by Norman Stone
The Saigon government considered just abandoning the five north-central provinces, more or less difficult to hold, given the enemy’s safe supply road through Cambodia. In black pyjama-suits, the Vietcong could even infiltrate American airbases and use mortars against them, knocking out a dozen planes; at the end of 1964, undetected, they encircled Saigon and planted a bomb in an American hotel for officers on Christmas Eve. The bombers had perfect intelligence, had had South Vietnamese uniforms, had even studied how these soldiers smoked. A little later they brought off a similar coup against an airbase at Pleiku. Against such an enemy, the American tactics of bombing and aerial machine-gunning from gunships were ineffectual, or even made the problem worse, because peasants, their homes wrecked, would support the Vietcong.
Johnson could not quite understand the passions that went into the Vietnamese resistance: why could Ho Chi Minh not just be bought off, with some enormous project to develop the Mekong Valley (1965) in return for concessions to end the war? He would have, with great reluctance, to increase the American commitment. In August 1964 he profited from an incident of naval attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to take authority for the war — Congress gave it, with few serious dissidents — and was determined to Americanize the war altogether: ‘power on the land, power in the air, power wherever’. On 8 March 1965 came a decisive moment. The Marines landed at Da Nang, on the central coast, and heavy bombing began against the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of tracks through the jungle. Overall, the plan was to bomb North Vietnam in such a way as to show Ho Chi Minh that he must give way, and three times the weight of bombs used in the Second World War was duly dropped — 6 million tons. On the other hand, Johnson was very anxious to spare civilians, and every Tuesday he held a lunch where he himself specified the targets and bomb weights. Quite often — sixteen times — he ordered pauses in the bombing, hoping that the North Vietnamese would come to terms as, in the end, the North Koreans had had to do. There were seventy-two ‘peace initiatives’. None had any effect. The American ambassador in Moscow at one stage sent a letter inviting negotiations, and it was returned unopened.
By the middle of 1965 there were 50,000 American troops on the ground, who had been well-trained for the wrong war, and the military authorities said they needed many more. By November 1965 there were 250,000. Soon there would be half a million. Their arrival transformed the country. A colossal effort was made, with extraordinary ingenuity in engineering, to build a base at Cam Ranh Bay, 200 miles from Saigon, with six panoramic jet bases, carefully protected from infiltration. The Mekong Delta was dredged, to create a 600-acre island used as a secure camp site; six deep-draft harbours were rapidly set up, the pieces, prefabricated, towed across the Pacific. The base had forty ice-cream plants, and enormous deep-freeze facilities, such that on alternate days the electricity in Saigon was shut off. All the Americans’ food was flown in, and the enormous PX arrangements (at Cholon, on the scale of Bloomingdale’s in New York) meant that there was an equally enormous black market in stolen American goods of all sorts. Saigon itself became disgusting — heaps of uncollected rubbish, dogs and cats rooting in them; rats and stray dogs everywhere; drug-dealers, whores, GI bars, refugees pouring in from the stricken countryside. By 1971 the Pentagon said one third of the men were on drugs.
At this stage, the Americans’ tactics were simple enough. As Sheehan rightly said, men of limited capacity, who knew their limits, would just go on doing what they knew they were good at; anything different would bewilder them. General William Westmoreland was one such. He replayed the Korean War. ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ went ahead, with huge quantities of explosives dropped on what were known as ‘free zones’. Westmoreland gave press conferences at which he outlined the stages in which the war was supposed to come to an end — in this case, quite precisely, November 1968, while McNamara busied himself with his mathematics on the subject, and his deputy, Cyrus Vance, established an air-mobile cavalry division, with Huey gunships, firing rockets from side-pods. In November 1965 there were already battles of some scale with North Vietnamese regular soldiers who had come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and, given the patience and ingenuity with which these troops waited in ambush, with Soviet weaponry, the battles were testing for the Americans. Their firepower could reduce fishing villages to rubble but there was nothing they could do to prevent the Vietcong from reoccupying the rubble, and there were grotesque episodes in which tactics of attrition were used in rice paddies, complete with ‘Zippo jobs’ on thatched village huts that could be ignited with a flick of a cigarette lighter. There was not much, either, to be said for the use of herbicides (‘Agent Orange’) to destroy vegetation, and hence cover for the enemy. Immense areas of forest were destroyed every year — in the whole war, 12 million acres, together with 25 million of farmland. B52s, in waves of three apiece, would attack a ‘box’ of two miles’ length and 1,100 yards’ breadth, with huge bombs, dropped at will. The aircraft also never flew lower than 3,500 feet, and thus were unable to pinpoint their targets.
Even the army Chief of Staff complained how ‘indiscriminate’ had been ‘our use of fire-power… I think we sort of devastated the countryside. ’ By 1966, there had been 2 million refugees and Saigon itself rose in population from 1 million to 3 million — rubbish cities, impossible to patrol or govern, except through mafias, of which the Vietcong were obviously one (Samuel Huntington remarked that ‘in an absent-minded way the United States in Vietnam may well have stumbled upon the answer to wars of national liberation’ — i.e. clear out the peasants who were then thought to be their principal support). All in all, up to 1974, there were 1.16 million civilian war casualties, at least half of them by US action from the air. By the time of the January 1973 ceasefire, an area the size of Texas had received three times the bomb tonnage dropped on Europe in the Second World War (though the air force complained that it had been forbidden to touch essential targets — Hanoi itself, or the port of Haiphong, or the Red River dykes, the collapse of which would have destroyed the country).
The North Vietnamese put up an extraordinary effort. They faced an exceedingly difficult situation, in that their Soviet and Chinese patrons were at odds — the ‘Sino-Soviet split’ which had the two sides bombarding each other with insulting messages and at one stage even produced combat over a disputed border. The Vietcong inclined towards the Chinese, and from them acquired, in 1962, 90,000 rifles and machine-guns. There was a prodigy of effort involved in the Ho Chi Minh Trail which brought weaponry to the guerrilleros in the South. At first the trail had been primitive, but in 1964 a railroad was constructed: in 1964 10,000 soldiers had gone south every month, but by 1967, 20,000. The Trail became a very elaborate network, with tunnels and several branches; it supported 170,000 North Vietnamese troops in the South. The heart of the military problem, for the Americans, was that they had to move out in small groups, probing for a much larger Vietcong force that would withhold fire — in May 1968, at Hue, even with 500 Americans set against 20,000 Vietcong in difficult country. Besides, the weakness of their allies meant that Americans had even to do small-scale patrol work. Now, they also had to undertake what resembled a frontal war, as the North Vietnamese came in via the tunnels or through Cambodia. There were set-piece battles in the absurdly named DMZ (‘demilitarized zone’).
Giant bombing raids were astonishingly ineffective, against North Vietnamese troops that could continue with slender resources — a mere fifteen tons every day — and the entire electricity supply of North Vietnam was only a fifth of that in Alexandria, Virginia. The dockers in the North learned how to cope with the threat of bombs, and imports from China more than doubled between 1965 and 1967 (to 1.4 million tons): barrels of oil went by barge along the canal network. The attrition campaign in effect damaged the Americans more, in that they lost 700 aircraft by the end of 1967. The Americans compounded their own problems by sending draftees home after a year, which meant a constant influx of inexperienced and, in the end, very reluctant young men, and it w
as remarkable enough that they did not run amuck, as such soldiery could easily have done. Of course, they resented the local people (‘staring at us as if we were from Mars’, said one) and there was a celebrated incident in March 1968 when at a village called My Lai peasants were killed by American soldiers, enraged at the endless obstinacy and guile of the enemy. McNamara had been obsessed with his ‘bottom line’, in this case dead enemy. The corpses were supposed to be counted, so ambitious soldiers gave him them. There was even an absurd system for spotting concentrations of urine below in the jungle, and many peasants died therefrom. One consequence was what gave Huntington his preposterous looking-on-the-bright-side. There were 2 million refugees in the cities, especially Saigon, by 1967. The Hao Hoa sect-gang did a deal with the Vietcong in order to operate a black market in the products distributed under the aid programmes: tractors were simply bartered. Meanwhile in Saigon Westmoreland presented multicoloured charts for the press, some of which was beginning to adopt derision. He defended the tactics with an all-American metaphor: that the alternative was like using a screwdriver to kill termites: if you overdid it you brought the house down. It was all an invitation to revenge, even suicidal revenge. The Americans had scotched their snake, not killed it, and it bit back.
In the early hours of the morning of 31 January 1968 two ancient vehicles drove up to the American embassy compound, and nineteen men jumped out, to plant explosives in the wall. The guards shot back, but one of the Vietcong managed to reach the embassy building itself, and got in. The shooting went on all night, until, finally, one of the diplomats killed the infiltrator. The Vietcong had prepared very thoroughly — smuggling the explosives in rice lorries, and using, as agent, a chauffeur who had worked for the Americans for years. Nor was this the only attack: the radio station itself was seized by fourteen men who had been training for three months, and there were lesser troubles all over Saigon, the worst when the Vietcong broke into the house of the chief of police, shot him, and slit the throats of his wife and six children. Another police officer, who had been godfather to one of the children, caught one of the men, held a gun to his temple, and fired. The young man’s face, freezing at the very moment of death, made one of the most famous photographs of the war. The godfather’s reputation never recovered from this characteristic photographic lie (the photographer later ‘apologized’). These attacks and many more like them were called ‘the Tet offensive’, and it counted as a humiliation for the Americans. By then, opposition to the war had been building up inside the United States. It was based largely on conscripts’ unwillingness to go to a Vietnam the scenes of which were nightly shown on television. ‘Tet’ was the Vietnamese New Year, which began in February, and the American generals had previously been very optimistic: but for the Vietcong to be able to attack so widely, and to reach targets that were not only spectacular, but also happened to be within easy reach of television cameras, appeared to be a tremendous coup.
But the reality was different. In the first place, there was a classic piece of fraud. A truce had been arranged for the New Year, for the sake of the ordinary people, and it was broken; many Americans were celebrating, and firecrackers masked the sound of gunfire. Besides, the attacks, however spectacular, all failed, with heavy loss of life to the attackers, and there was no popular uprising. General Frederick C. Weyand, near Saigon, had expected the truce to be broken, had prepared for an attack, and fended it off easily. In the north, on the border, 6,000 Marines held a base at Khe Sanh for seventy-seven days of battle, and this was presented as another version of Dien Bien Phu, the great French defeat in 1954. But the truth was that the Marines, in holding the place, lost on average three killed and twelve wounded every day, whereas the Vietcong casualties were much heavier, and in any case the essential problem at Dien Bien Phu had been the failure of the French over supply, whereas at Khe Sanh the C123 transports had no such problem. The ‘Iron Triangle’ north of Saigon was notoriously difficult to defend because of the relative freedom of approach roads for an attack, and the Americans had done well in the circumstances. Qualified observers have since said that the Vietcong’s southern element was dealt a tremendous blow by their losses, and that, thereafter, the North Vietnamese regular army predominated.
The curious aspect was that the American media presented Tet as a terrible failure. Newsweek talked of ‘the agony of Khe Sanh’ and Walter Cronkite on CBS referred to it as a ‘microcosm’ of the South Vietnam ‘problem’. Later on, Vietnamese Communists themselves admitted that Tet had been a disaster — 60,000 killed, as against 10,000 Americans and South Vietnamese (though also 14,000 civilians). Two American writers, very hostile to American intervention, Don Oberdorfer and Frances Fitzgerald, note that Tet was a failure, though of course very spectacular. Why did it have such an effect on American educated opinion? It did, and the role of the media was analysed in extraordinary detail by Peter Braestrup. Part of the problem was purely technical, in that getting a ‘story’ out meant seventy-two hours over thousands of miles: satellite broadcasting was still in a very early stage. Accordingly, journalists in Saigon — 464 of them, tending to repeat each other — were best placed to send out film of the various troubles in the capital, and as one of Braestrup’s informants said, ‘the networks see no harm in running a stand-up piece… by a guy who has just come in the country two days earlier’. The many positive aspects were ignored — the fact, for instance, that there had been no South Vietnamese defections. Was a central problem the fact that the American military did not know how to ‘manage’ the news? Westmoreland himself breathed confidence, and came across as a buffoon.
A war started between the media and the White House, and there were grand defections, including John Kenneth Galbraith, high priest of the Rooseveltian New Deal, and even Senator J. William Fulbright, who had done much for the spreading of democracy under an American aegis. The younger generation of the Johnson team broke off, and Johnson himself became demoralized, sometimes breaking down in tears. McNamara himself broke off, and went to head the World Bank, though his ministrations did not make a positive difference in all but two of the economies he treated. The fact was that Johnson’s nerve had already been badly weakened by the failure of the ‘Great Society’. He had been overawed by the grand Galbraiths and McNamaras; now they were making him take the blame.
The disaster was clear: America was losing, and doing so at much cost. There were to be nearly 50,000 battle deaths, over 150,000 cases of wounds severe enough for hospital, and over 2,000 missing. Two million Americans saw service in Vietnam but even then it was a selective business: conscription (‘the draft’) was theoretically universal, but in practice seldom hit young men who could ask for deferment on grounds of education, and education was a very broad church. The army took a dim view of homosexuals and exempted them: there were volunteers for that. Blacks and the working classes (and the inevitably enthusiastic Virginians) were disproportionately represented in the draft, which took 100,000 men for Vietnam in 1964 and 400,000 in 1966. There were protests across the land, and the universities, though not in truth much affected, were in ferment. Demonstrations and the media desertions caused collapse in Johnson, whose hopes for the reputation of his presidency were smashed. In March 1968 he made a dramatic announcement on television that he did not intend to run for President again.
13. Nixon in China
The withdrawal of Johnson introduced a period of surrealism in American affairs, a surrealism that became grotesque. A President, soon to be hounded from office for telling complicated lies about a matter of no importance, was seen on the Great Wall of China; he had come there as part of a fantasy game, had been received by a Chairman Mao who had ripped the hospital tubes out of his post-stroke body in order to exchange fifty minutes of exhausted and interpreted platitudes with his knees-pressed-together visitor. Mao was, said André Malraux, a colossus contemplating death. Of death, the colossus had seen much. His People’s Republic had turned into a sort of huge, failed version of anythin
g that the Bolsheviks had ever tried, beginning with War Communism in 1919. Thirty million people had starved to death in one of his campaigns, when, trying to stop birds from eating grain, he had ordered peasants to bang pots day and night to stop the birds from landing. They flew about, as planned, until they dropped. Insects were then deadlier to the grain than the birds had been, and Mao’s peasants were eating bark.
In the same period, the dollar turned into paper, and the financial structure that had saved the West collapsed. There was a consequence: oil producers quadrupled their prices, and then octupled them, causing mayhem. Stock exchanges imploded and banks failed; Keynes’s famous line, that modern ideas reflected defunct thinkers, boomeranged back at him. The period even managed to start off with a villa belonging to the modernist French painter Fernand Léger, who had bequeathed it to the French Communist Party, which then offered it as a place where peace negotiations could be concluded (a ceasefire over Vietnam was eventually signed there). These were another Panmunjom, endless haggling over tiny details while hundreds of thousands went on dying.
