The Man in the Net

Coming home from Vietnam

was close to as traumatic as the war itself.

For years, nobody talked about Vietnam.

We were friends with a young couple

and it was only after 12 years that the two wives were talking.

Found out that we both had been Marines in Vietnam.

Never said a word about it.

Never mentioned it.

And the whole country was like that.

It was so divisive.

And it's like living in a family with an alcoholic father.

"Shh, we don't talk about that."

Our country did that with Vietnam.

It's only been very recently that, I think,

that, you know, the baby boomers are finally starting to say,

"What happened?

What happened?"

What we need now in this country

is to heal the wounds and to put Vietnam behind us.

The killing

in this tragic war must stop.

General Westmoreland's strategy

is producing results.

The enemy is no longer closer to victory.

No matter how you measure it,

we're better off than we thought we would be at this time.

You have been less than candid

as to how deeply we are involved in Vietnam.

We have increased our assistance

to the government, its logistics.

We have not sent combat troops there.

You have a row of dominoes set up

and you knock over the first one

and the last one, certainly it will go over.

If aggression is successful in Korea,

we can expect it to spread throughout Asia and Europe

and to this hemisphere.

# Oh where have you been, my blue-eyed son? #

# And where have you been, my darling young one? #

Viktor Frankl, who survived the death camps in World War II,

wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning.

# I've walked and I've crawled on six... #

You know, "To live is to suffer.

To survive is to find meaning in suffering.“

And for those of us who suffered because of Vietnam,

that's been our quest ever since.

# And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard #

# It's a hard #

# It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall #

America's involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy.

It ended, 30 years later, in failure,

witnessed by the entire world.

# And what did you see, my darling young one? #

It was begun in good faith by decent people

out of fateful misunderstandings,

American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation.

And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through

than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions,

made by five American presidents,

belonging to both political parties.

# I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleeding #

Before the war was over,

more than 58,000 Americans would be dead.

At least 250,000 South Vietnamese troops died

in the conflict, as well.

So did over a million North Vietnamese soldiers

and Viet Cong guerrillas.

# Sharp swords in the hands of young children #

# And it's a hard... #

Two million civilians, north and south,

are thought to have perished,

as well as tens of thousands more in the neighboring states

of Laos and Cambodia.

For many Vietnamese, it was a brutal civil war;

for others, the bloody climactic chapter

in a century-old struggle for independence.

# And what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son? #

For those Americans who fought in it,

and for those who fought against it back home,

as well as for those who merely glimpsed it on the nightly news,

the Vietnam War was a decade of agony,

the most divisive period since the Civil War.

Vietnam seemed to call everything into question-

the value of honor and gallantry;

the qualities of cruelty and mercy;

the candor of the American government;

and what it means to be a patriot.

# Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten #

And those who lived through it

have never been able to erase its memory,

have never stopped arguing about what really happened,

why everything went so badly wrong, who was to blame,

and whether it was all worth it.

# And it's a hard #

# It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall #

The French conquest of Indochina began with an attack

on the ancient Vietnamese port of Danang in 1858.

It took 50 years to lay claim to the whole region-

Laos and Cambodia, as well as the 1,200-mile-long area

that would come to be called Vietnam.

All of it was ruled by a French governor-general

from his palace in Hanoi.

The French largely lived on plantation estates,

and in cities, like Saigon, made to look as much as possible

like those at home.

Most did not even bother to learn the language

spoken by their subjects.

Instead they installed a series of puppet emperors

and employed a network

of French-speaking Vietnamese officials-mandarins-

willing to carry out their wishes.

The French put their subjects to work building roads and canals,

railroads and bridges.

The Vietnamese people did not take easily

to French occupation,

just as they had fought against earlier invasions

by the Chinese.

By the early 20th century, nationalism was on the rise.

But anyone who dared resist colonial rule risked exile,

prison, or the guillotine.

LAM QUANG THY.

My hatred for them was pure.

Pure.

I hated them so much.

And I was so scared of them.

Boy, I was terrified of them.

And the scareder I got, the more I hated them.

I was an 18-year-old Marine rifleman with the ink still wet

on my high school diploma.

I didn't want to shame myself in front of my buddies.

But I was so scared.

I felt like I was hanging onto my honor by my fingernails

the whole time I was there.

In the spring of 1919,

as the victorious Allied Powers met in Paris

to rebuild a world shattered by the Great War,

President Woodrow Wilson headed the American delegation

housed in the Hotel Crillon.

One day, a tall, slender, 29-nine-year-old man

appeared with a petition for the president

he and other Vietnamese nationalists had written.

Inspired by Wilson's declaration

that the interests of colonial peoples should be given

equal weight with those of their European rulers,

the man was asking that this principle be applied

to his homeland.

The president's secretary promised to show it to Wilson,

but there is no evidence that he ever did.

His name was Nguyen Tat Thanh,

but he was now living under an alias, Nguyen Ai Quoc-

"Nguyen the Patriot."

During his long, shadowy career,

he would adopt some 70 different pseudonyms,

finally settling on "the most enlightened one"-

Ho Chi Minh.

Ho Chi Minh was a man who succeeded in projecting an image

of somebody who was totally dedicated to freeing

his country and his people from foreign domination

to the point that he sacrificed his own well-being,

his own life, not having a family of his own.

To Vietnamese, that's a big sacrifice

because to us everybody needs a family.

Ho Chi Minh was born in 1890,

the son of a minor official in the French regime.

After taking part in a demonstration

against the puppet emperor

and the Frenchmen who pulled his strings,

Ho was expelled from school and marked for arrest.

He left Vietnam in 1911 and remained in exile for 30 years.

He served as a cook's helper aboard a French liner,

and visited New York and Boston,

where he worked for a time as a pastry chef at the Parker House.

He shoveled snow in London, tinted photographs in Paris.

There, Ho Chi Minh joined the French Socialist Party.

But when he discovered the anti-colonial writings of Lenin,

he became a communist.

He was invited to Moscow to study,

underwent training as a Soviet agent,

was sometimes criticized for being a nationalist first,

a communist second,

and then was dispatched to China

to organize a cell of other Vietnamese exiles

and help establish the Indochinese Communist Party.

Through it all, "He was taut and quivering,"

a friend remembered, "with only one thought-

his country, Vietnam."

By 1940, much of the world was at war again.

Germany had seized most of Western Europe,

including France.

Imperial Japan threatened

many of the European colonies in Asia,

and occupied Vietnam, where they permitted their allies,

the collaborationist French,

to continue to oversee their colony.

To some Vietnamese, the coming of the Japanese

seemed to signal a welcome end to white colonial rule.

But Ho Chi Minh, still in exile in China,

saw the Japanese as alien invaders,

no more welcome than the French.

They were only interested in exploiting his country