Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Early in December the president instructed the State Department to start hustling among America’s allies for co-participants in the war, and he did not mean just ‘a chaplain and a nurse’. When William Bundy met the Australian and New Zealand ambassadors, the latter avowed his government’s caution. On the 7th, during meetings with Britain’s new Labour prime minister, Johnson sought Harold Wilson’s backing, urging that ‘a few soldiers in British uniforms … would have a great psychological effect and political significance’. Here was a familiar theme in the Anglo–American relationship: US armed forces were well capable of pursuing whatever objectives they chose without aid from soldiers bearing the union flag, but London could provide valuable political cover. McNamara once said that he would pay a billion dollars for a British brigade, and he seldom joked. In Washington, Wilson temporarily deflected Johnson by saying that the Queen’s soldiers had their hands full in Asia addressing Indonesian aggression towards Borneo and Malaysia. He was not told of American plans for escalation, because it was plain that his government wanted no part in it. Dean Rusk told a British journalist with considerable bitterness, ‘When the Russians invade Sussex, don’t expect us to come and help you.’

  On 20 December, amid continuing Buddhist demonstrations a new coup took place in Saigon – a shake-up of the Armed Forces Council now led by Khanh, Thieu and Ky. This prompted a shouting match between an enraged Maxwell Taylor and the generals. They were summoned to the embassy to hear a harangue about the damage their reckless politicking was doing to the war effort. Taylor started by demanding, ‘Do all of you understand English?’ then went on to say, ‘Now you have made a real mess. We cannot carry you forever if you do things like this.’ Taylor’s insults disgusted the Vietnamese. Ky wrote later: ‘We Young Turks were well aware that the military was the only institution capable of leading the country. Our challenge was to do so in the face of continuing US pressure to bring in civilian leadership.’

  Following successive coups, rumours of CIA conspiracies, some of them true, became a staple of Saigon conversation. A junior officer wrote: ‘In all my years serving the ARVN, the events in late 1964 brought me the deepest despair.’ The martial tunes played over Saigon radio during coup attempts became the stuff of jokes. When a soldier begged for a few hours’ grace to visit home, his platoon commander asked how he would know when he was needed for duty again. He responded cheerfully, ‘No problem, lieutenant’ – when he heard the radio playing ‘coup music’ he would know that it was time to report. Even some passionately anti-communist South Vietnamese had come to regard Saigon as the hub of everything they hated about the squalor and cynicism of their own society. A month in the capital, an Airborne officer wrote, ‘was enough to destroy one’s soul, to see how we were betrayed by a duplicitous rear area built on the blood and tears of soldiers … I dream of a great flood that will wipe away the … filth that our capital has smeared upon the tragic face of our native land.’

  During December coordinated Vietcong assaults culminated in a Christmas Eve attack on the Brink Hotel in Saigon in which two Americans died and fifty-eight were injured. The Brink explosion took place as ambassador Taylor was delivering Bob Hope to another hotel a few blocks away, following the star’s arrival for his annual Christmas show. ‘This is the warmest reception I’ve ever received,’ cracked Hope, but senior Americans were enraged. Taylor urged a reprisal air attack on the North, as did McGeorge Bundy. The president demurred, but a few days later there was a new shock when the communists attacked a village south-east of Saigon, where a thousand North Vietnamese Catholics had been resettled a decade earlier. On 28 December two VC regiments mauled ARVN troops, then shot down four American helicopters. In an ambush on the 31st they inflicted 60 per cent casualties on a Vietnamese Marine battalion, killing most of its officers. Within a matter of days the South Vietnamese had lost three hundred dead.

  At New Year 1965, Lyndon Johnson was still professing to vacillate about the way forward. In Saigon political chaos had become the norm. There were some twenty-six thousand Americans in Vietnam, most of them advisers. If more were to reinforce these, Johnson favoured sending special forces, Rangers and suchlike. What the hawks saw with a clarity that eluded some doves was that pursuit of any political option – neutralisation, a new Geneva conference, bilateral negotiations with Hanoi – meant acquiescing in a course that could only end with a unified communist Vietnam. No political or military force in the South possessed the will – means were less important – long to resist the iron men who ruled the North. And since such an outcome was gall and wormwood to Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and above all the president, a dramatic expansion of America’s war in Vietnam had become inevitable.

  * Tonkin Gulf local time.

  10

  ‘We Are Puzzled About How to Proceed’

  1 DOWN THE TRAIL

  Vietnam’s communist leadership, supposing victory at hand, entered 1965 in a mood of fierce excitement. Le Duan wrote to COSVN chief Nguyen Chi Thanh: ‘This is the moment to seize our opportunity.’ Hanoi’s Party secretary now envisaged popular uprisings in the South’s towns and cities. Northern officer Col. Nguyen An wrote exuberantly of ‘a high tide of mass insurrection sweeping through the rural lowlands and mountains’. An had commanded the Vietminh regiment that stormed Eliane 2 at Dienbienphu in 1954. Ten years later, this hoary veteran assumed command of the 325th Division, earmarked to become the first NVA formation to march south. He was suffering from bleeding haemorrhoids, that humiliating and painful complaint which often afflicts soldiers, and told Dragon Court, ‘Give me a week so that I can get them treated.’ In the event he was granted longer grace: the deployment was postponed until November ‘because of the requirements of our struggle on the diplomatic front’.

  An was briefed that rice for his men was stockpiled in dumps along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. An army logistics officer added encouragingly, ‘It’s been stored a long time and has worms, but is still edible.’ The general spent the next two months in his division’s thatched bamboo headquarters at Dong Hoi, labouring in intense heat to scrape together enough equipment to outfit his troops. Each man was issued with a ‘frog’ pack, hammock, two khaki uniforms, and a little Saigon currency. There were no sweaters, however, and in the face of night chills ‘the shortage of [warm clothing] adversely affected the health and morale of the troops during our long march’ – meaning that they shivered as well as almost starved on their harrowing progress to the battlefield.

  Early in November, An led a hundred-strong advance party south. At first they found that the rotting rice stockpiled at way stations stank, ‘but didn’t taste too bad’. The trek was an epic, however, as it would remain for every North Vietnamese until much later in the war, when trucks took some of the strain. One day they waded a wide river, then followed a path along its bank towards the base of ‘One Thousand and One Mountain’, the first high ridge they traversed from east to west. Pioneers had cut steps and positioned supports, but An complained that ‘the ropes and branches one had to grab were worn slippery by many previous hands … I could feel the weight of every fly that landed on my pack.’ In places the track was so narrow that it could accommodate only climbers in single file. When Bao Ninh, a college lecturer’s son, later endured his own agony on the Trail, he felt envious of his peasant comrades’ strength, notably greater than his own, and was grateful when they sometimes relieved him of part of the contents of his pack.

  As An and his party advanced, rations shrank. Each man started out on two daily milk-cans of spoiled rice, but this was reduced to one can, mixed with stinking and mildewed manioc, accompanied by a token shake of salt. They began to dream of meat, of boiled spinach and fish sauce, of lemonade. The cooks shook their heads in despair when they tried to wash the old rice in stream water and watched it turn to powder, leaving behind only worms. Eventually the men were served a gruel thickened with wild vegetables scavenged in the jungle. An felt bitter that Hanoi could have allowed such privations to
fall upon his formation even before it started to fight: ‘Looking at the pale, haggard faces of my officers and men, I became so upset that I sat down and wrote a letter … so that the high command could learn from our experience.’ At long last they reached a way station just short of South Vietnam’s Central Highlands, commanded by a colonel who had attended the same Russian-language course as himself. His host produced a supper of fish cooked in a sour soup, which caused An to enthuse, ‘I have since attended many banquets, but none so good!’

  It was December when they reached Kontum province. An and his staff marched to the local front headquarters, where they found plentiful food, and had time to rest while they awaited his division’s main body. There were three cans of rice a day; bamboo shoots and potatoes gathered from the jungle; occasional fish caught by soldiers. Orders arrived from Hanoi: two of the 325th’s regiments were to move further south, while An remained in the Highlands with the third, as deputy front commander. He directed a series of local attacks to ‘blood’ his men before launching their first major operation, against a district capital. The plan exploited familiar communist tactics: they encircled and bombarded the objective, having laid an ambush for an ARVN relief force approaching from Tan Canh. After a brutal night exchange of fire lasting several hours, there was still no sign of movement from Tan Canh, so An anyway ordered forward his sappers. ‘[Their commander] answered the field telephone in a nervous and hurried voice: “Sir! Company commander Luong, executive officer Mo and all the other officers of 9th Company are dead!”’ An responded, ‘Shut up and attack.’ It was essential that the sappers should move, to relieve pressure on other elements of the regiment, being heavily shelled. Dawn found his men triumphant, having overrun the first Southern district headquarters to fall into communist hands.

  Through three days and nights that followed, hungry and impatient, they waited in ambush for the expected ARVN relief force. At last the South Vietnamese obliged Hanoi’s colonel by driving headlong up the road into his positions – and receiving a pounding. Next, the 325th overran a series of strategic hamlets without firing a shot, and briefly occupied Dak To. An celebrated by holding a feast of which the centrepiece was a tiger, shot by two young soldiers to whom the beast had given the fright of their lives: ‘It was delicious,’ wrote the colonel, whose memoirs reflect a preoccupation with his stomach. As Saigon began to respond to the NVA presence, they fell back into the jungle. Their foremost prizes from those early battles were two 105mm howitzers, which they dismantled and bore over the border into Cambodian sanctuaries.

  During the early weeks of 1965 the Vietcong intensified attacks throughout South Vietnam. For a time Le Duan pinned hopes on the prospects of a political coup planned by a communist ‘sleeper’ agent, Southern Col. Pham Ngoc Thao. When a senior Northern cadre who had marched down the Trail reached COSVN headquarters, exuberant staffers told him he had better hurry, ‘because if we didn’t get our men down quickly we would be too late’ – the Saigon regime would have collapsed. New communist currency was printed and shipped to South Vietnam in boxes labelled ‘65 Goods’.

  Though the Pham Ngoc Thao coup failed, forcing the colonel to flee and to suffer assassination in mysterious circumstances, there was a surge in terrorism. In the Central Highlands, for instance, two anti-malaria workers spraying DDT were seized and tried before a ‘people’s court’. Convicted of ‘spying for the Americans and the puppet government’, they were executed with machetes. Two nurses working on a cholera-inoculation programme, one of them pregnant, were captured and found guilty of ‘acting in the name of the American imperialists and as a propaganda tool’. The woman’s life was spared, but her male colleague was hacked to death before her eyes. Soldiers’ and militiamen’s families suffered: the VC kidnapped the wife and child of a notably energetic Regional Forces sergeant. When he rejected their proposal that he should change sides, guerrillas cut the child’s throat. In this war without mercy, torture and arbitrary killings were commonplaces. A Southern officer wrote: ‘The situation was too complicated for even a Vietnamese to understand, let alone foreigners.’ After peasant girl Phung Thi Le Ly had been raped, beaten and exploited by both sides, becoming an outcast from her village with a baby to support, she scraped a pittance by selling goods, including herself, to Americans. She wrote sadly long afterwards, addressing a foreign readership: ‘You do not know how hard it is to survive.’

  Traditional family discipline was strained to the limits, and often beyond. A woman NLF member was the only daughter of an ailing father whose wife was dead. She found it hard to fulfil her filial duty to him while labouring as a communist cadre: ‘It was very dangerous for my life and virginity.’ At night, when at last they were alone in their hut, he pleaded with her, ‘You’re my girl. Because you have left this house and abandoned domestic chores, [most] of our land is barely cultivated and weeds have grown up everywhere. Where can we get food to eat? Many people can work for the revolution without pay, but I can find no one like you … You should at least take pity and cook for me … If you are killed by a bomb or shell I shall have to bury you. [Yet] according to the divine law of our ancestors, children should rightfully bury their parents.’

  As the war grew bloodier, the NLF found that the promise of land redistribution became a less potent propaganda weapon: peasants were preoccupied with the mere daily battle for survival. Across most of the Vietnamese countryside, 95 per cent of the time neither government troops nor guerrillas were visible. In the words of David Elliott, however, ‘It was the 5 per cent that was the problem.’ It is hard to exaggerate the stultifying dreariness, the relentless toil, of peasant life, which go far to explain why some young people chose either to become guerrillas or to migrate to the cities. When a friend of Phung Thi Le Ly returned to their village from a stint as a bar girl, full of stories of make-up, beehive hair-dos and flushing toilets, Le Ly said, ‘Saigon … sounded like heaven.’ A sixteen-year-old poor peasant girl from My Tho who visited the capital to stay with her brother, a policeman, was thrilled to find that she could earn twenty-five thousand piasters a month washing dishes. To be sure, she worked until 9 p.m. every night, but ‘I thought it was fun.’ Everybody had shoes or sandals, instead of going barefoot. An averagely successful prostitute made much more than twenty-five thousand piasters, as many girls discovered, at the price of ostracism if they later returned to their villages.

  In 1964 the RAND Corporation had launched what became one of its most important projects, the ‘Vietcong Motivation and Morale’ study. The army was not much interested, and delegated as its representative a mere lieutenant, David Morrell, who became passionately committed. He said later: ‘The remarkable phenomenon we were probing was why did [the enemy] keep slugging it out so incredibly? … What was this cause, and why did they eschew the goodies we were trying to give … and just go and breathe under the reeds, live in the tunnels at Cu Chi?’

  Morrell was astonished that the US was undertaking this important survey without informing or consulting the South Vietnamese general staff. When the young RANDsmen’s Vietnamese researchers quizzed local people, in December 1964 the field team presented its initial findings to Westmoreland, arguing that the Vietcong must be regarded as a far more committed foe than his staff acknowledged. The general demanded, ‘Do they believe in God?’ The interviewers were not sure about that. They were sure, however, about torture, which made ambassador Taylor look uncomfortable when they highlighted it during a briefing that he attended.

  The military were unimpressed by the RAND report, which implied that the enemy was in a considerably better strategic place than were the rulers of South Vietnam; they remained baffled by the unwillingness of Vietnamese peasants to recognise that their material interests absolutely demanded partnership with the US. In January 1965 the Morale report was presented in Washington. RAND’s Harry Rowen told assistant defense secretary John McNaughton, ‘John, I think we’re signed up with the wrong side – the side that’s going to lose this war.’ Dan
iel Ellsberg, McNaughton’s assistant, was impressed by RAND’s depiction of the enemy who now controlled half Vietnam’s countryside and a quarter of its population as ‘selfless, cohesive, dedicated soldiers who saw themselves as patriots, particularly within the context of a corrupt South Vietnam and a disintegrating army’. McNaughton responded to Rowen’s depiction of the communists by saying, ‘They sound like monks.’ Yet he did not convey this exchange to McNamara, his boss, because he knew that the real argument was done and dusted. The administration had already made its commitment to secure military victory in Vietnam.

  Senior NLF cadre Truong Nhu Tang expressed the bewilderment felt by himself and his kind: ‘The unrestrained irresponsibility and incompetence of the [Saigon] generals had led to apathy and disgust among people at every level. South Vietnam was a society without leadership and without direction – and these essentials the Americans could not provide. They could not impose order on chaos. And without a government that could claim at least some tatters of legitimacy and effectiveness, how could the United States dare commit its troops and its all-important prestige?’