Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  That spring, domestic resistance to America’s commitment burst forth to become a mass movement, entwined with, though certainly not confined to, the hippy movement and the new metro-generation’s embrace of drugs and liberal sex. Hairy hippy chieftain Jerry Rubin said, ‘There’s a war going on between young people and the old people who run this country.’ A galaxy of stars and celebrities came out against the war, headed by most of the Kennedys and their intimates such as J.K. Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger, and also including Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer and Jane Fonda, paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock, British philosopher Bertrand Russell, many artists, academics and leftists on both sides of the Atlantic, together with leaders of the black civil rights movement. Martin Luther King proclaimed in August 1967: ‘The promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam.’

  At veteran diplomat Ellsworth Bunker’s April confirmation hearing before succeeding Henry Cabot Lodge, the newly-designated US Saigon ambassador reasserted the war aim of a strong, viable and free South Vietnam. Sen. Fulbright demanded ‘whether the right of self-determination of fifteen million Vietnamese is worth the damage it is doing to our own country’. Month by month, demonstrations grew in scale until by October fifty thousand protesters rallied in Washington, where ten thousand troops were deployed to protect the Pentagon. Sen. Edward Kennedy declared: ‘No great nation can long claim to have won freedom and democracy for another people if … destruction of their land and way of life was the hallmark of the effort.’

  Nuance was a significant casualty of the argument. Supporters of the war saw themselves as patriots as well as foes of communism. The New York Times reported the strident words of a Reform rabbi, newly returned from Vietnam, who asserted that those attacking the administration ‘are helping to prolong the war … doing what the “hawks” in Hanoi most desire’ by portraying the US as ‘the aggressor and the Vietcong and North Vietnamese as the innocent victims’. Carl McIntire, founder of the Bible Presbyterian Church, declared the struggle ‘a righteous and holy cause’, while evangelist Billy James Hargis argued that Americans were fighting for ‘freedom … security and protection of the United States’. The editors of Christianity Today, an evangelical weekly, urged more bombing.

  Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum the anti-war movement became increasingly frenzied. Many Americans familiar with Vietnam deplored the manner in which their nation was conducting the fight. They also, however, acknowledged communist brutality and the totalitarian character of the Hanoi regime, and thus recoiled from protesters who made a moral leap beyond chants about the iniquity of their own president – ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?’ – to assert the goodness of the enemy. When Frank Scotton addressed students, he was dismayed to find that they took for granted the legitimacy of the struggle waged in the name of Ho Chi Minh: ‘When I challenged that, they couldn’t see what I was getting at – it was as if I had started talking higher mathematics.’ The chairman of the JCS was shocked to hear an anti-war protester, confronted with evidence that PoWs were being tortured, declare that blame lay with America’s fliers, for taking the work.

  Henry Kissinger once referred contemptuously to the ‘inexhaustible masochism of American intellectuals, for whom it was a symbol of faith to be convinced that all the difficulties in [East–West] relations were caused by the stupidity or the intractability of the USA’. This was the freakish phase of history at which a significant portion of the youth of the Western democracies professed to admire Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and other revolutionaries, heedless of the oppression their heroes promoted – and, in Mao’s case, the mass murders over which he presided, incomparably worse than any modern horror for which the US could be held responsible.

  The consequences of the rising tide of domestic turbulence were profound, especially on college campuses. Since the war’s beginnings, while in the field some soldiers, sailors and airmen had bungled and many had shown themselves insensitive, their pervasive spirit reflected commitment to an unwelcome but necessary duty. From 1968 onwards, however, this changed. As veterans went home they were replaced by new men, many infected by a cult of dissent, drugs – and disbelief. When a MACV briefer reported that incoming battalions included some men with college educations, Gen. Creighton Abrams thought that sounded good. However, one of his officers said sepulchrally, ‘More capable of writing their congressman.’

  Robert Holcombe was a black New Yorker who evaded the draft for a year and eventually took the military oath in handcuffs. The son of schoolteachers, he was an avowed rebel, stalwart of sit-ins and teach-ins, who devoured Mao’s Little Red Book and was expelled from the University of Tennessee for participating in a riot. He said later: ‘I had read tons of books including literature from Cuba, China, Hanoi itself. Wars are only fought over property, really. As I saw it, we were after a foothold in a small country in the Orient with rubber plantations, rice, timber and possibly oil. And the people. A cheap source of labor.’ Yet at the end of his long dodgem game with authority, he found himself unwillingly serving the US Army in Vietnam.

  Holcombe, though in 1967 he had not yet got near the war, was an extreme example of what was coming. A study of soldiers proceeding to Vietnam in that year showed one in five already using marijuana, a proportion that three years later would rise to half. The in-country percentage of known pot-smokers grew from one-quarter in 1967 to two-thirds in 1971. A host of men read with disbelief about the virulence of the protests back in the States, in newspapers from home delivered to paddies or elephant grass. Lt. Andy Finlayson’s sergeant recoiled in disgust when their unit picked up English-language communist leaflets quoting Eugene McCarthy’s and Robert Kennedy’s denunciations of the war. ‘Unfortunately I could not give him a good reason for why these American political leaders would say such things,’ said this career Marine. Some American warriors came later to believe – indeed, forever after to insist – that rather than losing the war in the field, they had been betrayed by moral weakness at home, the ‘stab in the back’.

  Texan Capt. John McNamara wrote from Danang, observing that he and most of his kind were ‘hurt by evidences of civil dissension [in the US] … I saw a VC-mined civilian bus the other day: women, kids, animals splashed all over the place.’ Yet he acknowledged his own confusion: ‘We don’t do that. The larger question is, did I and my government and by inference Western civilization create the conditions that bred the Asian terrorist?’ Yet even the communists were bemused by the excesses of the US anti-war movement. Radical activist Tom Hayden, who later married Jane Fonda, visited Hanoi and became its passionate advocate. One of the few comic moments in Doug Ramsey’s jungle captivity took place when Hayden’s name was mentioned during an interrogation. The prisoner asked his captors their opinion of him. A cadre replied coldly, ‘We admire his ideology, but despise him as a person. How can you respect a man who betrays his own country?’

  It remains debatable how far American domestic opposition to the war was influenced by principle, how far by conscription for military service – the draft – which gave some young men an overriding personal motive to crusade against a conflict that might waste two years of their youth, at worst forfeit their lives. Statistics show that relatively few Americans fought against their will. Twenty-five of the twenty-seven million draft-age men of the war generation never fired a shot. Of those who went, however – comprising a quarter of around 2.15 million Americans who served in Vietnam – 17,725 died. A Harris survey found that most Americans considered them ‘suckers, having to risk their lives in the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time’.

  Supporters of the conflict highlighted the fact that only 1 per cent of draft-eligible Americans failed to register, and a similarly tiny proportion refused induction. However, this ignored the extraordinary range of legal exemptions available to those savvy enough to exploit them. Until 1966 married men escaped, which prompted a 10 per cent rise in adolescent wedding
s. Others escaped merely by being in school – the Bill Clinton and Donald Trump option: Yale president Kingman Brewster spoke witheringly of ‘a cynical avoidance of service, a corruption of the aims of education, a tarnishing of the national spirit’.

  Draftee Don Graham recalled that his father’s generation had defined each other by who did, and did not, go to fight in World War II: ‘My dad could never forget that Hubert Humphrey was a 4F who stayed at home. Yet in Vietnam I was meeting almost no one who had been to college … I realised that the winners of our generation would be those who went to law school.’ Mark Rudd, leader of Students for a Democratic Society, sought a deferment on the grounds that he was a professional revolutionary. He was later declared physically unfit, though the draft board likely considered his adverse impact on the army, if forced into fatigues.

  The parents of one in four college students incited their sons to avoid the draft. Some got off because they could claim to be of ‘questionable moral character’, for instance through convictions for cattle-rustling, pot-smoking or killing an eagle. Gays were also exempt. National Guardsmen escaped – the route preferred by George W. Bush, along with ten players for the Dallas Cowboys, whose management arranged for them all to be assigned to the same local Guard unit. A Philadelphia footballer who likewise avoided Vietnam said: ‘If we had been called up, the Eagles would have been left without a backfield.’ Some smart doctors joined the federal Health Service Corps, becoming – as they mockingly called themselves – ‘Yellow Berets’: an astonishing nine such men later became Nobel Laureates. Sympathetic or venal medical examiners could get rich kids off, an avenue also exploited by Donald Trump. It was possible to fake a gastro-intestinal ulcer by extracting a pint of blood, then drinking it just before taking tests. Certain city draft boards were identified as soft touches for exemptions, such as Seattle, Washington, and Butte, Montana. Berkeley, California’s city council adopted a resolution barring the police from arresting deserters.

  Lawrence Baskir and William Strauss, authors of a study of wartime conscription, wrote: ‘The draftees who fought and died in Vietnam were primarily society’s “losers”, the same men who get left behind in schools, jobs and other forms of social competition.’ Only 7 per cent of those from high- and middle-income families saw combat; 9 per cent of college graduates, against 14 per cent of high-school dropouts. In 1965 blacks accounted for a quarter of all enlisted men’s combat deaths, which was such an embarrassment to the Defense Department that it contrived thereafter through selective posting dramatically to lower the percentage. Gen. Westmoreland said later that rather than the American people ‘bearing any burden … the only ones that … paid a price and made a sacrifice were those on the battlefield, who were mainly poor men’s sons’.

  Yet US Army historian Conrad Crane has re-examined the statistics on Vietnam service to make an impressive case for qualifying this view. He cites a 1992 study which showed that while 30 per cent of all those killed in action came from the lowest third of the income range, 26 per cent were drawn from the highest. Though 12.5 per cent of all combat deaths were black and 5 per cent Hispanic, these represented slightly lower losses than those minorities’ proportions of draft-age males. The black militants who convinced much of the world, as well as themselves, that they were bearing an unjust share of a white man’s war overstated their case.

  Some adolescents chose to make principled stands against service: the first ritual draft-card burnings took place in 1964. Fifty thousand refuseniks became fugitives, and some adopted exotic expedients. One took to the mountains, and spent six years living in a treehouse. A Minnesota resister was arrested in Eureka, California, while working as a department store Santa Claus. Some stayed in the US under false identities. Rural New England was dubbed ‘little Canada’ because so many fugitives hung out on its farms and campuses. For exiles, Mexico was sympathetic, but a tough place to hustle a dollar. Some new arrivals in Sweden – up there with Canada as US fugitives’ first choices – were obliged to become beggars, because welfare paid only $15 a week; but then a sympathetic Swedish government doubled this subsidy – to the fury of Congress.

  One deserter spent the entire Vietnam period bicycling around Canada, living on handouts. Another argued, ‘I’m not a draft-dodger – I’m a twentieth-century runaway slave.’ A young soldier identified only as Bob deserted to Canada while on pre-embarkation leave, from whence he wrote to a friend serving in the field: ‘I am not a pacifist, but in the army I became aware of what that war is – a racist war conducted on behalf of the huge American war machine … You guys are in the best position to let the people of America [k]now just what kind of shit is being carried out in their name.’ Some dodgers must later have asked themselves whether their long exiles were worth it, because the US judicial system dealt charitably with more than half a million draft violators: only twenty-five thousand were indicted, and 3,250 jailed. Among high-profile resisters, in 1967 Muhammad Ali was sentenced to five years, but never served a day. Nonetheless, in this respect blacks generally fared poorly, receiving longer sentences than white violators. Mississippi and Louisiana boards became notorious for using draft law as a weapon against civil rights workers. Only one in seven draftees saw combat. All but 3 per cent of these finally came home, 10 per cent having suffered a wound needing hospitalisation. Many were also burdened by memories they would have been happier without.

  It deserves notice that a vast number of young patriots who had not the smallest desire to serve went to Vietnam without complaint or fuss, because they believed it to be their duty. Out on a South Dakota farm, Larry Pressler’s pa told his boys they should make no attempt to dodge the draft. If they got out of it, he said, somebody poorer than themselves would have to go in their place, ‘and you will regret it for the rest of your lives’. The two Pressler brothers went, fought, came home. David Rogers, son of a New Jersey research chemist, read English and history at Hamilton College. Rogers, a thoughtful young man whose father was a Quaker strongly opposed to the war, then registered as a conscientious objector, but could not bring himself to stay home: ‘There were no good choices. I was from a small town. I felt it wasn’t right to let someone else go in my place. I saw a photo of a medic taking care of people and thought, “I can do that.”’ He defied his father’s anger to serve as an infantry corpsman. Far more young Americans accepted the call than refused it, though the latter received most of the publicity.

  One further point about the anti-war movement deserves consideration: Americans will forgive almost anything save failure. The struggle tried beyond endurance the patience of the world’s greatest democracy. Many of its citizens turned sour not because their cause appeared morally wrong, but instead because it seemed doomed.

  2 WARNIKS

  In Vietnam, by the spring of 1967 Frank Scotton was among those deeply depressed: ‘It was obvious we were making a lot of mistakes, basing the conduct of war on creating terrible destruction among the people we had come to protect.’ On 21 February, the perennially adventurous French journalist Bernard Fall was killed when he trod on a mine while accompanying a sweep in the ‘Street Without Joy’ near Danang. He had come to be hailed by sceptics as a seer, for the insistence with which he proclaimed that the US was repeating all the French blunders of the 1950s, only with more firepower. ‘Free World’ forces now numbered 1.3 million South Vietnamese and Americans, one soldier for every fifteen of the population, with two thousand tactical aircraft supported by SAC’s B-52s. While Chicago’s O’Hare airport boasted 690,000 plane movements a year, by 1968 Tan Son Nhut could claim 804,000, Danang 846,000 and Bien Hoa a record-shaking 857,000 – and those numbers did not include helicopters.

  Scotton formed an enduring conviction that the only credible strategy was to deploy US forces in depth and permanently along a line between Quang Tri and the Mekong. ‘If we did not do this, we were doomed to a long war, the sort Americans are not good at.’ It remains highly doubtful that it was feasible thus to close the Ho Chi Minh Tr
ail; moreover, even success would not have cured the debility of the Saigon regime. Scotton’s view remains nonetheless widely shared among veterans.

  Out on the battlefield, or rather a hundred battlefields on high hills, in flat paddies and dense jungle, by American decree the ARVN had become bystanders, while US forces launched a succession of bloody, messy operations to locate, engage and destroy both NVA formations and Vietcong guerrillas – in 1967–68, still many more of the latter than the former. Westmoreland hounded his commanders to keep their men moving, the enemy off-balance. After a battle near the Cambodian border on 31 March–1 April 1967, in which an attacking VC regiment was harrowed by Lt. Col. Alexander Haig’s 1/26th Infantry, MACV’s chieftain ‘royally chewed out’ corps commander Bruce Palmer for failing to pursue the retreating foe.

  ‘One of the agonies you’d go through,’ said Fred Weyand, then commanding the 25th Division, ‘is that you’d send out a sweep operation … maybe take fifteen men killed. Then, after that operation, we’d have to pull out of there … and when we went back a month later, we had the same problem all over again.’ Weyand was highly critical of Westmoreland’s belief that the US Army could crush the enemy through attrition: ‘It just seemed ridiculous.’ The Americans had nothing like enough infantry to secure anything beyond artillery range from the network of fire-support bases now excavated and fortified across the country, mostly on red hilltops stripped of vegetation. Foot-soldiers surged forth, fought, moved on, leaving behind discarded C-ration cans and munitions that returning Vietcong found most serviceable.