- 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.
