THE VIETNAM WAR | PBS Previews: Why Vietnam | PBS Video Lecture | The Impact of the Vietnam War Era on the Present day - Personal Learning

- When we approached the target
coming down from altitude,
it was obvious that they could
pick us up on their radar.
I remember my knee shaking.
And I was saying, "Holy
smokes, I'm going into war.
This is war."
I was a bit scared.
Once we went in and they
started firing at us,
the fear went away.
Everything became smooth,
deathly quiet in the cockpit.
It was sort of like a symphony,
in the sense that my plane was
just like a ballet in the sky
and I was just performing
what I was doing.
And then I got hit.
- There was no way we could
avoid telling this story.
We'd famously said, after
Civil War, "No more wars."
And then got sucked
in inexorably
to the film The War on
the Second World War.
By the time we were
finishing that,
we knew that we were
in some ways obligated
to jump into Vietnam.
Ken turned to me and said,
"Okay, I think we can fully
try to do Vietnam now."
And I said, "I'm in."
I've been in since day one.
I've always wanted
to do the stories.
So that's no problem.
There's been a lot done
about this subject.
Books, documentaries,
feature films, novels.
I mean, it's not like
no one's ever tried.
But it remains this kind
of unfinished business
in American history.
In order to move on
as a country at all,
we have to really
understand what happened.
And we've never done
that with Vietnam.
- So it's time now.
The decades have passed.
We've always felt that,
in any kind of
historical presentation,
you've gotta have 25 or
30 years perspective.
The kind of triangulation
that can take place
from that passage of time.
- [Lyndon] I understood
work last night.
The more I think of it, I
don't know what in the hell.
It looks like, to me, we're
getting into another Korea.
It just worries
the hell out of me.
I don't see what we can ever
hope to get out of there with
once we're committed.
I don't think it's
worth fighting for
and I don't think
we can get out.
It's damned easy to get in war,
but it's gonna be awfully
hard to extricate yourself.
- In many ways, the Vietnam
War was our second civil war.
Ripping the country
apart in ways
that hadn't taken place
since the Civil War.
And it's important now to go
back and try to understand it.
- We have tried to take a
look at this from every side.
So, within the
American experience,
there's people who
fought in the war.
There's people who
fought against the war.
There was tremendous conflict
within the United
States about the war.
And then, within Vietnam,
there's the winning side.
There's the losing side.
They were our
enemy and our ally.
There's just so many
different perspectives.
We tried to bring
them all together.
- Just hoping to stay
alive from day to day.
Most everybody just wants to
go back home and go to school.
That's about it.
- [Interviewer] You
lost any friends?
- Quite a few.
We lost one the other day.
Good buddy of mine.
Whole thing stinks really.
- [Ken] This film
is not an answer.
But a set of questions
about what happened.