♪ ♪
JEFF: The plane lands in Da Nang. The door opens.
And this heat rolls in, this incredible heat rolls in
which is a lot hotter than any place I'd been prior to that,
and you're exiting the plane, and there's
a row of troops leaving and a row of troops arriving,
and the difference between the way we looked coming off
and the way these other guys looked coming on
pretty much underscored that you didn't really realize
what you're getting into,
because these guys look very different.
They looked very different.
These guys had jungle uniforms,
and they'd been out in the bush for a year, and it showed.
You could certainly see that they'd experienced something.
Something had changed these guys.
[♪ The Angels' "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" ♪]
♪ We gotta get out of this place ♪
♪ if it's the last thing we ever do. ♪
♪ We gotta get out of this place, ♪
♪ 'cause girl, there's a better life for me and you. ♪
The U.S., they have all kind of support.
Well, that time, they have a very good tank they called M48.
Nothing can hurt that tank.
Beside that they can use bulldozer.
They knocked all the booby trap and mine and everything down
to reduce casualty.
The Vietnamese have a lot of casualty because
we don't have that kind of heavy equipment.
I believed the Americans can win the war very easily
because that kind of support, that kind of troop
and that kind of power.
So I don't know why the war keep continue.
JEFF: ARVN units, they weren't as well-equipped as we were.
You'd see these guys with a lot of
World War II surplus weapons, carrying M1s and Thompsons.
Just not up to speed.
The military campaign which ostensibly
is trying to defeat the insurgency
is actually having a negative impact on the population
because they're blaming the Americans for all the damage
that's being wrought on the countryside.
So I think that was part of the problem that you saw
from a quantitative approach
that folks like McNamara and others tried to place
on top of a war that was much more about legitimacy
and loyalty and relationships.
You can't do it by body count.
That's not how you win a war.
You win a war by making the enemy unable to continue,
not by killing their people.
RUFUS: You cannot kill your way to victory in an insurgency.
You go into a village, even one
that's basically sympathetic with the government,
and you fire on some American helicopters,
and they fire back and kill villagers,
and you just converted that village.
The Viet Cong very quickly realized
this was a great recruiting tool.
LE LY: Life is turned upside down for us.
And even young girl like myself,
we had to take a part of the war.
And we fought against the Americans,
against the South Vietnamese.
Even though there's a lot of dead and wounded,
that's our country.
And so for them to stay and fight, that's the only choice.
JEFF: And the military does not build nations, you know?
The military kills people, and it destroys things.
It blows things up and it kills people.
LE LY: American come we have to run and hide in the bunker.
We try to be friendly but we shaking, we so scared,
and we run around and somebody else die.
The Americans see Viet Cong as an enemy, as an evil.
To us, no. They're the Vietnamese. They are our people.
They are the villagers.
That tension between trying to build
a South Vietnamese political community or assist with that
and at the same time fight a war that was causing depopulation,
that was causing great tragedy
across the South Vietnamese landscape --
that helped undermine what was a very comprehensive strategy.
And all of that had to be taken into account
as you're trying to maintain support
not only from the American home front
but also from the South Vietnamese home front
and also demonstrate that you're making progress.
[protesters chanting]
PENNY: The anti-war movement had gone through what I think of
as being a period where folks in the movement
thought, well, we can just convince our leaders
that there's been a mistake,
that this was a terrible idea,
and if they knew everything we knew,
they would realize the errors of their ways.
But that wasn't working. It was clear to them
that the government knew full well what was happening
and that they intended to pursue this war,
and so by 1967 the movement took on a more radical turn.
This was the period in which folks were trying to
stop the war by any means necessary.
It was the year that they tried to levitate the Pentagon.
It was the year that the resistance,
the draft card burning and the draft resistance got started.
DEVIER: The staging area was usually Lafayette Park,
across from the White House,
and I would, for a large demonstration,
generally go out in front with a walkie-talkie
and direct attention to particular areas
if a large number were massing in a particular area,
and of course the residual fear would be that
there would be some storming of the White House itself.
It was even suggested at one time
that we should electrify the fence,
and I thought that was a supremely terrible idea,
and it did not go forward.
There were chants outside: "Hey, hey, LBJ,
how many kids have you killed today?"
And we could hear it in the West Wing,
and the President could hear it in the Oval Office.
Even when nothing more was happening,
it was just present all the time.
PROTESTERS: Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?
♪ We're gonna take your toys away ♪
♪ and bring our soldiers home now. ♪
♪ ♪