Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  A reporter pointed out that the National Commander of the American Legion had recently returned from Vietnam and had predicted that the war would go on for “5, 6, or 7 years.” Was that possible? Johnson replied that there was “no quick solution,” but he would not predict “the months or years or decades.” Another reporter asked whether the “American people may have to face the problem of guns or butter.” Answer: “I have not the slightest doubt but whatever it is necessary to face, the American people will face.” Not very illuminating.

  Given the enormous importance of the occasion, the President’s performance was disgraceful. The reporters sensed that something was wrong. The columnist Joseph Alsop, himself an extreme hawk, watched with dismay. “It must be said,” he wrote, “there is a genuine element of pathos (and pray God the pathos does not turn into tragedy) in the spectacle of this extraordinary man in the White House wrestling with the Vietnamese problem, which is so distasteful to him, and all the while visibly longing to go back to the domestic miracle-working he so much enjoys.”6

  General William C. Westmoreland had come to Vietnam in January 1964, had taken over the advisory group in June, and became commander when the great military build-up started in July 1965. He was, Stanley Karnow wrote, “nearly fifty years old, and he looked like the model of a modern American general. A tall, erect, handsome West Pointer with hooded eyes and a chiseled chin, he had earned a chestful of ribbons during World War II and Korea, and he exuded the same virtuous resolve he had displayed as an eagle scout during his boyhood in South Carolina.” He viewed generalship as an exercise in management and was extremely well organized. Under his watchful eye the Americanization of the war between 1965 and 1967 was conducted masterfully. He demanded enormous numbers of troops and immense quantities of equipment and supplies. He got everything he asked for. U.S. troops in Vietnam (end of year numbers) rose from 23,000 in 1964 to 184,000 in 1965, 385,000 in 1966, and 486,000 in 1967.

  Karnow recalled the Vietnam he knew in the late fifties. Saigon could have been a provincial French city—“its acacia-shaded streets lined with quiet shops and sleepy sidewalk cafes, its residential district of handsome villas wallowing in lush tropical gardens of jasmine, mimosa and brilliant red and purple bougainvillea.” Danang, Nhatrang, and Vung Tau were “lovely little seaside towns.” Those in the Mekong Delta awakened only once a week when the peasants brought their produce to market. Michael Herr, who covered the war with the grunts, their faces in the mud, came in low over Saigon on a chopper at dawn on a day in late 1967. He saw something “beautiful for once, and only once.” He saw the city as it had once been. “Paris of the East, Pearl of the Orient, long open avenues, lined and bowered over by trees running into spacious parks, precisioned scale, all under the soft shell from a million breakfast fires, camphor smoke rising and diffusing, covering Saigon and the shining veins of the river with a warmth like the return of better times.”

  Karnow was astonished by the “convulsive transformation” of the country:

  American army engineers and private contractors labored around the clock, often accomplishing stupendous tasks in a matter of months. Their giant tractors and bulldozers and cranes carved out roads and put up bridges, and at one place in the Mekong Delta they dredged the river to create a six-hundred-acre island as a secure campsite. They erected mammoth fuel depots and warehouses, some refrigerated. They constructed hundreds of helicopter pads and scores of airfields, including huge jet strips at Danang and Bienhoa. Until their arrival, Saigon had been South Vietnam’s only major port, and its antiquated facilities were able to handle only modest ships. Now, almost overnight, they built six new deep-water harbors, among them a gigantic complex at Camranh Bay, which they completed at breakneck speed by towing prefabricated floating piers across the Pacific. They connected remote parts of the country with an intricate communications grid, and they linked Saigon to Washington with submarine cables and radio networks so efficient that U.S. embassy officials could dial the White House in seconds—and President Johnson could, as he did frequently, call to check on progress.

  By 1967, a million tons of supplies a month were pouring into Vietnam to sustain the U.S. force—an average of a hundred pounds a day for every American there. An American infantryman could rely on the latest hardware. He was transported to the battle scene by helicopter, and, if wounded, flown out aboard medical evacuation choppers known as dustoffs because of the dust they kicked up by their rotors as they landed. His targets had usually been “softened” by air strikes and artillery bombardments, and he could summon additional air and artillery assistance during a fight. Tanks and other armored vehicles often flanked him in action, and his unit carried the most up-to-date arms—mortars, machine guns, grenade and rocket launchers, and the M-16, a fully automatic rifle.

  With the exception of the nuclear weapon, nearly every piece of equipment in America’s mighty arsenal was sooner or later used in Vietnam. The skies were clogged with bombers, fighters, helicopters and other airplanes, among them high-altitude B-52s and such contrivances as “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a converted DC-3 transport outfitted with rapid-fire machine guns capable of raking targets at the rate of eighteen thousand rounds per minute. So dense was the air traffic, in fact, that South Vietnam’s airports became the world’s busiest. In addition to flying from bases inside the country, the air armada operated out of Guam and Thailand and from carriers in the South China Sea. And the U.S. flotilla deployed off Vietnam also included destroyers, patrol boats, tankers, hospital ships and light craft to penetrate the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta. Every service sought to be represented in Vietnam because, as American officers explained at the time, “it’s the only war we got.”

  John P. Roche, a presidential aide, spent six or eight weeks in South Vietnam in 1966. He was appalled by “this incredible input of Americans and American stuff just piling into this little country and literally tearing its social fabric. … We should have cut two-thirds on the size, and we might have increased the efficiency 50 per cent.”

  Westmoreland quickly developed a strategy for victory, which he expected to have in hand by 1967. He visualized a two-sided enemy. “Guerillas, local forces, and political cadres at the hamlet and village level continued their small-unit war, seeking to terrorize and control the population and knock off small government outposts.” In the wings the enemy kept larger regiments and divisions “to seize and retain territory and to destroy the government’s troops and eliminate all vestiges of government control.”

  Westmoreland visualized three strategic phases: First, American troops would develop and secure their logistical bases. Second, South Vietnamese and American forces would eliminate enemy base camps and sanctuaries. A final major ground attack would destroy their main forces or drive them out of South Vietnam.

  Meantime, Rolling Thunder would destroy Hanoi’s capability to prosecute the war by wiping out its industry, transport, and oil supplies. South Vietnam would win over the hearts and minds of its peasants in the countryside, a program called “pacification” and, later, “Vietnamization.” American officers described it this way: “Grab ’em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow.”

  It is said of failed generals that they insist on fighting the last war. This may have been Westmoreland’s problem. In any case, he misread the topography of the country, the intelligence and perseverance of the enemy, the limits of his own forces, and the competence of the government and armed forces of South Vietnam.

  Thomas C. Thayer, who spent 13 years analyzing the conflict, concluded that it was “a war without fronts or battle lines, different from the wars we fought in Europe or Korea.” In those conventional struggles, “a commander needs to know only two items to monitor his progress. First, he has to know where the front is and which way it is moving. Second, he needs to know the strengths of friendly and enemy forces.” Both vanish when there is no front and the enemy cannot be seen. General Lewis Walt, who commanded the Marines, said, “So
on after I arrived in Vietnam it became obvious to me that I had neither a real understanding of the nature of the war nor any clear idea as to how to win it.”

  The North Vietnamese, in fact, wrangled in 1965 over how to respond to the immense American build-up, whether to infiltrate big units quickly or to pursue a more modest and slower course. The Chinese for their own interests urged the latter. The North Vietnamese rejected their advice and decided to annihilate the South Vietnamese army swiftly in order, they hoped, to produce a U.S. withdrawal. They placed a few large units in the South. But U.S. firepower was decisive in a series of battles during 1966 in which these units suffered devastating casualties. In 1967 General Giap, the hero of Dienbienphu, took over and changed the strategy. The war should be fought by squads, not regiments; it might take 15 or 20 years to gain the victory. The number of battalion or larger attacks declined from 73 in 1965 to 44 in 1966 and 54 in 1967; smaller unit attacks for the same years rose from 612 to 862 to 1,484.

  All the studies concluded that Rolling Thunder was a failure. The magnitude of the bombing strains credulity. Thayer counted 3.4 million combat sorties between 1965 and 1973. “In five years, 1965–1969, the U.S. dropped nine times the tonnage it dropped in the Pacific during World War II. This averages out to 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of Vietnam and about 500 pounds of explosives for every man, woman and child in the country.”

  The Pentagon Papers summarized a careful study for 1966. The preceding year there were 55,000 sorties and 33,000 tons of bombs. In 1966 these numbers rose to 148,000 and 128,000. By now most of North Vietnam, excluding part of the Hanoi/Haiphong sanctuary and the Chinese buffer zone, was open to attack. The cost was formidable. In 1965, 171 aircraft were lost; in 1966, 318. A CIA study estimated that it cost $6.60 to inflict $1.00 in damage in 1965, $9.60 in 1966. Estimated casualties in the North, 80 percent civilian, went up from 13,000 to almost 24,000.

  But these massive attacks had accomplished little. One study found that they had “not eliminated any important sector of the NVN economy or the military establishment.” The Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia, which Neil Sheehan called “one of the engineering marvels of modern military history,” remained open. A concentrated attack on the petroleum supply achieved nothing. Nor had there been any adverse impact on morale, if anything, the opposite. Stepped-up supplies from China and the Soviet Union quickly relieved shortages.

  The pacification program to protect South Vietnamese peasants to win their support for the war and the government faced insuperable odds. The Vietcong controlled or contested the countryside. The war disrupted farming and about 4 million people—a quarter of the population—were refugees, and they streamed into the cities, particularly Saigon. Karnow wrote: “They were shunted into makeshift camps of squalid shanties, where primitive sewers bred dysentery, malaria, and other diseases.” The cities acquired “an almost mediaeval cast as beggars and hawkers roamed the streets, whining and tugging at Americans for money.”

  Thus, Vietnam was a guerrilla war on the ground, an agonizingly ruthless war of attrition. When Westmoreland realized that his strategy was irrelevant, he substituted “search and destroy.” This was, he argued, “nothing more than the infantry’s traditional attack mission: locate the enemy, try to bring him to battle, and either destroy him or force his surrender.” As a result, American infantrymen carried the murderous responsibility for finding an enemy who was usually invisible and engaging him in small unit fire, M-16 versus AK-47. This was the war that Michael Herr discovered when he came to Vietnam in 1967:

  Search and Destroy, more a gestalt than a tactic, brought up alive and steaming from the Command psyche. … The VC had an ostensibly similar tactic called Find and Kill. Either way, it was us looking for him looking for us looking for him, war on a Cracker Jack box, repeated to diminishing returns.

  Westmoreland talked about “the light at the end of the tunnel.” Herr again:

  Outside of Tay Ninh City a man whose work kept him “up to fucking here” in tunnels, lobbing grenades into them, shooting his gun into them, popping CS smoke into them, crawling down into them himself to bring the bad guys out dead or alive, he almost smiled when he heard that one and said, “What does that asshole know about tunnels?”

  Heir’s apartment in Saigon had an archaic map on the wall, showing Tonkin, Annam, Cochin China. But a new one told you no more about Vietnam. “That was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind.”

  In the jungle you had to keep a cigarette going all the time to fend off the mosquitoes. “War under water, swamp fever and instant involuntary weight control, malarias that could burn you out and cave you in. … “ Herr:

  Every day people were dying there because of some small detail that they couldn’t be bothered to observe. Imagine being too tired to snap a flak jacket closed, too tired to clean your rifle, too tired to guard a light, too tired to deal with the half-inch margins of safety that moving through the war often demanded, just too tired to give a fuck and then dying behind that exhaustion.

  The roads were ruined, the trails booby-trapped, satchel charges and grenades blew up jeeps and movie theaters, the VC got work inside all the camps as shoeshine boys and laundresses and honey-dippers, they’d starch your fatigues and burn your shit and then go home and mortar your area. … Choppers fell out of the sky like fat poisoned birds a hundred times a day. After a while I couldn’t get on one without thinking that I must be out of my fucking mind.

  There wasn’t a day when someone didn’t ask me what I was doing there. … Blah, blah, blah cover the war. … Not that you didn’t hear some overripe bullshit about it: Hearts and Minds, Peoples of the Republic, tumbling dominoes, maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by containing the ever encroaching Doodah. … Some young soldiers speaking in all bloody innocence, saying, “All that’s just a load, man. We’re here to kill gooks. Period.” That wasn’t at all true of me. I was there to watch. … I went to cover the war and the war covered me.

  “In Vietnam,” Jonathan Shay wrote, “the enemy struck not only at the body, but also at the most basic functions of the soldier’s mind, attacking his perceptions by concealment; his cognitions by camouflage and deception; his intentions by surprise, anticipation, and ambush.” Deception was as old as warfare, but in American experience it had always been directed at commanders. In Vietnam, however, deception was aimed at the infantryman. “Americans soldiers literally felt tortured by their Vietnamese enemy. Prolonged patrolling in Vietnam led to a decomposition of the normal, the familiar, the safe.” Worse, the attacks came around the clock, but especially at night.

  By the end of 1967 this war had killed 15,755 Americans. During that year the President and his advisers knew that the war could not be won. Some, like McNamara, knew earlier. This transformed the way they looked at it. In memoranda written in the spring of 1967 John McNaughton wrote that victory was no longer an option. The best hope was a prolonged stalemate. That meant attrition, and in a war of attrition Hanoi held the winning cards. Ho would certainly not negotiate unless the U.S. stopped the bombing and he probably would not go to the table in any case until after the 1968 presidential election. On the American side, McNaughton wrote, the war had become

  increasingly unpopular as it escalates—causing more American casualties, more fear of its growing into a wider war, more privation of the domestic sector, and more distress at the amount of suffering being visited upon the non-combatants in Vietnam, South and North. Most Americans do not know how we got where we are, and most, without knowing why, but taking advantage of hindsight, are convinced that somehow we should not have gotten this deeply in. All want the war ended and expect their President to end it. Successfully or else.7

  During 1967 the Vietnam War destroyed Robert McNamara. His intimate relationship with the President collapsed. Johnson wrote later,

  When I met with him … on the night of November 22 [1963], I told him that if he ever tri
ed to quit I would send the White House police after him. Brilliant, intensely energetic, publicly tough but privately sensitive, a man with great love for his country, McNamara carried more information around in his head than the average encyclopedia.

  But now Johnson was deeply troubled about his Defense Secretary on several counts. McNamara was the bearer of the bad news he did not want to hear: the war could not be won; it was tearing the country to pieces; the U.S. should seek peace with North Vietnam. Equally, and perhaps more important, McNamara and his wife were extremely close to the Robert Kennedys and, during 1967, on many occasions the secretary would be in the White House during the day and with his wife at Hickory Hill in the evening. Johnson detested Kennedy and must have regarded McNamara’s behavior as disloyalty. Johnson could hardly fail to observe the terrible toll the war was inflicting on McNamara’s mind and body. During the summer of 1967 McNamara’s private phone line to the Oval Office stopped ringing. When both McNamara and Johnson were approached separately about McNamara’s leaving the Pentagon to become president of the World Bank, neither spoke to the other about the proposal.

  Further, the secretary was now at war with the armed forces. According to his biographer Deborah Shapley, “almost anyone in the military who expressed admiration for McNamara jeopardized his chances for promotion.” The “senior brass were embittered by the endless fights and mutual accusations of dishonesty. … A still uglier notion percolating in some quarters of the Building was that McNamara’s quantitative management techniques had not only hurt the armed forces but had caused the inconclusiveness of the war in Vietnam.”