by Max Hastings
On 14 November his men became engaged in a savage, protracted clash following an air assault on their concentrations at ‘LZ X-Ray’ by Col. Hal Moore’s 1/7th Cavalry, supported by B-52 strikes. That morning Colonel An set out to trudge a muddy path towards Chu Pong mountain, accompanied by his thirty-man command group. Just before noon, amid incessant fire and explosions around X-Ray, he was leaning on his walking stick, studying the terrain, when a staff officer grabbed him and hurled him to the ground just before a series of devastating concussions shook the earth, from the bombs of a Stratofortress. An shrugged as he stood up and dusted himself down, saying that when so much ordnance was flying about, the whim of providence alone determined whether a man survived, upright or prone. He told his command group to take up residence in the new craters, and tasked a battalion to attack the Americans just before dawn next day, the 15th. An described what followed: ‘For about fifteen minutes the enemy was thrown into confusion, then fought back ferociously.’ The struggle continued all day, then after nightfall flare-dropping C-130s circled above; 105mm guns fired thirty-three thousand rounds. When the communists renewed their attacks early next day, one NVA battalion got lost on its march to the start line, and the others found themselves engaged in a desperate struggle. A US general wrote later: ‘Some of the fiercest fighting in American history took place, almost all of it within the length of a football field.’
For the Cavalry, the most deadly phase of the battle came on the 17th. At noon, one of An’s battalions was eating its rations when scouts reported enemy troops approaching. The NVA hastily deployed, and ambushed the inexperienced 2/7th as its men advanced in extended file through high elephant grass. For the next two hours, little groups of Americans fought confused close-quarter actions, too much entangled with their enemies to call in artillery or air support. An, likewise, found the situation ‘tense, complicated and difficult’. From his perspective the worst fighting took place between 1400 on the 17th and 2000 on the 18th. At last the Americans were able to summon air strikes and artillery, causing the NVA especially heavy losses among runners and liaison officers – men obliged to keep moving across the battlefield – who often vanished without trace. The 66th Regiment was considered to have distinguished itself, even though its colonel mysteriously disappeared from the unit at the start of the battle – and remained missing, allegedly lost, for three days; political officer La Ngoc Chau took command.
An avalanche of shells, bombs and bullets eventually caused the NVA to break off the action. They afterwards asserted that engaging US infantry held no special terrors, but – in Col. An’s words – ‘this does not mean that fighting the Americans was easy, as some of our people have claimed. Their firepower was devastating. They had so many aircraft, so many bombs, so much artillery. They were practical people who learned quickly from their experiences, and had game-changing technology … They were clever and ingenious, sometimes capable of completely overturning an unfavourable tactical situation.’
Both sides claimed a victory after the Ia Drang battles: the Cavalry estimated that it had killed more than ten communists for every one of its own men lost. Senior Americans suggested that the enemy could not long endure punishment on such a scale. Westmoreland considered that Ia Drang, which effectively ended on 26 November, showed what fire- and air power could achieve in support of ‘search and destroy’. MACV estimated enemy dead at 3,561. On the American side the 2/7th lost 151 dead, the entire division 305 killed, with wounded in proportion. However, not only were communist losses overestimated by their enemies, but North Vietnamese commanders adopted, and sustained, a ruthless tolerance of casualties. After Ia Drang, their commanders held a triumphalist conference at B3 Front headquarters, presided over by Central Highlands commander Brigadier Chu Huy Man. Col. An wrote: ‘I have seldom attended a battlefield meeting that was so happy and lively. Everybody, friends and strangers alike, shook hands to congratulate each other on the victory.’ The communists, like the Americans, wildly overstated their achievement, claiming to have ‘annihilated’ – one of their favourite words – several US battalions.
It is easy to think cynically of Bob Hope’s annual Christmas Vietnam shows, or the visits to the war zone by other Hollywood stars, but those who served loved every moment of them. A US adviser team was likewise thrilled when James Garner, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda turned up in the delta. They were especially grateful that Ann-Margret took it so well when she found two sniggering NCOs peering up through the floorboards of her hooch as she undressed. Col. Sid Berry and his adviser team at My Tho gave a Christmas party outside their headquarters in an old seminary for three hundred family members of the Vietnamese staff, ‘some of the cutest, most appealing children I’ve ever seen. Almost all of us Americans just wandered around amidst that mass of childish humanity soaking up love and happiness and tenderness and joy and compassion.’ The huge foreign visitors distributed ice cream, cake, and a gift apiece before the screening of a cartoon movie. With boundless American ingenuity, they created another seasonal touch: a forward air controller zoomed overhead, throwing out a storm of white paper flakes labelled ‘Snow. Courtesy of the USAF and G-3 Section.’
On the 7 January 1966 edition of Country Music Hour on AFN Vietnam, Roger Miller sang ‘Attaboy, girl, that’s a way to make me cry’, then came Eddie Arnold, Carl Smith, Tennessee Ernie Ford. Sid Berry especially liked ‘I’m in love with the girl on the billboard on the highway who wears nothing but a smile’, and ‘As I left, the window curtains waved goodbye’.
There were now four divisions and a total of almost two hundred thousand American troops in Vietnam, but Robert McNamara reported to the president that these would not suffice. If the North Vietnamese did not quit, in 1966 he proposed doubling the size of Westmoreland’s army, with a likely further increase to six hundred thousand men in 1967: ‘US killed-in-action can be expected to reach 1000 a month,’ advised this obsessive statistician.
Yet, displaying a confusion of mind greater than that of Duong Van Mai, America’s executive warlord was already privately warning that the Chinese might come in; that the best the US could expect was ‘withdrawal with honor’. On 21 January 1966, McNamara told a group that included Arthur Schlesinger and J.K. Galbraith that ‘he did not regard a military solution as possible … He seems deeply oppressed and concerned at the prospect of indefinite escalation.’ Schlesinger wrote after that conversation: ‘The military have the bit between their teeth and are convinced that they can “win” the war.’ The irony, informed liberals noted, was that even as McNamara lost faith – an awesome turn of events – Dean Rusk gained it: the secretary of state seized the torch from the defense secretary and bore it aloft through 1968. It was becoming plain to McNamara’s intimates that almost two years and countless corpses before his belated departure, he was gnawed by uncertainty and indeed pessimism. It is extraordinary that he chose to retain his office while harbouring such misgivings.
At the sharp end, Sgt. Jimmie Spencer said ruefully, ‘It turned out to be a marathon, not a sprint.’ Sid Berry wrote home: ‘I would be nowhere else … I am convinced of the rightness and importance of our being here. I have come to have great respect and affection for the Vietnamese. They do surprisingly well under circumstances more difficult than our country has ever imagined. But a long road lies ahead. I hope that our country and our countrymen have the maturity, stamina, patience, guts, faith to stay in the fight as long as is necessary.’ The top of the escalator was in distant view. What remained absent, however, was any glimpse of an exit beyond.
12
‘Trying to Grab Smoke’
1 WARRIORS AND WATER-SKIERS
There was never one Vietnam war, instead fifty different ones, according to where a man fought or – in the case of nine out of ten non-infantrymen – did other stuff. Company commander Andy Finlayson once reprimanded an engineer corporal working on their positions because his men refused to dig or man foxholes. ‘We don’t do that shit,’ said the NCO stubbornly. �
��That’s the infantry’s job.’ Artillerymen, excepting FOs – forward observers – were exposed to far less risk than foot-soldiers. Capt. Chuck Hood, a thirty-year-old Virginian commanding a battery of heavy guns, found that while his men had to work hard in the dust or mud, rain and heat – on maximum charge the huge 175mms needed barrel changes every three hundred rounds – his biggest problem was assuaging boredom, ‘trying to come up with something different to keep their attention up and keep them out of the local villages and not drinking all the time’.
They were there for just one year, and most infantry officers served only six months with a company before being shifted to staff roles. Westmoreland pressed for longer tours but the White House overruled him. The limit may have been politically necessary, but was operationally corrosive: there were few really experienced American field soldiers, save a few ‘lifers’. Maybe two-thirds of the men who came home calling themselves veterans – entitled to wear the medal and talk about their PTSD troubles – had been exposed to no greater risk than a man might get from ill-judged sex or ‘bad shit’ drugs.
Support, technical and logistics personnel could serve in some giant base compound without seeing a Vietnamese save laundrywomen and bar girls, their worst gripe the stink in the huts of JP4 fuel and urinal pipes. Paratrooper Gene Woodley called Camranh Bay ‘the biggest surprise of my life. There was surfing. There was big cars being driven. There was women with fashionable clothes and men with suits on. I said, “Hey, what’s this? Better than being home.”’ Navy radarman Dwyte Brown agreed: ‘Camranh Bay was paradise, man. I would say, Boy, if I got some money together, I’d stay right here and live. I was treated like a king.’ Brown gained forty pounds during his ‘war service’, on a diet of lobster and steak, and spent much of his time in the plotting room assembling music tapes for a captain who returned the favour by lending Dwyte his jeep. Outside An Khe the 1st Cavalry created its own neighbourhood R&R centre, ‘Sin City’. A man could go to a Class 6 store and get two half-gallons of Gilbey’s gin for $1.65 each, and for five or ten dollars a girl who had been checked by medical staff.
Black infantryman Richard Ford said of another camp, ‘I didn’t believe Nha Trang was part of Vietnam because they had barracks, hot water, mess halls with three hot meals and air conditioning. [It] was like a beach, a resort … They be playing football and basketball. They were white. And that’s what freaked me out. All these white guys in the rear.’ Green Berets on Phu Quoc island waterskied and surfed in a bay off the Mekong delta. A Western visitor wrote of Vietnamese spectators: ‘The children thought it was fun to splash in the water and watch the huge blond men sweep by at the end of the rope, but the old people glared and muttered. Even in South Vietnam I have never felt so detested because of my size and colour.’
It was almost entirely arbitrary, who got to go where. Medic Charlie Shyab arrived in country with illusions that he would stay with the men with whom he had trained and established a relationship. Like almost every replacement, however, he was sent to face mortal peril among strangers. Lt. John Wright emerged from the assignment room at Danang looking ashen and told a friend laconically, ‘I’m fucked’: he was being sent to the 1/9th Marines, dubbed ‘the walking dead’ because of their ghastly casualty record. When corpsman David Rogers finished his infantry field time he was posted to a hospital in Cu Chi: ‘The doctors and nurses were all officers, and would eat and flirt together. I’d been in the jungle, and now found myself in this crazy world, just like MASH.’
Lt. Judd Kinne rode with the company first sergeant to identify bodies in the divisional mortuary, a refrigerated Quonset hut in which he was discomfited to find staff listening to AFN and cracking jokes. The sergeant inspected the battalion’s quota of body bags, present and correct among a great many more. ‘It looked like a full house,’ said Kinne, who thought with a shiver, ‘I’m not going home like that.’ Phil Caputo also did morgue time: ‘If I had been an agent of death as a platoon leader, as a staff officer I was death’s bookkeeper.’ All the dead looked pretty much the same, he reflected, whether in life they had been white, black or yellow. Their skin turned to tallow, so that they resembled wax dummies, ‘pupils a washed-out gray, mouths opened wide as if death had caught them in the middle of a scream’. Where men’s faces had gone absent without leave, they were identified by dental records.
A few of Vietnam’s would-be liberators succumbed to funk: Sid Berry deplored the poor spirit of his chaplain, who clung to a weapon and wore his flak jacket day and night: ‘He has been talking with people about the awfulness of war; and he sees Viet Cong all around us. He asks earnestly if we think the war will be over by Christmas … We cannot afford to have a man of God spread fear. He should be a man of calm faith and certainty’: the chaplain was relieved.
Others lived dangerously, but exotically. The special forces A Team at Ban Don near the Cambodian border used elephants to shift supplies, laying stars and stripes on the animals’ backs to deflect American bombs. George Bonville, who was prey to romanticism, gazed out on the delta waterway beside his quarters one balmy evening and thought, ‘Why are men fighting for control of this place? It is an agricultural paradise where anybody with a brain can live, work and be comfortable. Only evil people can make war in this place – egad I thought, I guess I am part of them. But I did not start this disaster. I only hoped to end it.’ A major about to rotate home warned Bonville not to risk his neck, because the cause was not worth it. The US should have cut bait back in 1964, said this grey-haired sceptic: ‘Just look out, son. We’ve already lost too many good young officers here. I got my battlefield commission in Korea – it was different, the Koreans were tough and determined to stop the Reds and the terrain was favorable to defend. This place is like a sieve, with Laos and Cambodia. Keep your head down. This place is gone.’
As for the big picture, an NVA general staff conference at Dragon Court agreed that the more troops the Americans committed, the greater would become their difficulties. Hanoi’s existing strategy was confirmed, whereby Saigon’s army and militias remained primary targets, because if they collapsed, Washington’s rationale for intervention went with them. Hanoi identified grandiose 1966 objectives: 250–300,000 ARVN casualties and 25–30,000 Americans; destruction of a thousand aircraft and helicopters; occupation of 80–90 per cent of rural areas. They sought to build communist strength in the South – ‘Battlefield B’ – to 400,000 guerrillas, ninety thousand local forces and 200,000 NVA regulars.
Vietnam’s war history acknowledges that such objectives were wildly overambitious: ‘The plan that was approved was simplistic and unrealistic … did not reflect our real capabilities, and took inadequate heed of the [impact of] the enemy’s [air] attacks on our supply lines, which created enormous problems.’ Logistics organisation was ‘confused and disorganised … The quality of some units sent to the battlefield was low.’ Hanoi’s chroniclers also admit to having underrated American and even ARVN battlefield capabilities.
The NVA and Vietcong leaderships pursued parallel and sometimes conflicting purposes. There were tensions between Southerners and their Northern brethren, whom some VC derisively dubbed ‘the spinach-eaters’, because their meagre diet could include pond weed. Le Duan and his politburo supporters were eager for big-unit showdowns. Giap opposed this strategy, because he believed that it enabled Westmoreland to maximise his own firepower advantages. The 1966 dispatch south of a further fifteen regiments reflected the growing dominance of Hanoi’s hawks, the diminished influence of the victor of Dienbienphu.
The political officer of Long An province’s Vietcong analysed the January 1966 activities of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade as closely as had the NVA’s Col. An those of the 1st Cavalry two months earlier. First experiences of air assaults were terrifying, said guerrillas: ‘helicopters filled the air, swarming like flies, and in moments the field … was filled with American troops. As soon as even one shot was fired, they called for air support and artillery to plaster everything. They exp
ended bombs and shells like there was no tomorrow. Our fighters concluded that American troops were slow, but could call upon inexhaustible resources.’ Tanks and APCs ‘crawled across the rice fields like crabs … right over the people’s … crops’.
Long An VC had planned to launch a big, full-frontal assault on a US battalion during the 1966 fighting season. After studying their enemies, however, they concluded that this was beyond their capabilities. They agreed instead to bide their time, husband strength, sustain relatively small-scale guerrilla attacks. The communists thought American soldiers unobservant: they often failed to spot fighters a few yards away. Their fear of mines and booby traps was evident, and must be exploited: Americans also became vulnerable during their regular halts.
Meanwhile in Washington John McNaughton and Bill Bundy composed for Robert McNamara a shopping list of 1966 objectives that was a mirror image of Hanoi’s. First was to ‘attrit’ – their word – the enemy faster than he could reinforce. They sought a reduction of between 10 and 50 per cent in secure communist base areas. They called for an increase of between 30 and 50 per cent in secure rail and road accessibility, and extension of government population control to 50–60 per cent. Critics later deplored the emphasis on statistical measures of progress, characteristic of McNamara and his protégés – yet also of Hanoi’s Dragon Court.
In February two new Northern divisions moved into the Quang Tri province of I Corps. This roused fears among allied commanders that the enemy might cut off the tip of the country, gaining control of everything beyond the spine of hills north of Danang. The US Marine Corps would spend much of the year, and indeed most of the rest of its war, fighting to prevent this. Fierce argument persisted about whether Westmoreland committed too large a proportion of his troops to search-and-destroy operations, at the expense of ‘clear-and-hold’ – securing territory. Capt. Chuck Reindenlaugh, an adviser serving at Xuan Loc east of Saigon, wrote home on 30 January 1966, describing his awe at what the enemy achieved with only small arms, mortars and courage: ‘Our weakness is rooted in our inability to garrison every village, hamlet or settlement … They attack where forces are not stationed … Imagine a football game in which one of the teams is conventionally uniformed, observes the NFL rules of play. The opposing team, however, wears no uniform and in fact has been deliberately clothed to resemble spectators. This team plays by no rules, refuses to recognise the boundary markers, the ref’s whistle, and when hard-pressed at their own goal the team’s quarterback will hide the ball under his shirt and calmly run into the spectator boxes and defy you to find him. The inclination of the unenlightened is to holler “Shoot ’em up, burn ’em out, smash the villages harboring the Vietcong.” That is what the VC hope we will do, and it is very difficult to refrain.’
