by Max Hastings
He and Frank Scotton once arrived in a hamlet unannounced, and entered its chief’s courtyard to find a cluster of black-pyjamaed men, obviously NLF, conferring within. They scowled at the newcomers, but made no hostile move since both Americans were armed. The hamlet chief assured both groups that if everybody stuck to his own business, nothing unpleasant need happen. The communists eventually recognised the comedy of the situation and posed for photos. Nonetheless, when the Americans drove away, they were relieved there had been no High Noon. And sobered to witness the freedom with which the enemy transacted business in broad daylight, within an hour’s drive south-west of Saigon.
For all its difficulties and frustrations Ramsey, like Scotton and Vann, loved the life. While rejecting Lawrence of Indochina comparisons, he liked to see himself as Spartacus, ‘though look what happened to him’. He wrote: ‘At worst, being in Nam provided one with opportunities to pander to and magnify childhood macho self-images: the heroic swashbuckler, rifle in one hand and candy for the kids in the other, by day doing his thing for God, country, democracy and free enterprise, in an environment providing enough danger to keep the blood running fast, the stories flowing and building, the promotions coming through – and by night being able to sample all that Saigon had to offer. In the words of Tom Lehrer’s 1953 “Old Dope Peddler”: in Vietnam, while doing good you could also do very well indeed.’ More than Lehrer’s satirical ballad, however, Ramsey became increasingly obsessed with the music of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.
The CIA’s Frank Snepp came to Vietnam later, but was cast in the same mould. He was the son of a fiercely establishment ex-Marine colonel and subsequent judge, with whom he had a troubled relationship. The most loving bond of his childhood in North Carolina was with his black nanny. His best claims to employment by the CIA on leaving Columbia’s School of International Affairs, he wrote, were ‘Aryan blood, a country-club mentality, and an immense capacity for dissembling’. He might have added, good looks that enabled him to sleep with an astonishing range of girls, some of them employed by the Agency. His critics called him priapic, though he would have preferred the word romantic. Two weeks into Snepp’s first tour as an intelligence officer, the Pilatus Porter in which he was crossing the Mekong delta took rounds in the wings from communist small arms, and the twenty-six-year-old exulted, murmuring to himself, ‘I love it! My God, I love it.’ He said later: ‘It was simply great. I fell in love with Vietnam and the Vietnamese … I believed that if the CIA generated the right intelligence and got it to the right people, we could really make a difference for the better.’
Harry Williams started working as a wireless eavesdropper in April 1964, and embraced the assignment eagerly: ‘This was a good war, a wonderful war. We were cowboys. I loved the work, and felt I was making a real contribution. I felt assured of the rightness of our cause, and that we would win.’ He left his pregnant wife Peggy at home in the US, and rented a Saigon apartment. Because he could speak their language, Vietnamese neighbours branded him ‘the Frenchman’. He travelled extensively around the country chatting to local people in those days before wandering became prohibitively perilous. One day up near Danang, a village elder asked him in puzzlement, ‘Why did they kill Kennedy?’ Williams found that many Vietnamese grasped the notion that the president had been seeking to help them, and vaguely suspected that his death might have been linked to this. The American decided that the default political stance of most local people was indifference to both sides: ‘The average Joe on the street really couldn’t care less, except to stay alive.’
The longer sensitive Americans stuck around, the more they lamented the change coming over Saigon. The tall plane trees on Tu Do were felled, and traffic doubled. Old hand Howard Simpson said: ‘The sleepy colonial capital had become a crowded, dirty wartime metropolis.’ Adviser Col. Sid Berry wrote: ‘Saigon has greatly changed … It has grown crowded, vulgar, glossy, commercial, grasping, greedy, dirty, tinny. Too many Americans. Far too many Americans. Who drive up prices, attract the cheap and gaudy and tasteless.’
The tempo of the war rose steadily. Williams often dined at the Brasserie, a little restaurant behind the Rex cinema run by a French-Vietnamese woman named Helene. One night in August when he entered, she greeted him by saying seriously, ‘You should eat somewhere else.’ Sure enough, an hour later the place was bombed. That summer, Williams was assigned to a team monitoring North Vietnamese infiltration on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They established a base at Khe Sanh, close to the western end of the DMZ, less than three miles from the border with Laos, where a special forces A Team was already ensconced. The key personnel were civilians from Syracuse University Research Corporation, a body created by the Office of Naval Intelligence. Their technology was dubbed POSSUM: Portable Signal Unscramble Monitoring System.
The plan was to plant sensors on nearby Hill 1701. On 28 May an H-34 airlifted Marine Capt. Al Gray and three Vietnamese to clear the summit with defoliants. Gray was an austere, dedicated warrior who relished the drollery that his ARVN sergeant had once commanded a Vietminh machine-gun company: ‘He was a great warrior.’ On the mountain, matters went sour: within hours of their arrival rain and mist descended – and stayed down for thirty days, preventing the team’s extraction. They subsisted for a while on starvation rations, then decided they must walk out. The descent went without incident save the usual leeches and big animals, until they emerged from the jungle to confront a man bathing: VC. They shot him, then bolted towards Khe Sanh. For the last six miles Gray carried a wounded man, earning himself a Bronze Star. The electronic monitoring eventually got started.
Many of that first crop of Americans were earnest men who feared God as well as honouring the flag. Sid Berry wrote to his wife Anne: ‘A good rest this weekend. Needed it. Now back to the fray. 101 sit-ups, 40 push-ups, 30 waistbands, two chapters of Romans, a shave, shower and now a letter to thee.’ Even some of those who spent fewer hours with their bibles than did the good colonel were less preoccupied with bargirls than legend suggests. A newly-arrived special forces NCO looked in awe at the filth coating Frank Scotton and his team after days in the hills and said, ‘Gee, after your experiences I bet you guys go wild with the ladies when you get into town.’ Scotton disabused him – their first priorities were always the same: a bath and decent sleep in a clean bed.
A few Vietnamese managed to enjoy the war, including Nguyen Van Uc, who clocked six thousand hours as a helicopter pilot. ‘I loved flying,’ he said, ‘and got huge satisfaction from doing the job when it went right.’ Most of his countrymen, however, took a bleaker view. One morning in August 1964, Lt. Phan Nhat Nam of Saigon’s 7th Airborne approached a bunker entrance in an apparently deserted village. ‘Anyone down there?’ shouted one of his men, then turned to Nam. ‘Lieutenant, let me toss a grenade in.’ Nam, twenty-one years old and experiencing his first operation, told the soldier instead to fire a burst from his Thompson.
This prompted an old man slowly to emerge, sobbing, carrying an old woman with a hideous head wound. He laid her on the ground before bowing solemnly in all four directions. Nam felt shocked by the spectacle, together with that of two dead teenage Vietcong in a nearby ditch, the first enemy corpses he had seen. This was a Catholic community, and in its church he found five more bodies – those of a husband and wife clutching three children to their breasts, all killed by blast, as had been a young girl he found nearby, her purple blouse flapping in the breeze. Nam wrote: ‘I felt stunned and found it hard to breathe, in a daze from my anger and sense of boundless grief.’
Next day, as his battalion swept through an almost abandoned village amid occasional bursts of enemy fire, he found a young woman sitting silent on the brick floor of a wrecked house, holding a wicker basket: ‘her eyes looked straight ahead in a blank, stupefied stare’. She stood up as the soldiers entered and Hieu, the radio-operator, slipped past her into the ruined kitchen, to search for food. Nam asked why the girl lingered in the midst of a battlefield. When he gesture
d towards her with his pistol, ‘she remained silent, her stunned eyes emitting a flash of terror. Suddenly, as if performing a gymnastic exercise, she thrust out the basket towards me. It contained two sets of clothing, blouses and pants, a head-scarf and a small paper package tightly secured with a rubber band. When I opened it, I saw two gold-strand necklaces and a pair of earrings. Hieu muttered behind my back: “This bitch is crazy. She’s got so scared she’s insane.” Then he caught the glint of the necklaces. “Gold! It must be more than one tael! Keep it, lieutenant.” He motioned the girl away. She turned and began to walk, moving like a corpse.’
Nam described how he called her back and held out the basket. Her hands trembled so violently with terror that she was unable to take it, and instead began to unbutton her blouse, sobbing the while. The young man was profoundly embarrassed – she had interpreted his rejection of her most valuable property as a sign that, instead, he sought her body: ‘What kind of life had she experienced, that in her terror she would unbutton her blouse and offer herself to a soldier who could be her younger brother, while tears ran down her terrified face?’ Nam persuaded the girl to follow his platoon to the nearby river, crowded with sampans filled with fugitives from the fighting. People were calling out to learn the fate of their homes and families. Among them a voice screamed, ‘Lai! It’s you, Lai!’ This was an old woman who recognised Lt. Nam’s traumatised follower. The girl stopped ‘as if she was trying to summon up a memory from a past life’. Then she cried, ‘Mother! Mother! Our house has burned down! Our house is gone.’ Nam described her walking away towards the water ‘like a person in a trance’.
This narrative deserves notice on several counts. First, though some South Vietnamese units acquired a dreadful reputation for pillage and rape, there were also men like Nam, imbued with deep feelings for both his country and its humbler inhabitants. Many Americans persuaded themselves that ‘Asians don’t feel about death the way we do’. This was not so. Sid Berry was moved by the fortitude of those with whom he fought: ‘The Vietnamese wounded don’t cry or moan or complain. They suffer silently and patiently. I’ve never seen anything like it. It tears your heartstrings to see them – and to watch them silently die.’
A British reporter walked along a dyke near Can Tho among a file of soldiers, one of whom chattered about his home in Nha Trang, and urged the visitor to come and see him there. The Vietnamese pointed covetously to the foreigner’s suede boots: ‘Shoes you, number one.’ Their owner said that he could have them after the operation: ‘Oh, no. You very big. Small me.’ In the midst of a sudden rainstorm, a solitary mortar bomb burst among them, throwing the Englishman to the ground. To his surprise, no more incoming followed. ‘My hands shook and my heart thumped, and I heard a strange human sound quite close to me; half-sob, half-gasp. A helmet lay on the ground like an abandoned seashell and near it lay my new friend from Nha Trang. He was clasping his stomach with one hand, and pushing at the ground with the other … His eyes were screwed up, and rain poured down his face, and I suddenly was aware of a terrible smell. I opened his sodden shirt, and saw that below his breastbone was nothing but a dark, shining mess – ripped clothing stained with rain, blood, bile and whatever comes out of bellies torn open by metal splinters. His eyes flickered open and he frowned. “Hurt me,” he said faintly.’ And soon after, he died.
Many higher commanders became regional warlords: a 1966 American report claimed that only one senior officer had been wounded in action since 1954. Frank Scotton described how Vietnamese love to play co tuong, the Chinese war game of ‘Capture the General’, resembling its old European counterpart L’Attaque. There are realistic pieces with realistic limitations – for instance, infantry can cross a river, but cannot cross back. And the generals at the heart of the game cannot leave their tents – which was true of most of their Saigon counterparts.
District chiefs were allocated rice for their soldiers, of which they would appropriate a generous portion before issuing the balance to those for whom it was intended. Police chiefs made fortunes by selling licences for every form of commercial activity – running restaurants, fishing, logging. ‘In the extended family culture you would probably have been considered sinful not to take advantage of the opportunity to help your family,’ said Edward Brady, who spent years as an adviser. A general would solemnly assert that he never sold a commission, and indeed did not do so – instead his wife and mistresses did the business on his behalf: ‘[The officers] divorced themselves from that reality. The Vietnamese are great at that. They have this mental ability to dissociate themselves and claim innocence.’ Nguyen Cao Ky wrote sourly: ‘Most senior Vietnamese officers were concerned only with pleasing their [American] advisor.’
Then there was the other side. Prompted by the deepening Sino–Soviet split, Mao Zedong changed his tune, suddenly seeing virtue in an intensified Vietnamese struggle. He offered Le Duan a big new injection of aid, and a conference of Asian communists without the Soviets. Politburo members began to characterise the Chinese as ‘comrades’, the Russians only as ‘friends’. So bitter became the ideological strife that forty Vietnamese working or studying in Russia – many of them close to Giap – requested asylum. Foreigners noted that Russian works were withdrawn from sale at Hanoi’s only foreign-language bookshop. Le Duan nonetheless turned down Mao’s conference scheme: he had no desire to precipitate an absolute rift with the Bear, who could offer more sophisticated weapons than did the Dragon. He and Le Duc Tho led a delegation to Moscow to reassure the Russians that they would not breach the Soviets’ global policy of peaceful co-existence.
At a March 1964 conference in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh made a remarkable personal plea for moderation, emphasising the leadership’s decision to send no NVA regular formations south. Nonetheless an increasing number of cadres, advisers and specialists made the journey down the Trail, suffering hardships that owed little to American interference, almost everything to the terrain; shortages of food and medical supplies; weather and insects; malaria. The Vietcong campaign received from the North fifteen tons of munitions per day by land and sea, to service a force of which the strength was estimated at around 170,000, including thirty thousand deployed in main force units. Among both Northern hardliners and the Southerners at COSVN, bitterness persisted about the perceived pusillanimity of Ho’s faction, when the Vietcong were fighting for their lives.
Yet North Vietnamese war-making, driven by Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, was becoming infused with a new urgency, a determination not to wait twenty years for unification. Within weeks of the spring 1964 promulgation of Hanoi’s Resolution 9, in the South there was a 40 per cent rise in Vietcong-triggered local incidents and a 75 per cent rise in bigger attacks. The guerrillas introduced their own conscription system, intensifying peasant miseries in areas they controlled. In one delta village three hundred young men found themselves forced to take up arms for the revolution, whereas a mere eighty served with Saigon’s forces. A VC draftee’s aged father abused the cadres, saying, ‘You always criticise the imperialists, but you are even worse. I want my son back.’
David Elliott has written: ‘Brute force and subterfuge were the main methods of dragging reluctant recruits into a service which the rural youth had come to dread as an almost certain death sentence.’ Meanwhile NLF taxes were higher than Saigon’s, forcing the average peasant to surrender at least 20 per cent of his income. One, who lived in a nominally government-controlled village, said that in 1964 he paid 125 Vietnamese piasters to the government and nine hundred to the NLF, out of an income of seventeen thousand from selling mangoes. In the following year, disaster struck: his income fell to three thousand piasters, but the communists were implacable in extracting from him all but two hundred.
The best of the Vietcong’s main force units were now deployed in the Central Highlands and the so-called Iron Triangle, 125 square miles of dense country fifteen miles north of Saigon. Most of their operations were carried out in company strength, because it was hard to concentrate lar
ger units. Esprit de corps was highest among the sappers – demolition platoons – who in exchange for playing the most skilled and dangerous role on the battlefield were subject to more relaxed discipline away from it. When the guerrillas sought soft targets they attacked civilian vehicles, especially buses, often with fatal consequences for passengers. Village and local VC units were instructed to establish ‘anti-American annihilation perimeters’ to protect the revolution’s areas of control.
Some government RF and PF – Regional Forces and Popular Forces – militiamen sold their weapons for cash, and the Vietcong established a tariff: two thousand piasters for an M-1 carbine; eight thousand for a Browning automatic rifle; eight per round of ammunition; and twenty thousand for the surrender of an entire post. The commander of one such place did even better, emerging in darkness with a lantern over his head to collect thirty thousand piasters from the local guerrillas, who then rushed through the gate he had opened, prompting the flight of the little garrison, leaving behind five dead and two wounded.
Unless Vietcong units bivouacked in remote and secure sanctuaries such as the Plain of Reeds, most shifted camp every seventy-two hours, marching eighteen miles a day in the dry season, fifteen in the wet. They were at their most vulnerable when they moved, especially when traversing roads – one of Van Ky’s old Vietminh ballads was entitled ‘Crossing the Highway’. Wet feet left telltale tracks, and thus the guerrillas carried waterproof cloth to unroll ahead of their passage at sensitive points. Village chiefs were expected to maintain hidden reserves of rice for units that bivouacked with them, and also to supply porters. These were often women who served in relays, each carrying three rifles, a single shell or 250 small-arms rounds. Some girls enjoyed porterage, because it introduced them to young men. By contrast, the task they all hated, guerrillas and conscripted labourers alike, was digging trenches and bunkers. This, at least, they had in common with their ARVN and American foes. The VC lost a steady stream of defectors, but the government’s treatment of these chieu hois was often unimaginative. When a guerrilla leader who had commanded a successful attack on a government post changed sides, he found himself translated into a South Vietnamese private.
