Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Robert ‘Blowtorch’ Komer – the famously dynamic former CIA and NSC man who acquired the unlikely title of President’s Special Assistant for Pacification, then in May 1967 became boss of CORDS (the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support programme) in Saigon – was always critical of search-and-destroy, which he considered injurious to winning hearts and minds. What was certain was that South Vietnamese people comprehended few of the subtleties of Westmoreland’s tactics, nor indeed of the ‘better kind of war’ which admirers of his successor claimed that Creighton Abrams later waged. Many Americans were equally bemused: a frustrated Marine lieutenant told a reporter that the fight was ‘like trying to grab smoke – when you open your fist there’s nothing there’. There was no good answer to the deployment issue: there never were and never could have been enough American troops to seek out the enemy while simultaneously protecting South Vietnam’s populated areas.

  Late on the afternoon of 17 January, the Vietcong claimed an important scalp. Province pacification chief Doug Ramsey was travelling in the cab of a truck delivering civilian aid near Cu Chi, a ride that the daughter of the local Vietnamese province chief insistently warned him not to take. Suddenly Lo, his driver, gave a cry: a hundred yards ahead crouched two armed figures in blue shirts and black trousers; the head of a third man bobbed up from behind an embankment. Ramsey raised his AR-15 carbine. Uncertain who the men were, however, he did not immediately fire. For a few seconds he thought they had passed unscathed through the VC ambush – for such it was. Then communist bullets began to rip the rice sacks in the back of the truck, and the vehicle stopped: a round had penetrated the driver’s leg. Ramsey turned and squeezed off a dozen single shots. Lo said the engine was dead. The American swore – he would have cursed even more fluently had he known that the vehicle was merely stalled. Lo climbed down from the cab and first stood with his hands in the air, then fell on his knees in a supplicatory position. More Vietcong rounds punctured a five-gallon can at Ramsey’s feet, shooting a jet of oil onto his forehead which poured down into his eyes.

  As he struggled to clear his vision, he heard footsteps immediately behind the truck. He shouted, ‘Toi dau hang!’ – ‘I surrender!’ Leaving his weapon, he stepped down with arms raised. Expecting to die, in his stomach-shrinking fear he muttered to himself unoriginally, ‘Oh, shit!’ But his captors were too thrilled with their catch to do any killing. They were young and happy, especially after appropriating Ramsey’s carbine, wristwatch and billfold. Having secured him to a rope, they allowed his driver to go free, and led him off into the bush to begin a captivity that would continue for seven dreadful years, some spent in a bamboo cage. So much for the Lawrence of Indochina fantasies that he, like Vann, Scotton and later Frank Snepp, loved to cherish.

  2 UNFRIENDLY FIRE

  In February 1966, when Lyndon Johnson heard that the 1st Cav had launched a search-and-destroy mission dubbed Operation Masher, the president personally intervened to demand a more mellifluous code name. Whitewing, as it became, claimed 1,342 enemy dead: in the course of the year the Cav estimated that it killed an average of ten communists a day, and in 1966 MACV credited every unit in the country with one dead Vietcong per diem. This was not nearly enough, however, to keep pace with the enemy’s force build-up. On 5 February Marine staff officer Col. John Chaisson wrote to his wife Marguerite back in Maine: ‘The more I see of this war and these fortified outposts, the more I think of the Indian frontier wars.’ Chaisson wrote of the ‘slow, ponderous pattern of redemption of the country from the clutches of VC terror … We can defend our positions forever, but this doesn’t get us anywhere.’ In jungle-clad mountains, a patrol might take a week to cover thirty miles.

  On 9 March there was another embarrassing debacle at a special forces camp: NVA attacked A Shau, thirty miles south-west of Hue. Many of the camp’s 360 irregulars not unreasonably mobbed choppers, inbound to rescue seventeen US advisers, who opened fire to hold back their own men. In the chaos five Americans were killed, and only half the Vietnamese ever returned to duty. Marine Lt. Col. Charles House, who led the rescue squadron, received the Navy Cross – accompanied by a formal reprimand for having given reporters a frank account of the shambles.

  In April Westmoreland’s operations officer Maj. Gen. William DePuy took over 1st Division, covering the north-westerly approaches to Saigon from Cambodia. He became the most gung-ho formation commander in the country, conducting parallel reigns of terror against the Vietcong and his own officers. Operations Abilene, Lexington, Birmingham, El Paso and Amarillo were sweeps of the countryside, supported by unobserved night ‘harassing fire’ – artillery delivering sporadic salvoes on tracks likely to be used by the enemy, or areas where he might be deprived of rest. Meanwhile the little general winnowed perceived weaklings among his subordinates. A bleak legend grew of ‘the midnight Chinook’ which removed unwanted battalion commanders, who were said to have been ‘DePuyed’.

  His ruthlessness attracted the unfavourable attention of Gen. Harold Johnson, who told him irritably, ‘To me, the mark of a real leader is doing the best with what you’ve got.’ DePuy wrote back impenitently, saying that one sacked G-2 was ‘a fat disheveled officer without any soldierly characteristics whatsoever’. A discarded G-5 was ‘a completely inadequate officer; no initiative, imagination or drive. Valueless.’ He wrote of a superseded battalion commander, ‘The first time I saw C, I strongly suspected that he was weak … [he] completely lost control over his battalion and suffered a number of unnecessary casualties while inflicting none on the VC.’ DePuy’s energy was not in doubt, but his tenure of command did little to win either American or Vietnamese hearts and minds. Harold Johnson wrote to him: ‘It’s very popular to say “Let’s send a bullet instead of a boy” … [but] I think we overemphasize firepower.’ DePuy carried on regardless.

  Adviser George Bonville felt sapped by the physical demands of his daily life with a Southern unit: ‘Up at 3.30am, eat a quick breakfast snack, load up trucks to My Tho, board [landing craft] for an amphibious attack at break of dawn somewhere along the Mekong – or load up on Huey helicopters for transport deep into the Plain Of Reeds – kill/capture a few VC, then get out. This usually means carefully withdrawing the [6–9 miles] out of the operational area through sweltering heat, slogging through the paddies, mucking it through canals in bamboo/nipa palm tree jungles then, if lucky, finally back at Cho Gao late … The monotonous rice with some local scrawny chicken and tasteless canned vegetables killed our appetites. The gums of our teeth began to recede … We also started radio duty at night – 2 hours per man – as we realized that we were so tired that we would not hear an attack, with our own artillery banging away.’

  Vietcong terror was relentless. Bonville described a typical episode in which Miss Anh, a typist at the nearby district headquarters, was seized during the night at her parents’ home. Her head was beaten in with a rifle butt, her young brother stabbed to death, following her refusal to assist an attack on the US advisers’ compound. Bonville wrote: ‘She was maybe twenty years old, a devout Christian, very pretty and very much a lady. My team used to sit on the porch in the morning and watch her stroll in to work in the long, flowing ao dai with a matching umbrella protecting her alabaster skin from the sun. She ignored their stares and you could only guess that maybe she disliked these foreign devils admiring her beauty, or maybe not.’ Adviser Mike Sutton landed a Huey in a delta hamlet where they found a limp figure hanging from ropes lashed to a tree – the village chief, disembowelled during the night. His wife had been less artistically murdered, their son castrated. ‘I thought: “What barbarians.” But then later I saw Americans do some terrible things, too.’

  Mike Eiland was a Californian from a modest background who secured a nomination to West Point. He married a general’s daughter three days after graduation, partly because in those days a wedding ring was the likeliest way for most young men to secure access to regular sex, ‘though there should be a federal law against c
adets getting married for a year after they leave’. He spent three years as a bored gunner officer in Germany before quitting this conventional career path to become a warrior. During his training as a Green Beret – ‘it was a cool hat’ – his great fear was that the war would be over before he could get into it. At Fort Bragg they read Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy and adopted the unofficial motto ‘Poussez!’ because everybody was always saying that in a training film they watched about an OSS team in 1944 occupied France.

  On May Day 1966, with the scantiest briefing he was sent to command a twelve-man A Team at a riverside base in the extreme south-west, a few miles short of the Cambodian border: ‘they just dropped us into the middle of nowhere’. The 5th Special Forces camp, located on the edge of that VC stronghold the Plain of Reeds, had been derelict since being overrun three years earlier. Eiland and his men quartered themselves in villas around an old French sugar mill, wired the compound and set about recruiting fighters. This process, they discovered, required tortuous negotiations with local chiefs. They formed one company from the Hoa Hao religious sect; another from army deserters and suchlike; a third through a Khmer Krom leader based at a Saigon temple: ‘He could deliver trained men in whatever number you wanted – it was just a question of fixing a price, which could take all day.’

  Eiland found himself almost drowning in a medley of novel sensations – the greenness of everything; the alien culture; heat and stench. His unit, some four hundred strong, began conducting four-man patrols, punctuated by firefights that sometimes persisted all night. Because the area was a Free Fire Zone, whatever civilians they encountered were trucked away in Vietnamese custody, labelled as refugees. The soldier, bemused by his orders to do this, said: ‘They were not refugees until we made them that way. Mostly we were just abducting them, as part of the policy of denying the area and food to the enemy.’

  On the night of 12 May, when the A Team had been operating for less than a fortnight, local VC attacked the camp in strength, achieving total surprise. In almost impenetrable darkness the Green Berets conducted a passive defence, firing M-14s and M-79s from their villas, which lay behind a deep drainage ditch that the attackers made no attempt to cross. ‘We could hear them shouting to each other, “Where are the Americans?” and milling around. It became clear the place was collapsing.’ The night was rent by gunfire, but neither side possessed illuminants, and Eiland had no access to artillery. Few of the Vietnamese put up much of a fight, and the ones who tried were soon dead. Those who lay low fared best – saying, doing and shooting nothing. At first light the Americans found the enemy gone, having destroyed all vehicles and sunk landing craft moored on the river. Prostrate figures lay everywhere, mostly those of defenders. Eiland was stunned: ‘I had never seen bodies before, especially chopped-up ones.’ Lacking medevac, his corpsman did what he could for the wounded.

  Eiland never felt much confidence in the ARVN special forces whom he was supposed to work with, and had less when it became apparent that hunger was driving his remaining recruits to the brink of mutiny: their Vietnamese captain stole most of their rice. The Americans determined to take over the distribution of rations, which caused the captain to lodge a bitter complaint about interference with local custom, and with his own income. Eiland and his sergeant found themselves summarily relieved, ‘for displaying a lack of cultural sensitivity’.

  Infantrymen’s lives lacked the exotic flourishes available to Green Berets. For Bob Nelson, the best thing about the service was that for the first time in his life as a black American he met no racial issues: ‘We looked after each other.’ A card-carrying Ku Klux Klan member told him that his perception of blacks was transformed after a ‘brother’ dragged him back across a rice paddy when he froze in a firefight. Nelson was the son of a maid and a labourer who died when Bob was six. He spent his later childhood with grandparents on their little tobacco farm in rigidly segregated South Carolina. He joined the Marine Corps out of high school because he needed a job, and found Parris Island as tough as did most recruits, maybe more so because drill instructors addressed all blacks as ‘nigger’. He never forgot the big sign at their field training centre in California: ‘Learn to look death in the face, because you are going where men are going to die.’ A Marine’s death, their sergeant told them, was a ‘good death’.

  Nelson was not sure about that, but when he joined a battalion at Phu Bai in March 1966, he was pleased to find how easy it was to become buddies with ‘Fred the Farmer’ from Minnesota; he rubbed along fine with men from Wilmington, Pittsburgh, Chicago. On interminable marches through the bush they chivvied each other to keep going past their exhaustion thresholds: ‘Come on man – let’s go! Let’s go!’ A keen basketball player, half-miler and miler, he exercised fiercely to stay fit, and for the first time in his life felt a real sense of self-worth. ‘It was a mark of honor to go on and on, never to quit.’ Yet Nelson found some things hard to get his mind around: he had grown up in a deeply religious household, where nobody spoke aloud the word ‘kill’. In his new environment, by contrast, everybody talked of little else but ‘wasting Charlie’.

  They were awed by the impact of their own firepower. Nelson watched air strikes, artillery, small-arms fire devastate a hillside, 20mm gunship rounds ‘chewing up the ground. We thought – man, we’re really in control here. Nobody could walk through all that lead!’ Generals felt the same way, yet vast tracts of real estate remained untouched: even in the midst of a barrage, an astonishing proportion of enemy soldiers survived. The rigmarole involved in proving a kill to higher authority could be grotesque. Reg Edwards delighted his platoon sergeant by shooting a Vietnamese who proved to have a grenade. ‘Goddam. This is fucking beautiful,’ the NCO kept repeating. Edwards was then ordered to drag the body back to camp. He said: ‘His arm fell off. So I had to go back and get his arm. I had to stick it down his pants. It was a long haul. And I started thinkin’ … You think about the mist and the smells the rain brings out. All of a sudden I realize this guy is a person, has got a family. All of a sudden it wasn’t like I was carrying a gook.’

  Frank Scotton wrote: ‘By a peculiar syllogism (people like us don’t live like animals; Vietnamese live like animals: therefore, they aren’t people), Vietnamese were too often considered subhuman. Only a rare American combatant recognised the sophistication of Vietnamese culture and its relationship to the environment and concluded: “We were the gooks.”’ George Bonville recoiled from the excesses of some Americans, one in his own adviser team: ‘Old papa-sans were getting killed by ambushes or patrols for just getting up in the dark of night and wandering out of their huts to take a leak. When a child might get very ill and the mother was terribly concerned, she might light a torch and try to carry the child across rice paddies to the clinic … In one case the torch blew out and unknowingly, a US ambush took the family under fire as they were coming out of a contested hamlet. The mother was wounded and the child died. What a hell of a war I was involved in.’

  Nor were Vietnamese the only victims of friendly fire. Bob Nelson’s squad included a Cherokee machine-gunner: ‘Man, he loved his gun – fired it every chance he got.’ One night on ambush a shadowy figure in front was challenged, and failed to provide the password quickly enough. The M-60 gunner fired, checking only when voices in front screamed ‘Marines! Marines!’ and identified themselves as a returning patrol, whose point man had taken a round in the hip. George Bonville was dismayed when the Southerners to whom he was attached laid down ‘prepping’ fire even when no target was identifiable. One morning during an assault, ‘we had mortars landing in the trees forward of us like air bursts, spewing ricochet fragments. Then the ’50s opened up, piercing the not so dense jungle, ripping over our heads and ricocheting off the hard wood of the coconut trees. Spent bullets were plopping around us and a bent, hot, sizzling tracer round splattered in the mud right in front of my nose.’ German photographer Horst Faas, who was accompanying the operation, lay cursing the prospect of death by friend
ly fire, and urged Bonville to tell the ARVN to stop. ‘You stupid Americans,’ he exclaimed, ‘getting involved in this shit war!’ Not an enemy was encountered on that noisy, violent morning, but the encounter with Faas fed the loathing for the media felt by Bonville and many other soldiers.

  ‘The only thing they told us about the Vietcong was they were gooks,’ said Reg Edwards: ‘They were to be killed. Nobody sits around and gives you their historical and cultural background. They’re the enemy. Kill, kill, kill.’ At 1900 on 23 September 1966 a nine-man Marine ambush patrol set out from Hill 22, north-west of Chu Lai. It was nominally led by Sgt. Ronald Vogel, but an aggressive twenty-year-old combat veteran, Pfc John Potter, announced that he was assuming command: the mission would be a ‘raid’. Every man was told to remove his unit insignia, and not to refer to each other audibly by name. In a nearby hamlet they seized a peasant, accused him of being a Vietcong, and began beating him. Four other men dragged his wife out of their hut, pulled her three-year-old child out of her arms, then raped her. The patrol next shot her husband, child, sister-in-law, and sister-in-law’s child. Potter tossed a grenade at the bodies ‘to make it look good’. Finally the Marines shot the rape victim and left her for dead.