by Max Hastings
So much must be said about those who did reckless or wicked things that it deserves emphasis that there were also fine Americans, some of them chronicled in action in the Mekong delta by the Elliotts. Maj. William Willcox was a Midwesterner ‘who had an exceptional rapport with the Vietnamese, and represented all his nation’s virtues. He could have been a case study for the perfect adviser.’ When Willcox’s time was up, David Elliott pleaded with higher authority to have his tour extended, but the US Army’s routines were inexorable: the major moved on. Elliott lamented, ‘He was just getting in the swing of things, just getting to know his way around.’ Another hero in the Elliotts’ eyes was the US Navy’s Lt. (jg) Henry Klein, who appeared in My Tho one day to organise a riverine operation, and delighted them by his enthusiasm to learn about local people and ways: ‘He didn’t just look on his assignment as a job to be done by numbers.’ When they heard a few months later that he had been killed, they mourned: ‘He was the all-American boy, the flower of American youth who lost his life doing something pointless.’ Sid Berry was joined for a time by Capt. Peter Dawkins, a fellow-West Pointer who became Life magazine’s cover pin-up for 8 April 1966.
Players from allied nations were also arriving, as Washington called in debts and favours. The South Koreans sent a contingent that grew to two army divisions and a Marine brigade – they were highly regarded as fighters and eventually lost more than five thousand dead, though their soldiers were also held responsible for several notorious massacres of civilians. The Philippines dispatched a brigade. America had acquired a powerful Australian friend when Paul Hasluck became its government’s external affairs minister in 1964. He embraced the domino theory with special fervour, at a time when Australian troops were already confronting Indonesians in Borneo. Hasluck, like his prime minister Robert Menzies, was convinced of Australia’s duty to stand four-square with the Americans in South-East Asia, as it had done in Korea. Menzies and Hasluck ignored the warnings of influential journalists such as Denis Warner, who wrote in December 1964 that South Vietnam had become an ‘uncountry’. They towed in their wake the New Zealand government, which was convinced that no good could come out of the war, but felt obliged to follow the lead of its much larger neighbour.
On 28 April 1965 an agreement for the dispatch of combat troops was reached between the Australians and the Saigon government, and a battalion reinforced by a New Zealand contingent was soon on its way, eventually swelled to brigade strength, with support elements and special forces. One of these men, nineteen-year-old Lt. Neil Smith, stared wide-eyed around him on arrival, especially at the blacks and Latinos: ‘In those days, you didn’t see many of them in Australia. And we’d never seen so much military kit in our lives – we didn’t know so many planes and helicopters existed.’ Prime minister Menzies fiercely rebutted critics of the commitment, but the cost to his successors proved high: before the decade ended, his bold gesture of support for the US became a dominant issue in Australian politics.
And although Americans henceforward saw themselves as foremost players in the war, vastly more Vietnamese people continued to die; they were merely much less important than Westmoreland’s men in the eyes of Washington, maybe also of the world. Doug Ramsey described the expansion of Saigon’s forces: ‘We were building, instead of an army, an ever-larger façade of one – a steel superstructure of M-113s, Patton tanks, and jet aircraft, resting on societal feet which were not even of hardened clay.’ Vietnamese experienced intimate cruelties of internecine strife such as no foreigner knew. There was the helicopter pilot who flew into Hue to retrieve an ARVN body bag, and discovered from its label that it contained his own brother. Skyraider pilot Tran Hoi said that before he flew on the first South Vietnamese mission against the North, ‘As I was running up my engine I prayed that if our ancestors could hear us, they should not permit my brother to be among the enemy soldiers beneath my bombs that day.’
The wife of Ly Van Quang, a colonel in the Airborne, sustained a correspondence throughout the war with her brother in the North, a famous NVA general, each mailing letters through Paris. One day Quang shouted at his wife in exasperation, ‘Are you trying to get me shot, keeping these letters going with the enemy?’ She was undeterred, however. For her, as for so many Vietnamese, family loyalties transcended all others. When one of her nine sons perished on the battlefield, she was eventually able to secure details of his death through her Hanoi brother.
One of the CIA’s more imaginative programmes was the establishment of a Saigon radio station, known as House 7, from which women read over the airwaves extracts from captured letters and diaries written by Northern soldiers on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The station called itself Mother Vietnam, and was designed to demoralise infiltrators by bombarding them with harsh evidence to highlight their impending doom. Like many such operations, however, House 7 had unintended consequences: one woman was so much moved by the tales she read out on the air that she embraced the communist cause. And successive CIA bosses fell in love with the station’s beautiful broadcasters, almost unfailingly winding up in relationships with one or other of them.
The clatter of rotor blades had become the struggle’s orchestral music, as familiar to every man who fought as the snick of a cocking rifle and the hiss of radio static. As Southern soldiers rode Hueys into battle they exchanged the usual semi-superstitious valedictions: ‘Don’t you be the one to get your “third leg” shot off!’ The communists deployed automatic weapons increasingly effectively against low-flying aircraft. A Vietnamese pilot said: ‘Unless you have experienced it, you cannot know the loneliness of flying home from a mission without your wingman.’ Helicopters were remarkably durable, but luck played a big part in their survival. Nguyen Van Uc flew a CH-34 into a firefight one day, and suffered a stream of hits without a man aboard being scratched. When they landed, however, his crew chief pointed upwards and said, ‘We ought to be dead.’ A heavy-machine-gun bullet had cut halfway through a control rod to the rotors. Had it sheared, the chopper would have tumbled out of the sky.
The US intervention rattled many Vietcong cadres who at New Year 1965 had anticipated imminent victory. In VC-controlled areas there was a new drive towards austerity and ideological purity; private radios were banned, to deny access to Saigon’s propaganda. There was a campaign to boycott American merchandise, which proved notably unsuccessful. The communists always underrated the charms of consumer goods: nylon trousers and shirts were especially prized. When a guerrilla in the delta was killed wearing these fashion items, his corpse was stripped, the clothes next seen on his platoon commander. A civilian witness said, ‘I must say I admire the hard-core VC for their cold hearts!’
For the most part, the Vietcong displayed greater fortitude on the battlefield than did government forces. This made manifestations of Southern courage seem all the more moving, because so little celebrated. The world never heard of the Ranger lieutenant commanding an encircled position, who called in an air strike on his own red smoke grenade, killing him along with half his platoon, but saving the rest of his company. There were no headlines for a twelve-year-old boy who led to safety the pilot of a USAF F-101 that crashed in a VC-controlled area – helicopters were sent to extract the child’s family from their village before communist vengeance struck them. A PF soldier named Nguyen Van Moi of Duc Lang in Chuong Thien province received two bravery awards which seemed exceptionally well-deserved, because he was seventy years old.
Giong Dinh was a small outpost thirty-five miles south of Saigon, which at 0225 on the morning of 3 October 1965 became the target of attack by a large force of Vietcong. In the initial shoot-out, two of five guards on duty were killed, two bunkers destroyed by recoilless-rifle fire, which was followed by a mortar barrage. Nguyen Van Thi, the thirty-five-year-old post commander, retreated with fifteen men into the sole surviving bunker and watchtower. He told Man, his wireless-operator, to call for artillery fire, but the radio went dead. An hour of tension followed, interrupted by sporadic flashes of f
ire from both sides across the darkness. Several attackers broke into the compound and seized two men, four women and four children. They then forced the wives to call on their husbands to surrender, on pain of forfeiting the hostages’ lives. Thi refused, and his men tossed a shower of grenades.
A defender crawled to the ammunition bunker, where after an exchange of fire he was able to grab more grenades and regain Thi’s position. The district chief was now monitoring the attack from his headquarters five miles away, and called in artillery towards the beleaguered post. Then Man got the radio working again. His nineteen-year-old wife, crouching beside him, adjusted supporting fire within twenty-five yards of their own bunker. By the coming of daylight the guns had fired 550 rounds. The Vietcong withdrew, leaving behind three of their own dead, two more men wounded and twelve weapons. At 0930 a Regional Forces relief column reached Giong Dinh, where they found twelve of the garrison and their families dead, ten of these murdered in cold blood by the communists. Here was the sort of action for which Americans would have showered Thi and his comrades with Silver Stars, maybe even a Medal of Honor. The only reward for Vietnamese, however, was a stay of execution, knowing that they must face similar ordeals again and again.
The supposed indispensability of advisers with South Vietnamese troops raised a big question: how was the NLF able to fight its own war without such assistance? The obvious answer was that the communists were better motivated and more skilled. It was one of Hanoi’s most astute propaganda strokes that while its forces relied on foreign arms, Chinese and Russian personnel remained invisible in most areas of the North, entirely absent from the South. By contrast, the Americans failed to perceive the damage done by the presence of their own officers at the elbow of every Vietnamese in authority. South Vietnam’s prime minister, Nguyen Cao Ky, wrote: ‘Insensitivity to appearances was characteristic of the American approach … There were hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers in North Vietnam, along with a significant Soviet presence, but neither the Chinese nor the Soviets called press conferences and issued statements. They left that to the North Vietnamese.’ Soon after the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964 the Russians began to provide technicians to train North Vietnamese air defence personnel – and initially, sometimes to fire missiles – but such largesse did not spare them from their hosts’ disdain.
In 1965, both sides bled plentifully. Doug Ramsey recorded an episode in Binh Dinh province during which massive air strikes and shelling of ‘suspected military formations’ caused 1,100 Vietnamese casualties, among which examination of bodies showed just fifteen to have been arms-carrying communists. He fumed at the tendency of US aircrew to assume that a line of black-clad figures on the ground below must be a military formation, whereas it was more likely to be composed of peasants tilling a field. ‘If its members fled – a normal human impulse – this often made matters worse, as some pilots were likely to take this as a confirmation of their suspicion.’ Huey pilot Dan Hickman acknowledged that a running figure was often deemed guilty: ‘I had one guy shot who turned out to be unarmed. He ran by, looking like he had a pack, so I said “Shoot him,” because the enemy were pretty close by. Turned out he was only carrying a sack of fish, but I still think he was foraging for the local VC.’ The communists learned to exploit fliers’ instincts by instructing cadres to stand their ground when overflown, thus persuading pilots that they were probably innocents.
Yet privation and firepower inflicted punishing losses both on North Vietnamese formations sent South, and on local Vietcong. By May 1965 Le Duan had become notably more cautious about the outlook. In a new letter to COSVN, he recognised that no political deal was imminent – ‘This is not yet the time for bargaining and negotiations.’ He admitted that he had underestimated the strength of American will. Among his forces in the South, in the month beginning 19 October, the NVA’s 32nd Regiment reported the loss of 166 men killed and 199 wounded; the 33rd Regiment 170 killed and 232 wounded; the 66th 208 killed and 146 wounded – and all these figures are probably lower than the reality. Additionally, chronic malaria and beri-beri rendered half the soldiers in some NVA units in the South unfit for duty. One of their officers wrote later that morale languished; soldiers were prone to sudden descents into tears. It became difficult to enforce sanitary discipline – men who deemed themselves soon to die could not be troubled to wash. Political officers censoring letters were dismayed to find soldiers convinced that they were doomed – by starvation if not by bombs and bullets. Around the campfire they sang plaintive little songs:
It is easier to march to the Highlands than to find a way home,
The lack of rice and salt numb a man’s heart.
When we’re sick we lack medicine,
So wherefore is a purpose in love for each other?
The crab lies unmoving on the chopping block,
Heedless of when the knife will fall.
Vietcong attacks on towns helped to sap confidence in the Saigon government, but were always repulsed. A night assault on the district centre of Cai Be in the delta by the VC 261st Battalion targeted the post office, police headquarters and Civil Guard barracks, but was met with artillery fire and Skyraider strikes, which inflicted two hundred casualties on the attackers. A civilian eyewitness said that at dawn he watched survivors withdrawing. ‘They looked sad and tired, and their ranks were noticeably thin. Most carried the rifles of two or three dead.’ An attack on a big government post at Phu My likewise failed, with the loss of forty-two dead, all from one company of the VC’s 514th Battalion.
On 17 May 1965 COSVN issued a directive entitled ‘Security Operations Against the Puppet Police’, which called on local cadres to ‘exploit every opportunity to kill enemy leaders and vicious thugs, intensify our political attacks aimed at spreading fear and confusion among the enemy, and … recruit support among police lower ranks’. A member of Hanoi’s politburo once boasted to the British SIS station chief of having agents in every ministry and village in the South. The spy, Daphne Park, responded feistily, ‘In that case, why do you find it necessary to hang village headmen?’ The Vietnamese replied, ‘Because we are Leninists and Lenin believed in revolutionary terror.’
The communists’ Saigon intelligence cell held a target list of some two hundred regime figures. Among its most prominent victims was the chairman of the National Constituent Assembly. Three murder attempts failed, but there came a morning on which four communist agents riding motorcycles overtook his speeding car and fired four shots, one of which took fatal effect. To the glee of Hanoi, the BBC broadcast a report that he had been assassinated by the Saigon regime as an alleged rival for power, which obliged President Thieu to issue a public denial. The same communist cell planted a bomb in the back of a vehicle which drove into the National Police headquarters compound where it exploded, killing or wounding seventeen officers.
As a RAND field researcher, Duong Van Mai was impressed by the implacable will of a senior Vietcong cadre whom she interviewed as a PoW: ‘Seeing the evidence doesn’t change your mind. But it increases your fear, because you see that they might win.’ She found herself adopting an incoherent but widely-held view: ‘I hated the war and I wanted peace, but a peace that would keep the communists from winning.’ Frank Scotton’s feelings had become equally confused: ‘I was suddenly struck by the thought that we would win by pouring in enormous resources, hundreds of thousands of troops, but we would win in the wrong way … by smothering Vietnam with materiel and scorching the countryside.’ In the streets of America, and especially Washington, protests against the war had begun to attract thousands of people, not all young prospective draftees. On 2 November 1965 thirty-one-year-old Baltimore Quaker Norman Morrison emulated the suicidal bonzes of Saigon, ritualistically burning himself to death outside McNamara’s office window.
The first big battle of the new war took place in the Ia Drang valley of the Central Highlands, favoured by the NVA as an initiation area for troops freshly arrived from the North. Special force
s camps, of which there were eventually around a hundred across Vietnam, were deemed especially attractive objectives, because almost all were located beyond range of American fire support. US Army chief Harold Johnson expressed ‘horror’ at SF operations that he believed consumed extravagant resources. Their personnel, in his disdainful view, were ‘fugitives from responsibility who … found a haven where their activities were not scrutinised too carefully’. Mike Eiland, an SF officer who ran Khmer Krom recce teams into Laos and Cambodia, shared Johnson’s scepticism, saying later: ‘The existential question is “What good did we do?”, and I suspect the answer is “Not very much.” The information the teams brought back was pretty low-level.’
When the communists hit an SF camp they always inflicted pain, sometimes minor disasters. Following a 19 October 1965 attack on Plei Me base, Westmoreland ordered the 1st Cavalry Division to ‘seek and destroy’ the enemy units responsible in the Ia Drang valley. This suited NVA commanders, who wished to test the new foe’s mettle. Col. Nguyen Huu An claimed that MACV’s Operation Silver Bayonet ‘gave us the chance to begin to kill Americans’. At a two-hour command meeting on 13 November that he described as ‘historic’ he expounded the objective: learning how to fight the newcomer by engaging him in a series of company- and battalion-scale actions: ‘We would beat the Americans, just as we had defeated the puppets.’
