The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  W ar is always a gamble, a venture into uncertainty. To paraphrase a famous comment by the historian and Anzio veteran Michael Howard, the victor is not necessarily the side that gets it right at the start but the side that adjusts more quickly. In launching the Tet Offensive of 1968, the Communist leadership was not correct in its understanding of what would happen, but it was less wrong than the Americans were.

  In November 1967, Westmoreland had stated, “We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.” Two months later, such talk would seem at least foolish and perhaps even mendacious. At 3 A.M. on January 31, 1968, some eighty thousand Communist fighters nearly simultaneously attacked across South Vietnam, hitting Saigon, thirty-nine provincial capitals, and seventy-one district capitals. Militarily, this was unwise, because it spread forces terribly thin. But the primary purpose of the offensive was not military but political, aimed at sparking a nationwide uprising of the people of South Vietnam. If that occurred, then military reinforcements would be unnecessary: The people would rise up, finish the war, and oust the Americans.

  The planning toward that end was careful and elaborate—and would quickly falter. One Viet Cong battalion was ordered to liberate the five thousand inmates of Saigon’s prison, many of them held on political charges. The unit’s guides were killed en route, and it became bogged down in battle before reaching the prison. The 101st Viet Cong Regiment, which had been trained to operate South Vietnamese tanks and artillery pieces, was directed to attack the headquarters of South Vietnamese armored forces and fight using gear it confiscated there, but it was unable to do so. Lt. Ngo Minh Khoi, a South Vietnamese paratrooper stationed at Tan Son Nhut air base, outside Saigon, was astonished to see Viet Cong soldiers charge into the minefields surrounding the base. “The majority of them clearly was killed by the mines, and the rest was killed by the firing of the unit that was defending,” he said. Assassination squads were sent to kill the South Vietnamese president, the American ambassador, and various chiefs of police and intelligence organizations. All these efforts failed.

  Some were almost successful. Another specialized unit was sent to take over the government radio station. The infiltrators arrived at 3 A.M., dressed as South Vietnamese police. A guard asked who they were. Reinforcements, they told him. None had been requested, he replied. They shot him. A platoon of genuine South Vietnamese airborne troops on duty on the station roof was wiped out by Viet Cong machine gunners from an overlooking apartment building. The attackers then escorted a radio technician trained to operate the transmitting gear into the station. They brought with them tapes to play, which would announce that the people had risen and liberated the capital. What they did not know was that the station’s director had instructed that, in the event of an attack, the station would be taken off the air, to be replaced by a remote station—which turned out to have on hand only “Viennese waltzes, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Vietnamese martial music.” The Communist tapes were never broadcast. At 10 A.M., the surviving Viet Cong fighters blew up the station and themselves.

  A Viet Cong platoon wearing South Vietnamese uniforms rocketed the gates of the Independence Palace but were fended off by the palace guard, which had two tanks on hand. The VC unit retreated into a nearby unfinished apartment building, where, over the following two days, thirty-two of its members were killed and two captured. An attack on the headquarters of the Vietnamese navy also failed. The assault on the American military headquarters for the country, located at Tan Son Nhut air base, was more successful, as three Viet Cong battalions hit it simultaneously from the west, north, and east. Unfortunately for them, a full Vietnamese battalion was at the base, waiting to be flown north, and was quickly thrown into the fight.

  A team of nineteen Viet Cong used a satchel charge (a small explosive device) to breach the compound wall of the American embassy and fought for several hours to try to get inside the building. They also were wiped out. But as one of the leading historians of Tet, James Willbanks, wrote, “This small squad of VC sappers had proven in dramatic fashion that there was no place in Vietnam that was secure from attack.”

  There would be additional political fallout from Americans seeing news photographs that showed the true face of the war. The following day, the chief of the national police force, Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, executed a Viet Cong guerrilla in the streets of Saigon. The image was splashed on the front pages of newspapers around the world. After firing his revolver, Nguyen turned to the reporters watching him and said, in English, “They killed many Americans and many of my men. Buddha will understand. Do you?”

  One bright spot during Tet ’68, now all but forgotten, was the performance of Lt. Gen. Fred Weyand, who by this point had been promoted from division command to overall leader of American forces in the Saigon region. At the time, Westmoreland, his commander, was focused on the besieged mountain outpost of Khe Sanh, which Westy mistakenly believed threatened to become his Dien Bien Phu—the climactic defeat that all but ended the French war for Vietnam in 1954. In addition, on December 15, 1967, the Americans had turned over responsibility for defending Saigon to the South Vietnamese. But Weyand was not so easily distracted. He discussed the movements of the Viet Cong with his friend John Paul Vann, and they concluded, “‘Hey, something is going on here that we don’t have a good handle on. It doesn’t look like they are going to be where we thought they were going to be if we move north.’” Westmoreland ordered Weyand to move forces to the border, but Weyand argued against that and ultimately got grudging permission to shift fifteen of his battalions from the countryside to positions closer to the capital, nearly doubling American forces there. This move, commented Lt. Gen. Dave Richard Palmer in his history, was perhaps one of the most significant and perceptive tactical decisions of the war. Characteristically, Westmoreland would fudge the facts in his memoir, asserting that Weyand’s concerns only reinforced doubts he already held. This claim is at odds with his actions at the time.

  Westmoreland would argue that Tet had proven to be a defeat for the enemy. When it was over, between 45,000 and 58,000 North Vietnamese soldiers and members of the Viet Cong lay dead. (By contrast, the total number of U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers killed in the offensive was about 9,000.) The general went to his grave considering the Tet Offensive to be the Vietnamese equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge, a last-gasp effort by an enemy facing total defeat. “We saw the Germans do this . . . when Von Rundstedt made the attack into the Ardennes, and the Allied troops were tremendously set back, but the Germans were defeated, and it was downhill the rest of the way,” he asserted in 1981. There is no doubt that the offensive had failed to achieve its explicit goal of inciting insurrection. The Hanoi government’s official history of the war concedes, “Our soldiers’ morale had been very high when they set off for battle, but . . . when the battle did not progress favorably for our side and when we suffered casualties, rightist thoughts, pessimism, and hesitancy appeared among our forces.” When the people of South Vietnam did not rise up, many Viet Cong cadres became “confused,” to use the Communist euphemism. So Westmoreland was correct that it had been a demoralizing tactical defeat for the Communists.

  But in strategic terms, Tet ’68 was a triumph, and the turning point in the war for the Communists. The people are the prize, holds one of the key tenets of insurgency and counterinsurgency, and the North Vietnamese seemed inadvertently to have hit the American people squarely: The American center of gravity in the war was not Saigon or the Vietnamese people, nor even the American military in Vietnam, but the willingness of the American people to continue supporting an open-ended war of attrition. The American public had been growing unhappy with the war for months, particularly since the previous fall, when President Johnson had proposed a 6 percent war surtax. “The president’s tax proposal made a lot of new doves,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk had observed to his staff on October 5, 1967.

  In the wake of Tet, “the Ame
rican imperialist will to commit aggression began to waver,” noted Hanoi’s stilted war history. “We had brought our war of revolution right into the enemy’s lair, disrupted his rear areas, and made a deep and profound effect on the puppet army, the puppet government, U.S. troops, and on the American ruling clique.” Robert Komer, one member of that “clique,” recalled, “Washington panicked. LBJ panicked. Bus Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, panicked. . . . The Chiefs have decided, because they too panicked, that we’re losing.” Richard Holbrooke, then a young foreign service officer, said that when he went to see senior officials in Saigon, “they were all in a state of shock.” DePuy seemed to capture the mood best with his observation that Tet had ruined internal American discourse: “Nobody believed anything that anybody said for a while after Tet.” Most skeptical of all were the American people, who were rapidly losing faith in the leadership of American officials in both Saigon and Washington. In November, two months before Tet, 50 percent of Americans interviewed for the Gallup Poll said the United States was making progress in the war, while 41 percent thought it was losing or standing still. By February those numbers had essentially reversed, with just 33 percent still believing that progress was being made, while 61 percent thought it was losing or standing still.

  Like his predecessor, Westmoreland was now seen as a failure by his civilian overseers. As the offensive was being extinguished, Johnson, on a visit to California, helicoptered to visit Dwight Eisenhower in Palm Springs. “He told me some stories about General Marshall,” Johnson related to Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, among others, the following day over lunch. “He said that Marshall was an impersonal man.” That was not the whole of it, according to the well-connected British journalist Henry Brandon, who had socialized with the Kennedys for years and would go on to enjoy unusual access to President Johnson, holding private conversations with him. Brandon spoke with Johnson a few days later and learned that Johnson had gone to inquire of Eisenhower how to know when to relieve a general. Ike, following what Marshall had taught him, said that it was necessary to do so when one lost confidence in that general.

  Just five days later, Johnson sent a telegram telling Westmoreland that he was taking him out of Vietnam. Westmoreland’s biographer’s grim conclusion was that

  in virtually ignoring pacification and the upgrading of South Vietnam’s armed forces, Westmoreland failed to advance the security of the populace or the capacity for self-defense of South Vietnam’s armed forces. He likewise failed to diminish the enemy’s combat forces, despite his near-exclusive focus on that task, as the casualties inflicted were simply replaced. What he had done was squander four years of his troops’ bravery and support by the public, the Congress and even most of the news media for the war in Vietnam.

  Westmoreland’s departure, following that of Harkins and indeed that of MacArthur seventeen years earlier, continued the new pattern in America’s wars: The only general removed was the topmost one, reassigned for political reasons by the defense secretary or the president. This was the new form of relief.

  Tet ’68 also knocked off a president. Two weeks after moving against Westmoreland, President Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection. Vietnam tormented the president even in his dreams. “Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space,” he told Doris Kearns Goodwin. “In the distance, I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me: ‘Coward! Traitor! Weakling!’ They kept coming closer. They began throwing stones. At exactly that moment I would generally wake up.”

  The war effectively was lost. When Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, became president in January 1969, he moved into the White House determined to terminate American involvement in the war. His chief foreign policy aide, Henry Kissinger, later would write, “Even before assuming office, we decided to withdraw American forces as rapidly as possible.”

  Coda: The Hue massacre

  Almost unnoticed at the time were the mass murders conducted by the Communists as they occupied parts of Hue City for twenty-five days. Among the executed were not just government officials but also teachers, students, priests, foreigners, and anyone else thought to possibly oppose Communist rule. At least 2,800 bodies were found in mass graves. “In any area where the grass was green, there was a body underneath it,” recalled Nguyen Cong Minh. Some had been buried alive. Many were buried in remote areas far from the city, apparently because prisoners taken along with retreating Communist forces became cumbersome and were killed for fear that they would reveal the routes of withdrawal. In the city, many more corpses were taken away for burial by the families of the dead, who often had been assured by Communist officials not to worry, that the family member simply was being taken to attend a meeting. “You had this horrible smell,” recalled Marine Capt. Myron Harrington, who was a company commander at Hue. “It was there when you were eating your rations. It was almost like you were eating death.”

  CHAPTER 20

  My Lai

  General Koster’s cover-up and General Peers’s investigation

  Unlike what happened in Hue City, the My Lai massacre has lived on in American memory—but only as an instance of a rogue platoon led by a dimwitted lieutenant. What has been forgotten is that the Army’s subsequent investigations found that the chain of command up to the division commander was involved either in the atrocity or in the cover-up that followed. The triggers were pulled by young men, but several senior officers were deeply at fault as well. In fact, it was the modern low point of Army generalship, and of the Army itself.

  When he left command of the 23rd (“Americal”) Division in mid-1968, Maj. Gen. Samuel Koster filed an end-of-tour debriefing report with the Army that depicted his outfit doing a difficult job effectively. “The Americal Division strives to maintain rapport with the local government and populace,” he reported. “Among the major subordinate areas in which the Americal Division has extended unique services are public health, commodities/resources control, transportation and movement of supplies, refugee assistance, civil employment, claims and indemnities, mobile training teams, and measures to minimize the effects upon the civilian population caused or which would be caused by VC/NVA [North Vietnamese Army] initiated actions.” When he signed that report, Gen. Koster was well aware that a few months earlier, one of his units had murdered many Vietnamese civilians in a small village near the coast. He flew over the village in a helicopter on the day of the mass killing and participated in the subsequent cover-up of the incident.

  On the morning of Saturday, March 16, 1968, about one hundred members of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, had slaughtered at least four hundred Vietnamese civilians in a fishing-and-farming village between the coast and Route 1 that the soldiers called “Pinkville” and the locals called Thuan Yen, a part of Son My that the world now remembers as My Lai, after a general area of the map in which Thuan Yen was listed as the sub-hamlet of “My Lai 4.” Revelation of the atrocity came the following year, and the ensuing revulsion would provoke a new wave of questioning about why the United States was in Vietnam, as well as about the state of the Army and its officer corps.

  The Army in Vietnam suffered “a collective nervous breakdown,” wrote Ronald Spector, once an official Army historian of Vietnam. If that is accurate—and it almost certainly is—then My Lai was the place where the collapse became apparent to the world and no longer deniable by the Army’s generals. Even half a century later, the incident is painful to study. Charlie Company was not a unit driven around the bend by months of unrelenting loss. It had been in the country for just three months, and in a combat zone for just half that time. It had suffered four deaths and thirty-eight wounded, almost all inflicted by mines. “They had received casualties, but they had received most of their casualties by taking shortcuts,” said Hugh Thompson, an Army helic
opter pilot who intervened to try to stop the killings. “Our enemy knew us a whole lot better than we knew them. They knew a new unit would take shortcuts, the easy way out.”

  Charlie was an odd company in a division that itself was something of an orphan, having been cobbled together from three separate infantry brigades and then staffed poorly.

  As is often the case with the formation of new units, Americal tended to be used as a dumping ground by other divisions. “The people we received at mid-level and lower, I suspected, were those who had difficulty finding a home,” Gen. Koster later said. He thought his staff was solid, but some of its members disagreed. “It was the most unhappy group of staff officers and unhappy headquarters that I ever had any contact with,” stated Lt. Col. Jesmond Balmer, the division’s assistant operations chief.

  Like William DePuy, Koster was one of those officers who had risen swiftly during World War II, graduating from West Point in 1942 and commanding a battalion by age twenty-six. But unlike DePuy, he was not embraced by Westmoreland. Rather, in Vietnam he himself was a bit of a stray, the only Army division commander in the country who had not been personally requested by Westmoreland but rather sent by the Army chief of staff. “He was a protégé of Harold K. Johnson, who wanted to make him superintendent of West Point, and thought it was well for him to get the division command experience before he went to West Point,” recalled Gen. William Knowlton, who would replace Koster at West Point years later, when Koster was forced to step down because of revelations about his role in covering up what his soldiers had done at My Lai.

  Command arrangements further isolated Koster. Because the division was located in the far north of South Vietnam, where the Marines were in command, Koster reported to a Marine general. Given the history of tension in command relationships between the Army and the Marines in World War II and in Korea, as well as in Vietnam, the Marines probably were inclined to let Koster and his Army division go their own way. “Terribly difficult command and control problem, in perhaps the toughest part of Vietnam to fight in, ‘Indian Country’ that the Viet Cong had owned for generations, far removed from Army supervision and working under the Marines,” commented a regretful Gen. Bruce Palmer Jr. It was a recipe for disaster: an understaffed, poorly manned unit led by an isolated general in a remote corner of the country, with a huge “tactical area of responsibility.” In addition, Palmer noted, Koster really did not have much time leading soldiers in combat—a repetition of a mistake the Army had made in the Korean War. “When we really looked at Sam’s troop record, it showed very little troop experience. So we gave the toughest job in Vietnam to our most inexperienced commander, who was least qualified to be a division commander.”