(bombs exploding)
(acoustic guitar music)
♪ Oh I march to the battle of New Orleans
- [Narrator] Two weeks after the Marines landed at Da Nang,
members of the University of Michigan faculty
organized a nightlong discussion
between professors and some 3,000 students
about the escalation of the war.
- I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Ann Arbor, Michigan in March of 1965
had one of the first teach-ins about the war.
It began in the anthropology department
and my father was in the anthropology department
and so our family was being pulled in a lot of directions
just as my country was.
(man yelling)
- I was born in 1962.
As I was growing up, it was sort of in the background,
this big, important and not good thing was happening.
And I could sense that all the adults were concerned
talking about it but I really didn't understand
what was going on, and as I got older
I began to sort of ask myself,
"What is this thing that was happening?"
Sort of overshadowing my whole childhood basically.
- So we had a very different idea of patriotism.
So we began an era in which two groups of Americans,
both thinking that they were acting patriotically,
went to war with each other.
(acoustic guitar music and birds chirping)
- We've spent a decade trying to put our arms
around a hugely complicated
and controversial event in American history.
We didn't have an agenda,
we didn't have an ax to grind,
we had a story that we wanted to tell.
- We think we're making this film at the perfect time
because the people who lived through it
are very much alive, very much aware
of what they went through,
and at an age where they want to talk about it.
- We hope that we might be some agency
of healing for the soldiers who lived through it
to take whatever slight burden
off the already immense burden they still carry.
- I think we have tried to make a film
that everyone will be interested in watching,
whether you're 18 or 80, whether you're a man or a woman,
whether your politics are left or right,
I think we want the film
to inspire a new conversation
about the war, but also the film is asking
a lot of questions, and we don't pretend to answer them,
we just want to throw those questions
out for our country to think about again.
(somber piano music)
- I've been to the wall more than once.
When I look back at the war, and you know,
think of the horrible things we said
to vets who were returning, you know,
calling them baby-killers, and worse.
I've, you know, I feel very sad about that.
I can only say that we were kids too,
you know, just like they were.
- Wars are so extraordinarily revealing,
obviously of the worst of humanity,
but as it turns out also the best of humanity.
(soft music)
As you dig deeper, as you go in and reach
into the lives of the people we spoke to,
you can understand new dimensions of courage
and new dimensions of heroism,
and it may not take place always in the case of this war
on the battlefield.
(slow drum music)
This is without a doubt the most ambitious project
that we have ever undertaken,
and I would probably suggest
that this may be one of the biggest undertakings
of our network, but the most important thing
with regard to PBS is that this is the only place
it could have been done.
This was the only network on earth that would have provided
the bandwidth to permit us to go in
and study it as we have over the last decade
and come to terms with a very complicated portrait.
(woman humming)
- I fear that there's a kind of national amnesia
about Vietnam, that we've erased the horror
of the kinds of mistakes that were made.
I think this film, at this point in history,
might be a terrific antidote to that.
- To see these kids who had the least to gain,
there wasn't anything to look forward to.
They weren't going to be rewarded
for their service in Vietnam.
And yet, their infinite patience,
their loyalty to each other, their courage under fire
was just phenomenal.
And you would ask yourself,
"How does America produce young men like this?"
(humming and guitar music)