Author’s preface
After three hundred years, could civil war again divide the United Kingdom? Given rising unemployment and industrial stagnation, an ever more entrenched class system and a weak monarchy detaching itself from all but its ceremonial roles, is it possible to visualize the huge antagonisms between the extreme left and right resolving themselves in open civil conflict? I take it for granted that despite its unhappy experience in South East Asia the intervention of the United States to defend its military and economic investments would be even more certain than it was in Vietnam. I also assume that the television coverage would be uninterrupted and all-pervasive, and have therefore cast it in the form of a TV documentary, of the type made popular by World in Action.
Part One
LONDON UNDER SIEGE
STREET BATTLE
Inner London, a back street in Lambeth, where confused street-fighting is taking place. Tank engine noise forms a continuous background to heavy machine-gun fire and intercom chatter. Twenty soldiers, five American and the rest British, move from door to door, firing at the other end of the street, where Big Ben is visible above the shabby roof-tops. Helicopter gunships circle overhead. A tank stops by a house and soldiers dart in. A moment later a woman emerges, followed by three exhausted children and an old man carrying his bedroll. They run past with stunned faces. Bodies lie everywhere. Two negro GIs drag away a dead enemy soldier with shoulder-length hair. Stitched to his camouflage jacket is a Union Jack. The picture freezes, and the camera zooms in on the Union Jack until it fills the screen, soaked in the soldier’s blood.
WORLD IN ACTION TITLES
Superimposed over the bloody Union Jack: ‘Civil War’
Commentator
One street battle is over, but the civil war goes on. After four years no solution is in sight. American casualties total 30,000 dead, a hundred thousand missing and wounded. A million British civilians have died. Despite mounting criticism at home America pours more and more troops into what is now the European Vietnam. But the fighting continues. This week the Liberation Front launched a major offensive against a dozen cities. Here in Lambeth a suicide squad fights its way to within 800 yards of the House of Parliament. How long can the British government survive? Will peace ever come? World in Action is here to find out.
STREET BATTLE
The fighting is over, and the government forces are mopping up. They flush frightened civilians from the basements and herd them away past the bodies of enemy soldiers. At the junction with the main road in the background a British Airways advertisement hoarding is riddled with bullet holes. A sullen-faced young English woman is frisked roughly by British troops while others tear the Union Jacks from dead enemy soldiers. The tank drags away a tangle of bodies lashed together by their wrists. In a jeep loaded with looted cameras, radios and record players pop music blares from the intercom.
CUT TO NIGHT-TIME SOHO
Background of garish lights, pintable arcades, strip clubs. GIs spill out of cars and move into a bar.
Commentator
GIs relax during a weekend of R & R. Two days ago they were fighting off a Liberation Front offensive in the suburbs of Manchester. As the United Nations talks of settlement and both sides in the civil war plan new offensives, what do the ordinary GIs think of the prospects for peace?
1st US soldier (reclining in bar)
It’s a very ticklish situation over here. It’s hard to analyse and get a complete grasp of the whole story, because from my position at least you can’t get a glimpse of the whole subject. You know, you don’t know what motivates these people. Peace seems to be very far off, at least to me it does.
Commentator
Tell me, do you think it’s all worth it?
2nd US soldier
It’s hard to say. I think we’re just, as I see it, we’re fooling around. That’s about all. I do think we should be here.
Commentator
What’s the alternative to fooling around?
3rd US soldier
Well, they call it a civil war. If it’s a war, it should be that. They push us, we push them, it’s a kind of stalemate as I see it right now. I think we should show them who’s boss. Because what I’ve seen of the gooks over here, they’re going to fight, fight – you know? – and just keep on fighting.
2nd US soldier
If you’re fighting a war, fight it like a war, with all the mass of power we have. Power in reserve, air power, land power, and power from the sea. We’ve got battleships offshore can pound this place to absolutely nothing.
Commentator
Tough talk from the GIs as they relax, but in the bright light of day, as London picks up the pieces after the latest NLF offensive, what exactly is the present military position? Can either side win this war? In New York today President Reagan was asked what kind of settlement he would hope to resolve. The President replied: ‘I don’t think we can talk about settlement of the war at this point. I think we can talk about our willingness to accept a coalition or fusion government. At least it could very well be talked about in the open before we begin to talk about negotiations.’ President Reagan spent the day in New York City where he addressed a luncheon audience and denied that the war is indefensible, a view strongly challenged by Congressional leaders of both parties. But how accurate is the picture which the American public at large has of the civil war?
NEWSREEL
Medley of clips – Civilians running as GIs and British government troops move across a tenement courtyard, firing at a roof-top sniper; helicopters circling a fortified Wembley Stadium; street execution near Piccadilly Circus of three NLF soldiers in plain clothes, hands wired, as a crowd outside a sandbagged cinema looks on; corpses of children laid out in a village hall; gun-battle outside a Top-Rank Bingo hall; crowd at Bellevue, Manchester, fun-fair backing off a roundabout to reveal a body pumped up and down by a wooden unicorn to the Wurlitzer music; lines of strip clubs in Oxford, entrances guarded by Military Police barring civilians; pound-notes over-printed ‘One Dollar’; tanks ringing Parliament Square; shops loaded with consumer goods; a huge bonfire of Union Jacks; elderly refugees camping on the canted decks of a multi-storey car park in Dover, guarded by uncertain-looking GIs straight off a troop-carrier; government troops demolishing a rebel earth bunker lined with carefully framed portraits of George VI during World War II, visiting munitions factories and bombed-out East Enders.
Commentator
As each day passes, life in the government-held areas becomes less and less tolerable. London is a city under siege. Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham are the last remaining strongholds of government support, defended by massive American forces. The countryside belongs to the NLF. The continuous infiltration of the London suburbs by guerilla battalions mingling with the local population has brought the front line to everyone’s doorstep. Bomb outrages, kidnappings, street battles with snipers, the assassination of local political leaders – these are part of day-to-day life. In the five years of its exile in Riyadh, uneasy guests of the Saudi royal house, the monarchy has lost all credibility, unwilling to commit its waning prestige to either side in the civil war. Meanwhile, in the London over which the Queen once reigned, the black market flourishes. Millions of dollars’ worth of American goods pour into the capital, propping up a juke-box economy of pirate TV networks, thousands of bars and brothels. In many towns and suburbs the main unit of currency is the illegal NLF pound sterling. The government-backed British dollar is despised. Anything can be bought, but nothing has any value. More and more young people slip away to join the Liberation Front. Doctors, engineers, trained mechanics desert to the enemy forces. They leave behind a population that consists mainly of the old middle class and an army of bartenders, croupiers and call-girls. London is now a gigantic Las Vegas, the largest light-bulb in the world, ready to blow out in a hail of rebel machine-gun fire.
COMMENTATOR IN GROSVENOR SQUARE
American Embassy in background, surrounded by tanks. GIs and British troops patrol. Muted gunfire near distance, but civilians go about their ordinary lives without concern.
Commentator
As both sides mount major offensives, I’m standing in Grosvenor Square, the old Eisenhowerplatz of World War II, once again the headquarters of the American and British government forces. This time they are fighting, not the superbly equipped German Wehrmacht with its panzer divisions, but a British peasant army. None the less, can the government forces and their American allies win? Will the war ever end?
INTERVIEW WITH BRITISH SUPREME COMMANDER
A sometime heir to the English throne, the 36-year-old commander of the government forces is an aggressive, media-wise opportunist with pearl-handled revolver, black flying suit and white silk scarf. He is shown parading in a succession of military uniforms, firing a sub-machine-gun at a rifle range, inspecting a dispirited platoon of government troops, boarding his roof-top helicopter which he flies himself to inspect the attacks breaking out all over the city (though the viewer is unsure whether he is about to make a discreet bunk), and generally trying to boost the morale of his entourage. His line is confident but embittered; he knows he has lost his throne by his involvement with the puppet regime. He hates the NLF, but the Americans more. His hero is Rommel, but his style is James Bond.
British Commander
As Commander of the British loyalist forces, my job is to win the war and unify the country again. The enemy is increasingly fighting out of desperation. Our intelligence tells us that he is running out of men, out of steam and out of material. He simply doesn’t have the economic potential to maintain a war. The people in Europe and the United States who criticize the war don’t really know what’s going on. Quite evidently the people of this country don’t want anything to do with the people up north, or with the communist way of life.
Commentator
You don’t feel, General, that you and the Americans are forcing a form of government on the people of this country?
British Commander
No, we’re not forcing anything on them. The United States feels that this is a good place to stop communist aggression, and if the government forces do win, and I know they will, we’ll have, firstly, a good ally, and we’ll have stopped communist aggression from taking over the United Kingdom and eventually France and everywhere else.
(Points to map showing blacked-out areas of British Isles.)
Our forces are now moving forward into a series of major confrontations with the other side, so I think you can look forward to when that map will be white again. Then I know the Americans will be glad to leave for home.
COMMENTATOR BACK IN GROSVENOR SQUARE
Maps in hand, he addresses camera.
Commentator
Meanwhile, however, the British Commander is reported to be asking the US President for yet more troops. How many soldiers will be needed to hold the line against the NLF? Despite the General’s easy optimism it isn’t his map which most people look at, but this one issued by the NLF.
(Lifts other map. Black areas encircle major cities, all the countryside.)
It’s this one they consult if they want to visit their relatives in the country or move to another town. It’s this one they use if they want to defect to the NLF.
EXPLOSION BURSTS ACROSS SQUARE
Camera wobbles, swings wildly. Panic, people running. Commentator ducks, then starts talking in confused way.
Commentator
. . . there’s been a – it looks, it looks as if a sniper. What seems to be happening is that a –
CROWD FORMING A ROUGH CIRCLE AROUND A JEEP
GIs push people back, and look down at the body of an American officer in the front seat, blood pouring from wound. Pop music blares from the intercom radio a few inches from his face.
Radio Announcer
We have a list of the latest curfew regulations. In the inner capital the curfew bell is midnight to 6 a.m. for Kensington, Knightsbridge and Battersea and from 10 to 7 a.m. for the 3rd Air Cav. and support units in –
GI REACHES OVER AND SWITCHES OFF RADIO
Commentator
Five minutes ago a senior American officer was assassinated as he sat in his jeep outside the American officers’ club here in Grosvenor Square. An NLF killer in civilian clothes stepped through the lunch-time crowd and fired a single shot, then disappeared back into the crowd. The officer, Colonel Wilson J. Tucker, a military adviser in the ‘hearts and minds’ mission, widely suspected of being a cover for a CIA murder squad, died within a few seconds. All that’s known about the killer is that he was ‘young’, probably in his early twenties, a safe enough assumption at a time when most of the young men and women here have long since left to join the Liberation Front, at a time when to be young automatically invites the attentions of the military police and the hostility of the old and middle-aged who provide the last support for the puppet regime. As one visiting Canadian journalist put it to me . . .
CANADIAN JOURNALIST IN HOTEL BAR
Canadian Journalist
All the NLF have to do to win this war is wait ten years. By then everyone on the government side will be either dead or in a wheelchair.
SHOTS OF YOUNG PEOPLE AT CAMP SITE
Police hustling them about. Older people watching as girls and young men have their hair shaved.
Commentator
Certainly one of the most striking divisions in British life is the now unbridgeable gulf between the young and the old. Even if the peace talks start and a settlement is finally reached, will it be possible for them to live together in one society? A legacy of resentment, intolerance and sexual jealousy has been fed by years of violence and open war. At a time when the twin pillars of life in the government areas are the strip club and the US dollar, does Britain any longer possess the political and social institutions to make possible a real society?
Canadian journalist
I don’t see Parliament now as a functioning entity in any way. It’s a rump of older Members of Parliament and extreme right-wingers, a blow-hole for all kinds of unpleasant fascist gas. As a legislature it’s non-existent. Let’s face the facts, the British government is a puppet regime, and it means to keep it that way. The economy has a real balance of payments surplus for the first time in thirty years, thanks to American war-spending and the GI dollar. Baby, nobody on this side says ‘Yank, go home’. They’re more likely to offer you their sister – or their mother. Their sister’s on the other side.
Commentator
Patriotism takes many forms. Is it significant, though, that the flag of the Liberation Front is the Union Jack, long-standing symbol of the union of Britain’s major provincial areas – a symbol now hated and feared by the government supporters? To what extent can the government itself provide any prospects for unity?
INTERVIEW WITH BRITISH PRIME MINISTER
A former Labour Prime Minister recalled to office, to lead the all-party coalition, he sits uneasily inside a sandbagged Downing Street, literally ducking every time a shot is heard. He is surrounded by armed guards, but looks shifty and dispirited. All too clearly he is at the Americans’ mercy, and has no ideas for bringing the war to an end.
Commentator
Could I ask you first, Prime Minister, are you hopeful at the moment at the outlook for peace?
Prime Minister
Well, it depends very much on what the other side wants to do. The latest offensives – attacks against the ordinary people of this country – don’t suggest that they’re particularly sincere in their talk about wanting a settlement.
Commentator
Do you envisage that the departure of the American troops will create problems? If one travels around London one sees that a large part of the local economy is geared to serving the GI. When the GI is gone, won’t there be problems for those people who presently are ...
Prime Minister
Well, this contains the same problem shared by all those countries that have had large American forces on their soil – Germany, Japan, Vietnam. I think it will be a good thing because we shall be back to normal and a lot of people will have to look for a living within their means. They’ll have to give up a lot of windfall benefits which come from the war and create social problems. We’ve now got in this country a class of people created by the war, and I think it’s a good thing that this will stop.
Commentator
Childhood for most of the children in London has been a strange life with the American dollar, hasn’t it? The American dollar has been the way they passed their childhood. When that in the form of the GI goes, are they not going to have a lot of problems?
Prime Minister
I’m sure they will. They’ll be economic problems mainly. I think we’re all going to have to find ourselves, so to speak, a painful process whether it’s an individual or a nation. I think there’s going to be a period of readjustment, possibly of turbulence, but they must go through the process. Perhaps if they’d gone through it twenty years ago there wouldn’t be a war now.
GENERAL VIEWS OF PEOPLE HANGING AROUND ENTRANCES TO AMERICAN BASES
Commentator
Can the British people find themselves? Can they go through the painful process of re-establishing themselves as a single nation? With 70 per cent of the economy tied to the war, with the revenues from North Sea oil long since sold off to the Germans and Japanese, will ordinary people be able to make the adjustments necessary to living with the other side? In short, do they want the war to end at all? World in Action visited a village in the front line to see how the bulk of the population is facing up to the reality of the war.
GENERAL PICTURE OF SMALL TOWN IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
Barbed wire, road blocks, troops and armoured cars. Gunfire in the distance.
Commentator
Here at Cookham, only twenty miles or so from the centre of London, the ‘windfall benefits’ of the war are more likely to be a sniper’s bullet or a barrage of enemy mortar shells. This is one of the so-called pacified villages. By day the British and American forces occupy the bunkers and pillboxes. In the evening they withdraw with the local administrators to a fortified enclave near the American base at Windsor. At night the Liberation Front moves in. At this moment their advance positions are no more than two hundred yards away, their sentries watching us through binoculars. None of these villagers will talk to us. All are assumed to be Liberation Front sympathizers, but in fact they are professional neutrals, living on the edge of a giant razor that could cut them down at any moment. They farm the fields, work in the garages and shops, and wait for the Americans to leave. Strangest of all here, there is no one between the ages of four and forty.
TANK APPEARS, FOLLOWED BY BRITISH AND AMERICAN SOLDIERS
Commentator
A special task force arrives, part of a self-styled Pacification Probe that will advance ten miles into country recently occupied by the Liberation Front. One tank, ten GIs of the First Cavalry Division, and thirty British soldiers are under the command of Captain Arjay Robinson. World in Action is going with them to see what happens.
CAPTAIN ROBINSON BRIEFING HIS UNIT IN THE VILLAGE HALL
The GIs, heavily armed with flak jackets and radio-equipped helmets, sit at the front, the British troops with two elderly officers at the back.
Captain Robinson
The primary mission of Alpha Company is to conduct a reconnaissance and pacification. Circles indicate supply caches within the area, also known parking areas, primarily wheeled vehicles and larger trucks. There are also some small yellow dots, these indicate known positions where we have seen tanks. There are tanks in the area definitely. As I see it right now we’re going to have two companies controlling the fire base. We’ll play it real loose, play it by ear pretty much as to where we’re going and the times that we’ll go. We’re going down there and kill the enemy where we find him and come back.
Part Two
PACIFICATION PROBE
Commentator
A Pacification Probe prepares to set off. It’s 6.35 a.m., and the thirty British soldiers who will do the major part of the fighting – and the major part of the dying – wait quietly in the background as the American tank crew and radio specialists prepare their equipment. The American weapons and communications are now so sophisticated that the British troops can barely understand them. Many of these men will defect on this mission, many more will die. What are they up against? Last month a Swedish film crew smuggled itself through the front lines. Their brief film shows what life is like within the Liberation Front.
NEWSREEL OF LIBERATION FRONT AREAS
Mountains, tunnel entrances guarded by young soldiers and armed young women. Union Jacks flying. People working in factories. Alternative technology, windmills, small-scale smelting works, machine shops, hand-looms. Children everywhere, thin but healthy. Kibbutz atmosphere, young mothers in khaki mini-skirts with babies and rifles. Slit trenches, men with rifles move through fields around burnt-out American tank. Callisthenics in drill-hall, communal singing around flag. Indoctrination sessions, 18-year-old political commissar addressing doctors and nursing staff in hospital. Children taking part in people’s theatre, 4-year-olds dressed in parody US military uniforms miming bombing attacks on sturdy villagers. Everywhere slogans, loudspeakers, portraits of George VI.
Swedish voice-over
The mountains of Scotland and Wales are the main strongholds of the National Liberation Front. In the four-year war against the British central government hundreds of underground schools and factories have been built. From here supplies and equipment go out to the front line. By now all the agricultural areas of England are under control of the Liberation Front. The soldiers and peasants are organized in communes, the women farming and looking after the children while the men are fighting. Their leaders are young. There are few old people here. Everywhere morale is high, they are confident that they have won the war and that the Americans must soon leave. They are Scottish, Welsh, people from the northern and western provinces of England, West Indians, Asians and Africans. For four years they have been bombed but they are still fighting.
COOKHAM
Cut to Captain Robinson on the turret of his tank.
He scans the empty fields. Nothing moves. In the compound below the soldiers have finished readying their weapons and equipment. The World in Action commentator puts on US combat clothing, strapping a gun around his waist, trying out heavy boots. A helicopter clatters overhead.
AFN radio announcer
. . . in the southern outskirts of London last night a guerilla unit fired a 107 mm rocket, killing one civilian and wounding four others. First Air Cav. ground elements in Operation Pegasus killed 207 enemy in scattered contacts yesterday, with friendly casualties light. First Division Marines killed 124 in two separate battles in Northern Province. The leathernecks ambushed enemy elements, calling in support by artillery and air attack. The marines took no casualties while killing 156 communists . . .
Commentator
Half an hour from now the forty men of Alpha Company will set out from Cookham. As we move off across this guerilla-infested countryside two companies of combat engineers will have flown in to the target area by helicopter. They will deal with any local opposition. The main function of Alpha Company, this so-called pacification probe, is to re-establish the government’s authority. The thirty British soldiers and the District Administrator will stay on after the Americans have left, recruiting local militia, setting up a fortified hamlet and redirecting the area’s agriculture. The target area is at a key point on the M4 Motorway to the south-west. To keep this road open the government forces are setting up a chain of fortified villages along its 200-mile length.
CAPTAIN ROBINSON CHECKING HIS MEN’S EQUIPMENT
Commentator
Alpha Company’s commander, Captain Arjay Robinson, is already a veteran of this war. Thirty-two years old, he comes from Denver, Colorado, and is a graduate of West Point. He is married to a clergyman’s daughter and has three children, none of whom he has seen in the two years he has been here. A career soldier, he has already decided to stay here until the Americans leave.
SERGEANT PALEY CHECKING TANK TREADS
Commentator
His second-in-command is Sergeant Carl W. Paley, a 26-year-old bachelor from Stockton, California, where he was general manager of a local radio station owned by his father. Like Captain Robinson, he has had almost no contact with the ordinary people of this country. To him they form a grey background of blurred faces – girls he meets in the bars outside the base camps, old men who clean out the barracks or serve as waiters in the sergeants’ mess. Apart from the prostitutes, the only young English people he will see are likely to be in the sights of his guns. Last month Alpha Company was involved in a major action in which over 250 enemy soldiers were killed, a third of them women auxiliaries. But to Sergeant Paley they are merely ‘Charley’ – a blanket term carried over from Vietnam, or ‘the gooks’.
TANK ENGINE STARTS UP
American soldiers climb aboard, the British form up into a column behind it.
Commentator
As for the British troops who will go with them – like all the Americans here, Sergeant Paley holds them in little more than contempt. Underfed and ill-equipped, the British troops have to provide their own food and bedding. During the next six hours the Americans will ride to the battlefield on their tank. The thirty British will walk. Mostly men in their forties, with a few younger men drafted from the penal battalions, they represent the residue of the armies conscripted by the government three years ago, armies now decimated by casualties and desertions.
MAJOR CLEAVER
A thick-set man with British army moustache climbs on to the tank beside Captain Robinson. He wears American boots, fawn trousers, brown leather jacket and carries US Army revolver.
Commentator
The only Britisher to whom the Americans pay any attention is Major Cleaver, the District Administrator who will be in charge of the pacified village. A former regular army officer, Major Cleaver is one of several thousand DAs sent out by the British government to run the civil administration of the recaptured areas. Part political commissar, part judge and jury, Major Cleaver will literally have the power of life and death over the people living under his rule, a power that he and his fellow DAs have been quick to exercise in the past.
THE CONVOY MOVES OFF
The infantry spread out ahead and to the side of the tank. They follow a road through wooded terrain with meadows and abandoned farms on either side. Now and then there is a halt as the tank is brought up.
Captain Robinson
Helicopters are the thing that’s happening these days. You can get in there real fast with heavy suppressive fire, and if you need to be pulled out you can get out real fast.
Sergeant Paley
It’s definitely the way to fight a ground war.
Captain Robinson
As I see it now we’re going to have two companies controlling the fire base, Bravo and Charley, who will go in by helicopter. They’ll clear the landing zone by the time we get in there, so the tactical side of the operation should be finalized. It’s also better from the psychological aspect that we don’t get involved on the tactical side too much.
Commentator
You mean the actual fighting around the village?
Captain Robinson
That’s correct.
RADIO OPERATOR PASSES MESSAGE TO CAPTAIN ROBINSON
Tank halts.
Commentator
But for Bravo and Charley Companies, who are supposed to be going in by helicopter, today is not the day for fighting a war. The weather in the target area has closed in, and the helicopters have returned to base. Alpha Company gets ready to move on alone, every man here hoping that the weather will clear.
Sergeant Paley
This country, weather’s the main thing. It rains a lot and you’re very wet most of the time, but you know as a soldier you can’t ask for a certain territory to fight on because you just have to make the best of what terrain you have.
Commentator
Sergeant, what do you think of the chances of peace here?
Sergeant Paley
Well, I think they’re . . . I don’t know, as I see it as long as Charley’s got a weapon and some ammo and using it he’s not going to give up. I think he’s pretty much got his heart in it, giving his own people a hard time here.
Commentator
How do you feel it’s all going?
Sergeant Paley
Well, it’s going well for the Cavs, I know that. Wherever we go we run into Charley – I know he doesn’t last very long.
Commentator
Tell me, sergeant, why are you in England?
Sergeant Paley
Why am I in England? Well, curiosity, I guess. I just wanted to know what the war was like.
Commentator
What is the war like?
Sergeant Paley
Well, it’s all right, I guess. For a year I’d say it’s a good experience. You really learn a lot from it.
Major Cleaver
Naturally one hopes that peace will come to the country as soon as possible. Positions have become very entrenched during the past year, there’s a legacy of bitterness on both sides. This is not the kind of civil war that resolves anything.
Commentator
What about the fighting itself? Don’t you find it difficult to be shooting at your own people?
Major Cleaver
They’re not our own people any longer. This is the whole point of the war. They’re the enemy now, and peace isn’t going to turn them overnight into our friends.
Commentator
But aren’t there a lot of desertions from the army?
Major Cleaver
Not as many as there used to be. Most of the men realize that conditions here are a lot better than they are on the other side. The bombing has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Sitting here eating C rations is a lot more comfortable than being boiled alive in napalm.
THE COLUMN MOVES ON
Slow penetration of forest on either side of the road. We see the tank stuck in a small stream. Cameo shots of individual American and British soldiers. Fade to early afternoon.
A long shot of farmland and the motorway on the left, the village to the right. Nothing moves. The camera turns and we see the American and British troops dug in along the edge of the field facing the village. It has been raining but the sky has cleared. Everything is very quiet. Machine-guns and weapons being set up. The tank is hidden in trees. Captain Robinson scans the low sky through binoculars.
Commentator
Three o’clock the same afternoon. Alpha Company has arrived at its objective. No signs of the helicopters, so Captain Robinson and his men will have to go in alone. How many Liberation Front soldiers are facing us? Perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred. Will they fight? Or will they fade away into the surrounding countryside, leaving their women and children behind until night comes again?
THE AMERICANS AND BRITISH ARE WATCHING QUIETLY
A farmer appears and walks along a pathway on the far side of the field. He carries a rifle over his shoulder. Sergeant Paley watches him cross the sights of his machine-gun. Nobody moves.
THE VILLAGE IS COMING TO LIFE AFTER THE RAINSTORM
Young men and women appear. They go about their work. A stall is set up and food is distributed. Young mothers in their khaki mini-skirts drop their children into the communal crèche. Others move towards the fields and farm buildings with rifles over their shoulders. A damp Union Jack is run up on the village flag-pole. Meanwhile, the American and British government forces watch quietly over their gun-sights. Through the zoom lens we focus on individual soldiers, and then on individual villagers in their sights: a young man with a headband who is the kibbutz leader; his girlfriend with a baby; a coloured girl with a pistol on her waist. The leader speaks through a megaphone, the sounds just carrying across the field. He is making some kind of joke, and everyone in the village laughs.
THE FIRST FARMERS WALK OUT ACROSS THE FIELD
They are still unaware of the government forces, and carry their rifles slung casually over their shoulders. One of them, a young Pakistani, has spotted something moving across the field. He follows it between the cabbages, then bends down and picks it up. It is an American cigarette pack. Puzzled, he looks up. Ten feet away he sees the barrel of a light machine-gun aimed at him by Sergeant Paley. Crushing the pack in his hand, he opens his mouth to shout.
CAPTAIN ROBINSON SIGNALS
Sergeant Paley opens fire straight at the young Pakistani. Torn apart, he falls among the cabbages. Massive firing breaks out. The other young men and women in the field are shot down. Mortar fire is directed at the village, the tank lumbers forward, its heavy gun opening fire. Through the long-distance lens we see isolated men and women being shot down, others running for shelter. The food stall is overturned. A barn is burning. Captain Robinson signals again, and the men move forward in a general advance, firing as they go. The World in Action commentator and Major Cleaver move up with them, taking shelter behind the tank. Counter fire is coming from the village, from a small blockhouse built behind a bicycle shed. Two British soldiers are shot down. In the village now everything is burning. Bodies lie around, there are burning motorcycles and food scattered everywhere.
EVERYTHING IS QUIET
The battle has been over an hour or so. A few fires are still burning, smoke drifting towards the distant motorway. The British government troops break down the doors of the houses. They stare at the lines of bodies, mostly young women and children. Six prisoners have their hands wired together. The remaining villagers are driven out into the field.
2nd Commentator
Two hours ago, in the attack on this small village beside the M4, the World in Action commentator was killed. As he followed the first wave of American soldiers he was shot by an unknown enemy sniper and within a few minutes died of his wounds. His report on this war has been shown as he made it.
VILLAGERS SQUATTING IN FIELD
GIs prepare demolition charges.
2nd Commentator
Alpha Company prepares to pull out. The weather has closed in again, and there will be no support coming in by helicopter. The action is called off at the request of Major Cleaver. Ten British soldiers have been killed or wounded. Without the Americans and their tank he could never hold the village.
Captain Robinson
We’re moving them out, just generally get them out of the way. You can bomb their houses flat easier that way without the conscience of the people on your mind. Put them out in the field.
EXPLOSIONS RIP APART VILLAGE BUILDINGS
Close-up of bodies of rebel soldiers dragged along in mud behind the tank. The column pulls out through the dusk, heading back to Cookham.
Major Cleaver
To help another human being out, it’s worth the expense and loss of life. It’s just that I sometimes wonder whether some of the people that I know who have died knew what they were dying for. That’s about the hardest thing to think of, you know. If a man doesn’t know why he’s dying, it’s a bad way to go.
Acknowledgment: For all the dialogue above, to General Westmoreland, President Thieu of South Vietnam, Marshall Ky and various journalists, US and ARVN military personnel.
1977