Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Loan progressively suppressed the remaining insurgents, jailing several hundred irreconcilables. He crushed the Buddhists, but at a high price for South Vietnam’s threadbare international standing. James Reston wrote in the New York Times that the country had become ‘a tangle of competing individuals, regions, religions, and sects, dominated by a single group of military warlords representing different regions, an army without a country presiding over a people who have been torn apart by war and dominated and exploited … for generations’. Prime minister Ky promoted to command of I Corps Hoang Xuan Lam, notoriously incompetent commander of the 2nd Division. Lam kept his post for years, despite repeated battlefield debacles, because he possessed the only merit that counted – loyalty to the regime. From Washington Gen. Earle Wheeler warned Westmoreland that Saigon’s chaos was feeding anti-war fever: ‘One cannot expect the American people to suffer indefinitely the continuation of this truly sickening situation … I think I can feel the first gusts of the whirlwind.’ The US government had ‘lost irretrievably the support of some of its own citizens … Many people will never again believe that the effort and sacrifices are worthwhile.’ The Chiefs were now specifying a requirement for half a million troops in Vietnam, and Westmoreland wanted seven hundred thousand.

  The Vietcong declared June 1966 ‘Hate America Month’. This prompted senior embassy figures in Saigon to stage a folk-music evening, to which they invited along Pham Duy, a famous composer and singer who had once served with the Vietminh, but had defected in disgust at their cultural repression. The Americans, led by Henry Cabot Lodge and Ed Lansdale, sang the ‘Whiffenpoof Song’ and ‘Wounded Soldier’, followed by Pham Duy’s 1965 hit ‘The Rain on the Leaves’. The Vietnamese, dressed in his usual peasant black, recited his tone poem ‘Mother Vietnam’, then sang three old Vietminh numbers, ‘Guerrilla March’, ‘Winter for the Fighting Man’ and ‘Carrying Rice for the Soldiers’. Finally, he said how moved he was by the theme song of the Civil Rights movement, ‘We Shall Overcome’. Duy, whose work remained banned by the communists until 2000, was dismayed soon afterwards to find his favourite American ballad hijacked by the anti-war movement.

  Assembly elections were held in September, with the important constraint that the only candidates permitted to stand were those acceptable to prime minister Ky. A major surprise thereafter was that Nguyen Van Thieu exercised increasing authority. It was said that Thieu’s wife pushed and prodded forward the taciturn soldier, just as many other ambitious, formidable Vietnamese spouses goaded their husbands. When a presidential election was held in the following year, to implement a new constitution mostly drafted in Washington, Ky agreed to seek only the vice-presidential slot, believing that he had cut a private deal to retain the real power. Instead, he found himself marginalised: his rival ruled until South Vietnam’s demise. A significant minority who cast protest votes against the military found their own candidate, an unappetising lawyer, dispatched to jail.

  American politicians demanded ever more insistently why the US should support Saigon governments composed of autocratic soldiers, but the CIA responded that there was nobody else: ‘They are the best-educated, best-disciplined and most talented among the elites.’ This was unsurprising, since war had been their society’s principal activity since 1945. Yet the dominance of Ky and now Thieu made it impossible credibly to project South Vietnam as a democracy. A Southern general long afterwards wrote about the mismatch between the US and its Saigon clients: ‘Americans are active, impatient and rationalistic. Vietnamese are quiescent, patient and sentimental.’ Democracy was an unfamiliar novelty, observed the soldier, and the uneasy compromises whereby South Vietnamese retained many freedoms, especially that of speech, gave the Saigon regime the worst of all worlds. It was oppressive enough to secure international censure, yet too liberal effectively to control its own people.

  In October 1966, Lyndon Johnson became the first serving US president briefly to visit Vietnam, where he urged troops at Camranh Bay to ‘nail the coonskin to the wall’. Robert Komer said, ‘We’re beginning to “win” the war.’ Trend lines looked good. Robert McNamara sustained a public posture of relentless optimism, though in private he now admitted haunting doubts and fears. The outcome of the 1966–67 political upheavals in Saigon, Hue, Danang and other cities was that the Thieu–Ky regime achieved a stability that persisted until 1975, at the price of becoming explicitly those creatures despised by Vietnamese of all political hues: catspaws of a foreign power. Relatively few villagers found themselves eligible to vote in the conspicuously corrupt 1967 local elections.

  If there was to be no more meaningful politics, nor could there be much pride in this state which so many thousands continued to die to sustain. The blessing that South Vietnam’s leaders proved conspicuously incapable of conferring upon their fellow-countrymen was self-respect. Late in 1967, Thieu moved into Saigon’s presidential palace. He was thereafter maddened by Ky landing his helicopter on the roof of the building, immediately above his bedroom, at unsocial hours. He left it to his wife to complain, however, and co-existed precariously with the airman. Neil Sheehan said: ‘Thieu knew how to play the game. Though he was an outrageous crook, he never made himself a threat to the US. The Americans would tolerate bad Vietnamese leadership as long as it didn’t threaten their objectives.’

  When Duong Van Mai became a researcher for RAND, interviewing Vietcong prisoners, though an unwavering anti-communist she found herself musing about why the Saigon regime was incapable of motivating its people as the communists did, building belief in a ‘just cause’. She wrote: ‘Gradually it dawned on me that … we were losing because of ourselves, because we had been unable to come up with a system, an ideology, and a leadership that could tap these same qualities in the people, inspire them, and pull them together.’ The United States attempted to provide generous sustenance for Vietnamese bodies, yet offered little that nourished Southern souls.

  3 GURUS

  As the struggle intensified, so too did the range of proposals for winning it, most of them fanciful. Among the psychological-warfare options considered was May 1966’s Operation Shotgun. This demanded a series of amphibious feints against North Vietnam’s beaches, to convince Hanoi that a US invasion was imminent. Earle Wheeler demurred: if the threat was believed, he said, world opinion would be appalled, providing ‘excellent propaganda material’ for the enemy. Contrarily, if everybody was told to expect an invasion which never happened, the US would look pathetic. Gen. Westmoreland’s flights of fantasy included a forced urbanisation programme, shifting peasants into city areas and thus forcibly separating them from the Vietcong, a concept also favoured by Bob Komer.

  Meanwhile the defense secretary espoused a proposal from Harvard scientist Professor Roger Fisher, subsequently endorsed by the JASON division of the Institute for Defense Analyses, for an electronic and explosive barrier to seal off the DMZ and the Ho Chi Minh Trail from South Vietnam. The ‘McNamara Line’ would have required the air-dropping of 240 million Gravel mines, three hundred million ‘button bomblets’ developed by Piccatinny Arsenal, and 120,000 Sadeye cluster bombs, 19,200 acoustic sensors, together with deploying more than a hundred aircraft, at an annual cost of $800 million. Elements of the plan were implemented – vast numbers of sensors were dropped around the Trail, and bombed when movement was detected. The wider ‘Barrier’ scheme was abandoned, however, in the face of ridicule shared even at MACV. The project came to be viewed as a spectacular manifestation of the madness that overtook Vietnam war-making.

  Much extravagant theorising concerned air bombardment, employed in South Vietnam, Laos and later Cambodia with an intensity unprecedented in the history of warfare. The NVA’s Col. An wrote wearily: ‘If tree-leaves suddenly withered, if water in a stream turned cloudy, if a path appeared where no path was seen on the photographs taken a day before, the enemy would bomb and shell the location.’ Among sensitive participants and onlookers there was dismay – indeed, revulsion – at the impact on civilians
of promiscuously broadcast ordnance. On 1 July 1966, for instance, USAF bombs hit a village designated as friendly, killing seven people and wounding fifty-one. On 9 August F-100s wreaked havoc upon a delta community, killing sixty-three civilians and wounding eighty-three. These were only conspicuous examples of daily mishaps. Adviser Sgt. Mike Sutton said sadly: ‘We killed an awful lot of people who didn’t have anything to do with the war.’ In My Tho, David Elliott agreed: ‘Vietcong brutality was individualistic, but American devastation was a matter of policy.’ Correspondent Neil Sheehan asked Westmoreland if he was troubled by the civilian casualties caused by friendly fire. The general replied: ‘Yes, Neil, it is a problem, but it does deprive the enemy of population, doesn’t it?’

  Air chiefs enlisted the backing of a guru who argued first that bombing worked, and second – oh, so soothing to their own sleep patterns – that civilian victims did not blame America. RAND researcher Leon Gouré played an influential and frankly sinister role in the evolution of bombing policy. Back in August 1964, following a one-month field trip to Vietnam, he told the USAF that he thought his RAND colleagues’ respectful study of the motivation and morale of the Vietcong was defeatist. He promised the airmen a more upbeat view of all the good things that bombs could contribute to the war effort.

  Gouré was born in Moscow in 1922, son of a Menshevik revolutionary soon forced to flee to Berlin. He moved to Paris in his teens, then in 1940, as a Jew, was fortunate to escape to America in the nick of time. After war service he became an academic, a Cold Warrior with an implacable loathing for communists, then an analyst for RAND. Unlike most of his colleagues he was happy to move to Saigon, funded by $US100,000 of air force money. He assumed responsibility for a new, expanded Vietcong Motivation and Morale study, on which he started work in December 1964. What followed became a case study in the distortion of academic research to serve factional ends, and contributed to the killing of many thousands of Vietnamese.

  Gouré catalogued the weapons captured in enemy caches – Czech sub-machine-guns, Russian shells, Romanian rocket-launchers, East German flamethrowers – and demanded, how could the Vietcong not be part of a worldwide communist offensive? Once established in RAND’s big villa at 176 Pasteur Street in Saigon, he took pains to gladhand every important visitor to the city, and to stifle dissenting colleagues. His message, for which he proselytised tirelessly through more than two years that followed, was that all restraints on the use of air power should be lifted. Noting that the enemy feared planes more than any other US weapons system, he urged that it was thus logical to maximise their use. Bombs could bring uncooperative villages to heel, forcing the inhabitants to leave VC-controlled areas for new locations ‘where they could be more effectively screened and administered’. Gouré’s logic was certainly inhumane, arguably deranged, and his junior colleagues recoiled in disgust and disbelief. RAND’s chiefs, however, decided that the corporation secured enhanced standing from their man’s access and popularity in Washington.

  On one of Gouré’s returns to Saigon he was met at Tan Son Nhut by Susan Morrell, whose husband David had been intimately involved with RAND’s original morale study. She asked the sage what he hoped to achieve. ‘I have the answer right here,’ he said, tapping his briefcase. ‘When the Air Force is paying the bill, the answer is always bombing.’ His vanity and ambition were matched by a shameless lack of concern for Vietnam, other than as a theatre in which to play out an act in the Cold War. In March 1965 he produced a first interim report, which professed to show that US might was working its magic, and that more might could deliver more magic. He concluded that while a few months earlier 65 per cent of defectors had believed the communists were winning, after a year exposed to American air- and firepower, the proportion of enemy optimists had declined to just 20 per cent.

  He perceived no negative effects upon civilian opinion, and said that enemy troop quality was declining, desertions increasing. He urged intensification of crop destruction, to starve out the enemy. Correspondents such as Neil Sheehan dismissed Gouré as a Cold War crooner, serenading hawks with tunes they loved to hum. The RAND man’s admirers nonetheless included decision-makers: the Pentagon and the White House received him with open arms. Walt Rostow thought he was terrific. McNamara, after one of Gouré’s brilliantly fluent briefings, enquired about the size of his project budget. Told that it was $100,000, the defense secretary asked, ‘What can you do with a million?’ Something much bigger, responded the RAND man. ‘You’ve got it,’ said McNamara.

  Thereafter Gouré galloped from podium to podium, relishing his own celebrity. When a colleague voiced dissent from his methodology and conclusions, Gouré waved him aside, saying, ‘Oh, I talked to Bob McNamara yesterday … and I said to him these B-52 bombings are really effective … and if we can do it with a little more accuracy so we don’t bomb quite so many villages, we can destroy their logistics and deny them the support of the people.’ Through 1966, Gouré’s remained an influential voice. His team eventually generated some thirty-five thousand pages of transcribed and translated interviews with prisoners and defectors, though latterly even Westmoreland came to question the optimism of the conclusions derived from them. A review of Gouré’s findings by Konrad Kellen, another Jewish émigré working for RAND, concluded that they were fundamentally flawed, rooted in a Cold War mindset and wilful misreading of data.

  Leon Gouré cannot be held responsible for the extravagant American use of air power, but he supplied a figleaf of intellectual respectability for policies the Johnson administration and many generals favoured anyway. He provided a vivid vindication of Michael Howard’s unease about RAND’s isolation from ‘friction, the contingent, the unforeseeable, all the things that really mattered’ in understanding war. An authoritative USAF historian has written that Seventh Air Force’s own commander, Lt. Gen. William Momyer, eventually became ‘appalled by the enormous tonnage of bombs the B-52s were dropping on the South Vietnamese jungle with little evidence of much physical effect on the enemy, however psychologically upsetting’. When Harry Rowen became president of RAND in 1967 he insisted on Gouré’s displacement, asserting that the man’s work was ‘harmful to the country’, as well as to the corporation. This evangelist for air power was first exiled to Danang to study enemy infiltration, later sacked.

  Yet it is striking to contrast the enthusiasm with which Gouré’s findings were received by most of the military, and the tepid response other Santa Monica researchers encountered when they presented data which cast doubt upon strategy or tactics. For instance, a report arguing that chemical crop destruction did little to hurt the enemy, while causing infinite grief to peasants, was dismissed out of hand. When its author visited MACV in hopes of briefing senior officers, he was sent home unheard. Bruce Griggs, the general’s scientific adviser, said contemptuously, ‘This is crap,’ and in Washington the Joint Chiefs agreed.

  By 31 December 1966 there were 385,000 Americans in Vietnam, and Robert McNamara announced that many more would be coming. Retired general John Waters published an article in US News and World Report which reflected the views and frustrations of many of his serving colleagues. It was headed ‘HOW THE US CAN WIN’, and urged dramatic ground thrusts into Laos and Cambodia. ‘It should be stated simply, clearly and in a dignified manner that we will not tolerate any interference from the Chinese, Laos and Cambodia … The US must choose the harder right rather than the easier compromise. We must … lay the future squarely on the line … In the end it will save men, money and materiel. It will accomplish the US mission with honor, with decision, and win the esteem and respect of the free world.’

  Maybe so. But although the 1966 cost of the war had been budgeted at $2 billion, the final bill came in above $15 billion, and would rise in the following year to $17 billion – about 3 per cent of US GNP. In President Johnson’s January 1967 State of the Union address, he announced a 6 per cent income and corporation tax surcharge to fund Vietnam. Privately, he was increasingly troubled by fear that C
hinese ‘volunteers’, of whom a million had fought in Korea, would soon appear alongside the NVA. He was shocked when the supremely charismatic Sen. Robert F. Kennedy announced that he no longer believed the war winnable. Thereafter Johnson became morbidly convinced that Kennedy, a close friend of McNamara, suborned his defense secretary.

  After twenty-eight months in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland told a Life magazine interviewer: ‘We’re going to out-guerrilla the guerrilla and out-ambush the ambush. And we’re going to learn better than he ever did because we’re smarter, we have greater mobility and firepower, we have more endurance and more to fight for … And we’ve got more guts.’ The US, he said, was now fighting a war of attrition, in which more than six thousand Americans had died in 1966. He was increasingly convinced that it was time to take whatever steps were necessary to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  In Hanoi, however, premier Pham Van Dong enquired urbanely of Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times: ‘And how long do you Americans want to fight, Mr Salisbury? … One year? Two years? Three years? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years? We shall be glad to accommodate you.’

  14

  Rolling Thunder

  1 STONE AGE, MISSILE AGE

  Air force chief Curtis LeMay never lived down a sentence in his 1965 memoirs: ‘My solution … would be to tell [the North Vietnamese] frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.’ Deep in the South Vietnamese jungle one of LeMay’s readers, Doug Ramsey, hankered to meet the general so he could point out that ‘It is hard to bomb something back into the stone age which has never left that in the first place.’ Lyndon Johnson committed US aircraft against the North because he was desperate to break out of the cycle wherein Washington seemed forever to dance to the enemy’s tune. McGeorge Bundy wrote to him on 30 June 1965: ‘It is within our power to give much more drastic warning to Hanoi … If Gen. Eisenhower is right in his belief that it was the prospect of nuclear attack which brought an armistice in Korea, we should at least consider what realistic threat is available to us.’ Fred Weyand, one of America’s smartest officers, and later MACV’s chief, supported Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Rolling Thunder II’ bomber offensive against North Vietnam: ‘If we were going to bend their will to ours, [this] was the only thing we had going for us.’