physical hill.
It is the fact that that PAVN regiment is on it.
One of the strategies employed in the war
by MACV, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam,
was body count, attrition.
"The more we kill of them, the better."
Attrition was just one
of several strategic approaches we employed.
Pacification was one.
Actually, this is very akin to a World War I battle
with entrenched positions.
They've got machine guns set up.
They've also, of course, because they're already up there
and dug in, they've got mortar sites pre-sighted.
So as the airborne guys are coming up the hill,
they're getting popped
because they're in places that have been pre-sighted.
Booby traps are synonymous with Vietnam.
The VC, the Viet Cong, especially used them
all across South Vietnam in areas where they knew American
or ARVN soldiers might be patrolling.
One of the most gruesome ones is this —
they dig a hole and they put in two rotors
with punji stakes in it.
And as your leg, your foot goes down in it,
it rolls down and it chews your calf up.
Pretty gruesome stuff.
The PAVN's got more equipment,
so they can do more explosive-type things.
They can set up more
Claymore-, trip-wire-type things, et cetera,
because they have more of that equipment available to them.
So that's kind of why, in this case,
you've got more of the explosive-type stuff set up
than the punji stakes.
The airborne troops did ultimately take the hill
after several frontal assaults.
Why keep doing it?
Why keep at it?
In part because the PAVN guys were up there,
and I think the blood calculus, the butcher's bill, was,
"We are doing equal if not more harm to them."
And that was worth the cost according to the commanders.
This is fighting at its grimmest.
72 Americans were killed after the battle was over.
Looking around, they found over 600 PAVN bodies.
The controversy around this battle was the casualties,
plus, days later,
the Army abandoned the hill after it was taken.
And that raised a lot of concern in the United States
about, hey, what are we doing?
I like "Hamburger Hill."
It's one of my favorite Vietnam films.
And so I'm a little biased here,
but I would give this probably eight or nine out of 10.
I think this is good stuff.
OK. Challenge flag.
With that helicopter coming in and staying stationary
for so long in that valley
in direct fire, right?
They would not have done that.
There would've been covering birds, helicopters around
to assist if needed.
Because if you stay still, somebody with a, I don't know,
a rocket-propelled grenade, or an RPG, as they call it,
is going to swack that helicopter.
And sure enough, that's what happens.
You know they're Viet Cong. They're not uniformed.
That's how you can tell. PAVN would always have a uniform.
Women serving with the Viet Cong,
yes, absolutely.
Gender did not matter in this war for the Viet Cong
or the PAVN, the North Vietnamese.
For them, this is an existential threat.
They're fighting for their survival.
One thing that's good here is the VC withdraw,
because they must realize
that air support's going to be called in
to support the guys on the ground now.
And now you've got two sets of wreckage to deal with.
So they gotta get the heck out of there.
The whole premise of the film, of Spike Lee's movie here
is to show the experience
of African American soldiers in Vietnam
both as combatants, but also as veterans of the war
returning to Vietnam.
At least 300,000 if not more
African Americans served in the war.
In the early years of the conflict, especially '65, '66,
African Americans were in combat units
and also casualties at a rate, a percentage much higher
than their percentage of the population
in the United States.
And this did not go unnoticed.
People like Martin Luther King
and others began speaking out on this.
And by 1968, '69, this had actually kind of leveled out.
I'd give it about a five, maybe a six.
This is actually very real.
Ambushes are very common.
The Viet Cong especially used the ambush,
in part because they don't want to be exposed in the open,
because if they get caught out in the open,
they're going to get hit with
the massive American firepower.
What they do is try to catch the Americans
or the ARVN soldiers out on patrol.
The VC would've been concealed.
And in this clip, you don't see them.
That would not be that unusual.
In fact, a lot of the frustration
that American soldiers experience in Vietnam
when they're on patrols out in the jungle
or in the mountains
is they get hit, but they cannot see the enemy.
You can see that the enemy has them pre-sighted.
They've got their mortars, RPGs pre-ranged.
That's why the Americans, Forrest Gump's people,
have prearranged lines for themselves to fall back to,
what they're calling the "blue line."
And usually that's some sort of physical structure.
It could be a ridge, it could be a tree line,
it could be a canal, a road, anything like that.
All that is spot-on, absolutely.
I just wish Forrest would put his helmet back on.
How many times someone gets
ricocheted off the side of the head with their helmet on,
and if you don't have that helmet on, that's all she wrote.
Pull back! Pull back!
In this particular scene, they do need to pull back.
They're exposed on this sort of road, embankment thing.
They don't have a lot of cover.
Dan: I got an airstrike inbound right now.
They're going to nape the whole area.
Calling in an airstrike. This is very common.
One of the big premises for the Americans in the Vietnam War
was to use the massive firepower
that they had at their disposal.
You gotta remember, this is a military that's equipped
and trained to fight the Russians in Western Europe.
Fighting in Southeast Asia,
they brought some of those same ideas there.
They didn't do it all that way,
but certainly firepower was incredibly important.
The problem is, the VC are good at melting away.
Once contact is made, they fire a bunch of shots,
they melt away because they've learned that the airstrike
or the artillery strike is coming.
I gotta find Bubba!
So, now he's going back to rescue Bubba.
And this is actually based upon an actual
Medal of Honor citation.
Sam Davis received the Medal of Honor
for going back to retrieve actually three wounded comrades.
So if you rate this on a 10 scale,
I would say this one's probably an eight.
This is pretty good.
What you have here in this scene is American POWs
being held by the Viet Cong.
The bamboo cages are actually for the VC
because that's what they've got to work with.
They don't have steel bars lying around.
The Americans were mistreated. It wasn't great.
But both North Vietnam and the Viet Cong in the South,
the NLF, the National Liberation Front,
their leadership recognized the propaganda value
of American prisoners of war.
So you don't want to mistreat them too much.
In North Vietnam, the famous Hanoi Hilton,
that's where most of the propaganda footage is filmed
about them being in "church" and doing a Christmas tree
and doing things like that
to show that they're being treated well and whatnot,
even though some of them had been there
for six or seven years by that point.
The South Vietnamese, they ran the POW camps, torture.
The Vietnamese police, national police,
especially in Saigon, Gen. Loan,
I mean, they tortured, assassinated.
Of course, we had the CIA's Phoenix Program.
We're doing a lot of bad things here,
and a lot of bad things are happening under our watch.
For this, these guys are rogue.
The leadership would not be happy with this,
put it that way.
This particular thing is a little outside the realm,
this scene depicting the VC
making the POWs play Russian roulette.
There is no evidence that that occurred at all.
And obviously the way they're depicting the Viet Cong there
is very brutal, barbaric,
incredibly racist.
Why? Well, again, we're talking the late '70s.
The war is still very raw.
We want to still portray it
as that they were a dishonorable enemy.
So to rate this on reality, pretty low, I think.
I mean, it's got to be a three or four.
I don't think it's in the realm of possibility.
Nighttime attack, very common.
Especially during the Tết Offensive,
the attacks were at night on the 30th, 31st of January,
which is the big North Vietnamese-orchestrated attack
across all of South Vietnam.
They hit almost every provincial capital.
The problem was, in order to undertake this,
VC units and PAVN regiments have to get out in the open.
They're exposed again to what? American firepower.
And they get swacked mercilessly.
The Viet Cong are never the same again after this.
So, the positions there, that's all very realistic.
You would've had prearranged defensive positions, trenches,
bunkers with machine guns usually already set up
as part of your perimeter defense.
So, the PAVN attack where they should attack,
which is the main gate. That's the best place to get in.
But the problem is it also might be
the most heavily defended.
It's the gate that the Marines have to use, right?
So they can't have it mined or that sort of thing.
So that's actually in some ways a weak spot to get in.
So it's kind of a weird, I don't know,
dilemma there for the enemy,
but that's where they choose to attack here.
Very typical of the PAVN and the VC,
mass wave assaults.
Support for the war in the United States had been falling
in the fall of 1967.
You have the huge anti-war, anti-draft protest
in Washington, DC.
That was a big signal to the Johnson administration
that support for the war was starting to erode.
So he calls Westmoreland, the American commander
of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam,
or MACV, as it's called, back over
to give a bunch of talks on the TV shows
and to Congress and whatnot
to show that, no, we're actually making progress.
So support for the war actually goes up.
Public-opinion polls rebound a little bit, right?
And then Tết happens.
The American people are kind of like,
"Well, wait a minute, you told us we were winning.
That doesn't look like winning."
This particular scene I like a lot.
I think it's pretty realistic.
The nighttime fighting, the assault on the gate,
the entrenched positions
for the defense of the perimeter, et cetera.
I'd give this a seven.
Guarding bridges, very common.
You often had US, ARVN forces
on either side of a bridge over a river
or a railroad bridge to protect it.
Unless you wanted that bridge destroyed.
I'm not sure you could be much more exposed
than being on a railroad bridge.
This is based on a real incident.
A unit murdered a young woman
who they had kidnapped and raped.
Unfortunately in Vietnam, as is the case
in pretty much all wars,
soldiers do mistreat noncombatants.
There are a few units that were notorious
for their treatment of noncombatants.
And right on cue, here comes your air power,
which, I'm not sure those explosions would've been that way.
Now, there you see an American river patrol boat
gets in the way and gets hit
by collateral damage there.
That would've been pretty common for a river patrol boat.
We had what we called riverine forces.
So these patrol boats would've been going up
and down the major waterways.
I don't think it's the best duty to have
because you're out there and you're exposed.
Now, these things are armored-plated.
They've got some protection,
but you're really exposed out there,
open to ambush from either side of the river
and things like that. So it was pretty dangerous duty.
I gotta rate this one probably a four,
because there's just so much of it that's just not right.
So, we've got a woman Viet Cong fighter
using a tunnel. All very good.
So, for the Vietcong to have
tunnels and dugouts,
trapdoors and things, very common.
When you go to Củ Chi today,
you can actually go down in some of the tunnels,
the actual, real tunnels.
And there's a few places where they have the trapdoors.
Now that's pretty crafty.
I don't know if they actually had those little holes
they could slide a grenade through or not,
push through their rifle.
OK, she was just running around dodging gunfire,
and then she stops and just stands there.
It's like, get down!
What they're doing is they're hiding the weapons
so that when they do come through,
they don't find anything on them
and they can just play innocent.
"Hey, we're just villagers here," right?
You know, "Wasn't us."
You gotta remember, when this was made,
in the late '70s in Vietnam,
this is really promoting still trying to —
you gotta show some unity between north and south.
And of course the VC were in the south,
so you kind of want to resurrect their role in the war
as part of the national narrative
for the purpose of unification.
Just the way "The Smell of Burning Grass,"
that film, that Vietnamese film made more recently,
kind of serves a similar purpose.
Vietnam is a young country now.
I mean, I think 60-something percent
of the population is under the age of 40.
So they don't have a living memory of the war,
but you want to keep that memory alive somehow.
So how do you do this? Well, you do it through film.
I like this film.
It's, again, when it was made
and the message it's trying to get across,
its purpose of promoting unification
by kind of resurrecting the Viet Cong role in the war,
it's not perfect, but I'd give it a good six.
So, I have two favorite Vietnam films.
One is from the early '70s called "Go Tell the Spartans."
And it's early in the war.
It's in the advisory phase.
And it's kind of foreshadowing
the problems that are going to arise.
The other one I like a lot is actually
"Good Morning, Vietnam."
Thanks so much for watching.
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