I'm John Baxter.

Jeff Warro is here.

His book is The Vietnam War, a military history.

It's 1970s, spring, summer of 1970.

And Jeff has outlined the Ho Chi Minh Trail that winds through Cambodia and Laos and then has exit

points into Vietnam. The ambition for the generals since the beginning was to cut the

the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They tried to do it with air power. It wasn't successful. The Vietnamese, the Viet Cong and the NVA needed far fewer supplies daily and monthly than the U.S. and Arvin forces.

And they could handle the bombing, and they did very well.

Until 1970, the idea was to incur Cambodia,

cut the trail, and isolate the so-called command and the commanders of the Ho Chi-Men Trail and of the

Vietnamese.

What's important here also is this rocked the protests in the United States back home.

Students, long hairs, it plunged the U.S. into a division that is still extant in my measure,

certainly my generation, the boomers, because

Mr. Nixon and Henry Kissinger had promised an end to the war. This looks like an entirely new war.

That's my observation, Jeff. You have very carefully compiled the facts here that I'm pointing to the division that were

from the Cambodia exercise, the division that was created not just in the Congress,

but all across America, setting the two sides angry at each other, and they were

powerless to change the future. Nixon and Kissinger were the future.

Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, when you think about Cambodia,

if revisionists will often argue if we'd only gone into Cambodia or Laos sooner,

we could have, we could have terminated this war.

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