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 for since the beginning was to cut the

the Ho Chi Men 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 Vietnam.

Vietnamese.

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

Students, long hares.

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 we're creating. 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.

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