Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  The airborne defoliation programme, which became more intensive in 1964, caused the VC real difficulties by destroying natural cover; moreover, while government forces suffered plenty of defeats, they also had their successes. One day in the delta, the Vietcong’s fabled 514th Battalion suffered a notable reverse in a clash with ARVN in the hamlet of Bac, where John Vann’s ambitious plan had miscarried so disastrously. Following the communists’ 1964 defeat, they repeated the folly perpetrated by Gen. Harkins a year earlier – lying about what had taken place. Cadres spread word that they had killed a hundred government troops for the loss of only twelve of their own men. Local people, however, had not merely seen the nearby road strewn with VC dead; they numbered some of their own sons among them. Grieving parents went to desperate lengths to discover where bodies lay, so that they might dig them up and rebury loved ones in family plots. A cadre wrote in the unit log, ‘As a result of this battle the 514th Battalion went into a serious decline.’ On another occasion three VC battalions concentrated for an attack on an airfield, again suffered a murderous repulse, and again tried to lie to the people about what had happened.

  This credibility gap cost the local NLF a temporary decline in peasant support. It did not last, however, for the usual reason: government firepower blasted away every wisp of goodwill. Civilians suffered far more grievously from careless air strikes and shelling than did Vietcong fighters, who were surprised by how few casualties they received, if dug in. A peasant told a RAND interviewer: ‘The Americans strafe and destroy too much. They only kill the people, and not many VC.’ Cadres told peasants: ‘[The government] will kill you even if you do not fight against them, therefore you might as well fight before you die.’ Too many Vietnamese agreed. While the communists suffered their share of defeats in 1964, the overarching theme was that they gained ground and popular support, while the forces of the Saigon government lost them.

  2 DODGING DECISIONS

  President Lyndon Johnson said long afterwards about Vietnam: ‘I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. If I left the woman I really loved – the Great Society – in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home … But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.’

  Every president inherits a stable from his predecessor – starts out riding another man’s horses. The war was the least biddable of Johnson’s. Creation of the Camelot legend began within a microsecond of the bullets striking John F. Kennedy. The first assurance that his successor gave to Congress and the American people was that he would sustain the legacy, and it is impossible to see how he could have promised anything else. Though Johnson took pride in being the rough-hewn Texas ranch-owner; the man mocked for his homely epithets – ‘Don’t spit in the soup, we’ve all gotta eat’; for his supposed taste for okra with black-eyed peas; and for being photographed holding up a beagle by its ears, he was nagged by his own lack of refinement alongside the Kennedys and their courtiers. Johnson said much later, in a fit of self-pity about his alleged abandonment by JFK’s men, that in 1964 he had ‘kept on the eleven cowhands’ – the Kennedy cabinet.

  Setting aside the elephant of Vietnam, the former vice-president was a much more effective politician than the wartime commander of PT-109. Every human being needs to get comfortable with himself, however. While such togetherness was achieved by Jack Kennedy, it eluded Lyndon Johnson, which goes far to explain the latter’s tragedy. America’s top military men were wary of him, not least because of sorties into windbaggery about his own record in World War II – he once told a reporter that he had been known as ‘Raider’, an implausible claim since his combat experience derived from flying as a passenger on a single 1942 B-26 mission in New Guinea, which secured the visiting Texas congressman one of the more tarnished Silver Stars awarded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

  No legacy imperative obliged the new president to bomb North Vietnam, nor to dispatch half a million troops to the South. It was unthinkable, however, that in his first year of office – a re-election campaign year – he should tell the Americans already in Indochina to pack up and come home. Nothing that came later was inevitable, but everything derived from the fact that sixteen thousand men were in country, because John F. Kennedy had put them there. Just before David Nes took off to become deputy US mission chief in Saigon, his commander-in-chief told him, ‘Lyndon Johnson is not going down as the president who lost Vietnam. Don’t you forget that.’

  At the end of November 1963 MACV launched a new initiative to strengthen government control in the Mekong delta. This involved widespread shelling of rural areas, and the declaration of ‘Free Fire Zones’, wherein anything that moved was assumed hostile. Villages were abandoned, and their inhabitants took up residence in shanty towns along Route 4. Some peasants adopted white clothes instead of their traditional black, because American pilots assumed that the latter represented dress code for guerrillas. The new aggressive policy was effective in lowering Vietcong morale, eroding popular support. It did nothing, however, to promote loyalty to the Saigon government, as distinct from temporarily outbidding the communists in the auction of peasant terror.

  Then the generals started something new. ‘Big’ Minh had been running the country for less than three months, but some of his fellow-officers had lost confidence in him. So too had the Americans. McNamara visited Saigon in December, and was appalled by the chaos. The US mission believed that Minh, like Nhu before him, had become dangerously interested in talking to Hanoi. The general was also a sceptic about the strategic hamlets programme and the merits of bombing. On 28 January 1964, thirty-seven-year-old Gen. Nguyen Khanh travelled down to Saigon from his headquarters at Hue on a scheduled Air Vietnam flight, wearing civilian clothes, supposedly to visit the dentist. In the early hours of the 30th he donned uniform and drove to ARVN headquarters with an aide. Khanh expected to rendezvous there with paratroopers and a close colleague, Gen. Tran Thien Khiem, to stage a coup to depose the Minh junta. Instead he found the building in darkness, and telephoned to ask Khiem why nothing was happening. ‘Oh, I must have forgotten to set my alarm clock,’ said this indolent plotter. ‘But don’t worry, we have the situation in hand.’

  The coup indeed proceeded smoothly. At daybreak the new leader of South Vietnam broadcast to the nation, saying that he was assuming power because Gen. Minh and his colleagues were making a poor fist of the war. Not a shot was fired. The inevitable Lou Conein had flagged the plot to his superiors, who decided to acquiesce because they accepted Khanh’s claim that Minh had become eager to neutralise Indochina, a concept wholly unacceptable in Washington. McNamara and Lodge thought the newcomer ‘the ablest of the generals’. The most notable achievement of his first days in power was the liquidation of Major Nguyen Van Nhung, killer of Diem and Nhu. This professional executioner was himself professionally executed, being ordered to kneel in the garden of a Saigon villa, then presented with a single bullet in the back of the head.

  South Vietnam and its army were reduced to confusion and demoralisation under a military ‘strong man’ who quickly appeared weak. British ambassador Gordon Etherington-Smith thought that the US should have prevented the coup: the readiness with which Washington turned down its thumb on ‘Big’ Minh suggested that the governance of South Vietnam was now at the disposal of any senior officer whose writ ran among a few regiments. Etherington-Smith wrote to London: ‘It seems increasingly probable that the very qualities which make Khanh attractive to American soldiers’ – his ‘bounce and fluency’ – ‘render him unpleasant to a very great many Vietnamese.’

  Khanh quickly began to agitate for an invasion of North Vietnam, on the grounds that it was unacceptable for the war’s death and destruction to be confined to the South. He was not alone in cherishing thi
s fantasy: some Saigon soldiers and politicians ever afterwards argued that they could have won the war, had the Americans allowed them to strike into the North. Bui Diem, Saigon’s former Washington ambassador, asserts that the Southern cause was doomed from the moment the US ruled out this option: the communists could be sure of eventual victory if they merely did not quit. Such enthusiasts were thus far correct, that Hanoi enjoyed an important advantage, because it need make scant provision to meet a major ground attack, while its own soldiers roamed freely across Laos, Cambodia and soon South Vietnam. But the US government displayed wisdom by forswearing any such overreach as MacArthur had perpetrated by racing to North Korea’s border with China in November 1950. Moreover the Saigon generals deluded themselves in supposing that the ARVN could unaided have mounted a successful invasion: in such an eventuality they would assuredly have been repulsed.

  Khanh’s adventurism nonetheless compounded the discomfort already prevailing in Washington. Decision-makers began to see that the general’s fluency and affability were his principal virtues. He was a less intelligent man than the displaced Minh, with a meagre understanding of his own people. Even those Americans who assumed that South Vietnam must be ruled by generals now strove to identify some new ones who were clever, effective, honest – and biddable. This last requirement was the hardest to fulfil, because the only way for any Vietnamese leader to secure popular respect was to distance himself from the US. Twenty-year-old embryo officer Doan Phuong Hai was bewildered, dismayed, and rendered increasingly cynical by the four changes of command at Dalat military academy during his pupillage there, following successive Saigon coups: ‘We young cadets began to see that our seniors, rather than being imbued with the spirit of military brotherhood, turned on each other in pursuit of personal gain, power, fame.’

  In those early months after the change of US president, almost every military option was on the table in Washington, at Lodge’s embassy and MACV. A key question was: who is our enemy? Was the rightful target for American might the communist guerrilla force fighting in South Vietnam? Or, instead, North Vietnam, which was seen – half-rightly, half-wrongly – as the struggle’s fountainhead? America’s joint chiefs of staff, now chaired by Maxwell Taylor, tended to favour the latter view. Among them were two weak or at least cautious men – the army’s Gen. Earle Wheeler and the navy’s Adm. David McDonald – and two strong ones, who cherished a clear vision. These latter were the US Air Force’s Gen. Curtis LeMay, ringmaster for the 1945 B-29 firebombing campaign against Japan that killed far more people than the atomic bombs, and Gen. Wallace Greene of the Marine Corps.

  Both favoured deploying either overwhelming force, or none at all. LeMay was an intemperate, obsessive advocate of strategic air power, arguing every case he espoused ‘with an abrasive voice that could sometimes whine like a turbine engine’, in the words of a colleague. The airman, for instance, fiercely resisted soldiers’ demands to be allowed to operate their own helicopter gunships, one day removing the cigar customarily clamped to his lips to bellow at the army chief of staff a challenge to fight a duel: ‘You fly one of these damned Hueys and I’ll fly an F-105, and we’ll see who survives. I’ll shoot you down and scatter your peashooter all over the goddam ground!’ McNamara decided this particular dispute in favour of the army, which did not diminish LeMay’s disdain for the defense secretary.

  Greene’s quiet, professorial manner earned him the nickname ‘Schoolboy’. He was intolerant of the instinctive caution of politicians, and even more so of the virtues of limited war, favouring ‘prompt, positive, dramatic and consistent action … pursued with the full concerted power of U.S. resources’. Like LeMay, he believed that North Vietnam could quickly be brought to heel by devastation of its installations and infrastructure. Greene told Lyndon Johnson on 4 March 1964 that air strikes might well precipitate another Korean-type conflict, with a risk of escalation into global war: ‘However, the bitter fact was that we were going to have to take a stand somewhere and the decision which he was going to have to make, as President, was – whether or not [Vietnam] was where this stand should be made.’ Maxwell Taylor, who remained chairman until July when Wheeler replaced him, changed his mind so often that he could later claim to have advocated at least five different policies, according to taste and date. The general came increasingly to believe that, since defeating the Vietcong in the South was so intractable a task, the US should instead focus on punishing the North. He thus became an exponent of bombing.

  The chiefs’ impact on policy-making was limited, partly because successive chairmen conveyed to the White House anodyne expressions of JCS views, and partly because the president spent far more time with his civilian advisers, among whom McNamara carried most weight. A more unexpected influence was lawyer and soon-to-become Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas, who knew nothing about Vietnam but was the president’s most intimate counsellor, communing with him almost daily. Those who have sought to blame the chiefs of staff for America’s 1964–65 policy choices seem mistaken, because all decisions for war or peace are ultimately political. Even after the Korean experience, most of America’s senior officers displayed an imperfect understanding of the merits of limiting conflict. Had the brass been permitted to dictate the course of events, they might well have mandated an even more disastrous escalation than that which took place.

  Yet the most remarkable aspect of the Washington debate was that it was almost entirely fixed upon identifying the appropriate level of force to apply, rather than with considering the case for extraction by political means. It was a weakness of Dean Rusk that, though responsible for America’s diplomats, he never had much faith in diplomacy. Lyndon Johnson seldom engaged with foreign leaders, far less allowed himself to be influenced by their opinions. Throughout the first year of his administration its principals showed themselves morbidly fearful of France’s influence, believing that President Charles de Gaulle’s enthusiasm for Vietnam’s neutralisation reflected a spiteful desire to see the US humiliated.

  Great states have an unsurprising predilection for fighting the kind of conflict that suits their means, rather than the one they have got. In World War II, the Western allies were spared from most of the embarrassments of being two naval powers confronting a land power because the Red Army did the heavy lifting to destroy Hitler’s Wehrmacht. In Vietnam, Washington policy-makers assumed that US technology and firepower could substitute for the acknowledged absence of a viable political and social structure. Lt. Gen. Andrew Goodpaster once warned Robert McNamara: ‘Sir, you are trying to program the enemy and that is one thing we must never try to do.’ An American prisoner told his communist interrogators that he thought his compatriots’ presence in their country was prompted 10 per cent by concern for the Vietnamese, the rest by a determination to check Mao Zedong. In that case, demanded his puzzled captors, ‘why do you not go and fight him in China? We do not like the Chinese either.’

  In the spring of 1964 Walt Rostow, director of policy planning at the State Department, reprised LeMay’s enthusiasm for the application of overwhelming air power. No credible studies were carried out about the costs and consequences; it was merely assumed that the North Vietnamese would find the experience of being bombed sufficiently damaging and dispiriting to mend their ways. Some senior officers favoured going further: dispatching ground forces into Laos – to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail – or into North Vietnam. The phrase ‘going North’, which recurred repeatedly in meetings and memoranda during the 1964 debate, embraced the bombing option, covert operations, full-scale invasion. In April Curtis LeMay asked the C-in-C Pacific what would be needed to win the war. Adm. Harry Felt responded that the US ‘would have to go North some time’. From the spring of 1964 onwards McNamara was conspicuously gloomy about Vietnam. Instead of causing him to advocate withdrawal, however, pessimism moved him slowly and reluctantly towards favouring escalation, eventually with perfervid zeal. In April a reporter sallied that Senator Wayne Morse was calling Vietnam ‘McNamara’s war�
�. The defense secretary riposted defiantly: ‘I don’t mind its being called McNamara’s war. In fact I’m proud to be associated with it.’ Bobby Kennedy observed that this remark did not seem very smart politics.

  Conservative journalists such as William F. Buckley, Marguerite Higgins, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak insistently urged fighting to a victorious finish. Joseph Alsop taunted Johnson for an alleged lack of guts, unleashing the dreaded charge of appeasement. Yet while the president would certainly have received slings and arrows from such people had he pulled back, there were now also plenty of media folk who understood the mess the US had gotten itself into. Johnson’s personal standing was sufficiently high that he would have been believed had he told the American people that they were backing losers in Vietnam. He would have received influential backing for such an admission from the likes of Walter Lippmann, New Republic and the New York Times, which predicted disaster if the nation committed combat troops.

  Inside government, from May 1964 under-secretary of state George Ball displayed prescient pessimism. He rejected the view that the US had vital interests at stake, and said he could not see why attacking North Vietnam should boost the Southern government. He argued that the war was unwinnable, whatever level of force the administration committed. The intelligence community was of the same opinion, and gloomy about the Khanh regime’s sustainability. At the US embassy, after two months in Saigon, on 17 February David Nes put on record to Lodge his belief that de Gaulle was right: the US should either get out, or reconcile itself to a major escalation. Willard Matthias, an analyst with the CIA’s Board of National Estimates, described the Vietcong as ‘under the direction of the Hanoi government but dependent largely on their own resources’. He, too, urged a settlement.