by Max Boot
Showing Humphrey around an overcrowded Saigon and in particular around a couple of showcase pacification sites he had been working on with the Ministry of Rural Affairs, Lansdale was pleased to see how the Vietnamese reacted to him. “When Humphrey was talking to some veterinary researchers,” Lansdale noted, “one of them looked up, saw me, and said to Humphrey—wait a minute, there’s our best friend in Vietnam—and reached over to grab me and give me a hug.” At the airport, with Humphrey preparing to leave for Washington, Lansdale told him that “ ‘we Vietnamese’ had enjoyed his visit very much.” Ky, who was standing nearby, laughed and told Humphrey that none of the Vietnamese leaders thought of Lansdale as a foreigner. “I guess he’s taking quite an impression back,” Lansdale said of Humphrey. All of this favorable attention, Lansdale added, “gave the team a shot in the arm . . . and helped me to cheer them up (sure puzzles me how quickly they slide into the gloom when I leave them alone a few days).”72
It also helped slightly when President Johnson, as a sort of consolation prize for not handing over control of pacification to Lansdale, appointed him as a “minister,” one of the most senior ranks in the Foreign Service.73 “No congrats from any Americans out here,” Lansdale noted bitterly, “but many warm ones from the Vietnamese. What colleagues!”74
GLOOM RETURNED soon enough as Lansdale and his team members grappled with their growing irrelevance amid the increasingly futile and destructive course that the war was taking. “The team went flat as a deflated balloon,” Lansdale noted in late February 1966. “It was pure hell for some days.”75 Among the “disheartening news” that Lansdale received was that he had been kicked off the Mission Council, the top-level team at the embassy that included Lodge, Westmoreland, Habib, and other senior officials. Lansdale’s old deputy Colonel Sam Wilson was the coordinator for the Mission Council, and he kept passing along its minutes to Lansdale—until Habib put a stop to it.76 Lansdale approached Wilson to ask him to secretly continue providing the minutes. When Wilson refused, he recalled, Lansdale was “very, very upset.”77
Lansdale’s growing irrelevance became a matter of public knowledge following the publication in the Washington Post on February 25, 1966, of a scathing article by the correspondent Stanley Karnow, who had tangled with Lansdale in the past. Karnow noted that Lansdale had not performed the “miracles” expected of him: “His adversaries, who are numerous within the U.S. Mission, contend that Lansdale and his eleven-man team have failed to make the slightest impact on the Vietnam situation.” The article was full of damning, if anonymous, quotes, both from rival Americans (“We are up against a superb Communist organization that must be uprooted by a better organization. This simply cannot be done by a few men of good will”) and, even more dismaying, from Lansdale’s own subordinates (“We haven’t really done anything that couldn’t have been done by any bureaucrat”). Lansdale suspected that the source of the internal leak was Bo Bohannan, who had just been fired from the team.78
Coming six months after Lansdale’s arrival in Saigon, the Washington Post article represented a dirge for the once high hopes that had attended his return. Lansdale had made some progress in ingratiating himself with Vietnamese officials, from Prime Minister Ky on down, but he had failed to carve out for himself a powerful niche as he had previously done in the Philippines and in post-French Vietnam. Lansdale tried to shrug off the Karnow article “as evidence of petty spite,” but the spite directed at him was potent.79 By the spring of 1966, the only real question for Lansdale and his team members was whether they should stay in a diminished capacity or leave in defeat.
30
To Stay or to Go?
I’m not sure that I have any desire left to serve my country when its superior servants behave so cynically and so self- servingly as I now see them do.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
WHILE Edward Lansdale and his team were struggling to exert even the slimmest measure of influence in Saigon, the war in the countryside was raging out of control, an inferno consuming American and Vietnamese lives at an ever-quickening pace. American troop strength had climbed from 184,300 personnel at the end of 1965 to 385,300 by the end of 1966 and to 485,600 by the end of 1967.1 North Vietnam matched America’s escalation, feeding more regular forces into the South.
In the Mekong Delta, amid the rice paddies and rivers known on U.S. military maps as IV Corps, a classic guerrilla war was being waged, pitting Vietcong fighters against South Vietnamese forces and their American advisers. A Special Forces officer named Tobias Wolff, who spent a year in the delta, later wrote in his celebrated memoir In Pharaoh’s Army,
Occasionally they combined for an attack on one of our compounds or to ambush a convoy of trucks or boats, or even a large unit isolated in the field and grown sloppy from long periods without contact, but most of the time they worked in small teams and out of sight. They blew us up with homemade mines fashioned from dud howitzer shells, or real American mines bought from our South Vietnamese allies. They dropped mortars on us at night—never very many; just enough, with luck, to kill a man or two, or inflict some wounds, or at least scare us half to death. Then they hightailed it home before our fire-direction people could vector in on them, slipped into bed, and, as I imagined, laughed themselves to sleep.2
Up north, in I Corps, the U.S. Marine area of operations located near the borders with North Vietnam and Laos, the fighting was heavier and more conventional. The enemy here was not shadowy guerrillas in black pajamas but tough PAVN (People’s Army of Vietnam) soldiers wearing green or khaki uniforms and organized into regiments and divisions. In his searing novel Matterhorn, the Marine veteran Karl Marlantes, who received a Navy Cross and numerous other decorations as a young lieutenant, vividly evoked the kind of war the Marines fought. The title derives from the fictional Fire Support Base Matterhorn, a mountain peak “shrouded by cold monsoon rain and clouds” that was “flattened and shorn of vegetation to accommodate an artillery battery of 105-millimeter howitzers.” Before long this hill had become “a sterile wasteland of smashed trees, tangled logging slash, broken C-ration pallets, empty tin cans, soggy cardboard containers, discarded Kool-Aid packages, torn candy wrappers—and mud.”
Every night Matterhorn’s mighty howitzers would unleash random “harassment and interdiction” fire into the jungle. Marlantes’s protagonist and stand-in, Second Lieutenant Waino Mallas, asks his company commander, First Lieutenant Fitch, what happens if a Montagnard—one of the tribesmen who lived in the hills—got hit by an artillery shell. Fitch doesn’t care. “You call off the H & I,” he replies, “and the gooks have access to this mountain like a freeway ramp. It’s my fucking troops over any lost mountain man, and it’ll stay that way. I decided that a long time ago.”
Every day Marine grunts would walk into the jungle on terrifying and tiring patrols to try to bring the elusive North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to battle. Simply hacking their way with machetes through the thick vegetation in the stifling heat and humidity, while carrying as much as a hundred pounds of gear, was an ordeal. In the “nearly impenetrable” bush, Marlantes wrote, “their eyes flickered rapidly back and forth as they tried to look in all directions at once,” hoping to see the enemy a split second before they were seen. Once a patrol stumbled onto enemy troops, the jungle would reverberate with the screams of M-16s on full automatic, answered by “the slower, more solid hammering of the heavier-caliber NVA AK-47s.”
The Marines would trudge back to Matterhorn punch-drunk with “stultifying fatigue,” their legs covered with leeches, their hands “crisscrossed with infected cuts made by sharp jungle grasses,” their bodies “drenched with sweat and rain.” And then they would have to get “ready for the evening alert and the long night of watch,” forgoing badly needed sleep to prevent the base from being overrun.3
It was hard to point to any real progress that all of this military activity was achieving. Lansdale wrote in mid-1966, “While the US military have been going great guns against large VC and NVA units, t
he hard fact is that the VC are still all over the landscape and their areas of control haven’t diminished all that much.”4 He noted that when he arrived in August 1965, there were an estimated 150,000 Vietcong in South Vietnam. Now, a year later, there were 300,000. “I simply don’t understand how anyone can figure that means we’re winning.”5
TO EDWARD LANSDALE and the rest of the Senior Liaison Office in Saigon, the war in the “bush” could seem almost as remote as the antiwar protests back home, which were growing in vehemence and volume along with the American military commitment. They spent most of their time in the relatively safe confines of the Cong Ly house and various government offices around the capital. The only member of SLO who spent much of his time in the field was Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon whiz kid. He developed a fast friendship with John Paul Vann, the onetime army lieutenant colonel who had returned to Vietnam in 1965 as a USAID provincial adviser. Vann and Ellsberg would go for hair-raising trips through the countryside in Vann’s International Harvester Scout, a four-wheel-drive utility vehicle, along roads that other Americans were too scared to traverse. Years later, Ellsberg wrote that “after years of reading cables and estimates,” traveling with Vann to see the real war up close “was like breathing pure oxygen.”6
Before long, Ellsberg was going off on his own, too, hefting a Swedish K SMG submachine gun, an unusual weapon that he carried as a status symbol. Those who encountered Ellsberg in combat recalled that he was often the most gung-ho person in the entire unit, urging the soldiers or Marines to get off their asses, to stay on the offensive, to get after “Charlie.” The SLO team member Bernie Yoh described Ellsberg as a “shoot-them-dead superhawk.”7 Once out of the bush, Ellsberg would write up his adventures in vivid reports that were avidly read in Washington. While unhappy that his subordinate was off playing soldier, Lansdale praised him for having “an unusual talent for writing narrative based upon really sensitive observations of the scene around you,”8 and for demonstrating a “rather unique skill at obtaining, digesting, and analyzing field problems that somehow hadn’t come to light before.”9
Ellsberg’s skills, as well as his connections in Washington, caught the eye of Deputy Ambassador Bill Porter, who had been put in charge of pacification by the Honolulu conference. He asked for Ellsberg’s services on his staff at the end of November 1966, and Lansdale agreed to let him go.10
By that point, most of the original SLO team had already drifted away. The most colorful departure was that of Lou Conein: after having transferred to the CIA station in Saigon, he got in trouble for having one Scotch too many and throwing flowerpots off a rooftop bar; hitting the pavement, they sounded like grenades going off. His punishment was to be transferred to a remote province called Phu Bon, which Conein referred to as “Phu Elba,” after the island where Napoleon had been exiled.11 By the end of 1966, only Sam Karrick, Joe Redick, Napoleon Valeriano, and Hank Miller were left from the original squad. The smaller team consolidated its operations at the Cong Ly house, with Baby, the boa constrictor, moving into a big cage in the front yard. “I’m not sure I’m fond of the idea of a 12-foot rubber tube like that trying to get in bed with me evenings,” Lansdale commented sardonically. “Maybe he’ll sleep with Hank.”12
Edward Lansdale contemplated getting out of Vietnam along with so many of his team members. He threatened to go public by “bugging out” and “blowing the whistle on the poor work of the U.S. in VN.” Acting once again as the American Cassandra, he demanded of one State Department official visiting from Washington, “How long do you guys want to see the shit kicked out of the U.S. to serve the career ambitions of a handful of Americans? You don’t seem to understand that, if the U.S. bureaucracies had done their work, we wouldn’t have over 2,000 American kids killed in combat so far.”13 Lansdale wanted to change the direction of the war but felt powerless to do so: “It is senseless to ask me to throw myself or any of the team in the path of this thing, just to have a spectacle of a big ‘spla-a-a-t,’ which would be us.”14 “I’m getting to hate some of my fellow Americans,” Ed wrote home, “and that’s not good.”15 Lansdale vented his frustrations at the embassy’s Fourth of July party in 1966 by trying to teach “some four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, ending in ‘Cabot,’ ” to the ambassador’s red-feathered parrots, an act of comical sabotage in which he was caught by one of the embassy staff.16
Writing from Washington, where he had returned, the former team member Mike Deutch urged Lansdale to stay in Vietnam. “However much you suffer, the alternative (coming back in defeat, retiring to a bit of writing on MacArthur Blvd., or getting entangled in domestic politics with Bo’s political friends) is even less palatable.” (Bohannon was a right-wing anti-Communist, Deutch a liberal anti-Communist.) The message of “stay the course” was reinforced by Pat Kelly: “I predict that if you did chuck it all and go back to Washington, within three months, the old fire-horse in you would have taken over completely and you’d be raring to get back and perhaps not able to do so. That frustration would dwarf what you now feel.”17
Lansdale took this advice and in the summer of 1966 put off plans for his departure until after the American midterm election in November at the earliest. Why didn’t he leave right away? There was, to be sure, the call of duty: Lansdale did not want to leave until he could place Vietnam, as he told Deutch, “on some kind of a sound enough political footing that even the heavy-handed Americans can’t screw up for another decade or maybe a generation or two.”18 But Dan Ellsberg thought that the heart of the matter was that there was not much waiting for Lansdale in Washington. In Vietnam, Ellsberg dismissively said decades later, “he had a nice house, good cheap liquor. I think he had a more interesting life than he had back home.”19
More generously, it might be said that the “magic potion” that Lansdale had imbibed when he first visited Vietnam in the summer of 1953 had not entirely worn off. As one of his aides from the 1950s was to say, “The whole thing was just elegant and romantic as hell. . . . My life in Vietnam was life in Technicolor. . . . It was always an enormous letdown to come back to the States.”20 The romance was no longer as strong in the rundown, overcrowded Saigon of the mid-1960s, but neither had it disappeared altogether. Nor had Lansdale’s feeling of obligation to his country disappeared, in spite of how shabbily some of its representatives treated him.
AS LONG as he stayed in Vietnam, Ed Lansdale also had the hope of rekindling another kind of romance. He was now in his late fifties, Pat Kelly in her late forties. It was twenty years since they had met, ten years since she had broken off their relationship. Pat was starting to lose her slim figure. But a strong spark remained between them.
On the way back to Vietnam from a visit to Washington in early January 1966, Lansdale was allowed for the first time in years to visit the Philippines. After getting back to Saigon, Ed wrote to his “honey-chile,” “It was wonderful to be close to such beauty and sparkle again—you, rascal—and thank you too for the gifts.” (Pat had given him a shirt and some nuts and guava jelly.)21 Ed returned the favor by sending her a Vietnamese dog and cat for her birthday, knowing that she was an inveterate animal lover.22
Pat invited him to take a rest in the Philippines—with her. Ed sent back a flirtatious reply: “I’d love to get over for some R + R, but are there any quiet beaches left that could be reached without a big hassle about my passing through Manila? I’m ready to sleep for a week. Well, 48 hours anyhow. And I still dream of some of those beaches we’ve known. And dream about other things, too.”23 It was not hard to guess what “other things” he was dreaming of while living in a house that had been nicknamed “the Monastery.” Yet Ed found that the press of business was too great to allow the getaway. In April 1966, he wrote to Pat, “So, honey-chile Pat, despite the great appeal of spending time with you doing what I most would want to do right now, in a country and with a person I love most, I have to say no, and have to stick to a course here which probably can only hurt me in the long run. Just chalk it down to my c
razy stubbornness toward a belief which I cannot let down.”24
As usual, Lansdale was working nonstop. “I’m sort of reeling from fatigue,” he wrote to Helen. “I’ve just had a 20-hour work session, concentrated without a moment to blink an eye, after another longer session with only a quick nap in between—and that after a field trip and other flights up-country on something quite different. I’m dog-tired, but still wound up, can’t seem to sleep, and want to visit with you.” (By “visit,” he meant “write.”)25 By early June 1966, Lansdale urgently needed a break from the pressure-packed atmosphere in Saigon. So he borrowed an embassy T-39 aircraft to take a weekend trip to Hong Kong with Joe Redick, Hank Miller, and Lou Conein. He found himself sitting in a room at the ultramodern President Hotel, which had opened just three years before (and has long since been torn down), sipping cognac, looking out at the harbor, and, he told Pat, “wishing to hell that you were with me, to make Hongkong just a really pleasant place for a guy trying to find life again, instead of a big city drowned out in rain + mud.”26
Ed did finally manage to reunite with Pat in Hong Kong at the end of November 1966. He brought along his team members Joe Redick and George Melvin as quasi-chaperones, and Pat brought her grown daughter, Patricia, who was about to be married. Ed’s older brother Phil, the ebullient owner of a chain of tire stores in Southern California, joined the party with his wife. “It was such a wonderful time for us that it made the descent into the maelstrom here all the harder on my return,” Ed wrote to Pat from Saigon.27 Pat’s reply has not been preserved: she saved his letters, but he did not save hers—in part, one may surmise, because he did not want them discovered by Helen. But a letter she wrote him a few months later—one of the few that survives—makes clear that she had resumed the bantering tone that he had always found so attractive. “Write when you aren’t too busy with your present Vietnamese pre-occupation,” she urged. “Just what was that all about anyway?”28
