by Max Hastings
In the new revelatory mood of the 1960s, however, suddenly the world witnessed nightly on prime-time TV the excesses and uglinesses perpetrated by US and South Vietnamese forces. Among images that inflicted special injury upon American purposes were that of Saigon’s police chief shooting a Vietcong prisoner during the 1968 Tet offensive; and of a screaming child, running naked in her agony after falling victim to a 1972 napalm strike. Hanoi released no comparable snapshots of cadres executing indigenous opponents by burying them alive, nor of Vietcong being mown down in unsuccessful assaults. Instead, it broadcast only heroic narratives, together with heart-rending footage of devastation inflicted by capitalist air power. The visual contrast between the war-making of a superpower, deploying diabolical technology symbolised by the B-52 bomber, and that of peasants clad in coolie hats or pith helmets, relying for mobility upon sandals and bicycles, conferred a towering propaganda advantage on the communists. In the eyes of many young Western people, Ho Chi Minh’s ‘freedom fighters’ became imbued with a romantic glow. It seems quite mistaken to suggest, as did some hawks fifty years ago, that the media lost the war for the United States. But TV and press coverage made it impossible for Westerners either to ignore the human cost or to deny the military blunderings.
Hours before I myself, aged twenty-four, flew to Saigon for the first time, I sought advice from Nicholas Tomalin, a British Sunday Times reporter. He gave me the address of the Indian bookshop on Tu-do Street which offered the best rate for changing dollars on the black market. Then he said, ‘Just remember – they lie, they lie, they lie.’ He meant the US command, of course, and he was right. Like many other Western writers then and since, however, Nick ignored the important point that Hanoi did the same. This does not render acceptable the deceits perpetrated by MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and JUSPAO (Joint US Public Affairs Office), but it provides a context often absent from judgements upon the so-called ‘credibility gap’.
Moreover, although American and South Vietnamese spokesmen peddled fantasies, MACV seldom barred reporters from getting out there and seeing for ourselves. In a fashion unmatched in any conflict before or since, free passage was accorded on fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to journalists and photographers, many fiercely hostile to their carrier’s cause. Relative American openness, contrasted with the communist commitment to secrecy, in my view constitutes a claim upon a fragment of moral high ground. The egregious error committed by US statesmen and commanders was not that of lying to the world, but rather that of lying to themselves.
In modern Vietnam collectivist economic policies have been largely discarded, yet the legitimacy of its autocratic government derives solely from its victory in 1975. Thus, no stain is permitted to besmirch that narrative: few survivors feel able to speak freely about what took place. This opacity has been amazingly successful in defining the terms in which Western as well as Asian writers address the war. While it is unlikely that US archives still conceal important secrets, many must be locked in Hanoi’s files. Liberal America has adopted an almost masochistic attitude, which has distorted the historiography as surely as do jingoistic works by conservative revisionists. I recently asked one of the most celebrated correspondents of the war era, ‘If peace demonstrations had been permitted in Hanoi, how many people would have shown up?’ He replied unhesitatingly, ‘None. The North was 100 per cent behind the struggle.’
This seems heroically naïve: most normal human beings crave escape from an experience that is inflicting grief and hardship on themselves and loved ones. Many of those in the West who opposed the war made a well-founded assessment that the US was doing something unlikely to succeed, employing grievously haphazard violence. Some then went a step further, adopting a view that if their own nation had embraced a bad cause, the other side’s must be a good one. Yet the Hanoi politburo and National Liberation Front caused the South Vietnamese people merely to exchange oppression by warlords and landlords in favour of even harsher subjection to disciples of Stalin. Democracy allows voters to remove governments with which they are dissatisfied. Once communist rule has been established, however, no further open ballot is indulged, nor has been under Hanoi’s auspices since 1954.
In conducting its war effort, the Northern politburo enjoyed significant advantages. Its principals were content to pay an awesome price in human life, secure from media or electoral embarrassments. They could suffer repeated failures on the battlefield without risking absolute defeat, because the US had set its face against invading the North. By contrast, when the South lost once, its fate was irreversible. There are significant parallels between the Vietnamese communists’ struggle and the Soviet Union’s 1941–45 war effort: Stalin yoked patriotism, ideology and compulsion in just the fashion emulated by Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan a generation later. Beyond peradventure the communists proved more effective warriors than the soldiers of Saigon, but it seems prudent to hesitate before anointing them the good guys in this saga.
Much of the narrative below depicts cruelties and follies, yet within the big canvas many individuals, Vietnamese and American, of all ages and both sexes, military and civilian, behaved decently. I have sought to tell stories of such people, because it is mistaken to allow virtuous endeavour to vanish into the cauldron of bomb blasts, brutalities and betrayals from which most accounts of the war are served up. I decided not to conduct primary political research: US archives have been trawled by scholars for decades; exhaustive accounts exist of the Western participants’ decision-making, notable among them those of Fredrik Logevall. Ken Hughes’ 2015 rendition and analysis of the White House tapes have established an almost incontrovertible record about the thinking and decision-making of Nixon and Kissinger that ended in the January 1973 Paris Accords, and supersedes much of the self-serving narrative presented in the participants’ memoirs. However, I have spent many hours studying testimony in the US Army’s Military Heritage and Education Center at Carlisle, Pa., and the US Marine Corps’ Archive at Quantico, Va. I have also accessed online material from Texas Tech University’s Vietnam War Study Center at Lubbock, and conducted almost a hundred interviews with survivors of all ages and both sexes, American and Vietnamese. Thanks to the indispensable aid of Merle Pribbenow, I have read many thousands of pages of translated Vietnamese memoirs, documents and histories.
Any historian such as myself, publishing a 2018 study of Vietnam, should acknowledge a debt to the recent Burns-Novick TV documentary series, which around the world has reawakened consciousness about this epochal struggle. I hope that my own work conveys something of the enormity of the experience the Vietnamese people endured over three generations, from the consequences of which they remain unliberated to this day.
MAX HASTINGS
Chilton Foliat, Berkshire, and Datai, Langkawi, Malaysia
May 2018
* Described, along with other experiences of conflict, in the author’s 2000 memoir Going to the Wars.
Note on Styles Adopted in the Text
Viet Nam is represented thus by its own people; in the interests of accessibility, however, I sustain the Western custom of using Vietnam, just as I render Ha Noi, Sai Gon, Dien Bien Phu, Da Nang and Viet Cong as single words.
The Vietnamese language makes extensive use of tone marks. I omit these in my text, but in the bibliography and index all proper names are appropriately accented.
Vietnamese names are commonly triple-barrelled, with the family name coming first, and I have adhered to this convention. Many Westerners are bewildered by the profusion of Vietnamese called Nguyen, but this is an accident beyond my undoing.
Wherever possible without forfeiting coherence I omit province names, to avoid crowding the narrative with geographical detail.
Translations often yield stilted prose. When quoting from foreign-language documents and memoirs in all my books, I respect Dryden’s admonition that a translator ‘should not lackey behind his author, but mount up beside him’. Thus, I seek to convey Vietnamese and French conversat
ions in colloquial English.
‘African American’ is a modern term; in the Vietnam era, the word ‘black’ was used, and thus I retain it here. I cite an American’s race only where this seems relevant.
Ranks attributed are those held at the time of episodes described.
North and South Vietnam are capitalised thus when referenced as separate states, but lower-cased as north and south when the country was unified pre-1954 and post-1975.
All the combatants measured distances metrically. I nonetheless adopt feet, yards and miles, even in direct quotations.
The colloquial phrase for joining South Vietnam’s communist guerrillas was ‘ra bung’ which meant ‘going out into the marshes’, rather as some French World War II Resistants designated themselves maquisards, because they sought refuge in the maquis wilderness. Vietcong and its abbreviation ‘VC’ were South Vietnamese slang terms, but too familiar not to retain here.
American spellings are used in quoted speech by Americans, or in a conspicuously American context, for instance ‘secretary of defense’.
In thematic sections – notably, about the experience of combat – personal experiences from different periods of the war are sometimes merged, where this does not distort their significance and validity.
Timings of military operations are given by twenty-four-hour clock, but otherwise in accordance with twelve-hour civilian practice.
No attempt seems plausible to set a value upon the South Vietnamese piaster against the US dollar, since chronic inflation and unrealistic official exchange rates render no comparison valid for more than a short period of the wartime era.
Glossary
AFN US Armed Forces Network radio stations
AK-47 Soviet-designed Kalashnikov assault rifle of which a Chinese variant began to be issued in quantity to Vietnamese communist forces in 1965
APC armoured personnel-carrier, most often in Vietnam the tracked M-113
ARVN Army of the Republic of [South] Viet Nam, pronounced as ‘Arvin’
bangalore torpedoes explosive charges packed in sections of metal or bamboo tubing, for breaching wire entanglements
battalion military unit, comprised of 400–1,000 men, normally organised in three/four companies and a headquarters
boonie-rat slang term for US infantry soldier
brigade military headquarters, controlling up to 5,000 men
cadre communist functionary
CAP combat air patrol
cherry green infantryman
chieu hoi literally ‘welcome return’, name of Saigon’s programme to process and rehabilitate defectors from the VC or NVA, often used to categorise the many thousands who joined it – ‘He’s a chieu hoi’
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
Claymore M-18 directional anti-personnel mine, spraying a hundred steel balls across a 40-degree arc, triggered manually or remotely
company military unit, a captain’s command, comprised of 100–180 men, in three or four platoons
CORDS Civilian Operations and Revolutionary [later changed to Rural] Development Support
corps military headquarters directing two/three divisions, commanded by a lieutenant-general
COSVN communist headquarters – the Central Office for South Vietnam, or Trung Uong Cuc Mien Nam, usually located near the Cambodian border
CP command post
division military formation, comprised of 8–15,000 men, organised in two/three brigades, commanded by a US major-general or sometimes by a Vietnamese colonel
DMZ the Demilitarized Zone, created near the 17th Parallel by the 1954 Geneva Accords, separating the new North and South Vietnams
dust-off slang for a medevac helicopter
DZ dropping zone for paratroops
ECM electronic counter-measures deployed by US aircraft against North Vietnamese ground defences
FAC forward air controller
flak slang term for anti-aircraft fire
FO [artillery or mortar] forward observer, accompanying infantry
FOB forward operating base
FSB fire support base
GCMA French special forces – Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés
grunt slang term for US infantry soldier
hooch slang term for soldiers’ quarters, alternatively a bunker or hut
ICC International Control Commission, established under the 1954 Geneva Accords with Indian, Polish and Canadian membership to monitor implementation. It persisted, albeit little heeded, until the 1973 Paris Accords, following which it was supplanted by a new
ICCS, International Commission for Control and Supervision, which had a wider membership to address an alleged 18,000 ceasefire violations, but proved equally ineffectual
JCS US Joint Chiefs of Staff
Kit Carson scouts NVA or VC defectors serving with US units
LAW shoulder-fired 66mm Light Anti-tank Weapon, used by US and South Vietnamese forces
LRRP long-range reconnaissance patrol
LZ landing zone for a helicopter assault – a ‘hot’ LZ was one defended by the enemy
M-14 US Army 7.62mm semi-automatic infantry rifle, standard until 1966–68, when progressively withdrawn
M-16 5.56mm rifle, a much lighter automatic weapon than the M-14 that it replaced, of which 1966–68 versions proved prone to jam in action
MACV Military Assistance Command Vietnam, US headquarters in Saigon – pronounced ‘Mac-V’
MEDCAP Medical Civil Action Program – deployment of military medical teams to provide care to the civil population
montagnards originally French term for Vietnamese hill tribes, often abbreviated by Americans to ‘Yards’, who were almost universally anti-communist and often recruited by special forces as irregulars
NLF National Liberation Front: the supposed political coalition – in reality entirely communist-run – movement, established in 1960 to promote and direct Southern resistance to the Saigon government
NSC National Security Council
NVA North Vietnamese Army, a contemporary American usage adopted below, in preference to the more common modern PAVN, People’s Army of Vietnam
platoon element of 30–40 men, normally four to each company, customarily commanded by a lieutenant, seconded by a sergeant
PRC-10, later replaced by PRC-25, US infantry voice radio set, weighing 23.5lb including battery. A company commander might be accompanied by up to three RTOs – operators – each carrying a set tuned to different nets
PRG Provisional Revolutionary Government-in-waiting created by the communists in June 1969 to supersede the NLF. It was initially located at COSVN, then from February 1973 at South Vietnam’s ‘provisional capital’ at Loc Ninh, north of Saigon
RoE Rules of Engagement, whereby US forces were permitted to attack communist forces and installations; entirely different in South and North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and varied during the course of the war
recoilless rifle relatively portable Soviet-designed short-range artillery pieces ranging in calibre from 57mm to 106mm, that could penetrate armour at a range of 500 yards, or propel an explosive bomb up to 4,000 yards, mounted either on a tripod or a two-wheeled carriage; extensively used by the VC and NVA
regiment military unit normally composed of three battalions, commanded by a full colonel
RF, PF Regional Forces, Popular Forces – militias recruited by Saigon for local defence, lightly-armed and commanded by province chiefs, totalling 525,000 men and sometimes known as Ruff-Puffs
RPG rocket-propelled grenade-launcher, a superbly effective communist shoulder-fired weapon, delivering a rocket with a range of 150 yards, that could penetrate seven inches of armour
R&R rest and recuperation – a week-long out-of-country leave granted to all US personnel at least once during a Vietnam tour, usually in Hawaii, Hong Kong or Australia
SAC USAF Strategic Air Command, of which the B-52 bomber force was the principal component
SAM Soviet-built sur
face-to-air missile, most commonly the SAM-2, deployed in North Vietnam from 1965
sappers VC and NVA elite spearhead units, specially trained in the use of explosives
SF Special Forces
‘short’ a term used by US soldiers – ‘I’m short’ – to denote a man close to his DEROS – Date of Estimated Return from Overseas Service, and thus exceptionally reluctant to die
slick troop transport helicopter, most often a Huey
SOP standard operating procedure
squad normally four in an infantry platoon, comprised of 8–10 men commanded by an NCO, subdivided into fireteams
USIA US Information Agency
Vietcong or VC derives from term Cong San Viet Nam, meaning Vietnamese communist, progressively adopted from the late 1950s
Vietminh common usage for the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, Vietnamese communist front organisation founded in 1941
1
Beauty and Many Beasts
1 CLINGING TO AN EMPIRE
Let us start this long tale, tragic even among the myriad tragedies of wars, not with a Frenchman or an American, but with a Vietnamese. Doan Phuong Hai was born in 1944 in a village on Route 6 only eighteen miles from Hanoi, yet wholly rustic. Among Hai’s earliest memories was that of wire, barbed wire, the rusty strands that encircled the French army post on a hillock near the marketplace, and the manner in which they sang when the wind blew through them. Behind the wire and beneath France’s fluttering tricolour flag lived a Vietnamese trumpeter named Vien, whom the little boy loved. Vien gave him empty butter tins and metal bottle caps, from which he built and cherished a toy car. Hai would sit among a little cluster of admiring children listening to Vien’s tales of his many battles, peering at the scar from a leg wound he had received at Limestone Mountain where he blew the call for a charge in which Foreign Legionnaires claimed to have killed a hundred communists. The boys stroked the sergeant’s stripes and hoarded empty cartridge cases that he occasionally gave to them.
