Much firepower was wasted or counterproductive. In 1966 the Army fired only 15 percent of artillery rounds in direct support of troops; the rest went to “harassment and interdiction” (H&I), which meant firing into pretargeted areas where the enemy might (or might not) be. In 1967 an estimated 350,000 tons of H&I shells killed, at most, one hundred NVA/VC. Firepower also increased American casualties. Shells and bombs sometimes fell short or went long, or hit the wrong target; an especially grim friendly fire episode occurred in November 1967 near Dak To when an artillery round fell short and a bomb hit a company command post, collectively killing forty-three men and wounding forty-five. Approximately 2 percent of shells and 5 percent of B-52 bombs were duds. The enemy was adept at locating duds and converting them into mines and booby traps. Although not all mines or booby traps came from dud munitions, many did, and in just the first half of 1967 these devices killed 539 Americans and wounded 5,532 more.
Finally, indiscriminate firepower was counterproductive because it killed and maimed South Vietnamese citizens, destroyed their property, and forced people to flee their farms to avoid shells, bombs, and the chemical defoliants (known as Agents Orange, Blue, White, Purple, Pink, and Green) that poisoned the landscape. Between 1965 and 1972 more than 400,000 civilians died and at least double that number were wounded; 20 percent of the population became refuges between 1964 and 1969; and so many fields went untended that Vietnam had to import rice. “Every artillery shell the U.S. fires in South Vietnam might kill a VC,” noted one CI expert, “but surely alienates a Vietnamese peasant.”
When the NVA/VC did not want to fight or were hard pressed, they sought safety in Cambodian or Laotian sanctuaries, slipped across the DMZ, or hid inside the South. Since the president forbade Westmoreland from pursuing enemy forces into Cambodia, Laos, or North Vietnam, it meant the NVA/VC dictated the frequency and intensity of combat and therefore had substantial control over their attrition rate. As for hiding, an NVA/VC unit could disperse over a vast area, hiding among lowland hamlets or under the Central Highlands’ triple canopy jungle. With minimal logistical requirements units rarely stayed in one place for more than a few days, and when on the move they exploited U.S. operational patterns. For example, infantrymen were reluctant to operate beyond the range of artillery support. Since 105-mm howitzers had a range of no more than 10,000 meters, the enemy drew 10,000-meter circles around U.S. fire bases housing the 105s and stayed outside the circles. Or they moved at night or during foul weather, which grounded reconnaissance planes and helicopters. And the VC/NVA excelled at military intelligence, in part because American radio communications personnel rarely took adequate security precautions. As one general confessed, “The enemy knew everything there was to know about us,” including when, where, and under what conditions the U.S. was going to strike, which made it easy to avoid contact. The Communists were also camouflage experts: Tunnels and bunkers were so well concealed they were invisible from even a few yards away. The most famous example was at Cu Chi, where tunnels allowed the VC to live near—even directly under—the 25th Infantry Division’s base camp.
One final way the VC/NVA avoided American firepower was to rely on “economy of force” measures, such as snipers, booby traps, mines, and standoff attacks. Snipers killed or wounded a grunt here and there, but booby traps and mines truly haunted soldiers. From January 1967 through September 1968, booby traps and mines accounted for approximately 25 percent of all soldiers and Marines who died. Frequent indirect attacks by mortars and rockets—more than 32,000 of them in 1967 and 1968—added to the fear and frustration. Rarely did these measures cost the enemy more than a few bullets, some explosives, or a dozen or so mortar rounds and rockets. In a typical example, during one month a U.S. company had four men KIA and about thirty WIA from booby traps and mines, yet not one of the grunts saw an enemy soldier or fired a single shot.
U.S. inexperience, which made combat units less effective, aided the VC/NVA in reducing the effects of American firepower. Westmoreland maintained the standard prewar one-year rotation policy (thirteen months for Marines) to spread the burden of service and to sustain morale, but the results were lowered combat proficiency and a higher casualty rate. Units endured renewed inexperience as veterans completed their tours and novices assumed their places. Not only did this exact a steep price in unit cohesion, but the newcomers fought against seasoned enemy soldiers who served for the duration. The failure to capitalize on hard-won experience had mortal consequences: Twice as many grunts died in their first six months as in the second half of their tours. Adding to the inexperience and detracting from combat effectiveness was the six-month tour for battalion commanders. Westmoreland, said an officer, “couldn’t have found a better way if he had tried, of guaranteeing that our troops would be led by a bunch of amateurs.” While a six-month tour helped train officers for the next war and nourished their careers, it had deadly consequences in the current conflict. According to a DOD report, in those unusual instances when battalion commanders held their position for more than six months, their units “suffered battle deaths ‘in sizable skirmishes’ at only two-thirds the rate of units under battalion commanders with less than six months’ experience.” Operations that repeatedly moved units from place to place compounded the inexperience of both grunts and officers. “Every time we were getting familiar with an area, we moved to a new one,” lamented a platoon leader. “The enemy always knew the territory. We were strangers wherever we went.”
Despite all their efforts the VC/NVA died in large numbers because U.S. ground and air operations were so continuous and American firepower so awesome. But exactly how many perished? One difficulty in assessing the attrition strategy was the “body count,” which became a crucial measure of progress. As with efforts to assess the air war’s effectiveness, reliable data regarding enemy deaths was rarely available. Many body counts were fictitious because getting an accurate count under combat conditions was dangerous. When the NVA/VC learned that Americans scoured battlefields looking for corpses, they planted mines and booby traps, posted snipers, and set ambushes. Rather than make an actual count, officers gave estimates, which headquarters rarely questioned unless they seemed too low, in which case negotiations ensued that arbitrarily increased the number. Another factor that inflated the count was including civilian deaths, since many soldiers acted on the slogan that “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC.” One of the president’s advisers alerted him that MACV’s numbers were suspicious because “nobody seemed to know how many innocent bystanders, impressed baggage carriers and others have been included in the VC ‘body counts.’” More than 60 percent of the generals who responded to a postwar survey considered the body count a fraud.
Compounding the inflated body counts was the difficulty of knowing how many VC/NVA the U.S. was fighting. In early 1967, when MACV estimated VC strength at 277,150, the CIA’s special assistant for Vietnamese affairs believed that number should probably be doubled. Since field reports routinely overestimated enemy dead and MACV underestimated the number of VC, was the attrition strategy really working? Westmoreland was sure it was. In part because MACV arbitrarily removed self-defense forces, secret self-defense forces, and the infrastructure from the enemy order of battle (though it still added the dead from these categories to the body count), he calculated the VC numbered only 224,651 by the end of 1967. So great were enemy losses that Westmoreland believed he had crossed the crossover point; in a speech at the National Press Club he announced Communist hopes were bankrupt and an American victory imminent. Army Chief of Staff Harold Johnson was not so sure. “I only hope that he has not dug a hole for himself with regard to his prognostications,” he wrote. “The platform of false prophets is crowded!”
The Naval War and Pacification
Although the ground war was of paramount importance, the 7th Fleet’s surface ships also played a major role. Approved in March 1965, Operation MARKET TIME interdicted enemy vessels operating in South Vietnamese waters. The
operation was so successful in ruining the North’s maritime resupply lines that Hanoi hastened improvements to the Ho Chi Minh Trail and developed Sihanoukville in ostensibly neutral Cambodia as a transshipment point. A complementary operation, GAME WARDEN, sought to deny enemy access to the Delta’s rivers and to the Rung Sat Special Zone covering the Saigon River’s mouth. Bombers, fighters, and electronic warfare planes flying from carriers based at Dixie and Yankee Stations flew ROLLING THUNDER missions, interdicted the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and supported ground operations inside South Vietnam. Organized as a task group, gunfire support ships consisted primarily of destroyers and cruisers but briefly included the battleship New Jersey; their guns supported ground operations along South Vietnam’s 1,200-mile coastline, though after mid-1966 they concentrated on I Corps.
The Riverine Assault Force consisted of four river assault squadrons, each with several armored troop carriers and five armored gunboats (called “monitors” after their Civil War predecessors), and originally operated in the Rung Sat before expanding to the Mekong Delta. In June 1967 this “Brown Water Navy” linked up with the 9th Infantry Division to form the Mobile Riverine Force, which landed and extracted troops in the Delta’s swamps and provided close gunfire support. Between 1968 and 1971 the Mobile Riverine Force played a pivotal role in SEALORDS (Southeast Asia Lake, Ocean, and Delta Strategy), which was an inland supplement to MARKET TIME’s coastal blockade. The war’s largest naval operation, SEALORDS erected a series of infiltration barriers along the South Vietnamese-Cambodian boundary; although it did not completely stop infiltration, it certainly complicated the enemy’s efforts.
The fifth war front was the pacification campaign, which confronted many difficulties: Communist military strength in the countryside; jurisdictional disputes among competing American bureaucracies such as MACV and the U.S. Agency for International Development; weak Vietnamese local leadership; and an overemphasis on bestowing material benefits and equating them with progress in winning peasant loyalty. In essence, pacification measures preserved the status quo, though at a higher standard of living. The VC’s promise to redistribute status and wealth had greater appeal.
Another handicap was that MACV and the JCS preferred destroying the enemy to winning hearts and minds. Summing up the Army’s attitude, one general said he wanted to mesh pacification with military operations but that “military operations would be given first priority in every case.” Considering pacification unduly defensive, Westmoreland gladly left this “other war” to ARVN, supplemented by Territorial Forces consisting of Regional Forces (RF) companies and Popular Forces (PF) platoons. The RF/PF were village- and hamlet-level militias, but they were often poorly armed, trained, and motivated, and they sometimes made arrangements with the VC to avoid violence. The division of labor between Americans and Vietnamese seemed logical because U.S. forces could best take on large VC and NVA units, it minimized the involvement of foreign troops in politically sensitive activities, and indigenous forces understood local conditions and spoke the language. Beset by poor leadership, low morale, and corruption, ARVN often victimized rather than aided peasants. Even when support for the NLF dropped as the violence escalated and the Communists’ demands for taxes, labor, and recruits increased, the ebbing enthusiasm did not translate into appreciable gains for Saigon.
Two seemingly positive steps occurred in 1967. One was the establishment of Civilian Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), which organized all civilian pacification agencies under military command. Heading the organization was Robert Komer, who held the rank of ambassador and the military equivalent of a three-star general, and who reported directly to Westmoreland. CORDS integrated all U.S. programs targeting South Vietnam’s social and economic development, and it brought all military and civilian personnel under a single chain of command. The other apparent improvement was the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), which rated hamlets from “secure” (A, B, and C) to “contested” (D and E) to “Viet Cong–controlled” (V). Although it had the potential to assess intangibles such as peasant loyalty, HES was better at measuring quantitative factors such as security and control. But freedom from a VC attack often masked continuing enemy influence. Many C hamlets were contested, and many D and E hamlets were probably VC-controlled. HES data showed more people coming under South Vietnam’s control, but large numbers of them were refugees whose loyalty to the government was suspect. Worse, some data was as fictitious as body counts. During 1967–1968 about 20 percent of villages were never evaluated yet appeared in HES reports as relatively secure. Equally misleading, deferential villagers habitually told authorities only what they thought those officials wanted to hear.
Two and a half years of conflict along five fronts produced two unhappy results. One was a stalemated war at ever-higher levels of violence, notwithstanding Westmoreland’s assertion that he had breached the crossover point. The U.S. won most (but by no means all) of the battles, but the war was no closer to an end. An official history of PAVN noted that its soldiers feared U.S. shells and bombs and “the protracted, ferocious nature of the struggle,” and that at times morale flagged, but the enemy refused to break. General William E. DePuy, one of Westmoreland’s foremost advisers, considered the enemy’s capacity to absorb punishment the war’s biggest surprise.
The second grim result was rising dissent on the American home front.
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EIGHTEEN
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The Lost War: Vietnam, 1968–1975
“Time is the crucial element at this stage of our involvement in Vietnam,” wrote an administration insider in November 1967. “Can the tortoise of progress in Viet-Nam stay ahead of the hare of dissent at home?”
Antiwar sentiment grew against a backdrop of social instability, a foundering economy, and a rising death toll. Urban race riots so threatened social tranquility that the administration repeatedly had to use the Army and National Guard to restore order. “[M]y God,” exclaimed a general who returned to the U.S. in 1969, “they’ve had a war in Detroit, and Baltimore, and Washington.” Refusing to cut domestic programs or raise taxes significantly, the administration paid much of the war’s steep price with deficit financing, resulting in inflation, soaring trade deficits, and rocketing interest rates. Even the staunchly anti-Communist Wall Street Journal wondered whether “the U.S. is inflicting more injury on the Communists or on itself.” Caskets returning from Vietnam increased from an average of 477 per month in 1966 to 816 per month in the first half of 1967, and both military and civilian leaders understood that deaths, not antiwar protests, were sapping public support.
Within weeks after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, Secretary of State Dean Rusk noted that citizens were “already beginning to ask what are we supporting and why.” The president had few good answers. To assert that the U.S. was supporting freedom rang hollow. In 1966 a junta headed by Generals Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu crushed the Buddhist Struggle Movement, which demanded free elections and a civilian government, killing and wounding hundreds of civilians. In a rigged election the next year, Thieu became president and Ky vice president; the curtailment of civil liberties became one of their regime’s hallmarks.
The disaffection that began as a rivulet in 1964–1965 became a full-sized river by mid-1967. It included both hawks who wanted to crush North Vietnam even if it led to war with China and the Soviet Union, and an amorphous flock of doves who wanted the U.S. out of the war. A comparative few doves engaged in active protests, while a much larger number opposed the war without publicly protesting. Even the protesters were splintered among pacifists, liberals who disliked the war on ethical and practical grounds, and “New Left” radicals who railed against capitalism and racism. Rent by fractious disputes, the antiwar movement lacked cohesive leadership and a national organization, so most protests were small and local. But a few had national significance, such as the Spring [1967] Mobilization to End the War, which attracted hundreds of thousands of people. The admin
istration tried to quash the antiwar movement, often by illegal means. In violation of its charter prohibiting domestic surveillance, the CIA’s Operation CHAOS and the FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO employed illicit wiretaps and forged documents, framed protesters on drug charges, and incited violence through agents provocateur to subvert antiwar protesters.
Whether they discussed it around kitchen tables or marched in the streets, the war’s dovish opponents viewed Vietnam as an anticolonial civil war with no impact on America’s vital interests, feared that the war undermined social reforms and domestic stability, or questioned its morality. Those most opposed to the war included older Americans, the undereducated, women, African-Americans, and Jews. The young, the highly educated, males, whites, and Republicans most avidly supported the war. Prowar sentiment was weakest among those over fifty, strongest among those under thirty. College-educated individuals consistently favored the war more than those with a high-school education. Of course, many young, educated males who rhetorically embraced Vietnam evaded the draft. Even under a Democratic president, Republicans predominantly favored the war.
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