The war isn’t over but it is ending. It is ending not because of the Paris talks or the demonstrations at home, it is ending because the largest and wealthiest and most powerful organisation on Earth – the American Army – is being challenged from within. From the very cellars of its pyramid, from the most forgotten, the most brutalised and certainly the bravest of its members. The war is ending because the ‘Grunt’ are taking no more bullshit. John Pilger, The Quiet Mutiny: Grunts Did the Fighting and Lifers Were the Management, ITV 1970
And I do know that thousands of young American soldiers like the Grunts of Snuffy are fighting an enemy that isn’t called Gook – it’s called the US Army. And that takes guts. ibid.
John Pilger: Do you think it was worth it?
Vietnam Contractor: Definitely. Definitely. Every limb that was lost and every individual sitting back in a veteran’s hospital now. And every death. I think it’s all worth it. I surely do. John Pilger, Vietnam: Still America’s War, ATV 1974
An American Embassy official arrives at a Saigon orphanage to award The Best Child of the Month Prize. All the children here are bastards of the American War. For which the Embassy will do nothing, except of course to provide that free ice cream for the lucky prize winner. ibid.
Contractor: The American idea of communist as applied to Asia just doesn’t apply. You have pre-conceived concepts. ibid.
Contractor: Fifty-two thousand American deaths is less than we lose in traffic in one year. You don’t even miss it. It wasn’t a great war but it was the only war we had. ibid.
Contractor: You’ve got to continue believing this myth. That it was good we were here. ibid.
The longest war this century ended just a few months ago. And since then there’s been almost a silence about Vietnam in the American press and television; after defeat and humiliation people just want to forget. John Pilger, To Know Us is to Love Us, ATV 1975
Every day, out of the sky, came hundreds of Vietnamese … Twenty-four thousand of them on the edge of town, just waiting for the good folks here to come and sponsor them. But every one was a reminder that the boys in the graveyard there died for nothing. ibid.
In Vietnam more Indians died proportionately than other Americans. John Pilger, Pyramid Lake is Dying, ITV 1976
In every major deal Mr Kissinger has done in recent years food has been a decisive factor ... For prolonging the war in Vietnam the generals in Saigon got American food, which they sold for arms ... There is a new more powerful weapon – food. And this one is lethal. John Pilger, Zap! The Weapon is Food for Dictators, ITV 1976
People starve to death for a number of reasons; the least understood reason is the denial of food for motives of politics and profit. ibid.
Vietnam was napalmed. Napalm is a chemical made especially to stick to human skin. And to fry people slowly ... Vietnam was people shot and laid out like rabbits ... Vietnam was atrocities you never knew about ... Vietnam was riding on a helicopter with a heap of dead and dying GIs ... Vietnam was drug-addicted kids ... Vietnam was above all a war of rampant technology against people. John Pilger, Do You Remember Vietnam? ITV 1978
They’re an extraordinary group, mostly volunteers. Blacks escaping the ghetto, and poor whites weaned on John Wayne. Day and night they were pounded with artillery, mortar and rockets. They lay in their trenches, in their own blood, and dirt and with their frustrations. I should say that few soldiers have endured such conditions and have resisted so bravely and suffered so long in the cause of nothing. ibid.
This is a film about those suckers. They made up the greatest volunteer army in history. They came home not to parades but to … silence, shame, indifference, or they came home in plain wooden boxes marked, This Way Up – Unviewable. John Pilger, Heroes! ITV 1981
60% of all combat soldiers are alcoholics. 40% are drug addicts. 60% of all black veterans can’t find a job. Thousands are in prison. And the divorce rate and their suicide rate is the highest in America. The report which gives these facts was suppressed by the government because what it says breaks the faith. ibid.
In August 1980 during the Presidential election campaign, Ronald Reagan said this: ‘To me it’s the height of hypocrisy for the Carter administration to repeatedly tell us how much we owe our Vietnam veterans and then recommend a stingy 10% increase in the GI Bill. We have been shabby in our treatment of those that return. They deserve our gratitude, our respect and our continuing concern. Our war was a noble cause.’ In March 1981 President Reagan asked Congress to cut programs especially designed to help Vietnam veterans find jobs, finish their education and be treated for drug addiction and alcoholism. ibid.
Missing from this film are the other witnesses to the Vietnam period – the Vietnamese. We hear very little about them these days, and the American veterans speak little about them, perhaps because what was done over there was so terrible that only the victims can afford to speak about it. Such has been the politics of vengeance that the people of Vietnam are now almost completely isolated. ibid.
The Grand Parade at the end of war has always been a grand illusion especially in countries themselves not ravaged by war. Like television movies where blood and gore are never seen, the parades of the past were seen as great demonstrations of vital victorious manhood. Vietnam changed all that perhaps for ever ... Who would take the salute for such a parade? ibid.
Vietnam was Australia’s secret war ... Documents now reveal that from 1962 Australian governments were prime movers in starting the war in Vietnam. John Pilger, Other People’s Wars, ITV 1988
Six pounds of a deadly poison called Agent Orange were dropped for every man, woman and child in Vietnam. And these are its victims. The Australian government at first denied taking part in chemical warfare but this was proven to be false. ibid.
It’s been estimated that as many Australians veterans committed suicide as died in the entire war. ibid.
It wasn’t only the media that invented the image of the Vietnam War, it was the CIA that virtually invented the War. John Pilger, Frontline, The Search of Truth in Wartime, repeated Channel 4 1991
The Vietnam War, which I reported, was often regarded by the American military as a war between Cowboys and Indians. It was rampant technology against the peasant people. Cluster bombs and chemical bombs against an enemy in rubber-tyre sandals and innocent civilians known as Gooks or Dinks or by the military term of collateral damage. ibid.
On June 21st 1983 the European Community decided to block food aid to Vietnam as part of the embargo initiated by the United States. Stockpiles of dried milk have never been higher in Europe. Children in Vietnam are hungrier now than in the War. Such is the indifference towards Vietnam today. ibid.
This century the Vietnamese have been invaded by the French, Japanese, the British, the Americans, the Cambodians under Pol Pot and the Chinese. That had seen them all off at huge cost. John Pilger, Vietnam: The Last Battle, ITV 1995
With the Americans finally gone Vietnam was made an international pariah. The United States mounted an embargo that covered both trade and humanitarian aid and used its influence to sabotage loans from the World Bank that would have prevented starvation. One of Margaret Thatcher’s first acts in coming to power was to ban shipments of powdered milk to Vietnamese children. ibid.
The secret history of Vietnam was also the chemical war. The spraying of a deadly poison called Dioxin. Its aim was to destroy the forests where the Viet-Cong were. And it was confined to South Vietnam, which America had come to save. The spraying was called Operation Hades and was hardly reported at the time. And when it was, it was changed to the more friendly Operation Ranch-hand ... Dioxin is a thousand times more powerful than Thalidomide. ibid.
Vietnam is fashionable. At Saigon airport there are backpackers and conga lines of package tourists, and Taiwanese businessmen watching Mr Bean. They almost cancel nostalgia and the memory of fear, but not the absurd. At Cu Chi, a drive from the city, they descend on the scene of one of the war’s most remarkable chapters – the tunnels where soldiers of the National Liberation Front (Vietcong was an American term) crawled through insects and snakes with the technology of a ‘free fire zone’ rampant above them.
Now teenage girls dress up as wartime guerrillas, guiding tourists through the bomb craters and shooing them off the new grass. Like so much else in the new Vietnam, the army has turned itself into a business and runs the tunnels like a theme park. They have thoughtfully widened the tunnels for large tourists and put in a shooting range where, for a dollar a shot, Americans can relive all the fun of Rambo and Platoon. There is the choice of an American M-16 rifle or a Vietnamese AK-47. And if you hit a bullseye you win a genuine, black and white checked Vietcong scarf. People line up to do this. John Pilger, article 22nd April 1995, ‘Vietnam Now’
I used to see Vietnam as a war, rather than a country. John Pilger, 1996
The longer I stayed in Vietnam the more I realised that our atrocities were not isolated, nor were they aberrations. That the war itself was an atrocity – that was the big story and it was seldom news. John Pilger, Freedom Next Time, Youtube 2007
First, I would like to go back some 40 years to a sultry day in Vietnam.
I was a young war correspondent who had just arrived in a village called Tuylon. My assignment was to write about a company of US Marines who had been sent to this village to win hearts and minds.
‘My orders,’ said the Marine sergeant, ‘are to sell the American Way of Liberty as stated in the Pacification Handbook. This is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks as stated on page 86.’ Page 86 was headed WHAM: Winning Hearts and Minds. The marine unit was a Combined Action Company which, explained the sergeant, ‘means that we attack these folks on Mondays and win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays.’ He was joking, though not quite.