The war technically concluded when North Vietnamese forces seized Saigon in South Vietnam, which was supported by the U.S., on April 30, 1975. However, the end of the war didn’t feel real for many Americans and Vietnamese. The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam led to .
Turning Point: The Vietnam War, a docuseries, explores the human impact of what was then America’s longest war (1955-1975) through interviews with U.S. veterans, Vietnamese survivors, recordings of U.S. presidents analyzing the situation, and previously unreleased CBS News footage. Approximately 58,220 Americans and over a million Vietnamese people died during the conflict.
U.S. presidents repeatedly stated that their goal was to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam, claiming that such an event would eliminate any hope for democracy in Asia. However, as the war progressed, the path to victory became increasingly unclear.
“There wasn’t a clear enemy,” director Brian Knappenberger told TIME. “Were they there to stop communism? Were they there to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people? A lot of the veterans that we talk to say they often felt like they were just trying to survive.”
Across five episodes, Turning Point delves into some of the most horrific episodes of the Vietnam War and examines their lasting impact.
Drug use among U.S. soldiers
In Turning Point, veterans share accounts about drug use during their service in Vietnam.
Marijuana was readily available. Soldiers could also obtain opium in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The series features CBS News footage of Ed Rabel reporting on a congressional investigation that discovered 10-15% of U.S. troops were using heroin.
“A lot of veterans we interviewed turned to heavy drug use to sort of deal with the day-to-day life of war and what they were seeing,” says Knappenberger. “They came home with those addictions, which lasted many years after the war and some almost never got over it. It destroyed a lot of people’s lives and the lives of their families.”
“I started to smoke marijuana every day all day to mask, hide the pain and the fear,” Dennis Clark Brazil, U.S. Army veteran, says in the doc.
Eldson J. McGhee, another U.S. Army veteran, says that when doctors stopped giving him morphine for an injury, he became addicted to heroin. “It completely ruined my life.”
Following the Vietnam War, drug testing became more common in the military.
U.S. soldiers killed their bosses on purpose
In a practice known as fragging, some soldiers intentionally killed their superior officers. Fragging is a term for the M67 fragmentation hand grenade, which releases small metal fragments in all directions. In the series, CBS News correspondent Jed Duvall is shown holding the M67 fragmentation hand grenade during a TV news segment.
During the war, there were approximately 90 instances of “fragging” in the U.S. Marine Corps and between 600 and 800 instances in the U.S. Army, carried out by soldiers as a form of revenge.
U.S. Marine veteran Mike Nakayama says in the series that a pot of money was collected and given to whoever killed an officer.
While Nakayama was in Vietnam, an explosive was placed under a sergeant’s tent, killing him, and three soldiers split the money.
“You can kind of call it justice,” Nakayama said.
The torture of South Vietnamese people
After Saigon fell, the new communist government sent hundreds of thousands of former Vietnamese soldiers and others who had assisted the American cause to re-education camps.
At these prison-like facilities, detainees were separated from their families and subjected to starvation, beatings, and disease. Chung Tu Buu, a detainee and former prisoner of war for about 14 years, says in Turning Point that the goal of the re-education camp was to “brainwash and force us to do hard labor work.”
The filmmakers interviewed some men who were in the re-education camps, as well as a woman who lost her husband in a camp.
South Vietnamese journalist Vu Thanh Thuy said her husband was sent to a re-education camp, leaving her to care for their two-month-old baby alone. “I thought about committing suicide during those days,” she says in the series. Her husband escaped from the camp and was hidden in a church by a priest, part of an underground movement of South Vietnamese people. They reunited and fled the country in 1979.
“The re-education camps…with harsh conditions, I do not hesitate to say this was one serious mistake that we made,” Ton Nu Thi Ninh, former Vice Chair of Foreign Affairs of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, says in the series.
The tragic Operation Babylift plane crash
This year also marks fifty years since a tragedy: Operation Babylift, a humanitarian mission to evacuate Vietnamese orphans to the United States, suffered a devastating setback when a cargo plane carrying hundreds of infants and toddlers crashed shortly after takeoff on April 4, 1975, ranking among the worst civilian air disasters in history. Approximately 50 adults and 78 infants perished, along with 35 American military personnel.
Turning Point includes recollections of the crash from Jennifer Kruse, an Operation Babylift survivor, South Vietnamese orphan who was adopted by American parents. Kruse said that growing up, she was always told that she was put on that plane because her mother wanted her to have a better life. During the war, it was common for U.S. soldiers to impregnate Vietnamese women, and some of those children were on the plane, in the hopes that they would face less discrimination in the U.S.
Kruse recalls seeing smoke while floating on some kind of debris. Her last memory of Vietnam is “floating on that debris, looking out…I kind of just blacked out. I have no memory of my rescue. My next memory would be in America.”
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