Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire

by Jerry Pournelle

  Richard Nixon, presumably, made similar calculations. For us, too, and for our allies, timing was crucial. Each move we made on the ground would have to be balanced against the effects it produced on our troops and at home. During the first five years of the American war our battle deaths had totaled some 16,000. By the end of 1968 the number had dramatically risen to 30,610. Disengagement began in 1969, but Hanoi saw to it that fighting remained heavy, with the result that another 10,000 Americans died in the course of the year. And the fact that we were now on our way out, in addition to affecting military morale, seemed to galvanize the most radical elements of the antiwar movement—those who were in fact pro-war, but on the enemy's side. In May 1970, for example, a few days after the start of a joint U.S.-South Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia, four students at Kent State University in Ohio were shot and killed by National Guardsmen during a demonstration; and all across the country colleges shut down in protest. Still, the Cambodian invasion vastly improved the security of Vietnam's eastern provinces, including the great rice-growing area south of Saigon; and Thieu had reason to be proud of the conduct of his troops.

  So it wasn't easy to draw up a statement of profit and loss. In this instance, my old friend Bui Diem, Thieu's ambassador to Washington, drafted a cable to Saigon to warn that Hanoi, on the whole, had come out ahead politically. So he tells us in his memoirs. But Thieu, with his Mandarin Confucian mentality, refused to take the point. The Cambodian action, he thought, was long overdue—as indeed it was.

  However that may be, from the onset of the Nixon administration, as Kissinger began his secret talks with Le Duc Tho, our troops were removed from South Vietnam in increments corresponding (we said) to the growing ability of the South to defend itself—but also, obviously, to political calculations and pressures at home. It was the sort of thing we did well, and the process took on a life of its own. From our peak troop strength of 543,400 in the spring of 1969 we went to 24,200 in 1972; and the last of these were gone in the following year.

  The ARVN, meanwhile, increased its complement from 820,000 to 1,048,000—an enormous effort, but insufficient to replace the shortfall in numbers and firepower; and the ARVN had become dependent on certain American command functions—intelligence and communications, especially—that the JGS was still far from being able to replace.

  These were technical matters, and most Americans were happy to leave them to the experts. They wanted out, and expected that we would leave in an orderly and honorable way; and this general approval of Nixon's policy as it was understood was repeatedly confirmed by opinion polls and by the landslide Republican victory in the elections of 1972.

  For the South Vietnamese, however, everything now hung on a thread. They knew that they could not have come this far without our help; and, having suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties during the preceding decade, they were physically and morally exhausted. Outnumbered, outgunned, with thousands of miles of porous frontiers and seacoast, they found themselves still facing a juggernaut, the PAVN, which could attack at will from sanctuaries in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, replace its losses from Soviet arsenals, and attack again. They knew that their country, for all the highly publicized faults of the Thieu government, was richer and freer than the North—but of what avail was such knowledge if Enlightened Opinion throughout the world decreed that Hanoi's nationalist credentials were more authentic, since it was Ho Chi Minh who had driven out the French; and if God, in any case, was on the side of the bigger battalions?

  To continue to fight under such circumstances, the South Vietnamese had to believe in our ultimate commitment to their survival. This had always been difficult for a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which was that a great many Americans did not believe in it and said so. But of course it was also difficult for the Vietnamese, if not impossible, to interpret the many varieties of opposition to the war. So most of them tended, like Thieu, to shrug the American opposition—Hanoi's hope and comfort—away.

  For the Southerners, the core of the problem was elsewhere: they could not see our interest, even when our involvement was at its height; and it became increasingly hard for them to grasp as we began to withdraw. The Vietnamese I knew, or more precisely met, in Saigon and a few years later in Paris, were incomparably more sophisticated than the villagers who made up the great mass of the population; yet even they astonished me by their ignorance of our world—which was almost as great as my ignorance of theirs.

  The Southern bourgeoisie was composed for the most part of villagers once or twice removed, with bits of property somewhere in the delta or up north; or Chinese merchants with Vietnamese names; or professional people, lawyers, doctors, teachers, and (for some mysterious reason) an inordinate number of pharmacists. They had been to French schools, usually, and had absorbed a little elementary history, but this did not include the doctrine of containment. Obviously, our intentions were not colonial, as some had hoped and others feared; we built no plantations and did no business, except with each other. The great bases we built at Danang, Long Binh, Camranh Bay suggested a strategic interest, but by the early 70's we were turning these over to the government of South Vietnam. Rumors kept cropping up to the effect that oil, or some other natural resource, had been discovered; but none was confirmed.

  Of course, there was our rhetoric, and we had certainly put our money where our mouth was, but this still begged the question—especially now that we were leaving—of why. Why had we come to save them at such horrendous cost in the first place? Why had we, visibly not the most patient of peoples, adopted a strategy that carefully preserved Hanoi's ability to inflict pain on us and prolong the war? And why, since we had now apparently become embroiled in some obscure but important crisis of our own, chez nous, should we continue to concern ourselves with theirs?

  I am not talking about peasants, for whom the great thing throughout the centuries of Chinese domination, warring kingdoms, and French colonialism had always been to discern who (in the immediate vicinity) had the "Mandate of Heaven"—i.e., the actual power to recruit their sons and confiscate their rice—but about their city cousins, especially those who had a modicum of education and the prestige that goes with it in Confucian society.

  The vast majority of these, including the minority who were or who had been tempted by the NLF, were anti-Communist and anxious to keep Hanoi at arm's length. "Kaplan-oi," I heard them saying. "Is this possible? Are you Americans for real?" And I used to hold imaginary conversations with them, lucidly explaining that the political and military mistakes we had made, appalling as they were, only increased our obligation to set things right; that the American people continued to believe that world peace was threatened if the Communists were allowed to believe that they could extend their empire by military force; and that, as a great power, we could not in any event afford to let the South Vietnamese down, lest we come to be considered more dangerous to our friends than to our enemies.

  In fact, however, this subject of our ultimate interest practically never came up, perhaps because it was too important. These people had a way that comes back to me now of tiptoeing around a fateful issue with a sort of superstitious tact. Most, it seemed to me, had simply given up trying to understand. They believed in our commitment, if and when they did, for no rational reason at all: because it was the only alternative to despair. But to carry on they constantly needed reassurance. And in this respect, alas, the manner of our withdrawal was the final disaster.

  Secrecy is a normal and necessary mode of diplomacy, but in this case it was counterindicated, as a diplomat might put it, because it played precisely into Hanoi's hands. Quite apart from the unsettling effect it had on the South Vietnamese, it was inevitable that the secrecy of the negotiations leading to the Paris Accords would discourage public interest in the United States—especially after the agreement in principle was signed and the haggling about details began. If there was any chance of committing this country to the responsibilities implicit in the Paris Accor
ds—the culmination, after all, of an enormous national effort—it was in using the presidential pulpit to the utmost and insisting that Congress and the media be informed of the entire process, all along the way.

  This is easier to say than it would have been to do, given Hanoi's opposition and Nixon's impatience. And no one could foresee in 1969, when Kissinger first slipped into Paris for a rendezvous with Le Duc Tho, what would happen to the Nixon presidency at the beginning of his second term. Yet, to stand the Clausewitzian formula on its head, the peace could only be "a continuation of the war by other means." An agreement with the Communists, any agreement with the Communists, would have to be enforced. And this meant that the country had to be prepared for a continuing effort, insignificant in comparison with what we had been doing, but irksome; and, as in South Korea, with no end in sight.

  To be sure, the mills of Watergate were now grinding, and it was late in the day to commit this country to anything in Southeast Asia, after ten years of a war conducted so incoherently, beyond the stand-off implied in Nixon's formula: an honorable peace. There was no public clamor to know what Kissinger was up to in Paris. It was as if Congress, the press, and the academic world from which he had so surprisingly come were relieved to let him rid them of this tiresome business at last.

  Of the negotiations, in any event, nothing or almost nothing was known until 1970. For once there were no leaks from the American side. And thereafter, until Secretary of State Rogers and the Vietnamese foreign ministers were summoned to Paris for the signing, the public knew only that Kissinger was conducting talks with Hanoi on the one hand and with Saigon on the other. It was understood that the latter, on the whole, was being at least as stubborn and difficult as the former; and this fed the growing anti-South-Vietnamese passion that had begun to inhabit certain corners of the Congress. But the details, excepting those that the Communists chose to reveal for the purposes of psychological warfare, remained obscure. For his part, Thieu never went public with his objections to the form and content of Kissinger's talks with Le Duc Tho. One can only speculate about the reasons for his discretion—but who can doubt now that it was a fatal mistake?

  In January 1969, as Kissinger was organizing his new office in the White House, the magazine Foreign Affairs appeared with an article in which he—writing as a Harvard professor—makes an elementary point about negotiations with the Vietnamese:

  To survive, the Vietnamese have had to learn to calculate—almost instinctively—the real balance of forces. If negotiations give the impression of being camouflaged surrender, there will be nothing left to negotiate. Support for the side which seems to be losing will collapse. Thus, all the parties are aware—Hanoi explicitly, for it does not view war and negotiation as separate processes; we in a more complicated bureaucratic manner—that the way negotiations are carried out is almost as important as what is negotiated.

  To which one can only say amen. But the newly appointed National Security Adviser then proceeded to deal directly with Hanoi, just as we in the Harriman-Vance mission had conducted "exploratory talks" a year or so earlier. Only, this time, the South Vietnamese were not even briefed after each meeting; for a long time they were not briefed at all. No serious consideration was ever given to Thieu's insistent demand that, since it was the fate of his people that hung in the balance, his government should be directly involved.

  And thus, over the next four years, the Republic of Vietnam, which even the Soviets had once been willing to recognize, was delegitimized, in direct contradiction to what we were saying in South Vietnam and to the world, and indeed to all that we had spent so much blood and treasure to assert since 1965—namely, that Saigon was the rightful government of the South and, given the wherewithal, would eventually be able to take care of itself.

  To provide the wherewithal we had a program called Vietnamization. In practice it meant that we left behind hundreds of millions of dollars worth of materiel, much of it useless to Thieu's armed forces because they lacked the facilities for repairing and maintaining it, and said in effect: goodbye and good luck and don't hesitate to call. And for the first couple of years or so there was usually someone, however distracted, at the other end of the line. With the materiel went certain training programs, some of them reasonably effective; and at least two or three South Vietnamese divisions were—by 1972—equipped and organized and led in a manner that made them equal if not superior to any units of comparable size that the PAVN could muster. But they were far too few, and the ARVN was fatally weak (after the withdrawal of MAC-V) at the general-staff level.

  Meanwhile the Communists, as expected, began violating the cease-fire immediately, just to make their point: small probing actions at first, increasingly bold as they discovered just how far it was possible to go without eliciting a reaction from us. The Soviets were now giving them the full panoply of their equipment, ineluding helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft; and then there was that ominous pipeline; and the reconstruction of their base areas in Cambodia, from which the Khmer Rouge could be unleashed to attack Phnom Penh and the PAVN to move eastward to control the vital centers of the South.

  All in good time. By the spring of 1974 it was clear that Hanoi need not worry about going too far, the Congress and the people of the United States being otherwise engaged. The Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives began its television inquiry into the possible impeachment of Richard Nixon on May 9. Few noticed, two weeks later, when the House voted to gut the budget for military aid to South Vietnam. This was a signal, if any were needed, to both sides.

  Still, the war would drag on for another year, until the final spasm which began with the PAVN offensive against Ban Me Thuot on March 10, 1975. Indeed, Hanoi did not anticipate that things would move so swiftly. In January a Northern division had been moved across the river from Cambodia to occupy Phuoc Long—not much of a drive, a few hours, perhaps an afternoon, from my house on Phan Dinh Phung. There was no reaction from our air force and this, when the ARVN began to crumble in the central highlands, must have told the Northerners that they could now drive on to Saigon unimpeded. On the coast, Danang, where our marines had come ashore ten years earlier, fell on March 10. On April 10 President Ford's last pro-forma request for funds was turned down by the House; it was already unlikely that such funds would ever be spent. One last ARVN division held the Communists up before Saigon for a few days, inflicting heavy casualties until its munitions were spent and most of its men were dead. Saigon fell on April 30.

  In the last twelve years of Vietnam's thirty-year war, during which we destroyed Diem's republic, which we had helped to create, then encouraged Thieu to set up another that might have survived and even prospered, and finally tired of the whole business and turned it all over to Hanoi, we ourselves had suffered over 300,000 casualties and more than 57,000 dead; inflicted enormous damage on both North and South Vietnam; induced our South Vietnamese allies to hope and fight and suffer even greater—far greater—human losses than our own; spent billions upon billions of dollars in the manner best calculated to distort and inflate our economy for years to come; built a lavish and immensely useful naval base for the Soviets to inherit at Camranh Bay, thus tilting the strategic balance in their favor in the South Pacific; disrupted and almost destroyed civil society and the idea of national service in our own country and—but need I go on? The disaster was and remains incalculable. And yet we turned away from it and went about our business, beginning to forget Vietnam even before it was over.

  Amnesia, I am told, is the response of the organism to an intolerable inner trouble. But this is a response that we cannot afford. It deprives us of a vital dimension. Memory, however painful, is better. My old friend Raymond Aron used to say that history, which is after all a form of memory, cannot really help us solve our present problems; we learn nothing from it, he said, but history itself. So much for that old tag that people are forever quoting from Santayana, to the effect that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.
But this is not to say that it is useless to think about the past. What we choose to remember, and how, is part of the process by which we become what we are.

  So now, I would suggest, it is time to remember what we did and failed to do in Vietnam. We cannot be content with the nightmarish fantasies of combat that our novelists and film-makers have given us. They were part of the experience, to be sure. But books like The Palace File and Ellen Hammer's Death in November remind us that this war was not simply devised as a test of our young manhood or a mindless horror show. There was more to Vietnam than "all that."

  Editor's Introduction To:

  Blessed Are The Meek

  G. C. Edmondson

  Gary Edmondson first appeared in the science fiction magazines some thirty years ago. He has made a living at writing ever since.

  Gary spent much of his time traveling around the country in a home built RV that serves as both house and office. About ten years ago I introduced him to writing with computers, and he installed a word processor in his rig. I keep trying to get him to write a book about that.