Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  One fighter spoke for many when he complained about interminable indoctrination sessions: ‘Talking to me about political matters is like playing a guitar to a water buffalo.’ Some liked propaganda fairy tales, however: a unit in Long An province was led by a woman named Kim Loan, whose husband had been killed by government troops. She became a local folk heroine, imbued with supposedly mystical powers. On one occasion she killed a policeman who tried to arrest her while shopping. On another she fled through the back door of a beauty parlour, and when soldiers scoured a nearby hamlet for her, climbed a tree, changed into a bird and flew. Frank Scotton challenged the old man who told him that story, saying, ‘You can’t really believe that?’ The Vietnamese smiled and responded that while he could not know for sure, ‘she got away, didn’t she?’

  Savagery remained the communists’ principal weapon. The Vietcong once entered a village in Lai Cay, denounced twenty inhabitants of both sexes as government spies, beheaded them and threw the bodies in the street, each with a scrap of paper attached, describing their alleged crimes. Elsewhere a hamlet chief was tied to a stake and disembowelled in front of the assembled villagers; his pregnant wife was eviscerated, their children beheaded. Such atrocities were artistically crafted to persuade peasants that the price of resistance to the revolution was much worse than mere death.

  Brutality was not confined to one side, of course. Doug Ramsey conducted a survey among students in Long An province and found that between a quarter and half had lost relations to the activities of Saigon’s security forces. In the course of 1962–63, government troops killed 150 inhabitants of a single village in the Mekong delta. Of these, an estimated sixty were associated with the NLF, but the rest were not. Among thousands of political prisoners held in appalling conditions in South Vietnam’s jails and camps, some in a wing of Saigon zoo, there were many innocents. Of legal processes there were none.

  Though urban areas remained firmly under government control, in the countryside the guerrilla struggle seesawed, with control of villages and entire regions frequently changing hands. Saigon acquired an arsenal of new weapons and equipment, and sometimes used these effectively. In late August 1962, guided by a defector, Southern troops overran an NLF training base at My Phuoc Tay, killing 150 cadres and trainees; surviving recruits fled back to their villages. American helicopters dramatically increased ARVN tactical mobility, so that they ranged into rural areas where the communists had for years held unchallenged sway. But capability and will were not the same thing: many South Vietnamese units declined to patrol where they might be ambushed, and flinched from pressing firefights. In 1963 the Vietcong began to receive arms shipped in quantity from North Vietnam, including some recoilless rifles and mortars, often landed from the sea, especially in the Mekong delta.

  In cities, cadres laboured to prepare the masses for a popular uprising. Children were often used to toss grenades into cafés or markets. Government intelligence remained poor, and communist activists were skilled in concealing their identities. As a VC courier, ten-year-old Truong Mealy was sometimes sent into a town to meet a code-named figure in a restaurant, clutching half a banknote to identify himself to a contact bearing the other half. If he or others of his kind were caught, their knowledge was confined to the first name of their Party teacher. Only senior NLF cadres knew the names of province chiefs.

  The tempo of the war was rising: after two years in which the impetus of the armed struggle had come chiefly from Southern hostility to the Saigon government, Hanoi’s influence and resources were becoming ever more conspicuous. Northern leaders scented rotting flesh, a stench of terminal decay, drifting upcountry from Saigon’s presidential palace. They had become impatient to expedite funerary arrangements for the Diem regime. So, too, were important people in Washington.

  7

  1963: Coffins for Two Presidents

  1 SMALL BATTLE, BIG STORY: AP BAC

  Alongside the swarms of American advisers, diplomats, fliers, special forces, electronic eavesdroppers and spooks setting up shop in Vietnam, ever more journalists came – men and a few women who would exercise at least as much influence on the story as the warriors and politicos. The swelling press corps reflected an awareness among their employers that the investment being made by the US deserved more attention at the sharp end than it had hitherto received. Saigon bureaux got not quite the A Team, such as then went to Washington, Paris, Moscow, London, but A-Team wannabes. Most were young, green, pretty bright, fiercely ambitious, and they fell in love with the romance of Saigon: men like David Halberstam of the New York Times, Malcolm Browne and Peter Arnett of AP, François Sully of Newsweek, Neil Sheehan of UPI who shared desk space with Halberstam and became his close friend.

  Sheehan was in Japan, finishing his draft hitch with the US Army, when he persuaded UPI’s Tokyo bureau to let him earn $10 a throw pulling night shifts. Then the news agency’s Saigon correspondent quit, and Sheehan got the job. He was a Massachusetts farm boy, born in 1936, strikingly handsome, who won a scholarship to Harvard before becoming a precocious alcoholic. After 1961 he never touched a drink, but he arrived in Vietnam the following year still a little high on a faith in the United States, born out of his elevation to the Ivy League, that would be sorely tested during the years that followed. ‘Saigon was a very nice place that hadn’t then been mucked up by Americans,’ he said. ‘For the first six months I was not at all afraid. I thought it was thrilling, skiing over rice paddies in a helicopter. I was a child of the Cold War. We all felt the same way. Americans could do no wrong. We went there to stop these evil communists trying to take over the world. We had very little grip on reality. We felt this country deserved support.’

  A cluster of the young correspondents, who swiftly acquired beautiful Vietnamese girlfriends, lived as a ratpack, dining together at L’Amiral, Souri-Blanche or Bistro Brodard, where they had a special table bearing a sign ‘Réservé pour la presse’; sharing cyclos or tiny blue-and-cream Renault taxis to briefings, helos to battle. Plenty of unattributable information was available from advisers, diplomats and the ubiquitous Lou Conein: in Sheehan’s laconic phrase, ‘Lou liked to talk.’ Ivan Slavitch, a soldier who commanded the first Huey helicopter unit, would sometimes call and say ‘Come out for breakfast,’ which was a coded tip that an operation was on. However, ‘most Vietnamese wouldn’t speak to you – they didn’t want to get into trouble’.

  The US Army sucked up much of the precarious electricity supply, so that when air-conditioners went down, the reporters sweated profusely onto their shirts, typewriter keys, stories. They made small fortunes from submitting expenses at the official currency-exchange rate while changing dollars on the black market, though Sheehan stayed clean because he was fearful of expulsion. Halberstam later urged him to title his Vietnam book The Last Frontier, ‘because it was the last place to have fun, to fool around with somebody else’s country’. Though the correspondents loved the place, most adopted an increasingly earnest view of their mission, having identified a chasm between the relentless optimism of the US military, especially its 1962–64 commander Gen. Paul Harkins, and the realities as they observed them.

  From an early stage, MACV propagated wilful falsehoods and suppressed inconvenient truths, such as the fact that US aircrew were flying combat missions in VNAF cockpits, belatedly revealed when the Indianapolis News published letters home from Air Force captain ‘Jerry’ Shank which made nonsense of official denials. Shank wrote: ‘What gets me the most is that they won’t tell you people what we do over here … We – me and my buddies – do everything. The Vietnamese “students” we have on board are airmen basics … They’re stupid, ignorant sacrificial lambs, and I have no use for them. In fact I have been tempted to whip them within an inch of their life.’ The use of napalm was unacknowledged until photos of its flame sheets appeared in the press. Peter Arnett later revealed the use of CS lachrymatory gas, which was seized upon by hostile propagandists to mean poison gas, in the face of deafening MACV and Penta
gon silence.

  Halberstam, then twenty-eight, started out as a True Believer, but by the autumn of 1962 had grown sceptical, writing in the New York Times: ‘This is a war fought in the presence of a largely uncommitted or unfriendly peasantry, by a government that has yet to demonstrate much appeal to large elements of its own people. The enemy is lean and hungry, experienced in this type of warfare, patient in his campaign, endlessly self-critical, and above all, an enemy who has shown that he is willing to pay the price.’ When in December Halberstam informed his office about reporting restrictions imposed by Nhu and his creatures, the Times forwarded the protest to the State Department, which shrugged that Americans in Vietnam were guests of a sovereign state. This much was true: that when the regime persistently dismissed advice and imprecations from the US embassy, MACV and the CIA, it scarcely acted out of character in refusing to indulge hostile – and, in Diem’s eyes, considerably depraved – liberal journalists. Come to that, Jack Kennedy once telephoned the Times’s publisher to lean on him to shift its correspondent.

  As for the American military’s pronouncements, Time’s Lee Griggs composed a song about its chief, to the tune of the hymn ‘Jesus Loves Me’:

  We are winning, this I know,

  General Harkins tells me so.

  In the mountains, things are rough,

  In the Delta, mighty tough,

  But the V.C. will soon go,

  General Harkins tells me so.

  Homer Bigart wrote in a June 1962 valedictory dispatch for the New York Times that unless Diem mended his ways, either US combat troops would have to be committed, or the Saigon government replaced by a military junta. Newsweek’s François Sully was the daddy of them all, a Frenchman born in 1927 who had been around Saigon since 1945. He was by no means universally beloved by colleagues, and was suspected by some of being a communist, but his connections on both sides were impressive. In one of Sully’s last dispatches before being expelled by Diem, he cited Bernard Fall’s view that the politics were far more important than the tactics, yet the US Army was training the Southerners to resist a Korean-style invasion. Marine helicopters, he said, could not provide the Vietnamese with an ideology worth dying for. The piece was accompanied by a photo of Diem’s female militia captioned ‘The enemy has more drive and enthusiasm.’

  Neil Sheehan said of the 1962–63 Saigon press corps: ‘We were a pretty serious bunch of guys: we found ourselves in conflict – very serious conflict – with the [US] command. You got pretty angry with the generals’ lying.’ Sheehan marvelled at the courage of some reporters, the cowardice of others: one New York paper’s reporter, he later recalled, ‘wouldn’t leave Saigon – he bribed operators for carbons of other correspondents’ despatches’. Then there were the adventurers, most of whom arrived somewhat later: a British freelancer ‘carried an M16 and killed people. Sean Flynn exulted about what a glorious thing street-fighting was.’ In Sheehan’s first weeks he himself toted a pistol in the field, ‘then I realised this was crazy’. He also stopped carrying a camera, because he decided that if you kept peering through a viewfinder, you didn’t see what was happening around you – and what might kill you.

  Sheehan’s generation of reporters enjoyed a notable advantage over most of their successors in the twenty-first-century war-corresponding business: having themselves served in uniform, they were familiar with weapons and military ways. Nonetheless they recoiled from the racism they observed in many American soldiers, exemplified by a special forces colonel who said, ‘You don’t need to know the gook’s language ’cos he’s gonna be dead. We’re going to kill the bastards.’ Several of the correspondents’ group, Halberstam and Sheehan foremost among them, made national reputations in Vietnam, though some Americans, not all of them uniformed, went to their graves believing that the reporters betrayed their country while winning plaudits from media counterparts around the world.

  The news story that unfolded on 2 January 1963 started out as a firefight between Diem’s soldiers and the Vietcong, but turned into a far more significant struggle between the US high command and the Saigon press corps, believers against unbelievers. The killing part was unleashed by Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, since mid-1962 senior adviser to the ARVN 7th Division. Vann, a wire-thin stick of ferocious energy and aggression, was weary of inconclusive encounters with the enemy. After US airborne electronic interceptors pinpointed transmissions from the Vietcong regional 514th Battalion in Ap Bac – ‘north hamlet’ – fourteen miles north-west of My Tho, the colonel was thrilled when Harkins’ headquarters ordered him to orchestrate a massive concentration of force to trap and destroy it: two local Civil Guard battalions; an infantry unit heli-lifted by ten American H-21 ‘flying bananas’, or ‘angle-worms’ as the Vietcong knew them; VNAF Skyraider ground-attack aircraft; five Bell Iroquois ‘Huey’ UH-1 gunships; a company of APCs – tracked armoured personnel-carriers; a battalion of paratroopers.

  American intelligence was significantly mistaken about enemy strength in Ap Bac, estimated at 120 guerrillas. In addition to a reinforced company of the 514th VC Battalion, there was also present an over-strength company of the main force 261st, on its way to an operation elsewhere. This was considered an elite unit: women said that if you had to marry a soldier, it was best to choose one from the 261st. Its men were thoroughly experienced, having an average of more than two years’ service, senior cadres as much as five years. The total number of full-time Vietcong guerrilla fighters in the South had more than doubled since the previous year, to fifty thousand, the overwhelming majority in the Mekong delta. Although they relied heavily on captured arms, an increasing volume came by sea. Disguised fishing trawlers from the North delivered 112 tons of arms and ammunition in 1962, and this total would rise steeply to 4,289 tons in 1963–64 – far more than moved down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  The 261st Battalion was largely composed of ‘returnees’ from exile in the North. It was led by Hai Hoang, whose real name was Nguyen Van Dieu, a popular commander considerate towards his men. Second-in-command was Tu Khue, tall, gaunt, bald and stern. A company commander, Bay Den, had an unusually smart social background in Saigon: his sister once arrived to see him, poled to the 261st’s camp in a rented sampan. She was appalled to find her brother digging a trench, and begged him to give it all up and come home. Den shook his head: he was committed, he said, and indeed he stayed until killed in action.

  The Vietcong around Ap Bac on 2 January mustered 320 fighters, who had been tipped off that an attack by Saigon forces was coming. What John Vann did not know – though he would have welcomed the prospect – was that communist province chiefs had ordered Dieu and his comrades not to pull back as usual when the ARVN struck, but instead to stand and fight. Thus, foxholes and bunkers had been dug along the treeline fronting the hamlet. The defenders were well-armed and ammunitioned, mostly with captured American weapons: .30-calibre machine-guns, Browning automatic rifles, M-1 carbines, .45 Thompson sub-machine-guns. Most of the twelve hundred peasants in the adjoining hamlets of Ap Bac and Tan Thoi fled into the nearby swamps on hearing that a battle was imminent, but some thirty stayed to carry ammunition and casualties. The board was set for Vann’s game to be played.

  Who were the human checkers on his side that morning? From beginning to end of the war, South Vietnam’s soldiers took most of its strain, grief and losses. Nothing did more to alienate peasants from the Saigon government than the draft, which stole workers from the paddy fields and made many newly-minted soldiers oppressors of country people in a region that was not their own, and thus to which they owed nothing. There were ghastly tales of ARVN callousness, some possibly true: of two riflemen wagering a pack of cigarettes on who could hit a child riding a water buffalo. In the war’s early years, 1955–59, only twenty-to-twenty-two-year-olds were conscripted, for twelve months. This was then increased to two years, and in 1964 to three. Once inducted, many South Vietnamese never escaped from green fatigues except in a wheelchair or body bag. A common factor between the
US and the two Vietnams was that in all three societies, children of privilege were excused from military service. In the South their families paid a bribe, while in the North the offspring of senior cadres were dispatched to higher education abroad. Though the Southern army consumed 15 per cent of the nation’s GDP, its soldiers were paid a pittance. Most were posted to fighting units after five or six weeks’ perfunctory training, assured that they could learn on the job. An officer spoke for most of his comrades when he said: ‘The communists seemed to know why they were fighting, and we did not. Our political training emphasised Diem’s personality but not much else.’

  John Vann’s plan for the morning of 2 January 1963 might have won a staff college commendation, had all its human elements acted as programmed. Instead of performing a balletic pincer movement, however, they descended on the battlefield as randomly as toys kicked out of a box. Early-morning fog delayed the infantry airlift, so that Civil Guard troops advancing on foot were first to bump the Vietcong, soon after 0700. When their leaders were shot down, they hugged the earth during a long, desultory exchange of fire. The government province chief, who was personally directing them, refused to order forward his second battalion. Soon after 1000, against Vann’s orders H-21s carrying an infantry company clattered down onto the paddy within easy shot of the ‘Victor Charlies’. Vietcong recruits were told they should not fear helicopters, soft targets made of cardboard pasted to metal frames. That morning at Ap Bac, this must have seemed true: communist fire quickly downed two of the old H-21s and mortally injured a third. A Huey that tried to rescue their American crews was shot full of holes, before toppling alongside the other wrecks.

  The hapless infantry were going nowhere, stuck on open ground swept by enemy fire. Almost every helicopter in the sky above the battlefield was taking hits, and neither air strikes nor misdirected artillery fire made much impact on the defenders of Ap Bac. From a circling L-19 spotter plane Vann watched in raging frustration as his operation floundered in mud, blood and chaos. Ly Tong Ba, a captain commanding a company of armoured personnel-carriers, refused to advance to rescue the stranded infantry and aircrew: Vann’s histrionics over the radio roused his pride against succumbing to hectoring. ‘I’ve got a problem, Topper Six,’ Capt. Jim Scanlon, the adviser with Ba, radioed Vann ruefully. ‘My counterpart won’t move.’