Vietnam - Krieg ohne Fronten

Instead of quickly winning, the West's most powerful military machine in the fight against North Vietnam's guerrilla fighters is drawn deeper and deeper into a confusing jungle war that soon reaches the streets of America: everyday television images carry the violence in Indochina's villages to the Americans' living rooms and eventually lead to the greatest anti-war demonstrations Washington has ever seen. Barely four years after Nixon's wild threats, the war is finally lost. At the end of one of the cruellest chapters in the history of the Cold War, no other time or place has seen so many means of extermination as Vietnam and the bordering regions of Laos and Cambodia, where U.S. Kampfflugzeuge dropped more bombs than all the sites of the Second World War put together. How many civilians were victims of the massacres and war crimes perpetrated by US soldiers can only be estimated to this day. At the end of the war almost two million people are dead, countless mutilated, homeless or on the run, thousands of villages are razed to the ground. The country still suffers from the consequences of this disaster. "We will raze this goddamn country to the ground," said Richard Nixon, drumming on the table on June 2, 1971. He is talking about the small country of Vietnam, where the United States has been in a grueling erosion war since 1964. It is the era of the Cold War and, according to official doctrine, the GI's in the distant jungles and swamps defend an outpost of the free world in Southeast Asia, and they must stop the advance of communism at any cost.