Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  A second border of Indochina was crossed the next year with the ARVN invasion of Laos — an operation that had much less happy results even in the short term than the Cambodian initiative. In February 1971, sixteen thousand ARVN troops, supported by American aircraft and helicopters, marched across the DMZ with the mission of cutting the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran from North Vietnam into Cambodia. The American commanders who planned the operation in Saigon saw it as a decisive blow to enemy supply lines: the North Vietnamese would either fall back and abandon their communication centers and storage depots, as they had in Cambodia, or they would fight a last-ditch battle for control of the trail, which would be their Waterloo. The American command had, however, greatly underestimated North Vietnamese strength in the region and the problems of operating in such terrain. In order to cut enemy lines it is first necessary to surround them, and in Laos it was the ARVN units who walked along a line and the North Vietnamese who surrounded them. For days there was no action to speak of. The ARVN columns moved slowly forward down the long narrow valleys, while American helicopters lifted in battalions to set up fire bases overlooking the vast network of camouflaged roadways the North Vietnamese had built through the mountains. Then, suddenly, just as the advance units reached the center of the trail, the North Vietnamese attacked with tanks, heavy rockets, and four of their best divisions. Most of the ARVN units stood up to the assault, and American aircraft killed thousands — perhaps ten thousand—North Vietnamese with close-in bombing near the ARVN positions.12 But the North Vietnamese were on their own territory and they clearly outclassed the ARVN units, which still depended upon American air power and upon their now absent American advisers to call it in with precision. The ARVN casualties mounted and the positions of their units weakened so that certain battalion commanders had to request orders for a withdrawal. Their requests were refused. The American command and the White House had claimed that the ARVN would stay in Laos and occupy the trail until the end of the dry season in May, and the ranking ARVN officers did not dare contradict the Americans. It was not until some of the commanders on the ground threatened to take the troops out and the retreat had already begun that the order for withdrawal was formally given. By the end of the forty-five day campaign the ARVN reportedly suffered about 50 percent casualties: 3,800 killed, 5,200 wounded, and eight battalions put out of action.13 Three months later U.S. intelligence sources reported that the traffic on the Ho Chi Minh trail had, if anything, increased during the spring.

  The Laos operation was a military failure in terms of the objectives the American command had set for it; it was a political failure as well. During the initial stages of “Lam Son 719” President Nixon said that this operation, like its predecessor in Cambodia, was designed to save the lives of American troops in Vietnam. Whether or not his announcement made any impression on the skeptical American public, it certainly had a powerful effect on the ARVN troops, who with some justification blamed their casualties on the failure of American intelligence and American air power. Lam Son 719 showed the South Vietnamese that “Vietnamization” meant increased Vietnamese deaths in pursuit of the American policy objective to extricate the American troops from Vietnam without peace negotiations. In Lam Son 719 the Americans had actually risked an ARVN defeat in pursuit of this short-term goal. And their maneuver had not worked.

  As Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon consultant, suggested, the operations in Laos and Cambodia were designed not only for their military utility but for their importance as a signal to the North Vietnamese.14 The signal was that Nixon was willing to remove the constraints that Johnson had observed; he was willing to use whatever force he had at his disposal in order to maintain the American position in South Vietnam. Just how far Nixon was actually willing to go remained a matter of doubt. He would not reintroduce American troops into Vietnam or take any action that was likely to bring the Chinese into the war. But short of that he had a number of options, all of which — or so the signal indicated — he was willing to use. In the first week or so of the Laos operation Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky had threatened a ground incursion by the ARVN into North Vietnam. The announcement was, no doubt, an attempt at a bluff. But had the Laos operation been a success, the North Vietnamese would have had to live with the threat of a future invasion by the ARVN. As it was, Nixon now had to rely on his air power alone.

  Even before Laos the U.S. air force had taken on the main burden of the war. The Johnson administration had intended that it should do so in 1964, but the strong ground position of the NLF inside South Vietnam forced the President into a commitment of American ground troops. Because after 1968 the main military threat came from the north, such a strategy was now feasible as a temporary measure. From 1969 on, Nixon expanded and intensified the air war, doubling the total tonnage of bombs dropped, so that after two years and a few months of his administration the United States had dropped more bombs on Indochina than it had in both the European and the Pacific theatres during World War II.15 The tactical strikes in South Vietnam continued while the B-52S expanded their operations in northern Laos, turning a large percentage of the Lao population and most of the montagnard tribes into refugees.16 U.S. air operations over Cambodia finished the job the troops had taken on, killing thousands of people and displacing millions.17 The administration also renewed the bombing of North Vietnam with what American officials called “protective reaction strikes against antiaircraft positions.” This hail of bombing did not substantially affect North Vietnamese military strength, but, perhaps, it was not even designed for such a purpose. Nixon could only claim in a vague manner that the strikes were made to protect American lives. Had he been interested in saving American lives, he would have negotiated a withdrawal and a political settlement. The raids were providing Nixon with the means to maintain the Thieu regime and the American presence in Saigon for a certain length of time at the cost of the lives and property of millions of Indochinese.

  The strategy would work for a while, but it would not work indefinitely, for the withdrawal of the American troops was removing the underpinning of the war. In May 1971, the U.S. and the GVN command announced a new drive into Laos through the Ashau valley with several thousand ARVN troops. The troops stalled in the valley while the ARVN generals demanded more American bombers and helicopter support. After two weeks, news of the operation receded from the newspapers, and, after three, it was possible to determine that the ARVN remained in place only because a North Vietnamese unit attacked a forward patrol. The ARVN would not go into Laos again that year, and, after a bloody battle near the Cambodian town of Snoul, certain divisions would be most reluctant to return to Cambodia.18 In 1970, during the first Cambodian operation, the desertion rate rose from its normal level of eight thousand a month to twelve thousand; after the Laos operation it was questionable how many battalions remained combat-effective. In the fall of 1970 the CIA reported that there were some thirty thousand people inside the Saigon government who more or less cooperated with the NLF, and that soon their numbers might reach fifty thousand, or 5 percent of the GVN armed forces.19 To change the Saigon government in the future, the Front would hardly require an introduction of any new personnel. The following year the resurgence of the political apparatus of the NLF began to manifest itself in a decline in GVN security in the countryside. The history of the insurgency, going back to 1961, had begun to repeat itself. At the end of the process, time would once again run out for the U.S. government. If the President did not make a settlement, he would be faced with the same dilemma with which the war had begun.

  The history of the war was repeating itself, only now the tide was running in the opposite direction. The Vietnamese of the cities understood and registered that shift. With the announcement of the bombing halt and the negotiations in Paris, the mood of Saigon changed. The vocal political groups now expressed open resentment against the Americans. The head of one Saigon student committee described to an American reporter how the change came over him. As a high-school
student in central Vietnam the young man had, he said, admired the American soldiers. “They seemed so carefree, so strong, I was moved to think they would have come from so far away to die for something other than their own country.” But later he began to look at them more critically. “I saw how they interfered at all levels in Vietnamese society. I read about the massacre of Vietnamese civilians in Mylai. I saw myself how the lives of city people were disrupted by the American presence. I began to feel that the American presence itself is the reason why the Communists continue the war.” And, his friend continued, “We students take note of the fact that on this side we have half a million foreign troops, while on the other side there are none.”20

  It was not only the students who criticized the Americans. For the first time in years, the Saigon newspapers, even those that supported the Thieu regime, began to attack the United States and expose stories of new military atrocities.21 The politicians who had been the strongest supporters of the United States now spoke of the Americans as they used to speak of the French in Vietnam. Just before his arrest, Deputy Tran Ngoc Chau issued a statement regretting his own cooperation with the United States and warning General Thieu and his associates of the “schemes of the U.S. officials” to keep the GVN weak and unrepresentative — in effect, a puppet to their will. At a meeting of “retired” generals, including the former chiefs of state, Generals Duong Van Minh and Tran Van Don — the nucleus of a new opposition group — General Ky ironically called the American ambassador “Governor General Bunker,” after the French authority in Indochina. Elsewhere, even more plainly, he spoke of the Americans as “colonialists.”22

  Rather than allay the resentment of the politicians, the slow process of “Vietnamization” only increased it. As time went on and the Americans hesitantly pulled at the fabric they had created, every slight tear seemed to remind the Vietnamese of the inevitable. The central and most sensitive issue was the economy. Resistant to all attempts at public relations camouflage, the value of the piastre registered with an almost mathematical precision the amount of U.S. aid to South Vietnam and Vietnamese confidence in the continuation of the war. As the U.S. troops withdrew and the flow of dollars diminished, the black-market rate shot up to new heights and the inflation, once “stabilized” at 30 percent a year, rose dangerously.23 The political temperature rose with it. When the Americans urged Thieu to impose higher taxes and devalue the piastre, the Vietnamese politicians warned him against complying with American “schemes” to impoverish all Vietnamese. There were fistfights in the legislature when Thieu presented a bill requesting dictatorial powers over the economy for the next several months. In 1970 there were demonstrations of veterans and war widows calling for reparations. Thieu met these complaints with stopgap measures, but he could not raise the salaries of the armed forces enough to compensate for the rise in prices. And it was the soldiers upon whom the regime depended.24

  During 1970 and 1971 the attacks against the regime and the American presence remained largely rhetorical. The soldiers, the city people, and the non-Communist groups disliked the regime and resented the Americans as much as they ever had, but they depended — and more heavily than before — upon the flow of American aid. Just after the Cambodian invasion, on June 11, 1970, the anniversary of Quang Due's death, a seventy-four-year-old bonze burned himself to death in a Saigon pagoda. A spokesman for the Buddhists said that while the Buddhists would never encourage self-immolations, they regarded the act as a sign of growing aspirations for peace.25 The statement was a good deal more ambiguous than the act itself, for while the Buddhists, like all Vietnamese, wished for peace, they knew that for the moment it would be quite futile to oppose American policy and the American-supported government. For the moment they, like most of the non-Communist “opposition” groups, aspired only to replace the Thieu government and take control of the American aid. As a result, the “opposition” remained as divided as ever and as incapable as ever of formulating any long-term strategies for creating a non-Communist movement or negotiating with the Front. After the Cambodian invasion it was thus only the students who demonstrated — some of them calling for the overthrow of the Thieu government and others, more significantly, for the withdrawal of American troops. Thieu's response was to throw the demonstrating students in jail and to raid the central pagoda of Saigon. Still the students continued to protest, and in 1971 they were joined by a number of young Catholic priests, who openly advocated a political settlement with the Front. The defection of these young priests was significant in that it pointed towards a political shift within the Catholic Church as a whole and a weakening of the last solid moral support for the regime.

  The elections of 1971 offered some hope both to those who hoped for peace and to those who hoped for the maintenance of American policy and a substitution of men. But the moment of hope was short-lived. Well before the presidential election it became clear that Thieu would do what was necessary to keep himself in power and that the Americans would support him. The Americans did not want a change of policy, and though they wanted a contested election — a façade of electoral democracy — they judged a change of men too dangerous at that moment in history. They assumed, and quite correctly, that after four years of the Thieu government a change of president would have meant a shake-up of government personnel throughout the country and a situation like that succeeding the fall of Diem. The difficulty was that their stance was quite apparent to the two potential opposition candidates, General Nguyen Cao Ky and General Duong Van Minh. When Thieu unsuccessfully attempted to get Ky out of the race, Minh withdrew his candidacy and Ky refused to act as a substitute for him. To the great dismay of the Americans Thieu finally ran the election as a referendum for himself and collected an impossible 94 percent of the vote. It was, as Tri Quang said apropos of Thieu's police actions against the Buddhists, much like the last days of the Diem regime. Only now Catholics and non-Catholics alike began to compare Thieu unfavorably with Diem.

  It was like 1963, only now the power in question was that of the Americans rather than that of any particular government in Saigon. General Thieu did not matter. He himself announced that he would quit the government if and when the Americans decided to withdraw their aid from the GVN. For the moment he controlled the police, but the more he had to use them against opposition groups, the more his power declined. For the moment he controlled the top army officers and province officials. But he trusted no one — not even his own premier — and he appointed only those particularly indebted to him as commanders of the provinces controlling the roads into Saigon. The regime was closing in on itself, just as Diem's had done. The opposition in Saigon waited for a change of American policy, but as the American troops withdrew and the economic situation worsened, the signs of disintegration began to gather. The armed forces increased their financial exactions upon the civilians, and incidents of theft, hooliganism, and even fighting between whole units were reported throughout the countryside. In the strategic Central Highlands the montagnard troops, once the protégés of the American Special Forces and now incorporated into the regular Vietnamese army, began to defect en masse from their Vietnamese officers. In these and other border areas the junior Vietnamese officers complained that they were being sacrificed to the interests of their senior officers and the Americans. The people of the central Vietnamese cities, still the last on the supply lines and the closest to the fighting, gave signs of turning against Saigon once again in reaction to the American withdrawals. Except for certain isolated incidents, such as the students' burning of American vehicles before the presidential election, Saigon was quiet, betraying as little of itself as it had in the early spring of 1963. Once again the Saigonese were withdrawing from political life and waiting for that crisis — economic, military, or diplomatic — that they felt sure would fall upon the regime. When it came, they would respond, breaking through the surface of order and orderly repression and putting an end to American power in Saigon.

  Though Nixon took no in
itiative to end the war, the U.S. government had used up its credit with the American as well as the Vietnamese people for the pursuit of its war aims. Vice-President Agnew liked to make a distinction between the “hippies” and “subversives” who opposed the war at home and the young patriots who nobly served their country in Vietnam. But by 1971 there was no political distinction between young Americans in and out of the armed forces. The army, once dominated by career men and volunteers, was now filled with draftees who did not want to die in Vietnam for a cause they felt had already been abandoned. Many opposed the American war aims; others merely resented their own condition. It was a white man's war being fought by blacks, a rich man's war being fought by the poor, an old man's war being fought by the young. While Agnew talked of patriotism, the soldiers grew more and more sensitive to these antagonisms. The American command made it practically impossible for the soldiers to demonstrate, write, or petition against the war, and thus the overt opposition to it was confined to the wearing of peace symbols, an occasional letter or petition, and the antiwar movement of the Vietnam veterans. These were the healthy signs. In general the soldiers expressed their sense of alienation in a manner reminiscent of the ARVN, turning their suppressed, and often unfocused, anger against themselves or their superiors. There were more reports of atrocities against Vietnamese civilians, and then, quite suddenly, there was a rash of “fragging” incidents in which enlisted men killed or wounded their officers. These incidents remained scattered, but many officers took the threat seriously and grew less and less willing to compel their men to carry out orders. The well-known Vietnamese practice of passive resistance and avoidance became almost standard. Combat units would shirk patrols and routine security duties, leaving their positions open to enemy attack.26 Many — perhaps the majority — of the soldiers in Vietnam smoked the cheap, locally grown marihuana on and off duty. In the spring of 1971 the U.S. command itself estimated that 10 percent of the troops in Vietnam were taking heroin, and that 5 percent were addicts.