Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  2 COMMITTAL

  In January 1965 Maj. Gen. William DePuy wrote home to his son from Westmoreland’s headquarters: ‘You ask me who is in power in Saigon. The fact is, no one is in power, and this explains much of the trouble we are having.’ Ambassador Taylor sent a similarly gloomy assessment, saying that the US must either bomb the North or commit American troops – he himself strongly favoured the former option, still resisted the latter. On the 21st in Washington, the president invited key members of Congress to hear from his defense secretary a euphorically optimistic and almost entirely unrealistic account of the war. McNamara said that covert operations against North Vietnam were going well, likewise bombing of the communists’ Laos infiltration routes. The Southern army was increasing in effectiveness. When McNamara said that only 254 Americans had thus far died, he failed to mention that half that total fell in the previous year. Johnson said nothing about his private determination to renew bombing, and asserted that he saw no need for US troops. Once again he played the patriot card, calling for bipartisan support: ‘There are no Democrats or Republicans on Vietnam.’

  Less than a week later, on 27 January, however, following another wave of Buddhist demonstrations in Saigon and pillage of the American library in Hue, the Armed Forces Council dismissed the Huong government and reinstated Khanh. Taylor cabled that the general appeared to be in league with the Buddhist institute, which held ‘a position of dominant power and influence … The most sinister aspect is … that the Buddhist victory may be an important step towards the formation of a government which will eventually lead the country into negotiations with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front.’ In other words, the South Vietnamese might be preparing to abandon a war Americans were determined that they should persevere with.

  That day McGeorge Bundy submitted to the president a memorandum asserting that the communists ‘see the enormous power of the United States withheld and they get little sense of firm and active US policy. They feel that we are unwilling to take serious risks.’ Robert McNamara chose to associate himself with Bundy’s memo, signalling the transformation of the defense secretary into an explicit proponent of escalation. These two powerful men were weary of cautious, half-assed strategy-making. So was the president. He responded: ‘We will move strongly. Khanh is our boy.’ He ordered Bundy to proceed to Saigon to formulate recommendations. Given the national security adviser’s status as chief hawk, there was little doubt what the nature of these would be.

  He found Saigon in a fever of street demonstrations and rumours, most of the latter about a looming coup by nationalists who would expel the Americans. Gen. Khanh at first refused to meet the presidential emissary, apparently because he was fearful of upsetting the Buddhists. News of this snub caused a spasm of Johnsonian rage against the Vietnamese leader whom he had endorsed only days earlier. The Americans began to search frantically, farcically, for a replacement, to be installed in yet another coup.

  Their alarm was not diminished by the presence in Hanoi of Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin. Washington had no inkling that privately this distinguished guest was urging Le Duan against escalation. Moscow felt obliged to provide him with anti-aircraft systems, both guns and missiles, as the price of preserving the Soviet Union’s status as acknowledged leader of the world socialist camp. Yet just as the Chinese had no intention of sending ground troops to fight in South Vietnam, so the Russians were desperate to avoid further entanglement. The White House, State Department and CIA failed to understand that, despite stentorian liberationist rhetoric from both Moscow and Beijing, North Vietnam was not a guided weapon in the hands of either.

  Meanwhile Bundy’s visit to the South exploded into a lethal firework display, almost certainly without authorisation or encouragement from Hanoi. On the night of 7 February the Vietcong staged a showpiece attack on US Army aviation Camp Holloway at Pleiku in the Central Highlands. Eight Americans were killed and 108 wounded, five helicopters were destroyed and a dozen more damaged. This feat, achieved by a single sapper company, was followed three days later by another destructive attack. Bundy, in Saigon, viewed the Pleiku raid almost as a personal affront. He cabled the White House that a drastic response was necessary: ‘The best available way of increasing our chance of success is the development and execution of a policy of sustained reprisal against North Vietnam.’ In Washington the National Security Council approved renewed bombing, oddly enough with the support of George Ball; Senator Mike Mansfield raised the only dissenting voice. A few hours later 132 US and twenty-two South Vietnamese aircraft attacked North Vietnam.

  At the Pentagon McNamara asked for a study of new contingencies – including a possible requirement to hit target systems inside China: ‘What faces us is how are we going to respond to a massive Chinese and North Vietnamese ground effort.’ He proposed using napalm for flak suppression, a notion quashed on political grounds by Dean Rusk. Earle Wheeler said in jocular fashion, ‘The secretary of defense is sounding like General LeMay. All he needs is a cigar.’ The South Vietnamese government was not consulted. Hanoi suffered an uncharacteristic spasm of panic, that the US might invade the North.

  Columnists Arthur Krock and James Reston were alike sceptical of administration claims that the new air attacks represented a spontaneous reprisal for Pleiku: they noted that three carriers instead of the usual one had been pre-positioned in the Tonkin Gulf, plainly poised to launch strikes as soon as a plausible pretext emerged. Reston wrote in the New York Times: ‘The time has come to call a spade a bloody shovel. This country is in an undeclared and unexplained war … Our masters have a lot of long and fancy names for it, like escalation and retaliation, but it is a war just the same.’

  Bundy in Saigon saw a feeble local government struggling against a surge of anti-Americanism. He told the White House: ‘The situation in Vietnam is deteriorating, and without new action defeat appears inevitable … The energy and persistence of the Vietcong are astonishing … There is still time to turn it around, but not much. The stakes … are extremely high … Any negotiated US withdrawal today would mean surrender on the instalment plan.’ In the first six months of 1965 the ARVN lost to death, wounds and desertions the equivalent of fifteen battalions.

  McNamara was now exerting relentless pressure on the president, making plain his own desire to dispatch troops in quantity: a figure of 175,000 was mentioned. His biographer has written of his ‘deep personal instinct for activism’. A few months later he avowed to British foreign secretary Patrick Gordon Walker that he saw no alternative to escalation, because it was impossible to admit to the American people that the war was unwinnable. Yet domestic considerations made it seem prudent to dispatch troops in doses modest enough for voters to swallow without taking fright. The chiefs of staff later asserted that they never had a chance properly to argue to the president that a piecemeal commitment was doomed: that the US needed to go for broke. Yet it remains hard to accept that even a full-blooded commitment from the outset, accompanied by a call-up of the Reserves, would have secured victory.

  McGeorge Bundy deserves credit at least for urging the president that the American people should be warned to expect a long war. Johnson, however, refused to accede, and deputed Dean Rusk to persuade William Fulbright to prevent a Senate debate. H.R. McMaster has written: ‘Vietnam was not forced on the US by a tidal wave of Cold War ideology. It slunk in on cat’s feet … Johnson and McNamara succeeded in creating the illusion that the decisions to attack North Vietnam were alternatives to war rather than war itself.’ It was ironic, as well as morally and politically deplorable, that the administration was able to escalate by stealth, because the president’s best chance of escaping from the morass into which he was headed would have been to bow to powerful voices on Capitol Hill who, had the options been honestly set before them, would have been happy to tell the American people that Vietnam was not worth a big war.

  William Bundy came to believe that Johnson made a fundamental error by failing to take the case for war to Congr
ess, writing: ‘Of course the debate would have been divisive, but if the doves had prevailed, the door to a political solution would have been opened much sooner.’ Bundy observed that Johnson’s actions in 1964–65 were no more dishonest than those of Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, during America’s dalliance with entry into World War II – which is true. Bundy added ruefully, however, ‘The trouble was that this turned out badly, and therefore looks much worse in history.’

  On 11 February 1965, British prime minister Harold Wilson telephoned the president to protest against escalation, and to seek an invitation to Washington to discuss it. Johnson rebuffed him, saying, ‘I won’t tell you how to run Malaysia, and you don’t tell us how to run Vietnam.’ Wilson explained that he was under immense domestic pressure for Britain to distance itself from US action. Johnson remained immovable, and indeed subjected his caller to a considerable tongue-lashing: he was disgusted by the negative attitude to his war displayed by both the British and the French. His own resolve was stiffened by a meeting with former president Eisenhower, who urged adoption of whatever military measures seemed necessary to avert defeat.

  Yet there remained in Washington plenty of prudent doomsters. An NSC staffer, James Thomson, wrote: ‘We have slipped into a gross over-commitment of national prestige and resources on political, military and geographic terrain that should long ago have persuaded us to avoid such a commitment.’ The CIA’s almost unfailingly pessimistic assessments, both of South Vietnam and of the unlikelihood of a successful air campaign, exasperated the president, who in April 1965 forced John McCone’s resignation as director. The Agency’s record of analysis was far from perfect, but proved consistently better than that of most other bodies, and especially that of MACV. On 17 February Vice-President Hubert Humphrey sent Johnson a brilliant memorandum urging against an escalation which most of the American people would not understand. He argued that, following the election victory, 1965 was the ideal year for the administration to exploit its sky-high standing to cut America’s losses in South-East Asia. The president’s response was to exclude Humphrey from the Vietnam loop.

  On 18 February there was a new coup in Saigon, following which the deposed Gen. Nguyen Khanh departed into exile. Dr Phan Huy Quat became nominal leader, but real power rested in the hands of the military, among whom Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu now loomed largest – in June their dominance would become explicit. Four days later Westmoreland asked for Marines to protect the ever-expanding US base facilities at Danang. His call came as no surprise to Washington, and the administration was braced to accede. Max Taylor wrote later: ‘It was curious how hard it had been to get authorization for the initiation of the air campaign against the North and how relatively easy to get the Marines ashore.’

  A 1,200-man brigade landing team was earmarked for the Danang mission, though the president dallied with sending instead the 173rd Airborne Brigade, on the curious grounds that the American people would deem a commitment of paratroopers less momentous than an amphibious landing. Already in February there was an expectation of going further – sending much larger numbers of troops to shield all the US bases: an estimate of forty-four battalions or a hundred thousand men was put forward. Gen. Wallace Greene thought a force of this size would be necessary ‘to guarantee 100 per cent protection’.

  Throughout February 1965 the designated assault force for Danang steamed circular courses in the South China Sea, while in Washington the president deliberated. Ensign Jim Koltes, aboard USS Henrico with the 3/9th Marines, was deeply impressed by their quality, the finest warriors America possessed: ‘These weren’t draftees or guys who had signed up because they couldn’t get a job: I met officers who had been with me at Notre Dame. Their discipline was terrific, and there was wonderful camaraderie. Everybody believed in the cause.’ The wait under warning orders persisted through thirty-two apparently interminable days and nights. In darkness they gazed from the ship’s rail at flares and gunflashes plainly visible in the hills above Danang. ‘Nobody had any idea what to expect when they went ashore, because almost none of them had done anything like this before. We wondered: would it be like D-Day in Normandy?’ It was not, of course. On 8 March 1965, when Ensign Koltes led elements of a flotilla of landing craft across the few miles of sea to the beach, not a shot was fired.

  Marine Phil Caputo’s company commander held an orders group before his unit left their assault ships, saying: ‘Okay, listen up. When you brief your people, make it clear that our mission is defensive only. I don’t want anyone going in there thinking he’s going to play John Wayne. We’re to provide security and that’s all. We’re not going in to fight, but to free the ARVNs to fight. It’s their war.’ Lt. Caputo, like Gen. Westmoreland, saw himself fulfilling the vision of JFK: ‘If he was the King of Camelot, then we were his knights and Vietnam our crusade. There was nothing we could not do because we were Americans, and for the same reason, whatever we did was right.’ Their communist foes were ‘the new barbarians who menaced the far-flung interests of the new Rome’.

  A significant aspect of the Marines’ landing, before a throng of photographers, excited children and pretty girls distributing garlands of flowers, was that nobody in Washington, the US embassy or MACV saw fit to inform the South Vietnamese government that they were coming. Moreover, in Max Taylor’s phrase, once the camel’s snout was in the tent – the first troops ashore – there was no getting it out again, though the president had yet to articulate a credible game-plan. Walter Lippmann wrote: ‘It used to be a war of the South Vietnamese assisted by the Americans. It is now becoming an American war very inefficiently assisted by the South Vietnamese.’

  Col. Sid Berry wrote of an ARVN operation he witnessed in the delta: ‘Good air strikes. Good artillery support. Good helicopter landings and armored personnel-carrier actions. Good troop movements on the ground.’ Yet the end of that story was depressingly familiar: ‘We didn’t get any big Vietcong units. Killed six, captured four, and got some documents. But the big numbers of VC we hoped for just weren’t there. Maybe next time.’ Another adviser quickly noticed that out with Southern troops, ‘we never seemed to bump into anybody … There was pretty much a gentleman’s agreement that if they left the VC alone, the VC would do the same to them.’

  Paul Warnke, who later became an assistant secretary for defense, thought that the whole story might have turned out better if Washington had imposed an honest-to-God occupation, rather than merely sought to hand-hold a grossly incompetent local government: ‘What we were trying to do was to impose a particular type of rule on a resistant country. And that required occupation, just as we occupied Japan [in 1945].’ Warnke missed the obvious point, that such a policy would have required treating the South Vietnamese as a conquered people, rather than as citizens of a supposed sovereign state. But he articulated a dilemma that would recur in twenty-first-century Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Many middle-class families in Saigon, like that of Duong Van Mai, had become so despairing of their society’s predicament that only lack of means prevented them from seeking exile. Some such people were at first delighted when the US troop commitment was announced. Mai’s father, a former mayor of Haiphong, said, ‘We’re incredibly lucky. We’re such a small and weak country, and yet the Americans have decided to save us with their money and their own lives.’ If such a view was confined to relatively privileged people, it deserves notice that, for a season at least, some felt a surge of hope.

  The process that began on 8 March 1965 nonetheless proved less a commitment than a committal to the earth – of US strategy, hundreds of thousands of corpses, and eventually of the Johnson presidency. Almost every modern Anglo-Saxon leader who sets a course towards a foreign policy catastrophe either compares himself to Winston Churchill, or his chosen enemy to Adolf Hitler. On 13 April Lyndon Johnson told visiting diplomats that Vietnam posed a comparable challenge to that faced by Churchill in 1940. He was contemptuously contradicted by President de Gaulle, who predicted that the war would l
ast ten years and ‘completely dishonour’ the United States. Those in Washington who accused the French leader of a disdain for American culture and resentment of American power were right – but that did not annul the validity of his warnings. Frank Scotton wrote that when the US began to seek to run parallel but separate Vietnamese and American campaigns, ‘The only player who seemed to understand the one-war concept, with everything having political impact and purpose, was the Viet Nam Communist Party.’

  From March 1965 onwards, the process wherein US troops supplanted the ARVN at the forefront of the struggle evolved astonishingly swiftly. The procession of coups had drained the heart out of South Vietnam’s soldiers even more than that of the US embassy. Desertions soared, reaching eleven thousand in April alone; units became increasingly reluctant to get into fights. A junior officer said: ‘When I first joined the army in 1962, I did so because I was patriotic. I loved my new country and hated the communists. Over time, however … so many leadership changes in Saigon and dependence on the Americans made it impossible for me to talk about “the nation”.’

  Max Taylor had always believed that it would be disastrous if Americans assumed the burden of doing the fighting, but now he bowed to the administration’s decision and withdrew his objections – for a while, anyway. For an assessment of future US troop requirements, the president dispatched to Saigon the head of the army, Harold Johnson, a survivor of the 1942 Bataan death march. The general must frequently have winced in the presence of Lyndon Johnson, because he deplored profanity and once sternly rebuked a subordinate: ‘I would appreciate it if you never again took the Lord’s name in vain in my presence.’ Now, the commander-in-chief gave the army chief his marching orders. As they descended together in a White House elevator, he jabbed his visitor in the chest with a forefinger and said, ‘You get things bubbling, general.’ Within the Pentagon, Harold Johnson was already on record as believing that it would take five years and half a million men to achieve an outcome. He returned from Saigon with a proposal to dispatch one division, and the Chiefs upped this recommendation to three. The president said at a 10 March meeting at Camp David, ‘Come hell or high water, we are going to stay there.’ On his notes was written: ‘To give in=another Munich.’