Death is certain in any war, but what happens when killing becomes a competition? For American soldiers in Vietnam, the higher their "body count," the greater their rewards.
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00:00Death is certain in any war, but what happens when killing earns you beers? A lot of what
00:05you know about the Vietnam War is worse than you imagine.
00:09The purpose of Agent Orange was designed to destroy the foliage where Viet Cong soldiers
00:13could hide and, as an added bonus, damage the fields used to feed them. But its usage
00:18was always morally questionable, arguably because it broke international law. You see,
00:23Agent Orange was an herbicide, and without getting too sciencey here, in order to kill
00:27that much brush in Vietnam, you have to be loaded with toxins. What no one really considered
00:33at the time was the long-term effects the dioxins had on people, some of which were
00:37reproductive issues, damage to the immune system, even cancer.
00:41Plus, the children of those exposed to Agent Orange were often born with physical and mental
00:45disabilities. Some were even born without eyes, or parts of their brain and skull. To
00:51make things even worse, the United States has been reluctant to admit to a correlation
00:55between exposure to Agent Orange and birth defects, or fear of having to make reparations.
01:01Don't just think of reparations to the Vietnamese, either. Close to 2.5 million American soldiers
01:06were exposed to Agent Orange. It wasn't until 1991 when the Agent Orange Act was signed
01:11into law to treat soldiers' diseases caused by exposure.
01:16Your thought of a child soldier might be a modern image in your mind, but unfortunately,
01:20that's not the case at all. Kids as young as 13 were trained in the guerrilla warfare
01:24methods that the war was infamous for. Child soldiers were also given official awards and
01:28titles like the Valiant Destroyer of the Yanks.
01:31It was a lot easier to recruit children than you'd think. With the constant bombing of
01:35villages and families being uprooted, that made it easy for the Vietnamese Communist
01:39Party to paint American soldiers as the enemy and inundate young children with propaganda,
01:44instilling them with a sense of duty to serve their country. This childhood involvement
01:48included building roads and fortifications, as well as putting together supplies for soldiers.
01:54You've undoubtedly heard about the My Lai Massacre, during which American soldiers killed
01:58up to 500 civilians in March 1968. U.S. military units received faulty intelligence that Viet
02:04Cong troops were in the My Lai region and that citizens had already evacuated. They
02:08were then given free reign to fire on anyone they found. Women, children, and elders were
02:13rounded up and killed, and buildings and farms were burned to the ground.
02:17You know, this is going to be a free-for-all. You can shoot anything you want, anything
02:20that moves, as long as he's not one of your own.
02:23Sadly, this wasn't a one-off, either. In fact, the U.S. military was enacting Operation Speedy
02:28Express, a desperate attempt to pacify the entirety of the Mekong Delta. Nearly 11,000
02:34Vietnamese people were reportedly killed over the course of the operation. Overall,
02:38north of two million Vietnamese civilians died during the war.
02:43During the Vietnam War, U.S. military officials decided to institute a policy that was widely
02:48referred to by soldiers as a body count, which is exactly what it sounds like. In practice,
02:53that ultimately meant that statistics were all that mattered. As Gary Nordstrom, a combat
02:58medic during the war, told The Nation in 2008,
03:01For all enlisted people, that was the mentality. Get the body count, get the body count,
03:06get the body count. It was prevalent everywhere.
03:09Soldiers would do almost anything to get those numbers, including waiting for terrified
03:13civilians to run in fear, or forcing them to walk in front of them in minefields. They even
03:18tried to hide those civilian casualties, claiming that they were actually armed militants, and that
03:22their weapons had mysteriously been destroyed in the struggle. If you're wondering how American
03:26soldiers could just brazenly kill people with reckless abandon, well, they were motivated the
03:31old-fashioned way — with beer. Seriously. The battalions with the most kills were given
03:37beer or vacation days. Name the beer.
03:40The message sent to the public during the war was essentially that Vietnam was a vitally
03:44important piece of international politics. If it fell, it would allow the Soviet Union
03:49to expand its influence throughout Asia. In reality, though, that wasn't exactly the case.
03:54The Soviets had little interest in Southeast Asia, and Vietnam wasn't very strategic to
03:59really anything. But all of that information was kept secret from the public and covered
04:03up by blatant lies. That is, until Daniel Ellsberg leaked everything to the public in
04:081971 by publishing the documents now known as the Pentagon Papers. The American people
04:14felt betrayed, and the fallout led to increased cynicism regarding the government.
04:18The country of Laos was in a rather complicated position during the Vietnam War.
04:23Earlier, during the Cold War, it was viewed as a vital piece of keeping communist forces
04:27at bay in Southeast Asia, due to its proximity to China. As the Vietnam War approached,
04:32American interest grew due to the existence of communist supply routes through Laos and
04:37into Vietnam. Communist forces were indeed on the rise there, but in 1962, 14 nations,
04:43including the U.S., signed a treaty that recognized Laos as a neutral nation.
04:48But that didn't stop the U.S. from interfering in Laos politics, which included the waging of
04:52a secret war. The CIA covertly trained and outfitted anti-communist forces in Laos to
04:57fight against the Vietcong-aligned Patet Lao. Less covertly, the U.S. military bombed supply
05:03lines on the Ho Chi Minh Trail starting in 1964. By the mid-1970s, over two million tons of bombs
05:10had been dropped on Laos, killing a full tenth of the population and leaving a quarter as refugees.
05:16To this day, no other nation has seen the same level of bombing as Laos did.
05:20What's crazy is that some of the bombs didn't detonate on impact, and they went on to kill
05:24over 20,000 people long after the war ended — people just randomly stumbling on unexploded bombs.
05:31In 1961, the CIA began a secret operation intended to sabotage North Vietnamese operations.
05:37Known as Operation 34A, the mission recruited and trained Vietnamese commandos and saboteurs
05:43to infiltrate North Vietnam. The mission lasted for about three years, at which point official
05:48documentation stated that there were 200 agents who had gone missing, many of whom were known to
05:52be alive and in prison. Then, in late 1965, military officials arbitrarily started to declare
05:59those agents as dead — until they were all assumed to have been killed in action,
06:03despite the knowledge that they were very much alive. The main reason they were left for dead
06:08was simply because it was cheaper. Those assumed dead couldn't be paid, and those funds could then
06:13be redirected to other operations. This action also allowed the U.S. to wash their hands of
06:17the whole mission and pretend to move on. This whole secret operation was completely
06:22unknown to the public until the mid-1990s, at which point surviving agents, who had spent nearly
06:27two decades tortured in prison, faced an uphill legal battle for their back pay.
06:32In late 1972, President Richard Nixon tried to bring an end to the Vietnam War by making one of
06:37the most questionable decisions during his time in office — Operation Linebacker 2, now known
06:42colloquially as the Christmas bomb mission. In short, American aircraft dropped 20,000 tons
06:48of bombs over a week and a half in late December, with a break on Christmas Day.
06:521,600 Vietnamese people were killed, as were 33 American airmen — all to accomplish Nixon's
06:58goal of forcing the North Vietnamese government back to the negotiating table for peace talks.
07:12The United States boasted that it accomplished Nixon's goal, but experts have since rebuffed
07:17that. The North Vietnamese government was running out of supplies and couldn't have
07:21sustained the war for much longer. Some experts even believe that North Vietnamese officials had
07:26already decided to come back to the table, but their message didn't reach the U.S. before the
07:30bombings began. Thus, peace could have been had without all the extra bloodshed if Nixon had just
07:35waited. All that the bombings really accomplished was giving the North Vietnamese people a rallying
07:40point around their own heroism. Over the course of the war, some American soldiers started
07:45relationships with Vietnamese citizens. But the children born of these connections found
07:49themselves with long and hard roads ahead of them. On the cultural front, Vietnam favored
07:53neither premarital sexual relations nor relationships with foreigners. So these
07:58children were often abandoned shortly after their birth, left behind at orphanages by their mothers
08:03and completely unaware of their father's identities. The social stigma surrounding
08:07their identities led to significant cruelty. Other children teased them, adopted families
08:12didn't want them, and many of them ended up uneducated and begging on the streets.
08:16Many of these kids hoped to somehow make it to America and find their fathers,
08:20but a lack of documentation has made that nearly impossible for almost all of them,
08:24with reportedly only 3 percent locating their birth fathers.
08:28"...when I start building this relationship that we don't have for 40 years, you know, so...
08:34love you, Dad."
08:35"...I love you, man."
08:36In the decades since the Vietnam War ended, thousands of American veterans have managed
08:40to find peace by returning to Vietnam. Some have even moved there permanently,
08:44building new lives for themselves and feeling more respected there than they ever did in the U.S.
08:49Despite being trained to hate the Vietnamese, they found peace, love, and redemption in a
08:53country that long symbolized war for them. And those positive associations aren't necessarily
08:58a new discovery. In fact, some soldiers recognized it during the war. Some photos
09:02taken during the conflict showcase American GIs rescuing Vietnamese children from war zones,
09:07or even tending to injured Viet Cong soldiers.
09:10None of this is bad, of course, but it paints the entire conflict in a far worse light.
09:15American veterans have questioned why they were ever fighting there in the first place,
09:19and what the American government found so threatening. While trying to find those answers,
09:23many of them have found the war to be more and more pointless. As one veteran told the BBC in 2016,
09:29If I were Vietnamese, I would have fought with Viet Cong.