Hearts and Minds: “Vietnam: A War Within a War” 1965 US Marine Corps; USMC in Vietnam War04:33

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Published on December 4, 2017

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“This is a U.S. Marine Corps Special Film Report.” ‘Vietnam-era film about the battle for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese. “In the final victory, it will not be who holds the ground, but who holds the allegiance of the people that win this war.” Images of Vietnamese village life.’

Reupload of a previously uploaded film with improved video & sound.

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

Wikipedia license:

Hearts and Minds refers to a campaign by the United States military during the Vietnam War intended to win the popular support of the Vietnamese people…

History

The term “hearts and minds”, which was used as a method to bring a population on side, was first used during the Malayan Emergency by the British who employed practices to keep the Malayans’ trust and reduce a tendency to side with ethnic Chinese communists, in this case, by giving medical and food aid to the Malays and indigenous tribes.

The program was inspired by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He used some version of the phrase “hearts and minds” a total of 28 times. In ten of these instances, Johnson inverted the words and used the phrase “minds and hearts.” The first time he used the phrase in his presidency was on 16 January 1964, and the last time was 19 August 1968. In his usage he addressed very different audiences, including heads of state, congressmen, and the American people. Also, Johnson referred to the “hearts and minds” of disparate groups, including the above-mentioned audiences and even humanity as a whole. His use of the phrase is most commonly taken from the speech “Remarks at a Dinner Meeting of the Texas Electric Cooperatives, Inc.” on 4 May 1965. On that evening he said, “So we must be ready to fight in Vietnam, but the ultimate victory will depend upon the hearts and the minds of the people who actually live out there. By helping to bring them hope and electricity you are also striking a very important blow for the cause of freedom throughout the world.”

Johnson’s use of the phrase is most likely based on a quote of John Adams, the American Revolutionary War patriot and second president of the United States, who wrote in a letter dated 13 February 1818: “The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations…. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution”.

A counter-insurgency or counterinsurgency (COIN) operation involves actions taken by the recognized government of a nation to contain or quell an insurgency taken up against it. In the main, the insurgents seek to destroy or erase the political authority of the defending authorities in a population they seek to control, and the counter-insurgent forces seek to protect that authority and reduce or eliminate the supplanting authority of the insurgents.

Counter-insurgency operations are common during war, occupation and armed rebellions. Counter-insurgency may be armed suppression of a rebellion, coupled with tactics such as divide and rule designed to fracture the links between the insurgency and the population in which the insurgents move. Because it may be difficult or impossible to distinguish between an insurgent, a supporter of an insurgency who is a non-combatant, and entirely uninvolved members of the population, counter-insurgency operations have often rested on a confused, relativistic, or otherwise situational distinction between insurgents and non-combatants…

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