FRANK McCONNELL: I pray to God it'll never happen again because we don't need that, not the mass slaughter, is all it was, and all the young kids, 18 years old. To me, that's entirely too young to go into combat.

WARD JUST: Nothing beneficial happened here, just a lot of blood was spilled on both sides, really to no beneficial end.

["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]

Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."

Nearly 20 years ago, the war in Vietnam ended, and there are many people alive today who are simply unfamiliar with that war in any fashion. There are many today who fought in that war who would like very much to forget what happened there. Unfortunately, there were a great many wounds caused in that war that linger on today in a traumatized America.

Before we become involved anywhere else in the world with our military force, whether it's in Bosnia or somewhere else in the world, we ought to recall the trauma, the wounds of the Vietnam War. Our program is about that subject today.

NARRATOR: All wars leave death, destruction and wounds behind. But the Vietnam War left an especially bitter emotional legacy: The dead, the maimed and the bereaved. Psychological problems. Deep internal divisions. Missing in action. High economic costs. Distrust of government.

THE DEAD AND THE BEREAVED

NARRATOR: America still mourns the 58,183 servicemen and women whose names are inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, "The Wall." They gave their lives in the country's longest and most unpopular war.

MARK BJISHKIAN: There's a tremendous amount of mixed emotions. I'm happy that I'm home. I'm happy that I'm sort of kind of alright. And I'm sad that the young men that I served with, which I was ten years older than when we served together, didn't even get a chance to enjoy their country.

NARRATOR: We interviewed Vietnam Veterans at the Wall on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. The names of all the American war dead were being read aloud.

Mr. McCONNELL: Well, this is my first time here and this is the best therapy in the world.

INTERVIEWER: Why is that?

Mr. McCONNELL: To visualize this, and walk by it and touch it, and think about everybody that died over there. It's one thing that's here and it's here forever. It's not going to go away.

NARRATOR: Visitors to the Wall have left over 30,000 objects behind in remembrance of loved ones. The National Park Service and the Smithsonian have teamed-up to sponsor a seven-month exhibit of some of these objects.

Duery Felton of the Park Service is a Vietnam veteran who helped organize the exhibit.

DUERY FELTON: This exhibit really evokes all the human emotions. It's just not pathos that's coming forth, but it's also joy and laughter, just as the exhibit is. It's a celebration of life also. It's all the human emotions.

[Displaying items.] This black beret, which bears the insignia of the 101st Airborne Division Recon Unit, was left by the surviving member of a 12-man team that was wiped out on November of 1967.

This offering was left by the African-American Marine in the photograph. He's leaving this assemblage for his friend, the white Marine, who was killed while both of them were serving in Vietnam.

NARRATOR: Dick Durrance was an Army photographer in Vietnam. In his book of photos, Where War Lives, he wrote:

"I had been living with these pictures for three months, studying and printing them, when the tears came. I think it was the eyes staring from those young, rapidly aging faces that broke my numbness. Their expressions seemed to reflect emotions and questions I had avoided for years.

"The tears that came were quiet and few, but they rose from a source deep in my memory. It was not so much for myself that I cried, but for all of us who went to Vietnam."

NARRATOR: Some of the vets at the Wall spoke of psychologi-cal wounds.

GAITHER WILDER: I have dreams, nightmares that I worry about being able to hold down jobs, get along in family situations.

Dr. ARTHUR BLANK: Vietnam veterans with post-trauma symptoms have had more difficulty in staying with a job and have had a higher divorce rate, more difficulty staying with the processes in a family.

NARRATOR: Dr. Arthur Blank served as an Army psychiatrist in Vietnam during 1965 and '66. Today he's Director of Counseling at the Veterans Affairs Department, the VA.

A 1984 study estimated that 30 percent of male Vietnam veterans had post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, at some point in their lives. As of 1984, 15 percent still had it.

Dr. BLANK: Well, some very common manifestations are anxiety and irritability, perhaps some depression, perhaps difficulty in relating to folks that one is close to, as in the family or one's circle of friends, and then some very specific post-trauma symptoms, such as nightmares, occasionally flashbacks.

NARRATOR: After World War I, symptoms like those were called "shell shock." After Vietnam, the government and the medical community were slow to diagnose PTSD. As a result, many veterans went without treatment.

Yet the nature of the Vietnam War, the American defeat, and the lack of a welcome home for the veterans added to the usual wartime psychological burdens. At least in the war's earlier guerilla phase, it was often hard to tell friend from foe. Some Americans founds themselves responsible for the loss of civilian lives.

And then the homecoming...

LOUIS HOLAHTA: Well, I felt as though I wasn't home when I came home.

STEVE JANKE: It's never left me. It's a memory. Sometimes it's very vivid in my mind. I've been learning that there are certain things that trigger the old memories, triggers, maybe sounds, or smells, or sights.

RANDALL JOSHUA: Like I say, if it wasn't for my kids, I don't know. I'd have probably done committed suicide.

NARRATOR: Mark Bjishkian was a Navy medical corpsman who was badly wounded the first week he was in combat. His homecoming was not typical, but it happened.

Mr. BJISHKIAN: I have a uniform at home, my dress whites, and I have a spot right over top of my medals where a lady with full length fur and covered in jewels spit on my chest in downtown Georgetown, right in the middle of Georgetown, at

M Street and Wisconsin Avenue, because she called me "a baby killer."

INTERVIEWER: Why do you think some people in the public took it out on the warriors rather than on the people who made the policy?

Mr. BJISHKIAN: I think if we knew that, a lot of the problems that the United States had with that war could have been dissolved. Unfortunately, we were not together in this particular conflict, as they put it.

THE WOUNDS OF VIETNAM

NARRATOR: If the wounds of the Vietnam War are still so raw in the United States, what about the small Asian country in which it was fought? Vietnam, North and South, suffered enormously. An estimated million and a quarter people died, perhaps two million were wounded. We will never know the true casualty figures.

Tran Van Ca is a Vietnamese American businessman who persuaded the government of Vietnam to permit private US aid to a clinic for the handicapped. Many members of his family died in the war and its aftermath. When Tran Van Ca returned to Vietnam in 1991, he found primitive conditions.

TRAN VAN CA: They don't have enough to eat. The way they dress, you know, they don't have any shoes. They barely have enough to have one meal a day. And everywhere you look, every-where you see, it is a struggle for life.

NARRATOR: Mary Stout served as an Army nurse in Vietnam. For four years, she was president of Vietnam Veterans of America. She has returned to Vietnam twice with delegations seeking information on the missing in action.

MARY STOUT: When we got there, we were told that it had only been like two weeks that they now had electricity in Hanoi 24 hours a day. That basically before that, it was kind of intermittent.

NARRATOR: Rigid rule by the Vietnamese communist government and the US economic embargo, which has curtailed trade with Viet-nam since 1975, have kept the country poor.

There are many reminders of the war years: AmerAsian young people whose GI fathers have long since returned home. Handicapped children born to parents exposed to Agent Orange and other toxins. Children in Hanoi playing on the wreckage of B-52 bombers.

TRAN VAN CA: There are tremendous amount of handicapped, amputees, the people that suffering from the war, the war victims. People that step on mines that left behind uncollected. There is no public service in health care or prosthetic care to these people.

INTERVIEWER: Practically didn't exist?

TRAN VAN CA: Largely been ignored because there are other urgent issues in front of the government, like jobs and other things.

NARRATOR: Tran Van Ca organized a private aid group, Vietnam Assistance to the Handicapped. He successfully overcame the suspicions of the communist Vietnamese government and of the anti-communist Vietnamese-American community in Northern Virginia where he lives.

The organization has provided artificial limbs, wheel-chairs and equipment to the clinic in the Mekong Delta. The group is looking for volunteer specialists to go to Vietnam.

DEEP INTERNAL DIVISIONS

Major ROBERT HOFFMAN: The war tore the country apart.

NARRATOR: The American presidential campaign of 1992 proved that the bitter divisions of the sixties and seventies have not disappeared. President Bush's healing words of his 1989 inaugura-tion were ignored four years later.

President GEORGE BUSH (1989 Inaugural Speech):

"The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory. A new breeze is blowing, and the old bipartisanship must be made new again."

NARRATOR: Ward Just, one of The Washington Post's star correspondents in Vietnam, is now a novelist.

Mr. JUST: In some respects, the wounds of the American Civil War have not healed. I can testify that the wounds from World War I in Europe have far from healed.

NARRATOR: The divisions in the country were emotional and many-sided. The most visible was the split between opponents and supporters of the war. Each group believed it held the moral high ground.

At first, almost all Americans found it hard to criti-cize the government. Early demonstrations of dissent in 1965 were moderate and orderly. As the US war role expanded, the protests grew larger, more heated, more confrontational.

The so-called "generation gap" added to the divisions. Most, but not all, of the protestors were college students. Many of the students rebelled in the sixties not just against the war, but also against authority -- parents, schools, religious insti-tutions, the military.

Yet another dividing line came within the generation called upon to fight the war, the baby boomers. College students could get deferments from the military draft, others could not.

Myra MacPherson is the perceptive author of Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation. She was a reporter for The Washington Post during the Vietnam War.

MYRA MacPHERSON: ...not only student deferments, but fake braces so you could get out. I mean, we had psychiatrists and doctors and dentists doing everything they could to help save these people. I think the only shame was that very little of this was thought about for the poorer and the minority groups, who went in disproportional numbers.

NARRATOR: While some young men went to jail or into exile for reasons of conscience, many affluent students remained in college and the poor and minorities filled the combat ranks in Vietnam. That class difference drove an even wider wedge between Americans with traditional values -- old fashioned patriotism and hard work -- and the rebellious, idealistic young people in the antiwar demonstrations.

By 1968, public opinion polls showed a majority against the war and a bigger majority against the war protesters. Televi-sion played a big role in the public's split view. TV brought graphic images of the Vietnam War into American living rooms. On the other hand, TV news organizations invariably picked out the most extreme forms of protest for use on the evening news.

As a result, many traditional, conservative Americans found no way to express their growing frustration with the war. Not wanting to associate themselves, even indirectly, with the protesters in the streets, they became "the Silent Majority."

THE MISSING IN ACTION

NARRATOR: For the American public, the MIAs -- the missing in action -- represent the most emotional issue remaining from the Vietnam War.

DOLORES ALFOND: I believe that we left hundreds behind.

INTERVIEWER: Hundreds of living prisoners?

Ms. ALFOND: Of living prisoners behind. Now we're not only talking about Vietnam, we're talking about Laos and we're talking Cambodia, possibly Cambodia.

NARRATOR: Dolores Alfond is chairperson of the 6000-member National Alliance of Families, which works on the issue of MIAs from all wars. Her brother, an Air Force pilot, was declared missing in action over North Vietnam in 1967.

Ms. Alfond, like many activists seeking information about missing relatives, has distrusted the government for a whole generation.

Ms. ALFOND: You know that they're going to keep anything and everything from you that they can. I mean, it's just common knowledge.

NARRATOR: Since the White House has been occupied by presi-dents from both parties since 1973, we asked Ms. Alfond:

INTERVIEWER: How do you understand the government's reluc-tance to provide information to the families? We've now gone through quite a few administrations since the end of the war.

Ms. ALFOND: I guess we have "Big Brother" up there, saying, 'well, the families can't stand the real truth, so we're going to withhold this information; we don't want to hurt them anymore.'

NARRATOR: The information, if there is any, would have to come from the Vietnamese government. In 1992, after years without much cooperation, the doors opened wide in Hanoi. Outspoken Senator Hank Brown, a Navy veteran of the war, was one of the members of the Senate Select Committee on POWs and MIAs who visited Vietnam twice in 1992.

Senator HANK BROWN (R-CO): We're getting enormous coopera-tion. I think we're beyond what any of us expected. We got access to over 5000 photos. We got access to an incredible number of archives and special equipment. We got access in the country, over 50 live sighting follow-ups, where we've gone anywhere in the country we'd asked to. And we got interviews with the military personnel who were on the scene.

NARRATOR: Is it likely that Americans have been held against their will all these years and still survive? In Vietnam, with an estimated 300,000 MIAs of its own?

Senator BROWN: Well, there are those who make the case that no one could have survived these 20 years. They might be right. But I think the point is we ought to do everything humanly poss-ible to find out the truth and to bring them home if there are any.

NARRATOR: Periodic reports of live sightings of Americans, especially in Laos, keep hope alive for some MIA families.

Major Robert Hoffman organized rescue missions for downed American pilots in Laos during the war. He served in the Army 20 years before retiring.

INTERVIEWER: Laos is in the news lately as the possible source of any lingering missing in action. Do you think there are MIAs there still?

Major HOFFMAN: I doubt it seriously.

INTERVIEWER: So, you're doubtful that there are any Americans still alive there.

Major HOFFMAN: Very doubtful. Very doubtful. Watching some of my friends lose their lives there and I was there when it happened, they certainly aren't walking today. They're dead.

INTERVIEWER: So, so far, there has been no confirmation of any live sighting report.

Senator BROWN: That's correct, in terms of visually being in-country. In all 50 times we followed-up, we haven't anyone else in the vicinity who said, yes, I saw them, too.

NARRATOR: Senator Brown is hopeful that the Vietnamese government will expand its cooperation on the MIA issue.

Senator BROWN: Vietnam wants to change. Vietnam wants to open-up relations with us. Vietnam wants to change their economy. Frankly, I think it's because of the demise of the Soviet Union, the cutoff of Russian aid. But for whatever reason, they're ripe for a change and want to cooperate.

HIGH ECONOMIC COSTS

NARRATOR: The United States spent $120 billion on the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1973. In those days, $120 billion was a lot of money.

As big as that sum was, President Lyndon Johnson did not want to raise taxes to pay for the war. The president's reluctance to admit there was a full scale war that needed funding raised concerns in the financial community. Belatedly, President Johnson agreed to a surtax.

The Johnson administration also understated the actual costs of the war. In testimony before the Joint Economic Committee in 1967, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admitted that war costs were $10 billion higher than estimated earlier.

The high costs of the Vietnam War caused increases in the national debt and the deficit. Some economists think that the surge of military spending without an increase in taxes also triggered inflation.

And Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, designed to end poverty in America, died in the rice paddies of Vietnam. The United States was not ready to pay the costs of both guns and butter.

DISTRUST OF GOVERNMENT

NARRATOR: From Truman to Nixon, step by step, each admin- istration moved, often stealthily, to involve the United States more deeply and violently in Vietnam.

Harry Truman began to provide military aid to the French during the First Indo-China War. By the time the French lost in 1954, the United States was covering most of their war costs. The value of the US arms exceeded the amount of economic aid the United States gave France under the Marshall Plan.

Dwight Eisenhower saw countries falling like dominos to communism.

President EISENHOWER (at press conference):

"You have a row of dominos set-up and you knock over the first one and what will happen to the last one is the certainly that it'll go over very quickly."

NARRATOR: The Eisenhower administration undermined imple-mentation of the 1954 Geneva Accords that ended the war with the French. The Accords provided for the temporary partition of Vietnam. Eisenhower brought to power in South Vietnam a govern- ment under Ngo Dinh Diem that refused to discuss the reunifica-tion elections proposed for 1956. That refusal, plus Diem's repression of his opponents, led to civil war in South Vietnam.

John Kennedy introduced thousands of US military advisers into South Vietnam. He authorized the overthrow of Diem.

Mr. JUST: It is hard to look back, even trying to under-stand the situation the way it was in the late fifties and early sixties, the '61-'63 period which, to my mind was the critical period, and find one single rational reason for the introduction of American advisers in number in South Vietnam.

NARRATOR: Lyndon Johnson found a pretext, in the alleged attack on US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, to start bombing North Vietnam. As he Americanized the war in South Vietnam, his administration periodically found "light at the end of the tunnel."

Ms. MacPHERSON: The government lied about what they were doing over there. They told us that it was a winnable war long after they knew it was not winnable.

NARRATOR: Richard Nixon invaded Cambodia and hid the aerial bombardment of Laos. At home, Watergate showed how far President Nixon would go to sabotage his political opponents.

Ms. MacPHERSON: We had years and years of being told it was -- you know, "peace was at hand," this was going to happen -- 'No, we're not in Cambodia. No, we're no in Laos,' and it really, really soured this country.

NARRATOR: The misleading statements and the outright lies by political and military officials, the high costs in lives and money, the military defeat all contributed to a distrust of government that still exists today.

The American presidents involved with Vietnam knew little of that troubled country's history. They did not under- stand why the war was unwinnable. The Vietnamese and their 2000 years of history fought as nationalists against Chinese invaders, against French invaders, against Japanese invaders.

The Vietnamese communists led the successful fight to expel the French. Under Ho Chi Minh, the communists had seized the banner of Vietnamese nationalism.

Many Vietnamese thought of themselves as fighting on their home ground as nationalists against an invading American army. And the Americans were trying to prop-up a corrupt govern- ment in South Vietnam that never gained the loyalty of the people.

Today, many Americans still think we could have won if only we had applied more military power. But retired Major Robert Hoffman examines what "winning" would have meant.

Major HOFFMAN: We could have won, but what would it have meant? Let's just think about that.

INTERVIEWER: What would it have meant?

Major HOFFMAN: It would have meant that we'd been more of an occupying power, which would mean more colonialism to them. They realized the world was shrinking and they should have self-determination. I believe they think that.

INTERVIEWER: So, you think the Vietnamese communists were essentially fighting for independence?

Major HOFFMAN: They were nationalists. The communism is a mere vehicle.

NARRATOR: What will it take to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War?

Mr. JANKE: I think a lot depends on the benefits that these veterans deserve. A lot depends on the recognition that's given to them.

NARRATOR: For Senator Hank Brown and many other Americans, the healing process is tied to the MIA issue. He wants to see continued Vietnamese cooperation on the MIAs before the United States normalizes relations with Vietnam.

Senator BROWN: Complete normalization has been talked about, but it really is some way off. I think it would be a mistake to normalize until we have all the answers.

Ms. STOUT: You hear people talk about normalization of relations, but I think the most important thing to the Vietnamese is the lifting of the trade embargo. That's been devastating, absolutely devastating.

NARRATOR: President Bush moved toward ending the embargo in his last weeks in office. He authorized US companies to prepare to do business in Vietnam. Other countries are currently trading with Vietnam and many American firms have been pressuring for an end to the embargo.

In any case, Mary Stout is not content to wait for governments to take steps toward normalization. Here's what she says about her trips to Vietnam.

Ms. STOUT: I ran into people who were just traveling there, saying we're looking for some way that we can help, and I think more and more of that's going to happen. And a lot of it's being done by Vietnam veterans. I'm real proud that they -- you know, to be affiliated with the people that are saying, '25 years ago, I was fighting this war and I saw what happened to these people, now I want to help them.'

NARRATOR: So, as some American veterans look for ways to help the Vietnamese people, and more Americans visit Vietnam, and the MIA issue appears closer to resolution, perhaps the wounds of war can finally heal.

Senator BROWN: We should never allow our country to be drawn into a winless war, one which the American people won't support.

[End of broadcast.