The World of Charlie Company

A CBS News camera team spent four months with an American infantry company in South Vietnam in 1970. They lived in the field with the soldiers of one squad: marching, eating and sleeping with them, filming interviews and scenes for regular reports on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and, eventually, a one-hour documentary broadcast on the CBS Television network. The 105 man company was patrolling in the midst of a ferocious war zone in Tay Ninh Province, close to the Cambodian border. A sister battalion 2/8 suffered such heavy casualties it had to be withdrawn from the war zone. The troops were fiercely loyal to their company commander, who had kept casualties to a minimum by his careful rules in the field, one of which was never to walk down a trail. Never. When he was withdrawn from the field with heart trouble, his replacement, a LLRP captain, order the men to walk down an open road capable of taking trucks. The troops rebelled. The documentary tells the soldiers' stories, individually and collectively.