16. Robert Shaplen, Time out of Hand, p. 414.
17. New York Times, 28 February 1968.
18. Ibid.
19. Shaplen, Time out of Hand, p. 414
20. Washington Post, 19 February 1968.
21. Westmoreland, Report, p. 169.
22. John Bronaugh Henry, “March 1968: Continuity or Change?” This fascinating account of the events of March 1968 was written on the basis of personal interviews with General Wheeler, General Westmoreland, Clark Clifford, and others. Wheeler read the completed account and confirmed the facts above mentiond.
23. Jean Lacouture and Philippe Devillers, La Fin d'une guerre, p. 19. The Débré quotation is from the Journal officiel, débats parlementaires, Conseil de la Republique, 1953, p. 1741.
24. Washington Post, 25 October 1968.
16: Nixon's War
1. Washington Post, 29 October 1969.
2. The age span, perhaps, seemed reasonable enough to Americans because it would not have been excessive for the American population. But in a country where the average life-span cannot under normal conditions be much above forty-fave to fifty, the drafting of men of forty-three meant the drafting of grandfathers.
3. Army magazine estimated that the regular, uniformed soldiers amounted to 6 percent of the entire population of 17,400,000 people (this is not counting the selt-detense forces, which amounted to another 6 percent). But over a half of the total population must have been children under fifteen, over a half of the remainder, women, and a good percentage of the remaining 25 percent disabled or beyond the age limit.
According to Army the armed forces of the ARVN in October 1969 included ten regular infantry divisions, 46,000 “elite striking forces” (Marines, paratroopers, and rangers), 391,000 RF-PF, some 182,000 paramilitary troops (RF, PRU, CIDG, etc.), and an air force of eighteen squadrons with four hundred planes. (Army, October 1969, pp. 113–114.) This force was to be expanded a bit later.
4. New York Times, 4 October 1969.
5. New York Times, 4 October 1969.
6. Nixon's statement was doubly ironic as the period 1968–1969 was the period of some of the most brutal of the American massacres. In a single six-month operation, for example, the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division reported eleven thousand “enemy killed” and seven hundred weapons captured. When asked about discrepancy between these two figures, the commanding general, Julian Ewell, said: “The Ninth Division is so good we get them before they have a chance to pick their weapons up.” The general did not, in other words, even attempt to cover up for the fact that a great proportion of “enemy killed” were civilians.
7. New York Times, 18 February 1970. Some long-term observers of the weekly “enemy killed” statistics from the ARVN have noticed that these numbers hardly ever end in a zero or a five. The Vietnamese, perhaps, realized that these would not seem quite “random” enough for MACV or the American press.
8. New York Times, 18 August 1969.
9. Ibid., 18 February 1970.
10. Dr. Samuel L. Popkin of Harvard University uncovered these incidents in the course of academic research in Vietnamese village politics.
11. Dr. Popkin and this writer presented this thesis in a memo to Dr. Henry Kissinger in the fall of 1969. U.S. field officers said the official figure of 13,668 enemy dead was inflated.
12. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird called the North Vietnamese attack “vicious” — an indication, perhaps, of his surprise and alarm. Once again, the U.S. military command appears to have underestimated its enemy. The New York Times and various television newcasters reported that MACV did not anticipate the use.of tanks or prepare the Vietnamese for the size and strength of the attacking forces.
13. This figure came from the ARVN spokesman at the operational headquarters.
14. Daniel Ellsberg, “Laos: What Nixon Is up to,” pp. 13–17. Signaling, as opposed to militarily effective measures, was the primary intention of the Johnson administration in the first of the “Rolling Thunder” air operations against the north.
15. The United States dropped slightly more than two million tons of bombs during the Second World War. It dropped 2,539,743 tons in Indochina from the time of Nixon's inauguration until March 1971, according to Pentagon statistics. (Noam Chomsky, “Mayday: The Case for Civil Disobedience.”)
16. Previously, air operations in Laos had been conducted principally against the Ho Chi Minh trail and the area held by the Pathet Lao in the north. Targets had to be approved by the American ambassador in Vientiane, William Sullivan. From the start of the Nixon administration all civilian restrictions were put aside, and the air force bombed populated areas in most parts of the country almost at random. (Fred Branfman, “Presidential War in Laos, 1964–1970,” in Laos: War and Revolution, ed. N. Adams and A. McCoy.)
17. Neither the U.S. nor the Cambodian government would release data on American air strikes in Cambodia. Owing to poor communications it was simply impossible to tell how many civilian casualties and how many refugees there were. It was difficult enough to determine how many casualties Lon Nol's army took.
18. Boston Globe, 4 June 1971.
19. New York Times, 19 October 1970.
20. Ibid., 4 July 1970.
21. The Le Monde correspondent, Jacques Decomoy, had a number of these articles translated.
22. Robert Shaplen, “Letter from Saigon,” New Yorker, 20 September 1969, p. 116, and Time, 29 June 1971.
23. In the spring of 1970 the black market rate rose from its normal level of 250–300 piastres to the dollar to 400 piastres to the dollar. The government rate was then still 118–1.
24. New York Times, 21 June 1970.
25. Ibid., 12 June 1970.
26. General Abrams himself was forced to warn against such practices after a North Vietnamese sapper entered one military compound and killed thirty Americans who, against regulations, were taking cover in the same bunker.
27. Boston Globe, 4 June 1971.
17: Fire in the Lake
1. Extract from Tru Vu's “The Statue of the Century,” translated by Nguyen Ngoc Bich. In Nguyen Ngoc Bich, “The Poetry of Vietnam.”
2. The name Bui Phat is a contraction of the names of the two Catholic bishoprics in the north, Phat Diem and Bui Chu, from which the first population of the district came.
3. Le Monde (sélection hebdomadaire), 14–20 May 1970. Jean-Claude Pomonti.
4. Ngoc Ky, “A Visit to My Village,” in Between Two Fires, ed. Ly Qui Chung, p. 90.
5. Samuel Huntington, “The Bases of Accommodation,” p. 655.
6. New York Times, 7 April 1968.
7. Cynthia Frederick, “The Vietnamization of Saigon Politics,” pp. 9–13.
8. Henry Kissinger, “Viet Nam Negotiations.”
9. Le Monde (sélection hebdomadaire), 14–20 May 1970.
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