by Max Hastings
He temporarily delayed a response to the Pentagon troop proposals, but on 1 April approved the dispatch of two more Marine battalions and twenty thousand support personnel. Three weeks later he authorised deployments that by June would put forty thousand Americans into the theatre. Taylor urged that these men should be confined to defence of coastal enclaves. Westmoreland protested, however, that this would be intolerably inglorious, and the president agreed. Once troops began to move from the US west coast to Asia, the White House faced a barrage of proposals for escalation. Westmoreland wanted more men, and yet more men. Adm. Sharp, as C-in-C Pacific, urged that Marines were especially well-suited to counter-insurgency. On 6 April the president approved Rolling Thunder II, an Air Force programme for sustained though target-restricted bombing of North Vietnam. In the days that followed, the first anti-war protesters appeared outside the White House.
Still the military situation continued to deteriorate. On 9 May Doug Ramsey wrote in his diary from Hau Nghia province: ‘Report that at least one platoon of 33rd Ranger Battalion was nearly wiped out at bivouac positions at about 0245. VC also blew bridge … Total friendly [military] KIA [Killed in Action] 41, with 36 WIA [Wounded in Action] and 50 missing. VC attack reportedly accompanied by procession of villagers carrying knives and spears, torches. Number of civilian and VC combatants each said close to five hundred. According to province chief, troops of 33rd were again caught asleep.’
Saigon’s army was crumbling before the Americans’ eyes. On 18 May Ramsey described how RF militia and Rangers had conducted a comradely half-hour battle with each other, apparently provoked by a row over cards, in which a Ranger was killed by tommy-gun fire. He wrote to his parents: ‘Military discipline, never very good, has been atrocious during the past two months. Every few days someone shoots up the town and no one does anything about it. [The ARVN] are almost universally detested for their misbehavior and aggressiveness towards unarmed civilians … The pacification effort is rendered meaningless by the inability of [Saigon] forces to provide security … The American government, furthermore, is almost as bad as the Vietnamese in covering up, or lying outright about, the situation.’ Hanoi also deceived its own people, but did so more successfully, because it exercised ironclad control of its society’s information streams.
The communists scarcely needed to employ spies when Saigon newspapers recklessly flagged troop movements. On 9 June, as Airborne soldiers rode trucks towards an airfield, they read on the morning’s front pages that their unit was to be committed to a heliborne assault against an identified objective. An officer wrote: ‘We cursed to each other, saying, “Those mothers! We have not yet received our orders or the battle plan, but the papers are publishing sketches of the Landing Zone!” Some brasshat in starched fatigues obviously wanted to make himself seem important to some journalists.’
Lt. Doan Phuong Hai led the point platoon onto the battlefield, some forty miles north of Saigon. They set down amongst the usual corpses and wrecked buildings; an ox dead in the shafts of a cart loaded with Vietcong bodies; ownerless dogs barking; abandoned bicycles, a derelict truck. More ominously, they passed a cluster of wrecked helicopters, downed earlier when they landed in the midst of a communist concentration. The Airborne’s first task was to collect the corpses of both friend and foe, already decayed and stinking. Lt. Hai sniffed repeatedly at a bottle of heavily scented Nhi Thien Duong oil, but this did not suffice to suppress his horror as he gazed on the ants hastening busily in and out of the ears, noses, eyes of the dead. By evening, when he opened a ration tin ‘the pork covered with a layer of grease so closely resembled the rotting flesh of the bodies I had seen that afternoon that I threw up’.
Next afternoon, 12 June, as his platoon was approaching a rubber plantation a ferocious firefight erupted. Beneath a storm of incoming mortar bombs, Hai requested air and artillery support – and was turned down. The plantation compound was crowded with civilians, he was told. ‘I shouted into my radio, “What motherfucking civilians?! They’re VC!” All I could see were men wearing yellow-green khaki uniforms and pith helmets running all around the rubber-processing plant and housing compounds.’ His platoon was ordered to make a frontal attack across the flat ground of an intervening airstrip. To his astonishment, most reached the cluster of houses alive. But then torrential rain descended, and he awaited an inevitable counter-attack.
Enemy troops swarmed forward. Once again the Airborne begged for air and artillery support, and once again were refused. Much later, as firing belatedly subsided, Hai learned that his company commander was dead, along with an elderly second lieutenant who had somehow survived twenty years of war until his luck ran out that day: ‘I prayed that his next life would be less wearisome.’ Another of the day’s casualties proved to be a captain who had been among the garrison of hill Béatrice at Dienbienphu. How could any man expect to survive indefinitely, who kept fighting through his country’s interminable conflicts?
Hai wrote despondently: ‘Our battalion had virtually disintegrated. All four company commanders were dead. Suddenly I saw stars in front of my eyes. My arm flew upward and my AR-15 dropped from my grasp. I collapsed next to a machine-gun, which was still spraying fire at the enemy.’ When he regained consciousness, darkness was falling, rain dripped from the rubber trees, and a dead enemy soldier lay across his stomach. His face and right arm were acutely painful. One AK-47 round had cut through his cheekbone and nose, while two more had passed through his right arm. He was soaked in blood from the VC corpse, which he was somehow able to push aside. He crawled to the base of a rubber tree, and lay listening to enemy troops searching the battlefield, cursing considerably about their own losses. One of them kicked Hai, then stripped him of his watch, webbing and transistor radio. The thick skein of blood on his torso convinced the scavenger that the body was that of a dead man. The communist moved away, arguing with companions about the disposal of Hai’s property. As silence descended and the rain intensified, Hai was just capable of crawling to the body of his radioman, Corporal Tam, from whom he borrowed a poncho for which Tam had no further use.
‘The two of us lay there, one dead and one still alive, our bodies curled up next to each other. I looked at Tam sadly, thinking of our good and bad times together. I thought about my parents, who would be eating dinner at this time, and wondering about me. My mother would have run over to the family altar and lit an incense stick for me.’ As Hai lay nursing his pain among so many dead men, the bombs and cannon fire that might have saved them a few hours earlier raked the area, lit up by flares. He eventually staggered to join a small group of stragglers, mostly wounded like himself. For two days they dragged themselves across the devastated landscape until they reached a friendly base, where doctors found his wounds unsurprisingly infected. He proved almost the only surviving officer of his battalion, which had lost over two hundred dead and around three times as many wounded.
The Airborne Division was among the most effective combat formations Saigon had, yet here was one of its units chewed to pieces by the Vietcong. This was a story repeated again and again in 1965, so that Westmoreland reported to the White House: ‘The South Vietnamese armed forces cannot stand up to this pressure without substantial US combat support.’ MACV had developed a grand strategic plan: to use American troops first to defend their own facilities; then to reinforce the Central Highlands; then to pursue the enemy – ‘search and destroy’ – while conducting pacification activities and sustaining the bombing of North Vietnam. DePuy, Westmoreland’s operations officer, was convinced that the Vietcong could not resist overwhelming firepower. David Halberstam characterised him as ‘tiny but cocky and imperious’. Neil Sheehan wrote with repugnance that he believed in ‘more bombs, more shells, more napalm … till the other side cracks and gives up’.
Westmoreland urged that his own forces must relegate the South Vietnamese to local security duties, the garrisoning of towns and cities. MACV’s commander proposed that the 1st Cavalry Division should be dep
loyed in Thailand, to operate from the west against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. DePuy said it was crazy that Americans were expected to respect neutralities when the enemy refused to do so. The president demanded of Westmoreland: what do you need? The general responded: 180,000 men immediately – thirty-four US battalions and ten from South Korea, with appropriate support – and a further hundred thousand to follow in 1966. While this request was under consideration the navy launched Operation Market Time, a protracted inshore commitment designed to interdict arms shipments from North Vietnam by sea into the South.
Between air raids and troop deployments, the president extended occasional olive branches. In an April speech at Johns Hopkins University he suggested that if the North Vietnamese abandoned the war, he would mail them a billion-dollar check for a Mekong dam – a massive bribe to leave the South alone. After he spoke, he leaned over to his aide Bill Moyers and patted the younger man’s knee complacently. ‘Old Ho can’t turn that down,’ he said, then repeated, ‘Old Ho can’t turn that down.’ Hanoi of course did so, baffling Johnson.
On 13 May the president ordered a five-day bombing halt while a new peace offer was passed North via Moscow. Pham Van Dong declined even to read the message. It is interesting to speculate whether, if the billion-dollar carrot had been advanced with more diplomatic subtlety, it might have changed anything. Had Ho Chi Minh’s half-starved people been consulted, informed that all this could be theirs in exchange for postponing reunification, who is to say how they might have responded? They could not eat national pride. But this was capitalist money, imperialist money, tainted money, proffered like swill to swine, before a society whose inhabitants were permitted no choices. It was unthinkable that Hanoi would take it.
In Washington, it was still assumed that the Russians could halt the war at any moment their new leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Alexi Kosygin chose to pick up the telephone to Hanoi. Dean Rusk told ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, ‘We are puzzled as to how to proceed, assuming both of us really want peace.’ The Soviets were alarmed by escalation, apprehensive that the Americans might even deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Yet Dobrynin could offer Rusk no comfort: Moscow declined to assume the thankless role of intermediary when both combatants were bent upon achieving military dominance before negotiating.
A bitterly indignant Lyndon Johnson told Senator Fulbright that it was Hanoi’s rejection of his peace proposal – North Vietnamese withdrawal from the South in exchange for a cessation of bombing – that made it necessary for the US to make more war. Yet the world recognised that the administration was vacillating. On 17 May 1965 The Times in London reported: ‘bombing has failed as an instrument of diplomacy … With the US in its present fix, on the lower rungs of an escalation ladder which it does not want to climb further, there would appear to be small reason for Hanoi to help it to the ground.’ If this was by no means an accurate appraisal of where the White House had got to, the paper correctly grasped that it was in a muddle. On 7 June, Westmoreland bluntly informed Washington that South Vietnam faced military defeat unless forty-four US manoeuvre battalions were committed: ‘I see no course of action open to us except to reinforce.’
From the State Department, George Ball penned a new memorandum, warning against sending more men: ‘Before we commit an endless flow of forces to South Viet-Nam we must have more evidence … that our troops will not bog down in the jungles and rice paddies, while we slowly blow the country to pieces.’ But the Joint Chiefs supported the general’s assessment, and his request. The president told a congressional group, ‘Westy wants help – and I’m gonna give it.’ Attorney-general Nicholas Katzenbach reported to the White House that ‘As a matter of law, further Congressional approval at this time is not necessary’ for an increased commitment. On 16 June McNamara announced reinforcements which would raise the troop level to seventy thousand.
Two days later, giant USAF B-52s began to attack alleged communist troop concentrations in South Vietnam. In the eight years that followed, the bombers carried out 126,615 so-called ‘Arc Light’ sorties, dropping four million tons of bombs. Aircrew considered them milk runs. Pilot Doug Cooper shrugged: ‘The job had all the excitement of being a long-haul truck driver without being able to stop for coffee.’ A navigator said he felt that he and his crew just bombed an endless succession of map coordinates ‘that seemed to do nothing except put holes in the jungle floor’. From mid-1968 onwards, ordnance was released not at the behest of bombardiers, but instead that of Skyspot radar-operators on the ground. The B-52s operating over South Vietnam and later Cambodia and Laos faced no threat from enemy action, merely a slight risk of accidents. Most of these elderly monsters suffered from corrosion: one had its bombs fall off the wing racks onto the runway during take-off, because of wiring corroded by rain and sea salt. In eight years, just twelve Arc Light planes were lost to such mishaps: the B-52 crews suffered very little, to destroy very much.
11
The Escalator
1 ‘BOTTOM OF THE BARREL’
A new military junta had assumed power in Saigon. It was headed by Nguyen Cao Ky as premier, with Nguyen Van Thieu as head of state. A despairing William Bundy described the pair as ‘absolutely the bottom of the barrel’. Ky, in a later account of the generals’ meeting that preceded his appointment, described himself challenging the others: ‘Anyone want to be prime minister?’ Only after a silence did he say that he himself would try it. He shrugged: ‘I am not a good politician, not a good diplomat. The only thing I can do well is to fly airplanes.’ That spasm of modesty, however, was avowed only after years in exile, following defeat.
Lyndon Johnson professed to be unmoved by the latest political upset, saying, ‘We will move strongly – stable government or no stable government.’ The new prime minister was just thirty-four, a 1954 fugitive from the North who had trained as a pilot in France, then flown thousands of hours in both transports and combat aircraft, participating in agent-dropping missions over North Vietnam. Ky was a slick dandy with a pencil-thin moustache, who affected a custom-made black flight suit and an impressive procession of wives and girlfriends. He was publicly affable, fluent, enthusiastic about all things American save the taste of Coca-Cola – and remote as a Martian from the Vietnamese people. In June 1965 he was confident that he himself had secured the real power in Saigon, relegating the less flamboyant Thieu to a merely ceremonial role, though time would show otherwise.
Chester Cooper described the first appearance of the new prime minister and head of state at a July US embassy dinner for Robert McNamara: ‘Ky made a spectacular entrance. He walked in breezily, wearing a tight, white dinner jacket, tapered formal trousers, pointed patent leather shoes and brilliant red socks. A Hollywood central casting bureau would have grabbed him for a role as a sax player in a second-rate Manila night club.’ The defense secretary seemed bemused by the encounter, later describing Ky contemptuously as ‘“executive agent” for a directorate of generals’. Another American studying Ky muttered to Cooper: ‘At least no one could confuse him with Uncle Ho!’ President Thieu, more conservatively dressed in a business suit, seemed content to allow Ky to occupy the limelight the airman craved.
It was on 16 July, during this same McNamara visit, that the defense secretary received a cable advising that the president had privately determined to go ahead with the forty-four-battalion commitment Westmoreland sought. This dramatic surge was accompanied by the usual inter-service squabbles and jealousies: Adm. Sharp warned Gen. Greene that ‘General Westmoreland and Ambassador Taylor … will do everything they can to prevent the Marine Corps from getting credit for their accomplishments in South Vietnam.’
Greene, in consequence of the war, presided over a dramatic expansion of his service, but was nonetheless astonished when McNamara informed the Joint Chiefs about the reinforcements, because an agreed strategic plan was still lacking. The army’s Gen. Harold Johnson recognised that the decision to escalate without a public acknowledgement of its significance was e
xtraordinary, and left him ‘tongue-tied’. Years later he said: ‘What should my role have been? I’m a dumb soldier under civilian control … I could resign and what am I? I’m a disgruntled general for 48 hours and then I’m out of sight. Right?’ This was, of course, a limp-wristed explanation of his pusillanimity. On 14 July Earle Wheeler told McNamara, ‘There appears to be no reason we cannot win if such is our will – and if that will is manifest in strategy and tactical operations.’ Wheeler meant, of course, if the gloves were taken off, curbs lifted from the generation of violence, as the president – haunted by fears that hitting the North too hard would trigger a Chinese intervention, such as took place in Korea – refused to do.
Maxwell Taylor, who had obviously lost faith, was recalled from the Saigon embassy, to which, for a season, Henry Cabot Lodge returned. McNamara identified to Lodge three alternative courses: quit, and accept humiliation; deliver more of the same, and preside over a progressive deterioration; escalate, with ‘a good chance of achieving an acceptable outcome within a reasonable time’. Lodge endorsed the third option, knowing that this was already ordained. The defense secretary now favoured the mining of Haiphong harbour; far heavier bombing of the North’s infrastructure; mobilisation of army reserves to enable a massive deployment of troops. Johnson decisively rejected this last measure – a call-up would do what he had set his face against: proclaim to the American people that they were in a big war.
