(cow mooing) (glass breaking)
Downloaded from YTS.MX
(crickets chirping)
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
(somber music)
(guns firing)
- So we entered this room.
Around the table were perhaps a dozen visitors,
most of them military,
mentioning that I had recently been
an advisor at the province level in South Vietnam.
People stopped and looked at me
and one said I've always wondered
what happens at the province level?
(low music)
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
remind me of the issues we faced back then.
We just didn't know who to trust among the Vietnamese.
Who were the sympathizers and who were the enemy?
Who could you believe?
US military saw this as an organizational problem.
They thought it could be solved
by reorganizing the way the Vietnamese fought the war.
The US had developed a system
for coordinating intelligence collection,
but America didn't wanna be viewed as a colonial ruler
forcing its policies on Vietnam.
Our orders were to persuade our Vietnamese counterparts
to implement this system at the province level.
As if that would overcome the lack of motivation,
lack of will, and lack of honesty
in the Vietnamese military.
We couldn't get them to do anything.
We weren't trained to deal with the Vietnamese people
and their traditions.
Our military leaders didn't seem interested.
But we had unlimited faith in organization
and bureaucracy as tools of war.
That lead to a breakdown of communication
between those of us at the province level
and those planning the war from higher up.
(low rock music)
How does the typical American in the early 1960s
wind up in Vietnam?
I agreed to go into the Army in May of 1966.
And I was commissioned and went to Fort Benning, Georgia
for infantry school training.
The culmination of the infantry training
was escape and evasion:
what to do if we were captured by the enemy.
At a predetermined point, you were allowed to escape.
Your job was to find your way back to safe haven,
and to do that you were supposed to not get captured again.
Well I think I was the only one
who got captured twice on the way trying to get back.
Next was combat intelligence training.
How to identify the enemy, how to classify them,
how to collect intelligence about them,
and put them into some kind of analysis
of what was going on.
(low electronic music)
In August or so of 1966, this was still based
upon the Korean War and so we had maps
with information about large units moving here and there,
and it really had very little relevance
to what we were going to find in South Vietnam.
And my own view on the Vietnam War
was that the worst I thought it might've been misguided,
but I couldn't conclude that it was immoral.
That there was some justification
for assisting a nation that was resisting a takeover
even if it were kind of a civil war.
(low electronic music)
Midway through the training, we got our orders.
(ominous music)
The Army had designated for South Vietnam the Four Corps.
I Corps ran along the DMZ.
II Corps was central highlands to the west
and then the coast on the east.
III Corps was the area around Saigon.
And then IV Corps was the Mekong Delta area.
II Corps was where I wound up being sent,
in the province of Ninh Thuan and in the town of Phan Rang.
And there I was assigned to be part
of Advisory Team Number 39,
Military Assistance Command Vietnam, the MACV.
(low music)
We were there as advisors who worked in parallel
with the Vietnamese officers
who were in charge of that province, the ARVN.
A kind of parallel military structure
to that of the South Vietnamese military.
So you had a commanding officer at the corps level
who advised the commanding general of the ARVN unit.
And then on down the line with various officers,
including what we would be
which were the staff intelligence officers, the S2.
So that you really had no true civilian leadership anymore,
it was all based on a military structure.
(camera shutter closing)
(soft drum music)
One of our tasks in the intelligence business
was to observe the province that we were in.
(soft drum music)
The guerrilla warfare primarily consisted
of Viet Cong units, often in the mountain areas.
They would come down from wherever they were hiding
and enter hamlets.
(soft drum music)
We would get reports overnight about these episodes
and then set up ambushes.
(low music)
I was part of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion.
(low music)
The intelligence corps was not part
of the regular army unit,
and we were assigned to these advisory teams.
We had dual loyalties, one was through the American stream
of intelligence collection,
and the other was working with the Vietnamese military.
We would spend part of the day doing our own analysis,
writing our own reports for the US military,
and then meeting with our Vietnamese counterparts.
We were supposed to help the Vietnamese
understand the information that they were collecting.
Here I was, a 23-year-old
with about six weeks of intelligence training.
My counterpart, the senior Vietnamese intelligence officer,
had been in the business for at least 10 years.
The idea that we could teach them much (laughs)
was a bit presumptuous.
(somber music)
I used to go into these hamlets
and I would hear sometimes the children
sometimes the women saying (speaking foreign language).
My interpreter told me (speaking foreign language)
stood for lieutenant.
(speaking foreign language) meant very big,
maybe very fat, it wasn't too clear
what exactly that meant.
That was what I was worried about,
and so I said to him well, I said, I've gotta do something,
but I said what's the word for handsome?
(laughs) And he said well (speaking foreign language).
So after that, whenever I'd hear somebody say
(speaking foreign language) I'd say,
(speaking foreign language) which would,
they thought was hilarious of course.
There was a great deal of friendliness on the part
of most of the Vietnamese people for the Americans.
Even by people who might otherwise
have been under the threat of Viet Cong retaliation.
(somber music)
But even with the Vietnamese military forces,
there was a dichotomy between the true believers
in the cause for resisting
what they saw as Communist takeover,
and others who were willing to deal
with the Viet Cong or with their sympathizers.
(somber music)
The Regional Forces and the Popular Forces
effectively, well they weren't very effective,
but they were a National Guard kind of unit,
very little training, some of them with no training at all,
often with very old, inadequate weapons.
There would be a small group of men,
sometimes elderly men, who would take turns at night
and guard the hamlet from intruders.
Sometimes they were successful, oftentimes they were not.
A small group of these Popular Force people,
they had seen an ARVN, an army truck, headed towards an area
that we considered Viet Cong controlled.
They stopped the truck and were holding it and the driver.
And in the truck was a load of American medical supplies.
(somber music)
These Popular Force people were offered
more money than they would ever see in their lives
by the driver to just forget about this and let him go on.
And they refused and they held them until we arrived.
Tracing back the origins of this truck
we found that it had been under the command
of the operations officer in the Vietnamese army
who was part of the province structure.
The man that it was generally agreed
was the most effective officer in their whole organization.
He was considered to be the kind of person
we could really work with.
What all this meant was that he was,
at the very least, willing to sell
these medical supplies to the Viet Cong.
Now here were these Popular Forces folks
who took this great risk to their own lives
and at the cost of a very lucrative pay off
in support of the cause,
and here is this army officer who is highly admired
and aggressive, who may be the one betraying it.
(triumphant music)
- [Announcer] The Central Highlands,
the Trường Sơn cordillera, are a mountainous,
largely jungle-covered region military strategists
on both sides of this struggle are agreed
that he who gains the highlands
will have won the fight for Vietnam.
Villages of the highlands are inhabited
by many races known to the outside world
by the French term Montagnards, or mountain people.
They are known to themselves
by such tribal names as Rade and M'nong.
Are vastly different from the light-skinned lowlanders
whom the world knows as Vietnamese.
Through these mountain villages
for more than a decade have passed
increasing numbers of Communist guerrillas.
The Montagnard on his own ground is a formidable ally.
A man of great personal courage,
the Montagnard holds the key
to a strategically vital area of Southeast Asia.
If he can be won to the government's cause,
the guerrillas' jungle sanctuary
in the Vietnamese highlands will disappear.
(bombs exploding)
- You know what is corruption under these circumstances?
Well the district that was in the northern part of Ninh Chu
was dominated by Montagnards
who had a very difficult time with most of the Vietnamese,
who treated them as second class citizens.
They had a district chief there that we were working with
who was ethnically Vietnamese.
When we went up to these hamlets in that area,
we'd be asking the Popular Force people
how they were getting along, what they needed, et cetera,
and they kept complaining that they were hungry,
that they weren't getting enough rice.
Well one of the ways that they were rewarded
for their service was the rice
which the United States provided.
It would eventually go to the district chief,
and the district chief would distribute it
to the Popular Forces.
We realized that the district chief
had to be siphoning off rice,
selling it on the black market,
and cutting back on what he gave to the Popular Forces.
This kind of corruption, we thought, was truly outrageous.
And so we began what turned out to be a long campaign
to get rid of him.
One day my colleagues and I noticed
that there were literally hundreds of Montagnards
walking along the road or coming down out of the mountains,
some of them crying.
They said he was the best district chief they'd ever had.
That he was the first one
who had treated the Montagnards fairly,
and that all in all he was the best guy they'd ever known
among the Vietnamese.
And here we were, the proud Americans,
and we made sure he got out of there.
As I said, I think I said to the colonel,
we should've just paid him directly
in order to keep doing what he was doing.
(bombs falling)
- [Dispatcher] Control one, control two.
Control one, control two.
(radio chatter)
- With Phan Rang Air Base right nearby,
we would often get calls from the Air Force pilots
coming back to the air base who
for some reason or another had not dropped their ordinance
on the original targets.
(somber music)
And since you didn't wanna land with ordinance on board,
they would ask us for any targets of opportunity
that they could drop their bombs on.
(radio chatter)
You wound up sometimes not much more
than picking a dot on the map
where there might be some VC somewhere.
(somber music)
There was a darker side to the colonel,
often related to his desires
to become a higher grade officer.
One that I remember vividly involved
a decision that he made about defoliating
part of a mountainside.
Because the technology or the weapons system was available,
the colonel thought he oughta use it.
Where he decided to use it was in an area
that we had only rarely been able
to even see from our aircraft.
The mountains were covered with clouds
and the aircraft could not safely get into them.
The Montagnards lived high in the mountains.
Often they would burn off a section of the mountainside
and then plant, and then move on to a different section.
Now we'd had a number of reports,
and it probably was true,
that there was some infiltration
of Viet Cong down through that area.
But it tended to be an area in which
both sides sort of left alone.
Some of us argued that, you know,
we'd never had any hostile fire at our aircraft
while we were traveling in that area.
But the colonel was insistent
and one day we saw come into the offices
a crew of kind of older Air Force pilots
with fluorescent scarves around their neck
who announced themselves as the people
who effectively delivered Agent Orange.
A few weeks later, our Air Force observers
went up into the area to see what the result was.
For the first time in our experience there
they heard rifle shots.
Shots at the aircraft.
They reported that to the colonel
at the briefing that night,
and of course the colonel turned to me and said,
see I told you there were VC up there.
And I think I held my tongue,
but later pointed out that they didn't shoot at us before
but who wouldn't shoot at an aircraft now
after we dumped all of this shit on them?
And we're killing their plants?
(somber music)
The American advisors lived in a compound
that was located along a main highway
that ran between Phan Rang and the air base.
And along the highway there was a pipeline
to carry jet fuel.
One Sunday afternoon, we were relaxing in our rooms
when we heard screaming and a loud explosion.
We saw the small huts that people lived in
across the way in flames.
And then dozens of people either on fire
or running away from the fire.
The pipeline had developed a leak.
Either that or the native Vietnamese
had been using some of the jet fuel
for their own cooking purposes.
We ran back to the compound to get blankets
or anything we could to help put out the flames.
I noticed one of our surgeons
who was standing nearby but not reacting.
I said to him, why aren't you helping?
He showed me his hands and said
these are hands that have been trained as a surgeon.
I can't afford to risk them and risk my future
in order to help these people.
(radio chatter)
The work of intelligence.
There really are two components to it.
One is to record incidents of contact with the enemy.
We'd get reports of three VC having entered a hamlet
and conducted an indoctrination lecture,
and so with the help of my interpreter,
we would interview people.
(low music)
There was a civilian component.
Representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency
that was the advisor to the National Police.
There was the information received through American sources
to pinpoint areas where Viet Cong
or NVA units might be located.
(electronic music)
The second part was collecting information
reported by agents.
These created the greatest problem in terms of evaluation.
(electronic music)
Without knowing the agents,
many of them would have to be classified as F, unknown.
Most often, the information itself would be unknown.
(electronic music)
We'd get a report, for example,
that an NVA battalion had moved
through this mountainous area on its way south.
Possible, but there was no other evidence of it.
It was either unlikely or it was at least unknown.
We didn't know who the agent was.
And part of the reason we didn't know who the agent was
was because of the Vietnamese system
of not sharing much information about their agents.
One of the other problems associated with this was
that the various Vietnamese intelligence agencies
refused to share information
about their agent with one another.
This really complicated our lives,
because one of the things that you would like to have
is to get the same or similar information
from two different sources.
(electronic music)
So now we've got this NVA battalion moves
through this area reported by one agent,
perhaps coming through the Vietnamese military.
And we get a report from the National Police
that their agent had seen an NVA battalion
coming through the area in a similar fashion.
One would like to conclude
that that was accurate information.
The problem was we were never sure
that it wasn't the same agent selling the same information
to both of the different services.
(ominous music)
(bombs exploding)
A building had been blown up in the downtown Phan Rang area.
Two construction workers had been killed,
Vietnamese construction workers these were.
It evidently had been a Viet Cong operation.
None of us could understand why
this particular building or these people
might have been targeted by the VC.
(eerie music)
We were informed that the advisors to the National Police
would be arriving in country on Air America.
The people who were coming were obviously CIA people.
The Viet Cong knew that these two individuals
were agents working for the Central Intelligence Agency,
but we didn't.
(ominous music)
There had been an uproar in Washington by President Johnson,
and he had told the CIA to send people
and get them out there to get more information.
My image of the CIA functionary in our province.
I'd never seen him come out of his house,
nevermind do anything even a little more risky.
It did not surprise me at all that he was not calling in.
He was notoriously a man who liked his alcohol,
liked some of the young women from the area.
A lot of the people who'd been assigned
to these provincial roles
had never been out of the office in Langley, Virginia.
They were desk people, analytic people,
something like that had happened to me
in terms of being sent out into the field.
(car horns honking) (somber music)
We were as intelligence officers
brought to Saigon to be briefed on the Phoenix program.
The Phoenix program was an effort
to try to improve, on one level,
intelligence collection coordination.
(electronic music)
It also aimed at the identification of the individuals
within the normal hamlet village operations,
but who were secretly part of the Viet Cong apparatus.
And the point of that identification
was to then conduct assassinations against them.
The program was really aimed at identification
of individuals, ostensibly civilians,
who would be taken out as potential leaders
of a Viet Cong government.
The program as it was to operate at the province level
was with the establishment
of an intelligence tactical operation center.
Wherever intelligence was being collected
from all sources would be brought together and shared.
When we asked what the Vietnamese knew about this,
they said that they had asked the Vietnamese commanders
to institute these things but they had decided against it.
And so we were supposed to persuade our colleagues
and counterparts at the local level to do this,
so that it would be in place and then
the ambassador could simply tell the president
that it now already existed.
Well there was no way that the Vietnamese lieutenant
was going to institute a system for sharing information
unless he got direct orders from higher authorities,
and so our ability to really do this was very limited.
But the controversy about whether or not
either an individual or that the United States military
is justified in assassinating people
who have not quote done anything that we know of yet
as participants in a plot to do something
is obviously a very difficult moral question.
(eerie music)
We had problems associated with the use of force
and extracting confessions out of prisoners.
One technique involved the use
of the American military field telephone.
We called it ringing somebody up.
This field phone,
that you generated a electrical shock by winding up,
would be used by attaching the bare wires to,
perhaps, a finger on one hand and a toe,
or in some cases to genitalia,
that depended on the mood of the operatives.
One day I walked into an interrogation
of a Viet Cong prisoner.
The Vietnamese, our counterparts,
were using this telephone as a way
to encourage him to speak.
We asked them not to do that,
told them they should not do that,
and then basically had to leave.
They did stop for awhile while we were there,
but I'm sure it probably continued afterwards.
This goes along with things like
threatening to throw people out of helicopters
if somebody didn't talk.
Clearly that kind of psychological threat was used.
(ominous music)
South Korea had sent a couple of battalions of forces.
We didn't have much contact until one day
we got a call that three Vietnamese woodcutters
had been killed in an ambush
that had been set up by the ROKs,
the Republic of Korean soldiers.
These were innocent people, although they were near areas
that we considered free fire zones.
The problem for the woodcutters was
that was where the wood was.
And even though they weren't supposed to go in there,
for their livelihoods that's where they went.
Well, early one morning,
the Koreans had set up an ambush along a trail,
and evidently had cut down these three woodcutters.
Already, there had been an offer made to compensate
the families of the woodcutters with great apologies,
but the Vietnamese were looking
for some other kind of compensation.
We agreed to meet with the ROK commander.
We approached him with the question
of was there some other gesture
that they thought the Koreans could make.
The commander talked with a few of his aids
and he came back and he said,
would it help if we returned their ears?
(intense music)
This would've been in the middle part of 1967.
The US Army sources were doing a reanalysis
of the numbers of Viet Cong and NVA troops
that we were confronting.
At the same time, coming down through
the Vietnamese chain of command,
they were getting the same requirement.
They were to do their analysis
of the size of the enemy force.
Basically an attempt to finally figure out
not only how many Viet Cong military there were,
but also this infrastructure,
this parallel governmental universe that existed.
Maybe even going down to sympathizers
who would be part of the Viet Cong effort.
(intense music)
And it resulted in what came to be known
as the corral reports.
We were gonna round up all of the enemy
in a corral kind of situation.
(intense music)
The Viet Cong had a political military structure
that was parallel to that of the ARVN.
They had a province chief and they had various levels
of command that would be like the shadow government
if and when they took over the province.
(pulsing music)
(intense music)
Only a few weeks before, 101st Airborne Division
had conducted an operation in the province
on an area identified as the location
of the Viet Cong's province chief.
(bombs exploding) (guns firing)
(dramatic music)
We had a pile of documents that appeared to be lists
of people and gave us some ideas about troop strength.
The measure that was being used was body counts.
The commanding general of the 101st Airborne
was very disappointed in the number of bodies
identified as Viet Cong.
And so he questioned us, why they didn't find more VC there.
We said something to the effect of
what did you expect to find there?
You found the province capital.
And they said well we had these reports
about NVA battalions and we said, you know,
I think, sir, if you look at those reports
you'll see that we consider those reports
either doubtful or F-6 unknown, unable to classify.
Well obviously they'd never looked at the classification.
They never looked at that, they just read
whatever the report was and so you learn
that it wasn't working.
That up the chain they were simply interested
in the numbers and weren't paying any attention
to the evaluation.
Coming back to this Corral Report.
We developed some numbers about the size
of the Viet Cong force that operated in the province.
(intense music)
(pulsing music)
A few weeks later, the colonel called us in
and said that Saigon was not happy
because our estimates of Viet Cong strength
and those of the Vietnamese did not match.
And that we should reconcile them.
We asked what the Vietnamese had offered,
and they had said some much lower figure
than what we had come up with.
He says what do you think this means.
And I said Colonel, I don't think they want
our higher numbers (laughs).
I think they want the Vietnamese lower numbers.
(electronic music)
He finally decided to send them the Vietnamese numbers,
afraid that he was going to alienate his superiors
if he continued to argue the case for the higher numbers.
A few weeks later, I met with some of my friends
who were still at Tan Son Nhut,
a major base known as Pentagon East,
and they were operating there as intelligence officers:
looking at the big map of South Vietnam
and receiving reports from around the country,
and making the Order of Battle,
what units were where and how many were, et cetera.
And they said you've gotta come over
and see the new Order of Battle map that we've created.
We've gotten all these corral reports
and we now have numbers for people.
We think we have a picture of the whole countryside.
I had to say to them, you know,
I think that's a wonderful map,
you've got a nice diagram, nice set up here.
I said there's only one problem with the map,
we sent you those numbers and we know
those aren't the right numbers.
(electronic music)
The numbers that we were talking about
tried to be inclusive of everybody
who might be a part of the enemy force.
The Vietnamese were willing, perhaps,
only to look at the numbers of people
in the kind of official military position.
There were different levels of commitment
to the Viet Cong cause and it was very important
to know whether or not there were people
in the hamlets who were sympathetic,
even if they weren't the military people.
And so that was part of the disagreement
about how to count the enemy force.
Our position was that there were many more
than the Vietnamese were willing to admit.
(electronic music)
One of our colleagues responsible
for briefing General Westmoreland,
the commander in the entire area,
and Ellsworth Bunker, who was the ambassador at the time,
he had been concerned about the fact
that they were going to have to justify
these much larger numbers than had been used before
by the American military to assess
the nature of the problem.
Instead, he said, there was no reaction from them
except for a discussion between the two of them
about how they were gonna present
these numbers to Washington.
It was probably less the case that Westmoreland
was fudging the numbers than it was
that the whole bureaucratic system
was designed to fudge the numbers
before they got to Westmoreland.
(electronic music)
By telling us they didn't want the higher numbers
that we were getting and giving them,
they were telling us to keep them lower.
The political atmosphere and the political leadership
are obviously vested in a certain policy
and they don't like the bad news being brought to them.
So we contributed to that, we made the compromise
of changing our numbers to meet the expectations
of those people above us.
(somber music)
Virtually everybody that you saw
could tell you what day they were on
in terms of the 365 days that they were scheduled
to be in country.
You had to worry for people who were very new
to being in country,
but also then when you got short,
when you were only a month or so away from leaving.
One of our observer pilots,
who also was getting ready to return home,
was on a reconnaissance mission and saw a truck
driving up into Viet Cong controlled area.
He fired off his M60 machine gun,
planning to strafe alongside of the road
as a warning to frighten the driver.
The rounds strafe the truck itself.
The driver fell out of the truck
and turned out to be killed.
Something that he didn't mean to do.
In this war zone, you felt you ought to be doing something
that would make a mark as part of that war effort,
and it was a dangerous kind of psychology that took over.
And I felt that this guy in some ways had had that.
He hadn't had any real confrontation with the enemy.
There would've been the possibility of an investigation.
As it was, we were able to construct a reasonable case
that this individual had to be either
dealing with the Viet Cong, paying the Viet Cong,
or in some way cooperating with them
in order to be in that area.
And as far as I know that's as far as that went.
Well, you know, had some moral twinges about it,
especially in retrospect.
The government of Vietnam and of the United States
offered its apologies, there was compensation paid,
and I often wonder how that individual feels
about the episode, whether that continues to be a thought.
But I know at the time it was something
that had really bothered him a great deal.
(somber music)
(helicopter flying)
(somber music)
The American military went through a very elaborate
set of codes for identifying people,
you know, that it would be a mistake to use real names.
I was known as Silver Lightning Alpha Two.
So we're out in this little operation in this hamlet,
and I get a radio call to Silver Lightning Two Alpha
that your son, John Jay Murphy, has been born (laughs).
Which of course broke all code violations and the like,
but I remember spending the rest of that day
taking pictures of children just trying to imagine,
you know, what my new son looked like.
(light guitar music)
(acoustic guitar music)
Each month there would be a junior officer
from one of the teams who would be assigned
to go to Saigon to pick up a satchel full of money,
both military payment certificates
which was the American currency,
and a thick book of official papers.
I wound up having to do what we call the pay run.
We had to fly out to an advisory team
that was experiencing attacks
by a North Vietnamese battalion virtually every night.
Needless to say, I was particularly interested
in getting to them early in the day
and leaving before nightfall.
(acoustic guitar music)
It took us awhile to figure out
where their landing area was.
And it turned out to be on the side of a hill.
Landing was no real problem.
I paid the people that were there,
and we got ready to take off.
The pilot was not as big or as heavy as me,
but heavier than some of the others.
So together we had quite a bit of weight
with the machine guns, the rockets, the lead,
and this little single engine.
We sat at the top of the hill and he said,
I don't think we've got enough engine power
to go up the hill and get enough air speed.
So we're gonna have to go downhill.
And we came down the hill, building up airspeed,
I felt us leave the ground.
We started to hear pop, pop, pop.
(guns firing) The pilot noticed
that he was losing fuel.
We had taken a couple of rounds in the fuel tank.
And then we began to come down again.
We come back down right at the foot of the hill,
bounced up in the air,
bounced back down on the other side of the hill,
and go plowing into this grassy area.
The pilot shouts to get out and as I do,
I look over and I notice
that the fuel in the wing is dripping.
I try to climb out, I'm in the back seat
of a two seat plane here,
but got suck between the front seat and the doorway.
Had to back out and then literally dove
over the front seat out the door,
rolled on the ground away from the plane,
and as we stood there looking at the plane
waiting to see if it's gonna go up in flames,
I remember that I probably have about
20,000 dollars in military payment certificates
and pee-as-toos still in the plane
and the army is awful if you lose the money
on these pay runs.
We've been warned over and over again.
I can just see it burning up and having
to try to explain that this money burned away.
I was able to go back and retrieve the bag
and then it occurs to me,
I may have to stay in this place this night
because that NVA battalion is still out there.
How am I gonna get out of here now
that our plane is unable to fly?
So we immediately begin calling for help,
but now they have to fly another plane out
with another pilot to get me,
and I have to complete the pay run.
I complete the pay run and I go back to Saigon.
(guitar music)
One of the buildings that's been taken over
in downtown Saigon is the headquarters
of the finance branch of the Army.
I go to turn in the money that I have left
and the signed slips for people who've collected it.
I get to the office in the morning,
we get the bag, the money is in it,
take it to the sergeant who's responsible
for checking the signatures,
and he stops at one point, oh, he says, we've got a problem.
I said what's the problem?
He said you see here, the official signature
for this sergeant is John J Jones.
He signed it J James Jones.
That's an incorrect signature, I can't accept it.
Can't accept it.
He says you can't turn in the money,
you can't turn in the pay slips,
you've gotta go back and get the right signature.
That would've been bad enough except
when I look at JJ Jones or whatever his name was
he's at this outpost where we crashed the plane (laughs).
And so theoretically I'm supposed to go back
and get a new signature from this guy.
I said you gotta be kidding me.
I said this is ridiculous.
I said I'm gonna just, no, he says you can't do that.
You can't just sign it yourself you know (laughs)
we'd really be in trouble.
So, so I have to take everything back.
I get together with my pilot.
I'll tell you one thing he said, that's gonna happen
is no way am I going back in there with you
(laughs) in the plane.
He says give me the stuff, I'll go.
I'll fly in there, I'll get the signature,
and that was fine with me (laughs).
(rock music)
So we entered this room.
Around the table were perhaps a dozen visitors,
most of them military,
mentioning that I had recently
been an advisor at the province level in South Vietnam.
People stopped and looked at me
and one said I've always wondered
what happens at the province level.
(guns firing)
In walked the man we had evidently been waiting for
who was disheveled, although he wore
a very preppy, blue, pinstriped suit.
(rock music) (guns firing)
He sat down at the table, put his head in his hands,
rubbed his eyes a bit and said,
you'll have to excuse me I've been up
in the war room all night.
The president wants to know what's going on.
Somebody said to him well what's the latest news.
And he looked at him and he said, we don't know.
We just don't know.
None of our people are reporting in.
This news that not even the CIA knew what was happening,
we had probably gotten more reports
through the military channels than they were getting.
(ominous music)
There's no doubt in my mind that in the short run
the United States could've won quote
the war in Vietnam by taking it over and running it.
To do that, however, they would've had
to have become the colonial rulers,
and in the long run we could never win at that.
We had in many ways a connection
with some of the population,
which saw us as a useful and positive force,
but who also had to deal
with this kinda corrupt, or inefficient, leadership.
Someone once asked me is what we hear about Vietnam true.
And my answer used to be everything you ever heard
about Vietnam is true in some way.
None of us had the same experience,
none of us went through exactly the same kinds of learning,
but that's been the Vietnam that I knew
and the stories that I tell.
(somber music)