Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Sen. Mike Mansfield wrote presciently to the president on 27 July 1965: ‘The main perplexity … is that, even if you win, totally, you still do not come out well. What have you achieved?’ Among his colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he said, ‘there was full agreement that … we are deeply enmeshed in a place where we ought not to be; that the situation is rapidly going out of control; and that every effort should be made to extricate ourselves’. Lyndon Johnson could never say that he was not warned about the likely consequences of the course upon which he was now embarked.

  As for the enemy, a senior NLF cadre wrote that the prospect of all-out US engagement ‘filled us with sick anticipation of a prolonged and vastly more brutal war. It was not a question of any lack of determination or confidence in our ultimate victory … But if the Americans were to intervene in strength, the scale of violence would increase exponentially.’

  2 NEW PEOPLE, NEW WAR

  And hereafter legions of Americans landed in Vietnam. Medic David Rogers had to buy his own one-way ticket to Oakland for embarkation: ‘It was almost like they were sneaking you out of the country.’ The girl at the airline counter asked, ‘No round trip?’ Flying was so strange and new to Robert Daniels, a black kid from a poor street on Chicago’s South Side, that on the plane crossing the Pacific ‘I was scared to death. I thought we’d never get there.’ After a seventeen-hour flight, the zonked arrivals were told ‘Okay, everybody, form up on the hardstand,’ then herded into buses which took them to a white clapboard building. Their money was changed into MPCs – military payment certificates – and they were assigned bunks in a transient barracks.

  When Sgt. Jimmie Spencer got there in December 1965, ‘it looked to me as if the United States had taken over the country’. Spencer was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1944, to an unmarried mother ‘back before it was popular’. He volunteered initially for three years, then after discharge found that he missed the service and signed up again. He first served in Vietnam with a special forces unit, acutely conscious of veteran NCOs around him who had done Korea and World War II, striving to measure up to them. Every new arrival was given the same advice about how to treat Vietnamese: ‘You grab ’em by the balls and the hearts and minds will follow.’ Spencer said: ‘I was in my element. Everybody was a volunteer. I was very proud of my service. We were doing what people had done in World War II – going to the aid of people who needed it.’

  Capt. Gordon Sullivan said: ‘In 1965 we decided that we had come to win this war, and we wanted the Vietnamese to stand aside while we did it … Americans had a very low opinion of the Vietnamese people.’ Capt. Henry Gole characterised himself and his special forces comrades saying to their allies: ‘Step aside. The first team is here to clean up this mess.’ Some of these young men knew as little about alien regions of their own country as they did about the one to which they were now translated. A lance-corporal from the east coast demanded of a corpsman from Oregon, ‘Are there still wild Indians out where you come from?’ Capt. Joseph Fitzgerald noticed that ‘Some soldiers thought it cute to walk around Saigon rodded up like Wyatt Earp, with a pistol in an open holster.’ Pfc Reg Edwards’ first shock had nothing to do with death and devastation, but instead with finding that even tiny children smoked cigarettes, which seemed to him horrible: ‘The first Vietnamese words I learned were Thuoc la co hai cho suc khoe, “Cigarettes are bad for your health.”’ In the boondocks, many men were nervous of snakes, disconcerted by gibbons shrieking in the trees. They loathed the ubiquitous leeches.

  Infantry were issued a machete, entrenching tool, Claymore mine with wire and ‘hellbox’ firing device, poncho and poncho liner, helmet with liner and cover, bug repellent, olive drab towel, web belt, ammo pouches, radio batteries, and an M-14 semi-automatic rifle. NCOs harangued their men: ‘At one hundred yards you aim at the crotch and hit the chest cavity. At three hundred yards you aim at the head and hit the chest cavity.’ They were told that French rubber-planters were communist sympathisers who paid VC taxes. Down in the delta Sgt. Mike Sutton traded captured weapons for everything his adviser team needed, up to and including 40hp Johnson outboards, in what they called the green market. The new American facility in My Tho was christened Base Whiskey, until a hand-wringing USIA officer got this changed to the more sonorous Dong Tam, meaning ‘With One Accord’. Vietnamese people received leaflets which explained that the visitors might find certain English phrases well-received: ‘I want peace,’ ‘Do you miss your wife and children?’ ‘We are civilians,’ ‘This route is dangerous.’ Instead, however, children were likely to say, ‘Hello … No VC … Vietnam Number One.’

  Peasants were bemused by the joshing of GIs – soon called ‘grunts’ in this new war – who tied NLF flags around their own heads and cried out to villagers ‘VC Number One!’ A Marine jeep collected an officer fresh from home, who gazed wonderingly at pillars of black smoke curling upwards on the horizon. ‘Is that incoming?’ he asked. ‘Hell, no, Major,’ said a pfc, ‘they’re just burning the shitters.’ Behind the troops came a stupendous array of equipment, vehicles and machinery: beyond helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, there were jeeps, deuce-and-a-half trucks, steel containers – conexes – millions of sandbags and millions of miles of wire; hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete; a fabulous array of weapons; a few million prophylactics, just to get everybody started; billions of cigarettes in those days when almost every soldier smoked tobacco, even if he had not graduated to other stuff. In 1966 Americans would complete fifty-nine airfields; each month ship into Vietnam six hundred thousand tons of stores; write cheques approaching $2 billion. Forty-two military construction companies laboured halfway around the clock, while civilian contractors such as RMK-BRJ and DMJM brought in thirty-inch pipeline dredgers, thirty-ton dump trucks, four-hundred-ton-per-hour rock crushers, giant winches, bulldozers, Rome ploughs that consumed six hundred gallons of diesel a day.

  They dug ditches, raised blast walls, erected plywood huts thirty-two feet by sixteen with galvanised roofs that drummed an ear-splitting tattoo in the rain. Pacific Architects & Engineers, Vinnell Corp, Computer Sciences Corporation, Dynalectron and many others waxed fat on the cost-plus system, which meant that the more they spent – for instance, on their own employees’ housing – the more profit they made. Frank Scotton said: ‘The Vietnamese knew all about this, and it vitiated the image of Americans as trusted partners.’

  A CIA officer wrote of a typical contractor, holding forth in Saigon’s Mimi’s bar: ‘Florid, bull-necked, checkered shirt hanging loose over the barrel gut … Here in all his glory is the American homesteader, the former truck driver or factory foreman, who hangs on year after year bossing Vietnamese road gangs or construction teams. Master to a cringing Vietnamese wife or mistresses, keeper of the American superiority complex.’ Yet such a man might have riposted to this scornful spook that he was hard because only hard men could do the business in that hard place.

  Everything about the war was hard – vehicles, guns, shells, planes, body armour, bullets, C-ration cans, conexes, the will of the enemy – except human flesh and most of the ground underfoot. Between them, soldiers and civilians were carpeting the country with a network of bases, runways, all-weather roads and PXs – Post Exchange stores. For every American serviceman a hundred pounds’ weight of supplies and equipment was delivered daily, straining to breaking point the port and airfield facilities of a relatively primitive Asian land. Theft on an industrial scale became endemic. Trucks bouncing breakneck along potholed roads brushed aside peasants and their lumbering water buffalo, while low-flying Hueys blew dust clouds over countless washing lines. Far out in the wildernesses, American propaganda paper ‘turned the forest white’, according to a communist officer – by 1968 MACV would be putting out four hundred million leaflets a month. One that was deemed notably effective was addressed to those troops marching down the Ho Chi Minh Trail: ‘A North Vietnamese Soldier’s Poem to His Mother’. Across large tracts of Laos and South Vie
tnam, aerial defoliation caused forests and indeed all vegetation to vanish.

  When army nurse Sharon Bystran left Oakland in July on a ship carrying three thousand troops, she noted that even at that early date, a small group of hostile demonstrators waved banners on the shoreline. As a twenty-three-year-old from Oregon, she was thrilled by the prospect of the adventure: ‘It’s sort of exciting finding out what the unknown is.’ When they landed at Qui Nhon, however, their first sensation was revulsion at the stench. She joined the staff of the 85th Evacuation Hospital, and in the year that followed gained a decade’s worth of nursing experience. But it was tough being a woman in an overpoweringly male environment, because many senior officers saw the nurses as founts of discord. The captain running a mess hall shooed them away: ‘[He] explained to me that it was better to fight a war without women around … I think it was the sense of wanting to remain loyal to his wife and he didn’t like the idea that there were women there, constantly reminding him that women did exist.’ The nurses learned to shower in groups, allocated thirty seconds’ water apiece: ‘We used to say, “One in the shower, one on the pot and one at the sink.” The rule was never to lock the bathroom door except when you were having your period. You were allowed a little more privacy then.’

  Meanwhile the warrior newcomers started to fight, to ‘search and destroy’. Phil Caputo wrote: ‘There was no pattern to these patrols and operations. Without a front, flanks or rear, we fought a formless war against a formless enemy who evaporated like the morning jungle mists, only to materialise in some unexpected place. Most of the time, nothing happened; but when something did, it happened instantaneously, and without warning.’ Westmoreland had summoned his huge reinforcements on the assumption that the Vietcong were escalating their own operations, planning big assaults that it should suit the US Army’s manoeuvre battalions to confront. Yet George Ball was sceptical: ‘We have no basis for assuming that the Viet Cong will fight a war on our terms … We can scarcely expect [Gen.] Giap to accommodate us by adopting our preferred method of combat, regardless of how many troops we send.’

  Events proved Ball right: many early American clashes involved only small groups of VC: the average guerrilla found himself in action just one day in thirty. The communist war effort in the South was sustained on 380 tons of supplies and munitions a day, of which nine-tenths were generated locally. Only thirty-four daily tons had to be shipped from the North, the equivalent of seven 2½-ton truckloads, albeit rather more bicycle or porter loads. The Joint Chiefs reported in August 1965 that the quantity of supplies Hanoi shipped South ‘is primarily a function of their own choosing’. Newly-arrived American infantry found themselves sweeping successive swathes of almost impenetrable wilderness. An NCO said: ‘If we made contact the enemy would not stand and fight – most often he would just leave behind the odd sniper tied up in a tree … In the Central Highlands jungle, you were lucky if you could see more than twenty feet. Sometimes the vegetation was so thick it was almost impossible to get resupply.’ In those early days they tried to climb mountains wearing twenty-pound flak jackets, which caused a lot of casualties from heat exhaustion.

  Though the US Army and Marine Corps waged war somewhat more effectively than did most ARVN formations, their political masters in Washington had been mistaken in supposing that the mere appearance of Americans would open a path to victory. Capt. Andrew Comer was executive officer of 3/3rd Marines during the August 1965 Operation Starlite, an amphibious assault on the Batangan peninsula near Danang. Although his superiors reported success, he assessed the battle as a shambles. He described how the commander of a tank ‘fired with its machine-gun on a boy of about ten years of age at a range of 75 yards’. Comer ran to the ditch where the boy had taken refuge, ‘saw that he was unarmed and unhurt, and sent him on his way’. Seeking to remonstrate with the shooter, he could not make himself heard above the roar of the tank’s engine.

  An amphtrac-driver succumbed to hysterics under incoming mortar fire. The man repeatedly reversed his vehicle over wounded men, killing five prostrate Americans beneath its tracks. When Comer tried to check the ‘frantic’ driver, ‘I was totally ignored and was nearly entangled myself.’ The captain gazed in revulsion at the helmeted head of one of the victims, a man he recognised: this lay at his feet, while the rest of the remains were caught beneath the LVT’s tracks. Comer also described his outrage that a named private received a Silver Star: ‘The truth is that he evacuated himself from the battlefield by climbing aboard a helicopter and riding to Chu Lai … He did nothing that was considered heroic that I recall.’ The Marine officer wrote in 1991: ‘I have suppressed my anger over that tank action on Hill 30 for 26 years and feel that I cannot go to the grave without revealing these facts … I desire to have my knowledge of them recorded.’

  A North Vietnamese General Staff directive issued on 10 June 1965 required all units to submit detailed reports on encounters with US forces, so that tactical lessons could be learned. It decreed: ‘Keep the enemy constantly in a defensive, reactive posture. Force him to fight on our terms … in a constant state of psychological tension to erode his strength … Ambush and annihilate small parties … Conduct independent, isolated sapper attacks.’ Units were urged to seek opportunities to attack relief/rescue parties, to promote tensions between the ‘long-noses’ and the Saigon regime’s troops. The newcomers’ key weakness, said Hanoi’s military chiefs, was their aversion to casualties: ‘If we were able to conduct some early actions in which American units suffered annihilation, they would become confused politically as well as militarily.’

  While most US battalions took casualties, these were nothing like as bad as they would become a year or two later. Between March and August 1965, 1/3rd Marines – for instance – lost 10 per cent of their strength, over a hundred killed and wounded. But during a battle in the following spring, one company would lose that many men in a single hour. The newcomers saw themselves as pros, in the words of an officer ‘self-confident and proud’: they had acquired all the military virtues ‘at the price of a diminished capacity for compassion’. Capt. Walt Boomer ‘was willing to do anything to get to Vietnam because I thought the war was going to pass me by. I fully bought into this thing that the communists were going to take over the world, and this was the place to stop them. Even then high school kids were saying, “This war doesn’t make any sense to us,” but I thought they were pretty stupid.’

  Jimmie Spencer was bemused by the other-worldliness of Vietnamese rural communities: ‘Some of those folks didn’t even know what was on the other side of the mountain to where they lived.’ Men learned to hate the inhabitants of hamlets close to the scene of ambushes in which their comrades died or were maimed, because these stone-faced people must know the perpetrators; where they hid out until the early hours of morning, a favourite time for killing Americans. Doug Ramsey wrote in August 1965 deploring ‘the wilful and unilateral burning of whole villages by US Marines in response to a few rounds of sniper fire’. Ramsey and John Vann also compiled a report on pacification in Hau Nghia province fiercely critical of the Saigon regime: ‘The present leaders, bureaucrats and province and district officials do not come from, think like, know much about, or respond to the wishes of, the rural majority of the population.’ The social structure had been transformed by the communist murder programme, so that with almost all landlords and relatively prosperous folk dead or fled, only poor peasants were left in villages and hamlets, prey for both sides.

  Saigon’s local chief in Vinh Kim was described by his US adviser as ‘honest, fair, dynamic and a man whose military competence is obvious … Gradually he has given the peasants the feeling that Vinh Kim is reasonably safe from Viet Cong harassment.’ In August 1965 Marguerite Higgins, an inveterate optimist, wrote a story about this admirable figure headed ‘Vietnam Town Regains Prosperity’. Yet local people hated ‘Mr D’, as he was known, because they held him responsible for the deluges of shells and mortar bombs that fell upon them. He was subs
equently replaced by an officer who proved highly popular because he checked the bombardments.

  Many Americans found it impossible to regard thatch and bamboo huts, their dim interiors boasting only a few pots and beds of woven straw, as the homes of real people deserving of respect. Vietnamese watched with apparent indifference as soldiers or Marines probed their walls and strawpiles with bayonets. Phil Caputo wrote: ‘I smiled stupidly and made a great show of tidying up the mess. See, lady, we’re not like the French. We’re all-American good-guy GI Joes. You should learn to like us.’ Caputo was dismayed to discover that not all his Marines, in whom he took such pride, had a store of humanity as impressive as their combat skills: ‘Some of them were not so decent and good. Many had petty jealousies, hatred and prejudices. And an arrogance tempered their ingrained American idealism.’ His sergeant observed that in Korea he had seen men sight in their rifles by firing at farmers: ‘Before you leave here, sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.’

  He was thinking of men like L/Cpl. Marion McGhee, a fire-team leader in the 3/3rd Marines who on 12 August 1965 walked out of the unit perimeter announcing that he was ‘going after a VC’. Two men sent in pursuit heard a shot and a scream, then met McGhee walking calmly towards them. He said he had just killed a VC, and was going back for more. It was later established that he had kicked through the wall of a hut in which a family was sleeping, seized a fourteen-year-old girl and shot dead her father when he sought to intervene. At his subsequent court-martial he offered a defence of insanity – the usual plea in scores of such cases during the years that followed – but was eventually found guilty of unpremeditated murder, for which he served six years’ imprisonment. Most Marines, most soldiers, were not like L/Cpl. McGhee. But from the first days of the 1965 commitment it became plain how hard it would be to convince the people of South Vietnam that escalation would serve their interests.