[DRUMS]

ROBERT MULLER: I've had the opportunity to travel in the past year to 35 college campuses across the country and lecture on the Vietnam experience. And what I have encountered [INAUDIBLE] stunning and appalling to me.

When you realize just how devastating that war was for my generation and for the country as a whole and when you remember that the average age of a combat soldier in Vietnam 19, for me to go to college campuses today and have the 18 and the 19 year olds asking questions as they have this past year, such as, Mr. Muller, what side why did we fight on in Vietnam, the north or the south?

PETER ARNETT: I must confess I came here without any clear idea of what this conference was looking to, what it was trying to achieve. And after three days, it's still not clear in my mind how beneficial it'll be. But I would say the Vietnam is less a historical problem than a current one. That the world today is a continuum from that. And so that anything we talk and discuss about its origins and its impact has to be valid.

The other factor that I like about this conference is that traditional enemies in print and in government and in academia are gathering here, discussing their differences, meeting, chatting. And this to me is a-- yet another positive example of American democracy at work. We need to do this.

[INAUDIBLE] in a combat zone. Request [INAUDIBLE] 30 seconds--

HARRISON SALISBURY: Ten years after the Paris Peace Accords brought a formal end to the Vietnam War, the embers of that fire in the lake, as Frances Fitzgerald once called it, still haunt America. Nowhere was this more evident than on the peaceful campus of the University of Southern California in 1983 when a group of 85 American men and women, most of them journalists but including diplomats, military men, CIA personnel, and historians, met to try and learn some lessons from the war.

It was not an easy task. Outside the conference hall could be heard the angry shouts of those lost people, Vietnamese refugees in a strange land, victims of the war. And inside the conference call again and again were raised the angry voices of Americans, of Vietnam veterans who had fought there. Through all these discussions, there was one simple refrain that [? ran ?]. Why? Why? Why? Why Vietnam?

Nothing like Vietnam has ever happened to America. Nothing has had such consequences of a political and social nature. We do not see it mentioned in politics. Our politicians hate the word. They seem to believe that if [? they ?] touch the coal of Vietnam it may sear their careers. And there may be some reason for this. Because president after president has been blown away by the perceived or unperceived echoes of Vietnam.

The question will not leave us. And that is why these discussions, these efforts to understand what went wrong, and, indeed, what went right in Vietnam must be pursued. We must understand our history and apply its lessons to the present. And that was the purpose of these discussions which are held on that peaceful University of Southern California campus to try and analyze each aspect of this difficult task.

ARTHUR MILLER: It's the story in the world in one respect. It was the exercise of power without insight. The enormity of it is that we went to war with a country whose language I doubt three people in Washington could speak and understand. The ignorance was sublime. They had absolute reliance on technology. It's the classic story of a denial of the human spirit and its power. They really were pagans. They really thought that what you could see was what you could believe. And what you couldn't see wasn't there.

HARRY TRUMAN: Our vision of progress is not limited to our own country. We extend it to all the peoples of the world.

WILLIAM APPLEMAN WILLIAMS: Truman talked about the hoards of Asians, the wilderness threatening to overwhelm civilization. The hoards were Russians. [? Atchison ?] had a favorite metaphor. America was the locomotive puffing away to pull the rest of the world into civilization. Those images and metaphors tell us most of what we need to know and about why we went to kill people in Vietnam. We were transforming a wilderness in order to save the city on the hill.

RONALD STEEL: The idea of an American mission is a very profound one, a mission to transform, to improve the world, to create it more along the lines which we feel are better for us and better for everybody else, too.

FRANCES FITZGERALD: The American establishment created the war. It did so because it saw it as its mission as its role in the world to set up barrier to the extension of communism in Asia and elsewhere in the world.

J EDGAR HOOVER: In 1917 when the Communists who overthrew the Russian government, there was one Communist for every 2,277 persons in Russia. In the United States today there is one Communist for every 1,814 persons in this country.

JOSEPH McCARTHY: If we lose Indochina Mr. Jenkins, we will lose the Pacific. And we'll be an island in a Communist sea.

WILLIAM APPLEMAN WILLIAMS: There is a great book yet to be written about how during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the left and the right in America agreed to define socialism in terms of the Soviet Union. That legacy of misplaced concreteness made it easy to define Stalinist Russia as the monster.

FRANCES FITZGERALD: The Vietnam War was in many ways a symbolic war. It wasn't fought for the very territory of Vietnam itself. It was fought as an example, both to the Communist world and to the world that we condemned with the word neutralist.

RONALD STEEL: The theory of containment, the definition of security had to be tested somewhere. And these confluence of historical forces had led it to take place in Vietnam. If it hasn't taken place in Vietnam, I do believe it would have had to have occurred somewhere.

PETER ARNETT: There was a feeling, in fact, a concern, more than that, a certainty amongst American policymakers in the early '60s that the Communists were making another bid beyond China to enslaved that part of the world. I arrived in Southeast Asia in the late '50s. I could hear it. Amongst American advisers and diplomats, I could see it in their thinking. I could see that thinking in South Vietnam. They were concerned that the domino theory was valid.

There were few people in those days who argued against the dominant theory. Certainly the leaders of Thailand, the leaders of Laos, the leaders of Vietnam were for the domino theory. They agreed with Americans that there should be American aid. But they were thinking beyond guns and troops. They wanted money, lots of money. And they got lots of money. It was their way of getting foreign aid. So the political feeling at the time was one of an advancing Communism.

DWIGHT EISENHOWER: Now let us assume that we lose Indochina. If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The Kra peninsula, the last little bit of end hanging on down there would be scarcely defensible. The tin and the tungsten that we so greatly the value in that area would cease coming. But all India would be outflanked. Burma would certainly, in its weakened condition, be no defense. So you see, somewhere along the line, this must be blocked.

JOHN F KENNEDY: We withdrew from Vietnam, the Communists would control Vietnam, pretty soon Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya.

LYNDON JOHNSON: If this little nation goes down the drain and can't maintain their independence, ask yourself what's going happen to all the other little nations.

Three times in my lifetime, in two world wars, and in Korea, Americans have gone too far lands to fight for freedom. We have learned that a terrible and a brutal cost that retreat does not bring safety. And weakness does not bring peace. And it is this lesson that has brought us to Vietnam.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: With Lyndon Johnson, the democratic part of the establishment, it was a fear, going back to the loss of China. A fear that if Vietnam fell, Ho Chi Minh walked into Saigon, or Lyndon Johnson would lose his presidency. He didn't want to lose Saigon because he didn't want to lose Washington. He didn't want to lose the Great Society.

So that's why they make those decisions. And there was an arrogance of power, contempt for the other side. A belief that the other side-- And unwillingness to understand what the French-Indochina War was. That it was a real history. That the other side had to emerge enormously strong and vital. That they had defeated a powerful western army. That it was capable of stalemating our army. A disrespect for history.

WILLIAM APPLEMAN WILLIAMS: Some of that arrogance of power was subconscious. I learned about that as a midshipmen at the Naval Academy. It was taught very polite accents. We had destroyed the first Americans in protracted guerrilla warfare, punctuated by occasional set battle pieces. We had wiped out the freedom fighters in the Philippines. We had won two world wars. Some of it was terrifyingly rational. We had the bomb.

RONALD STEEL: It was a manifestation of the ambitions of a rising imperial power.

SPEAKER 1: I think it's very interesting to some of the international connections of the war in Vietnam are being brought out here and openly talked about because that's what happened. This came about at the end of World War II, a time when the US was stepping into the shoes of its so-called ally, Britain, the so-called ally, Holland, and the Dutch East Indies and other areas all over the world.

While out of one side of their mouth, they were talking about the end of colonialism, talking about self-determination for peoples. In fact, they were getting rid of one oppressor in order to step into their place.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: We did not go there in classic imperialists terms to exploit. I mean, we didn't lose 50,000 men and burn up billions of dollars worth of material in order to keep our hands on rubber plantations. And I think that, that's important. I think it was a misconception of the way the world was and who we were and who the other side was.

ARTHUR MILLER: It had been a revolution for 40 years before we ever got near it. Anybody with the least understanding of the area knew that. To have painted it as a simple continuation of the Cold War, was quite uninformed. It was really stupid.

FRANCES FITZGERALD: Was not at all easy for the United States to get into the war that cost the lives of 10s of thousands of Americans and millions but literally countless Indochinese. It wasn't easy a bit. Vietnam was not a quagmire in the sense that we stumbled into it and were sucked down and unable to get out, despite our own efforts.

Though this is the textbook and I think probably the cinematic version of the war. In fact, the United States created the war. And if you count from the time of the Geneva agreements in 1954, that creation took over a decade. It took an enormous amounts of time and expense and the energies of a great many people.

WILLIAM APPLEMAN WILLIAMS: They had sold the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in Europe by scaring hell out of the American people, by presenting the Soviet Union as evil incarnate. And they explained the Chinese revolution as the devious manipulations of Stalin.

They had taken the worst of isolationism and the worst of internationalism and created the mentality of a fortress American empire. They had destroyed their own options. They had no place to go but [INAUDIBLE].

DAVID HALBERSTAM: The Vietnamese were just one more [INAUDIBLE] come to meddle in their country and to drop bombs on them.

PETER ARNETT: That to be an American reporter almost anywhere today is to be challenged for what we're doing. Whether it's for allegedly insulting the President of the United States by raising your voice at a Rose Garden photo op or by interviewing left wing guerrillas in El Salvador or by insisting on staying in West Beirut and reporting on the systematic destruction of that city by Israeli siege guns, we seem always on the defensive these days.

MORLEY SAFER: I agreed to take part in this conference because there is a not too subtle move afoot to rewrite history and to assign blame to the messengers of that war, to justify the official lies of Vietnam.

KEYES BEECH: I do not share the view that the media lost the war. But the media helped by its merciless, relentlessly negative, staggeringly lopsided reporting of the war.

PHILIP KNIGHTLEY: Since the end of the war in Vietnam there has been a reassessment of the role that the press and television played in the Communist victory. During the fighting, the correspondents learned to live with the accusation that their reporting was helping the enemy. But the post-war conclusion goes much further than that. It is eloquently summed up by Robert Elegant, a long-serving Asia expert and a former Vietnam correspondent himself. Elegant accuses the correspondents not merely of contributing to the Communist victory but of being directly responsible for it.

HARRISON SALISBURY: Did the reporters in Vietnam skew their dispatches to fit their personal prejudices? Were they, in fact, in the majority against the war? Did they do a bad job of reporting? Did they fail to go to the front? Were they ignorant of the background of Vietnam? All of these questions became involved in what was the great Vietnam controversy. Did they become part of the action? In this panel on the quality of reporting in Vietnam, these issues are discussed.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: And there is to this day in this room bitter division among us. None of the pleasant, old enmities not yet settled. I thought they had been. But they haven't been in terms of our assumptions of duties between those, I suppose. And I don't think it's really even ideological. I think it's more generational, those going back to loyalties of World War II and Korea who had a simpler and more traditional view of what a reporter does and what his loyalty was to the flag, right or wrong. And I suppose the generation of which I belong to and Peter [? and Forrest ?] and Morley Safer and others, who found that duty more conflicted and who found the ideals of democracy made it harder to automatically salute the flag each night.

I will tell you-- And that's what, of course, made us controversial. Were we going to be loyal first and foremost to the ideal of an American democracy? Or are we automatically, in immortal words of so many high officials, going to get on the team?

JOHN LAURENCE: It's an old story, of course. In the last century, Czar Nicholas I condemned, castigated, and censored the alarming dispatches of a young officer correspondent who was reporting from the Russian side in the Crimean War. Tolstoy was muzzled. At the turn of the century after Britain's loss of Boer War, Rudyard Kipling was criticized for exposing the senseless conditions in which wounded British troops were treated in that war.

Without meaning to suggest that the American press corps in Vietnam belongs in the elevated company of Tolstoy and Kipling, although you could make a case for one or two, the reports were at least continuing the tradition of trying to discover and then report honest accounts of what was happening in the Vietnam War. Even when it conflicted with official reports.

Quite naturally military and civilian officials, some of whom are here, were angered by some of that reporting. And now searching for explanations or excuses for the tragic consequences of the war, they and others seek to place some or all the blame on the press. Even with the best intentions, they are reconstructing and revising the history of the period in attempts to substantiate their particular theories.

ROBERT ELEGANT: Well, let's put it this way. I mean, what changed the attitudes of the American Congress, let's say. Or for that matter, what about Mr. Johnson's resignation to go back in time to '68. I believe that it was the public perception of the war. Where did the public get its information from? It got its information from the press. And it seems to me that this may almost sound simplistic, but there was no another source of major source of information. And the public, based upon what I considered an erroneous perception of the war, revolted from the war.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: If the other side had not been as good, we would have covered battles that had been won. As it was, we covered a dying order. And none of us wanted to. Most of us turned around because we saw that it did not work.

FLOYD ABRAMS: If you check the films of the early '60s not to say the 1950s but the early '60s when David was in Vietnam, there was a basically an articulation which was very, very pro governmental view of what was happening in Vietnam. So the lessons that different people have learned are quite different.

There are times when a large segment of America at least has come to the view or has been led to the view that the broadcasters and journalists, print and broadcast, were the leading sponsors of the anti-war movement. At it just wasn't so. The journalists-- And the journalists-- The journalist know it wasn't so.

MICHAEL ARLEN: Now, I realize that a certain amount of myth has evolved around our television coverage in Vietnam. That fact that television kind of stuck it to the home audience with its scenes of bloody combat and kind of stuck it to the military with its relentlessly negative commentary. But what I remember, and I think not uncasually, is really something very different.

My recollection is that for most of the war, television very, very rarely showed us anything of the horrific or bloody or Goyaesque nature on the nightly news. On entertainment programs, yes, but not on the news. In fact, television dutifully passed on the body counts, a distance alienating kind of announcement but almost never showed us death which might have been more meaningful.

BARRY ZORTHIAN: The war at Vietnam was also the first television war, the first complete exposure of all the horror and destruction of war to a mass audience, in color, in the comfort of the home. And while Dr. Muller believes television in the final analysis, did not make a difference, certainly television news came to maturity in Vietnam. And its impact was considerable in intensifying conceptions and emotions.

MICHAEL ARLEN: The point is, that for most of the years and years of this undeclared war, almost never was anything resembling a flunking grade given our military by television news. Until, of course, the final phase when some nervous C minuses were handed out. Though by a television press confidant, the mainstream America feel pretty much the same way about it. But I suspect it is an important challenge in the matter of television journalism.

It's only in part a challenge to the people who own the cameras. In a much greater part, I think the challenge is to the rest of us, the audience, which insistently confuses the camera eye with a human eye. Which, of course, loves the cameras, all those cameras everywhere. In fashion, of lovers in the early stage of an infatuation who, alas, expect the love object somehow to do absolutely everything.

ROBERT SCHEER: I don't think it's enough to do the cops and robbers reporting, the police beat reporting. I think when you're talking about international events, you're talking about intervention in other country's history. You have to get historical. You have to read up on it. You have to care about it. You have to be sensitive to its complexity, as we said before. But you also have to get involved with the big political economic questions that are supposed to be behind it.

GEORGE REEDY: In terms of the press, the press was totally unprepared for Vietnam. The press had no way of covering that kind of a war. You know what the press release does? And we've got to reconcile ourselves to this. The press covers things on the basis of daily events. And if you can't say that somebody said today or something happened today, the press, whether for good or for bad, becomes a little bit helpless. And Vietnam was not that kind of a war.

PHILIP KNIGHTLEY: Indochina was never a simple or straightforward, but it was arcane even before the commitment of the US ground troops. Afterwards it became so complex that it was virtually impossible to understand it all and its ramifications. And I must add, it was impossible to convey those ramifications to the public.

DAVID HABERSTRAM: I'm enormously proud of the military reporting than our sources were very good. I'm not nearly as proud of my political reporting. I don't think it was nearly as profound. I think that I've always been criticized for the wrong thing. I've been criticized for being too pessimistic. In truth, I was not pessimistic enough.

And I think I speak for most of my colleagues of those years in that way. And I wonder-- I've wondered why we weren't better. And I think there's a very real reason. Our military sources were very good. And a good reporter can always find good sources.

Our political sources, our people in the embassy weren't nearly as good. And the reason they weren't as good was McCarthy had wiped out a generation of State Department people. Just ravaged. It wasn't just John Service, John Peyton Davies, John Carter Vincent who were wiped out in China.

It was the next generation coming along after them who might have served in Vietnam, who might have been able to phrase some of these things in historic way and give us, the younger reporters, a sense of their expertise. They were gone. It was a vacuum there. And we as reporters, and thus we as a nation, were weaker for it.

PHILIP KNIGHTLEY: The significant point about the flush of stories in this period attacking US involvement is not that they were written. That was inevitable. But the United States provided the access and the freedom that enabled them to be written.

GEORGE REEDY: But I think myself that the turn in Vietnam had very little to do it the press. I think it was when Mrs. Clancy's son was killed, wading through a paddy, a rice paddy in a country she had never heard of in a place that meant absolutely nothing to her, and that all of a sudden, the American people began to realize that the nation was really committed to this particular war.

And that there was absolutely no foundation for it. That there was no understanding of the American people for what they were doing. And I think that we've got to reconcile ourselves to this.

PETER ARNETT: Revisionism is revisionism. There are those who are to be to reinterpret history. As far as the press involvement, it would be delightful for me to feel that I had the power to change history. I know we had the power to get people's attention, but I don't think we've got the power to change history. I would simply put our record of what we did, which is in the public domain, is against what they are writing. And just point out that that's what we did for good or for ill. And that's about it.

FRANCES FITZGERALD: Journalists never lose wars for people. The messengers that bring bad tidings are not the ones that create the bad tidings.

ARTHUR MILLER: I just-- I was told that they're quite vocal. And I've known some of them in the past, but never in a situation quite like this because there's been no situation that I know quite like this.

SPEAKER 1: Did they leave? Are we back to the same spot? Are we talking to ourselves again? One more fucking time, right? You reported the war. If you reported the war, you wouldn't have lines running up and down the aisles. We've been trying to talk for years. You're talking for us. What is this? You veterans are-- Veterans are put on display to be looked at. We stand up here and tell stories.

They hurt. I ain't going to keep anybody in this room from going to a God damn war. They told stories in World War I. We've forgot those stories. We've forgotten so much we sit down and watch a movie called Chariots of Fire and figure that the God damn shit that they're showing on that movie is some sort of great celebration of a certain amount of values. Excuse me. You needed at least one mad veteran.

AUDIENCE 1: All right.

HARRISON SALISBURY: The veterans of the war in Vietnam almost physically forced their presence into the University of Southern California discussions. True, a small panel had been arranged for the discussion of these issues. But from the very beginning, they were there with their angry insistent questions at panel after panel. And the questions they were asking were why. Why have we been forgotten? Why have you not taking up the issues of the Vietnam veterans?

This was unusual. Vietnam veterans had not taken center stage. But now they're moving there. And it's a healthy development for them and for the United States. It's examined in this discussion of the war and the Vietnam veterans.

BRUCE WEIGL: I have nothing to say, so I'm going to read these poems. This is called The Last Lie. "Some guy I was with in the miserable convoy raised up in the back of our open truck and threw a can of c-rations at a child who called into the rumble for food. He didn't toss the can. He wound up and hung in on the child's forehead. And she was stunned backwards into the dust of our trucks.

Across the sudden angle of the roads curving, I could still see her when she rose, waving one hand across her swollen bleeding head, wildly swinging her other hand at the children who mobbed her, who tried to take her food. I grit my teeth to myself to remember that girl smiling as she fought off her brothers and sisters.

She laughed as if she thought it were a joke. And the guy with me laughed and fingered the edge of another can, like it was the raised seam of a baseball until his rage ripped through him into the faces of the children who called to us for food."

SPEAKER 2: The heart of the story is something that happens as we filed through the village. As we were going through, a little in front of us there was a woman screaming cursing at us as we passed by. The Army spent all its time teach me how to kill the Vietnamese, rather than how to speak to them. So I don't know for sure exactly what she was saying. It didn't matter. There was no doubt that it wasn't complimentary whatever she was saying.

So I said to myself, what the fuck is she yelling at me for? I come 10,000 miles, march in the rain, mud, monsoons, tropical sun through mountains, rivers, hip deep rice paddies slime, tripping over vines, falling off dikes. Being bitten by uncounted species of bugs, carrying unknown sicknesses, got diarrhea, always tired, being fuck with by the lifers, living on crap packed 15 years ago I wouldn't give a dog I hated.

Getting shot at, ambushed, booby trapped, hand-grenaded, friends getting fucked up to save her sorry fucking ass, and she's going to stand there and spit and curse at me?

A voice in the back of my head started speaking, softly, very softly because there was a lot of misguided patriotism in the way. Misguided patriotism makes it hard for sensible thoughts to linger for any amount of time. Still something back there was saying, hey man, this woman don't care about how noble you are for coming all this way and being here to save her from her neighbors.

All she knows is that you or someone just like you just set her house on fire. You may call it a hooch and laugh because it ain't got a door, but it's her house. And it has just been torched for whatever noble reasons. That's why this woman is cursing you in all your ancestors because you, not her evil neighbor, Zippoed her home and destroyed all the things valuable in her life.

JAMES STOCKDALE: I spent 10 years in Vietnam, two years flying planes off aircraft carriers and eight in a dungeon. I spent my 40s in Vietnam. I was 42 when I was shot down. And I was nearly 50 when I got out. But I think we had it better than these poor soldiers.

SPEAKER 3: If you look at the statistics which we never brought out by the press, the National Council of Churches in 1973-- And I'll make this brief. This is as a 1973, said there were 45,000 died in combat. Well, we know it's 55,000 plus. 1973, 47,000 died from non-hostile. That means muggings, rapes, ODs, accidents, you name it. Another 49,000 died since their return into civilian life. Those are statistics that people need to deal with.

SPEAKER 4: I had a reality a few months ago-- little over-- little less than a year ago. When after one night waking up, I found myself in the hallway when with a hole punched in the wall again. And my 13-year-old son that was born when I was in Vietnam said, "Daddy, what's wrong? You scared me." That scared the crap out of me. I don't want Vietnam left out of my memory. It's something that has to stay there.

SPEAKER 5: I have a friend who has sat at home for the last 10 years building models. He went to Vietnam five months after being drafted. He was sent on a five-man patrol. They were ambushed. His best friends were killed beside him. He had the top of the skull blown off. Due to our fine medical staff in Vietnam, he also had a frontal lobotomy.

SPEAKER 6: I served in Vietnam '69 to '70. At 19 years old, I had the job of keeping about 35 people alive. Within the span of a week and a half, 65% of the people were either killed or wounded.

SPEAKER 7: I saw Vietnamese, young Vietnamese chained to trees to fire machine guns at the Marines as we were coming into a place doing an operation. I saw the Americans, the same Marines being shot at, killing women and children. Atrocities are part of war. What bothers me most, is that the only people that fight war basically, by and large, are children themselves. We were children over there.

SPEAKER 8: So I turned 18 when I went to Vietnam and from Reading, Pennsylvania. And the only people I knew were the people that lived next door to me and sat next to me my homeroom class and people that I delivered newspapers to. And Vietnamese people about the lessons I learned from them came from my drill instructor, who said they were gooks.

SPEAKER 9: My whole attitude, I think, the whole time I was in Vietnam in regards to the Vietnamese people and for several years afterwards was that I wanted to kill them first. Sometimes I still flash on that.

SPEAKER 10: As we marched through Hue, I've look into the faces of the Vietnamese. And I saw unity there. But it was a unity against us. And for the first time, I began to question exactly why the US was in Vietnam. If we were there to defend the freedom and liberty of the Vietnamese, why did the Vietnamese universally look upon us with such disgust?

SPEAKER 8: I did notice that the people were terrified of us. And that frightened me, that power. That people were that frightened of me was something I never experienced before and I couldn't-- It was hard for me to deal with it. But it did-- It frightened me. Their fear of me frightened me, that I had that power.

SPEAKER 7: For me, the sense of my innocence, the sense of me being a child, was totally shattered. And when I see my own children playing now, I want that back. And my country can't allow me to have that back.

SPEAKER 11: I have two sons, a five year old and a two year old. When they come to me and ask me, Daddy why did you serve in Vietnam? And not-- And not able to give him an answer, a solid answer. Because [INAUDIBLE] how this system has treated blacks over many years.

And I feel that, I hope from this experience of being in Vietnam as a black individual that my white brothers here that served with me are-- will understand my plight because for the first time. They're really facing what I've been facing-- my generation's been facing all this time, related to this [? government. ?] As being recognized as a human being.

CLANCY SEGAL: Most combat soldiers work in general working class, blue collar, or farm kids with very few resources, almost no quote social skills, except perhaps a gut instinct for survival. As we know, as a rule, middle class kids did not have to go and fight the war. They knew about lawyers. They knew about psychiatrists. They knew about college deferments.

JAMES FALLOWS: I was in the class of 1970 at Harvard. There was one member of my class who was in combat in Vietnam out of 1,200 people. During the whole Vietnam War, of children of members of Congress, one congressman who served in that time had a son in combat.

SPEAKER 8: There are people that made money from Vietnam. People that made money from Vietnam. Those people, they don't want to talk about now. They don't come to these conferences and so forth. And some of the people are here made money as well. Maybe they wrote about the war. They got their name-- The got some publicity. They moved up the ladder. People don't seem to realize that the reason that they live the way they do is because of an empire. They command a lot of resources.

But the cost of that empire is war. And I paid a little bit of the cost of that war. But they don't want to deal with me now. Makes them comfortable, I think, a little bit. I think that's why this is important. This is one of the first times that the people, the intellectuals who basically interpreted my experience actually have to deal with the people that went through the suffering. I think that's important. They should do that.

FRANCES FITZGERALD: What do the veterans have to tell us? What they have to tell future soldiers? Well first, that killing and risking one's life demands moral seriousness. Soldiers must ask the purpose. And if they do not do it sooner, they'll have to do it later. And it'll be far more painful then.

What the Vietnam veteran have taught the rest of us is this, that we cannot simply write off our losses, declare a failure, and get on with the matter, close the subject because the young men we have sent to fight our wars for us will not forget. They will become our conscious. And they will insist that there is responsibility.

VOICES READING: [INAUDIBLE] Abeta, Jerry D Abeta, Tony [INAUDIBLE] Abeta, Robert T Abeta, David F Able, James L Abler, Elmer R Ables, Kenneth R Abmeyer, Carl E Abner, Daniel T Abney, Jr.

SPEAKER 12: How did you think Americans can help Vietnamese people? To fight, to [INAUDIBLE] Hanoi regime. To bring the freedom to our people. That the question.

ROBERT MULLER: I just got to say something to you my friend. When you ask how can we help you fight the Hanoi leadership to try and improve the state of affairs for the Vietnamese people, you know, after describing what this nation did in fighting a war of Indochina, you know we lost 57,000 Americans in Vietnam. We had the largest military assault in the history of the world launched against that people. And we didn't prevail. Now if you think that on the basis of some reaching out that you can even dream that you're going to muster an effort that's going to come on against those people and somehow prevail after what we did and lost. There's some point in time, my friend, where you got to face reality.

HARRISON SALISBURY: Saddest of all the Vietnamese questions is that of the Vietnamese themselves. As they said, you lost a war, but we lost our country. And then the other questions followed swiftly. Why did you come to Vietnam if you were not going to stay, if you were not going to win that war? What was your purpose there? Were you really out to bring democracy to Vietnam? Or was there some other purpose?

And then that lingering question, why have you forgotten us? Why does no one know that we are refugees in America? Don't you really care? These are deep and poignant issues. And the questions must be answered. And these are the issues which are discussed in the panel that dealt with the war and the Vietnamese.

[CALL AND RESPONSE]

PETER ARNETT: The Vietnamese are demonstrators by nature. They're a political people. Demonstrating is a way of life to them. When I saw them, I was aware that they may gather. And I thought it was a valid expression of their frustration with what they feel is happening to Vietnam. Because many of them were young, I talked to some. They were young when that came out in the boats, just teenagers, preteens.

They're growing up in a world they feel is quite alien to them. And they can't go home. They can't go back, no visas for them. And they're frustrated. And their youthful energies are looking to try and do something about it. I think it is a tragedy that young people have the rest of their lives to live in frustration, that parents came here because of the good life. They know the reality of Vietnam and what Vietnam has become. These young people, they don't know.

SPEAKER 14: My father, he is [INAUDIBLE] And I want my parent have to get out of jail early as he can. And that way I have to [INAUDIBLE] down here. And [INAUDIBLE] freedom in Vietnam and for my family and all the people in Vietnam and everything if I can't do.

SPEAKER 15: Did any of us foresee a whole chain of re-education camps in which thousands of people, 10s of thousands of people, would be incarcerated without trial for indefinite periods? Did we expect the liberators to be condemned a few years later by Amnesty International, as has happened, as violating basic human rights?

SPEAKER 16: Since 1975, thousand and thousand of Vietnamese citizen have been detained in camps, in prison. Some camps truly resembling the early Nazi concentration camps. I've appealed to several member of the peace movement to help. Their response was, in view of the wickedness that we brought against Vietnam, it is moral arrogance to criticize the [? Hanoi ?] regime for the prisoner, number one.

Number two, if we give help, it will improve the lot of the prisoners. I believe that unless we speak up clearly on behalf of all of the victims of all regime, whether they are [INAUDIBLE] or under the [? Hanoi ?] today, we are going to lose our credibility as defenders as the human rights for all people.

SPEAKER 17: I left the Vietnam Communists because I could not live under Communist in human. And I would like to tell people here, that the Communist are killers and murderers. They kill thousand of people in Vietnam. And they kill my family.

SPEAKER 18: The anger of the refugees who are at this conference should not surprise us. Because of the steps of US intervention in the 1950s to create an anti-communist government in South Vietnam, what had begun as a nationalist, anti-colonial revolution by the Vietminh did take on aspects of civil war.

We see here with us one side of a bitter and deep division that was produced. The other side is what has led to often harsh treatment of the persons that the successful Vietnamese revolutionaries regard as having been puppets of the United States.

SPEAKER 19: Did we expect hundreds of thousands of boat people to take to the sea and to leave their ancestral lands, lands which Don Luce told us this morning they valued so terribly highly?

SPEAKER 18: For the individuals involved, it was a terrible experience. But again, it did not have to be. Had the US and other western countries been prepared to negotiate a massive orderly departure program in 1975 or 1976, immense suffering and loss of life could've been avoided. A limited ODP was finally set up and works today. But the criterion to be accepted to it by the United States are far stricter than for those who come out by the dangerous boat route.

ROBERT MULLER: We have carried with us for more than a decade the time frozen images of our earlier encounter with Vietnam, of villages exploding, of people dying, and of untold suffering and misery. To be able to go back and replace those images with the current ones of a country, albeit suffering and poor but still at peace, went a long way to help us relieve ourselves of some the baggage we've carried.

To look upon the Vietnamese no longer as objects of war, as gooks, and dinks as we had been trained and conditioned to regard them, but now look upon them as people who are fathers and mothers and family people, added an element of compassion that many of us have continued since we've come home to try and adjust to and to settle with. We have got to end the war against Vietnam.

We have got to stop portraying them as the bad guy all the time, stop isolating them politically and economically, and take the step that we've done would certainly greater enemies in the past. And start the process of diplomatic recognition and work towards normalization and ultimately help rebuild that country. And in doing that, recapture part of what the American people have historically been about.

HARRISON SALISBURY: And let me say one thing about the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese emigres who have been in our midst for these three days, who have demonstrated outside the hall, and who have asked those painful repetitive but truthful an emotional and natural questions about what about us. Those happen to be the people of the country whom we supposedly were fighting a war to preserve.

And what has it done to them? Where has it landed them? Thousands and thousands of miles away from their homeland, a tiny band of exiles in an enormous country which still knows nothing of their culture. Knows nothing of their aspirations. Would rather never hear that word Vietnam again. It is embarrassed by their presence.

I assure you that whether you support or did support the war in Vietnam or not, that any great state which permits itself the indignity and the contempt for the people whom it expressed such enormous warmth and cherishing respect, that it sent 500.000 and 600,000 of its fighting men that over there to fight for Vietnam, and then turns it back on those people, that nation, our nation we the people of this country have damaged ourselves in a manner which will take a long, long time to correct.

If indeed we are able to do it because first we have to face up to the facts of what we have done.

SPEAKER 19: You think we are bunch of cowards who are stupid? [INAUDIBLE] opportunity?

ARTHUR MILLER: People don't find it easy to acknowledge what they don't approve of in themselves. I think there's a profound disapproval in this country of what we did in Vietnam. And that's why it's so hard to acknowledge it.

HARRISON SALISBURY: The lessons for a war are not yet learned. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that we do not yet know all of the questions which are posed in those lessons. What we're now doing and what we must begin to do much more strongly, is to attend to our lessons, to pay some attention to the results of the Vietnam War, to struggle out of the rather drugged sleep in which we have been bemused for the last 10 years.

The Vietnam veterans are leading the way. They have spoken up. And they continue to speak up. We will hear more from them. And their criticism is the kind of criticism which you must take to heart. But we, Americans in general, have much more to learn because we are the ones who will decide in the future whether there will be a Vietnam in some other form which may cast a shadow across America's path.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: I think one of the lessons is when you plant the flag you better really know why you're planting it and what it means. I think that it was casually and incompetently planted in the Kennedy days. I mean, [INAUDIBLE] number [? advisors ?]. Couple people killed. Every soldier killed becomes not a rationale. This is what bothered me during the days [INAUDIBLE] El Salvador.

Not a rationale for a reexamination of the policy, but a rationale for sending ever more young men. When I was there I think there were fewer than 100 Americans killed. And everybody said, oh, we can't turn back now. We'll dishonor those young men. We have a monuments now in Washington with 50,000 names on it.

HARRISON SALISBURY: I do believe that it is our ignorance, not the ignorance let us say of President Reagan which may be intense, but generally ignorance in this country and lack of knowledge of the world in which we live, in which we survive and only barely survive.

It has been my belief for a long, long time that when we blame a Nixon, a Reagan, a Johnson, or a Kennedy for getting us into wars or getting us into situations which we do not like, which are full of moral contradictions, that they really are representing the general level of the great American public.

FRANCES FITZGERALD: In fact, there is nothing easier than to avoid future Vietnams. It's extremely easy not to intervene in the internal affairs of small third world countries, particularly ones--

[APPLAUSE]

--particularly ones of no economic or strategic importance to the United States. It's also quite easy not to get involved in weak, corrupt, and repressive governments, even if you do not have to go to the lengths of manufacturing those governments yourself. Of course, it's quite possible that our administration may forget these lessons and try and repeat history. Indeed, this administration seems to be taking all the preliminary steps necessary right now in Central America.

But if that's the case, there's very little that I or perhaps anyone else here can do about it. For to send a CIA operators and US military advisers into the social upheavals of Central America with the idea that they could stop them is, I would submit, evidence of some mental instability.

[APPLAUSE]

I can't tell the Reagan administration how to prevent another Vietnam. And I won't tell this audience because it hardly needs the advice. Thus, I'll try and draw some rather more detailed lessons from the Vietnam experience. The first lesson is this, you may create a leader, you may find him, put him in power, protect him to the best of your abilities, but his purposes will still not be yours, if you want to continue to control him.

To paraphrase one North Vietnamese leader, you can create a puppet, but you can't make a good one. There are only bad puppets. There's a corollary to this proposition. And that is you cannot bribe a man to end corruption.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

There's a lesson that almost any leader in any country might learn from Ho Chi Minh. And that is, if you embark upon a war of any duration, you must have the support of your people. This support is more important than weapons. For if people believe their cause is just, they are capable of extraordinary sacrifices. If they do not, all your weapons are useless.

[APPLAUSE]

There is also a rather serious lesson that President Lyndon Johnson has for future presidents. And that is, if you choose generals and cabinet members who will not resign for reasons of honor, then in the end, you may have to. But there are a series, I think, of lessons that the American press corps learned in Vietnam. And first one is that any official who talks about credibility is almost certainly lying.

PETER ARNETT: I think the major lesson I would suggest came out of the Vietnam War is try to make sure that you're not being like to by your government.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Nothing we have done has really changed the attitude of the people running the government. The absolute certitude they have that a lie can go down. The absolute inability to look at a foreign policy event and commit our children to it without ever once saying who's going to die? How many people will die because of this? How many deaths we'll cause? How many people whether they be an Indian village in Guatemala--

[APPLAUSE]

Well, no. I'm not looking for-- I don't mean that. I'm not trying to [? play at it. ?] What I'm saying is, that the fact that we're in a situation where whole villages can be wiped out in Central America and these little goddamn places that nobody cares about, it isn't that-- Again, it isn't that we're ignorant about it. It's much more. It's we're racist. What do you think we know about the Indonesians or whether they're Chinese? It's a racist attitude, I think. I don't mean deliberately so. It's unconscious, but it's there. You can't tell me it's not there.

HARRISON SALISBURY: There is already in progress in this country after a substantial period of quietude, the first steps towards staking out the control of the myth of Vietnam. This is not a matter of little note. It is important because the generation that follows after us is going to have an image of what Vietnam was.

We're not going to leave this hall tonight and say, oh my God, we've got the answer. Because the answer is too complicated. It's too bitter. It's too difficult. And it involves each one of us. We can't lay it off on the military, the Pentagon, the various presidents, or the newspaper man, the television cameras or anything else. It is a case of collective responsibility. And each one of us in this room and each one of us in this country extending as far as this country goes bears one share of that responsibility.

And if we try to lay it off on somebody else, we're just ducking the problem. And we're building it up for the future.

FRANCES FITZGERALD: If the United States were to-- US government were to plunge us into something like the Vietnam War again, I think that I would advise any younger brother that might be of an age to go into the army to go into the army and to organize an anti-war movement inside army.

INTERVIEWER: Why inside the army?

FRANCES FITZGERALD: Because I believe that one of the worst things that happened in the Vietnam War was that the poor fought it. Those who were rich enough got out. Those who were clever enough found ways around it. As a result, it was, in some sense, a class fought war that divided our nation as much as anything else.

I believe that all of us are responsible as citizens and that, I'm afraid, young men who are of draft age are probably more responsible than others.

SPEAKER 7: Perhaps I'm lucky in the sense that I have daughters. But I've seriously sometimes thought what would happen if I had a son. And as horrible as it may seem, I would probably maim my son before I'd let him go into fucking service.

FRANCES FITZGERALD: I think most importantly for this conference certainly, but for us in general is that, the past is not simply for historians. Strength and endurance come from having a connection with one's own history. The past and future are balanced in the present. And you have one only to the extent that you have the other. You can have control over your future only to the extent that you are deeply and firmly attached to your own history.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: Vietnam seems somehow now to be ancient history. We have people today on campuses who were four years old when the Tet Offensive happened. It seems probably as World War I to them.

PETER ARNETT: I think that a 21-year-old American today has got all sorts of other interests far beyond foreign policy. And considering that he doesn't-- he's no longer eligible for the draft, he has no commitment to be forced to make. That he doesn't have to come up against the kind of decision in making, that previous generations did.

It has to be possibly shoved down its throat. That he has to be alert about what his government is doing and watchful. And at this point in his life, only the academic environment can do that. And I think in this way here, it's helping at least on this campus to get the message home.