by Neil Sheehan
What Diem and Nhu did not realize was that in drawing up the movement order for Bravo One, Dinh was actually bringing into Saigon the troops and tanks and armored personnel carriers to conduct a second scheme code-named Operation Bravo Two. Except for Cao, who sat in Can Tho in ignorance of the plot, Diem and Nhu had run out of generals. Their faithful Dinh—the same Dinh who had boasted two months earlier to his old CIA friend Conein that he had made himself “a great national hero” by foiling “the American, Cabot Lodge”—had turned traitor. Minh and Don had tricked Diem into offending him. They had told Dinh that he was a great national hero and that he should ask Diem to reward him by appointing him minister of the interior. When Dinh had tried to claim his reward, Diem had refused. (He and Nhu had already paid Dinh a large cash reward.) Dinh had gone off in a sulk and the plotters had then recruited him, promising him the ministry in their government. As insurance they also recruited the officers under him, so that they could shoot him and seize command of the troops and armor if he changed his mind at the last moment and tried to turn traitor on them.
Bravo Two began at 1:30 P.M. on November 1,1963, with the storming of the National Police headquarters by a battalion of Saigon marines. Three hours later Diem telephoned Lodge from the palace. By the time of the call, which was tape-recorded, Diem knew enough to realize that his position was hopeless. Tan Son Nhut and all of the city other than the palace and the nearby Presidential Guards Barracks were in the hands of the coup forces. Diem had learned that Dinh was a traitor; that his other pillar, Tung, had been tricked into a meeting with the generals at JGS headquarters and shot; and that Cao was blocked from coming to the rescue with troops from Can Tho. Minh and Don had told Diem over the phone from JGS that they would give him and Nhu safe conduct out of the country if he surrendered and resigned the presidency. They had then put all of the other generals who had joined them on the line one by one so that he would understand the futility of resistance. They had also broadcast the offer over Radio Saigon. The offer might be a trick. If Diem surrendered, he and Nhu might be murdered. He would, however, save the lives of the soldiers holding out at the palace and the Presidential Guards Barracks.
“Some units have made a rebellion and I want to know, what is the attitude of the U.S.?” Diem asked Lodge.
The ambassador evaded the question. He told Diem, “I am worried about your physical safety,” and asked a question himself: “I have a report that those in charge of the current activity offer you and your brother safe conduct out of the country if you resign. Had you heard this?”
Lodge had wanted the generals to make the safe-conduct offer in order to avoid the bad publicity of an assassination. His question carried a question within it that Diem could not have failed to hear after nine years of dealing with American and other foreign statesmen. By raising the safe-conduct offer in these circumstances, Lodge was extending the offer himself and saying that it was not a trick. The American ambassador was telling Diem that the U.S. government would fly him and his brother to safety if Diem would formally relinquish authority.
Diem gave Lodge an answer in the language of implication that statesmen use when they wish to say clearly what they do not want to say literally. No, Diem replied, he had not heard of the safe-conduct offer.
Lodge carefully left the offer open should Diem later change his mind. “If I can do anything for your physical safety, please call me,” Lodge said.
“I am trying to reestablish order,” Diem answered. He did not call back.
He was at the end what he had been at the beginning, a self-willed anachronism, an obstinate pseudo-mandarin lost in his reverie of an imaginary past. While there was life in his body he would never resign and abdicate the role of emperor that Lansdale had made it possible for him to assume. “After all, I am a chief of state,” he said to Lodge earlier in their phone conversation. “I have tried to do my duty … I believe in duty above all.”
The Presidential Guards Barracks was overrun before midnight in an assault by a paratroop battalion. The palace fell at dawn. Diem and Nhu had secretly fled from it during the night to hide in the house of a Chinese businessman in Cholon who had grown wealthy on their favors. The brothers apparently deluded themselves into thinking that Cao might still come to their rescue from the Delta. Cholon is on the south side of Saigon. The loyal Presidential Guards holding the palace had not realized until they discovered Diem’s absence at dawn that they were dying for a shell. With the fall of the palace, the symbol of Diem’s authority was also gone, and the value of his resignation fell accordingly.
He also angered Minh by telephoning early on the morning of November 2 to say that he would meet Minh at the palace to surrender and resign. The preparations for the abdication ceremony had been ready since the previous afternoon. The generals had a table set up and covered with a green baize cloth in a conference room in the main headquarters of the JGS compound. There was a chair waiting in front of it for Diem to sit in when he signed the document of resignation. Minh went to the palace. Diem failed to appear. Later in the morning the brothers were traced to a church in Cholon where they had gone to hear mass and were seized.
Minh had had enough of Diem’s trickery, and he feared the fox alive. He decided that safe conduct for him was to murder both brothers. He sent his aide, a major, to be the executioner. The major shot them with his pistol while they were being brought to JGS inside an armored personnel carrier with their hands bound behind them. The soldiers mutilated Nhu’s corpse by stabbing it repeatedly with bayonets.
For the first time in the history of the war, crowds in Saigon spontaneously cheered ARVN soldiers. Girls gave them bouquets of flowers. Men bought them beer and soda. Women carried pots of tea and food to the parks and schools where they were bivouacked.
Madame Nhu escaped because she was in the United States on a publicity tour to try to drum up support for the regime. She had been notably unsuccessful. Public opinion polls showed disapproval of her statements by thirteen to one. Lodge saw that her children, who were at the family’s villa at the mountain resort of Dalat when the coup occurred, were protected and flown to her in Rome.
Diem’s older brother, Archbishop Thuc, also escaped. The Vatican had called him to Rome in an effort to disassociate the church from the regime’s behavior toward the Buddhists.
Can, the younger brother and overlord of Central Vietnam—the one member of the family who had vainly urged concilating the monks—was not as fortunate. He took refuge in the U.S. Consulate in Hue with an airlines bag full of gold leaf and greenbacks. Lodge had him tricked out of the consulate and onto an American plane on the assumption that he would be flown to asylum in the Philippines. The plane stopped at Tan Son Nhut. Can was handed over to the generals. He was later shot by a firing squad. Cao thought that he was going to be shot too, but he was merely fired.
Lodge was not unhappy that Diem and Nhu had declined the offer of safe conduct out of the country. “What would we have done with them if they had lived?” he said to Halberstam. “Every Colonel Blimp in the world would have made use of them.”
The hope that Halberstam had expressed in his letter to Vann three days before the coup was misplaced. The overthrow of the Ngo Dinhs came too late to save the Delta and to avert the catastrophe that Vann had feared. Within a week of the coup the Viet Cong launched an offensive across the entire northern half of the Delta and in the rubber-plantation provinces of the 5th Division above Saigon. There were also assaults of unprecedented scale in the southern half of the Delta, but these attracted less attention, because the Vietnamese Communists had already solidified so much of their control south of the Bassac. The temporary interruption in the line of authority from Saigon caused by the coup facilitated the offensive. The hiatus did not prompt the Viet Cong to strike the blow or explain the offensive’s success. Ho and his associates had been building toward this opportunity over the ten months since Ap Bac (or more than a year if one took Vann’s view that Saigon’s decline had starte
d in mid-October 1962, when Cao had begun faking operations), and the regime’s position had been eroding all the while. The Hanoi leaders had scheduled the opening of the offensive independent of who was in office in Saigon. The National Liberation Front called it the Second Phase of the Ap Bac Emulation Drive. When the new Viet Cong battalions attacked the week after the coup, the structure of the regime in the countryside was like a beam that has been eaten from inside by wood-boring beetles. The instant the beam is stressed it snaps in two and reveals the powdered residue within.
The violence began suddenly, and it was unremitting. Outposts were being assaulted all over the place, hardly any stretch of road seemed safe from an ambush, one was constantly being shot at by snipers, and to ride in a convoy was hard on the nerves because the norm was no longer whether the convoy might run into a mine, but which truck or jeep would be blown up. Merely to drive to My Tho in the daytime in a civilian car—not a high risk a year before—became dangerous because of the groups of guerrillas who set up shifting roadblocks along the highway.
Outposts fell by the dozen that November. In Dinh Tuong Province surrounding My Tho, twenty-five outposts fell that month, many of them large forty-to-fifty-man garrisons. From a distance across the rice paddies in the morning one could detect the evidence of the night’s harvest by the guerrillas. The Viet Cong would burn the posts after overrunning them, and smoke would still be rising when the light returned to show the ruins and the corpses. It became difficult to sleep at the Seminary, because the howitzers crashed all night in response to radio appeals from terrified garrisons, and if the artillery was silent the planes were bombing to try to save some post.
The Seminary itself now buttoned up like an outpost at night. The advisors were forbidden to drive the quarter of a mile into town after dark. Toward the end of the month the Viet Cong grew so bold that they began assaulting outposts close to My Tho in the daytime. One afternoon in late November while I was in the club at the Seminary questioning several of the advisors the planes began bombing so close that the ice cubes rattled in the glasses. The guerrillas hardly bothered anymore with the small posts and tiny watchtowers. Their garrisons fled, and those that stayed and survived did so because the Viet Cong left them in place to serve as quartermasters for fresh ammunition. A standard price for a month’s survival was 10,000 rounds. The demoralized militiamen would turn it over and requisition 10,000 more to survive next month by telling the district chief that they had been attacked and fired it off themselves.
What happened in Dinh Tuong occurred all over the northern Delta and in the ring of provinces above Saigon. Most of the thousands of strategic hamlets that Harkins listed on his charts ceased to exist. By the end of the year, except for Catholic hamlets and other isolated communities that had always opposed the Viet Cong for some particular reason, the regime held little beyond the district centers and the province capitals. The Saigon troops could venture into the general countryside only at a price, a price that the guerrillas raised steadily to discourage intrusions. Areas into which the Saigon side had been able to go before with a company now required a battalion reinforced by armored personnel carriers with artillery and air cover standing by. On many mornings the main road out of My Tho running west and south into the Delta would itself be cut and the ARVN would have to send a battalion-size convoy to open it. The task was laborious. The troops had to search for mines and carefully dig them up and fill in the ditches that guerrillas had ripped across the road during the night with ease. The Viet Cong would simply stuff a culvert under the road with an explosive compound of potassium chlorate and red phosphorus that Hanoi smuggled to them through Cambodia as agricultural fertilizer and touch it off with a detonator. From other towns other convoys would be pushing out in this morning ceremony that was familiar to those who had fought in the French war. With their bent for formality, the French had given the ceremony a name. They had called it L’Ouverture de la Route, the Opening of the Road. Behind the shield the guerrilla fighters erected, the Viet Cong cadres could go unmolested about their work of marshaling the peasantry for the final phase of the revolution in the South.
The American leadership had furthered the goal of Ho and his followers to a degree they could not have imagined. The combined distributive powers of Harkins’s command and the CIA had exceeded the midyear figure of a quarter of a million weapons. About 300,000 American arms had been passed out to the Civil Guard, the SDC, the strategic hamlet militia, and the other irregulars by the beginning of November. Precisely how many of these weapons the Viet Cong captured is impossible to determine. The guerrillas had already seized enough before November to acquire the strength they displayed then, and in November they tipped the cornucopia and weapons began to flow to them by the tens of thousands. The evidence indicates that if one counts the period before November and from then through the first half of 1964, the Vietnamese Communists obtained about 200,000 U.S. arms. With the exception of the heavy weapons specialists, the U.S. government armed virtually every fighter—right down to the local hamlet guerrillas—on the Communist side. The galvanized-pipe shotguns and other homemade arms that had been so common became curiosities for collectors. Hanoi seems to have reduced shipments of Soviet-designed semiautomatic carbines and other small arms that it had started to smuggle into the South to be sure the second Viet Minh did not lack for infantry weapons. There was no need for them, and they required different ammunition. The Viet Cong commanders wanted to keep their supply procedures as simple as possible by standardizing on American ammunition.
Washington’s reflex was to apply more force. Another Honolulu conference convened at Camp H. M. Smith on November 20 to assess strategy in post-Diem Vietnam recommended that the president adopt a scheme Krulak had devised for large-scale clandestine warfare against the North. The idea had occurred to Krulak because of his experience as a Marine raider. The coast of North Vietnam appeared to him to be open and vulnerable to hit-and-run operations. Krulak wanted to substitute his big program for a sparely tailored scheme William Colby had devised to foment a guerrilla war in the North with Vietnamese infiltrators trained by the CIA. (Colby had ended three and a half years as CIA station chief in Saigon in the summer of 1962 and by late 1963 was chief of the Far East Division of clandestine operations.)
McNamara sponsored Krulak’s idea at the November 20 conference. Thinking on the American side continued to be governed by the presumption that the war in the South could be controlled—kept a “limited war”—by exerting military and psychological pressure on the North. The American civilian and military leaders of the 1960s tended to see force as a panacea and thought there was no bottom to the reservoir of force they held. They believed that the men in Hanoi could be frightened into abandoning the Viet Cong and that an end to infiltration and other support from the North would substantially reduce the violence in the South. No one looked closely enough to see that the insurrection drew its main sustenance from the Saigon government and the United States.
Colby was opposed to Krulak’s scheme. His own program had been, by his subsequent admission, “notoriously unsuccessful.” All of the teams he had parachuted into the North or smuggled in by boat had either ceased radio communication within a short time or were known to have been captured. One or two were being “doubled” by their Hanoi captors and were sending messages designed to lure more teams to capture or death. The previous May, McNamara had told Colby to increase the number of teams he was parachuting into the North and to concentrate on sabotage groups. They had perished one after another just like the earlier teams. Colby had concluded that such World War II—style commando and underground operations were futile and that it would be “unconscionable” to waste any more lives on them. He said as much to McNamara.
The secretary had been undeterred by the losses in May, and he was undeterred now. “He listened to me with a cold look and then rejected my advice,” Colby recalled. McNamara was influenced by Krulak’s belief that the flaw in Colby’s program was tha
t it was too small and that a major program run by the military would work. He was also unheeding because Kennedy wanted to try Krulak’s scheme. The idea appealed to Kennedy’s romantic notions about covert operations. McNamara was performing a role he often fulfilled, that of being the president’s straw man. He was seeing that the president received the moral support of a formal recommendation from his advisors for a decision he wanted to make anyway.
Two days after the November Honolulu conference, John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas by a psychotic sharpshooter named Lee Harvey Oswald. The war in Vietnam that Lyndon Johnson inherited was not much of an American war by comparison with what was to follow. There were 17,000 U.S. servicemen in the South. Less than 120 had been killed, and the number of men wounded seriously enough to require hospitalization had not yet reached 250. Nonetheless, it was an American war. John Kennedy had raised the Stars and Stripes and shed blood and enveloped in the protection and self-esteem of the United States that half of Vietnam below the 17th Parallel which the 1954 Geneva Agreements had said was just a truce zone, but which American statesmen had pronounced a sovereign state and called South Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson was no more willing than Kennedy would have been to become the first president to lose a war. The record also indicates that had he been the president-elect in 1960 rather than Kennedy, he probably would not have handled the war up to this point any differently than Kennedy had. Four days after Kennedy’s death, Johnson formally recorded his intention to carry on the war in a top-secret National Security Action Memorandum and accepted the recommendation of the November 20 conference to begin large-scale clandestine warfare.
