Vietnam's Bloody Secret (five): AMERICA expected an easy victory when it went to war in Vietnam to stop the spread of world Communism.

By the time US troops left in 1973, some two million American and Vietnamese were dead or wounded. Not long after, the country was united under Communist rule.

America, this absorbing documentary explained through new research and testimony from both sides, won every battle but lost the war. This was a story of botched US intelligence reports, failed bombing raids, the wrong sort of weapons and the willingness of the Vietnamese to die for their cause.

Watching this programme, it was difficult to divorce what happened in Vietnam to what's taking place in Iraq today. Circumstances, as well as motives, may be different but the feeling persists that the Americans repeated history by taking on something for which they were ill-equipped, mentally and militarily.

By 1968, half a million American soldiers were in Vietnam, fighting both the regular North Vietnamese army and guerrilla Vietcong in South Vietnam. Partly, the problem was that the Americans didn't really know who the enemy was.

It was revealed that a Vietcong cell planned the Tet offensive at their HQ situated above a noodle bar where American soliders were eating. US intelligence failed to pick this up.

This was a new kind of war, a media-saturated conflict in which TV played a key role for the first time. Although the Tet offensive was a US victory, across the world it was seen as a North Vietnamese victory.

At first, the US media was uncritical of the war. As casualties mounted, reporters such as Walter Cronkite began to question the conflict. Film and photographs of casualties brought home the horror of war to ordinary Americans.

US soldiers weren't motivated as their enemies were. Morale was affected as the war dragged on and no progress was made in bringing hostilities to an end. They were a conventional army fighting an unconventional war. Whole Vietnamese communities - men, women, young, old - joined the fighting. One woman told how she became a volunteer fighter at 13 after her family was killed.

The Vietcong outfoxed US surveillance teams by keeping open the Ho Chi Min trail, the 1,000-mile supply route. Bombing failed to hit targets with the Vietcong pointing the Americans towards false targets.

With US planes on daily bombing raids and spraying toxic chemicals over the land, the Communists moved underground into a complex of tunnels. Anthropologist Simone Clifford Jaeger squeezed through a narrow trap door - too small for big Americans but not slimmer Vietnamese - to give us a tour. She could barely stand up but whole families lived down there for years on end. There were schools, hospitals and even theatres in the tunnels.

America was a technologically advanced superpower whose soldiers had the latest M16 weapons. But the North Vietnamese's AK37, designed 20 years before, could be used easily by untrained men, women and children.

Booby traps - pits with sharpened bamboo stakes in the bottom - were cheap and easy to make for the Vietcong - and frighteningly effective.

Published: 06/10/2004