by Max Hastings
John Del Vecchio wrote: ‘For many soldiers Vietnam was depression, despair, a valley of terror. Much of the anxiety came not from the NVA, not from the jungle … [it] came from being taken away from wives and friends and family and being totally out of control.’ Some men wrote letters, others made audiotapes. A few were crass enough to include recordings of the noises in their lives: mortars and dime-nickels – 105mm guns. The tapes were vivid, sure enough, but frightened the bejeezus out of hapless folks back home. Meanwhile many idle soldiers clowned. Tim O’Brien wrote: ‘The average age in our platoon was nineteen or twenty, and as a consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere, like a sporting event at some exotic reform school. The competition could be lethal, yet there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and horseplay.’ Some, whether wilfully or through lack of mental equipment, took this spirit into the field, and paid. One boy was ‘always playing around’, until the morning he did his playing outside the perimeter, triggered a mine, lost a leg.
During the hours of darkness, most men’s sleep was interrupted by a stint on watch, or if they were unlucky out with a patrol, tiptoeing in their fear of stepping on something lethal, striving to avoid stumbling over a mangrove root or falling off a paddy dyke. Everybody hated night patrols, knowing that their silent-movement skills were imperfect, especially in the dry season when every stick and leaf crackled under the feet even of practised ‘ghost walkers’. In darkness the communists could move freely into hamlets and villages, knowing that it was unlikely they would find Americans or Southern troops. Walt Boomer: ‘At night we weren’t there, and the Vietcong was.’
Most often, commanders contented themselves with putting out ambushes, anything from a hundred to a thousand yards out. Sgt. Jerry Ledoux said: ‘I always stayed awake, and it shocked me because I had guys actually snoring when they were supposed to be on watch. Some people just didn’t realize that hey, this is not a game, this is a life-and-death thing.’ Capt. Joe Tenney agreed: ‘Too many men slept on watch, without their officers or NCOs checking up on them.’ Even if a squad on ambush was awake, when large numbers of enemy appeared it became a nice call whether to fire, or stay mute. Wayne Miller sometimes got so cold, wet and miserable that he urinated underneath himself, partly for the relief of the hot wetness, and partly because it was so dangerous to stand up and do it anywhere else – plenty of men got shot by nervous buddies. In a dozen contacts during Miller’s eight months in the field, he never knew whether his shooting hit anybody, but one night he was nannying a Claymore in an ambush when three enemy walked by. He had been instructed to do nothing until somebody fired. Sure enough, the first shots caused the Vietnamese to dash back up the trail, pausing momentarily in front of Miller’s hiding place. He touched the ‘hellbox’ that tripped the Claymore, and watched with horrified fascination as these human bodies disintegrated before his eyes.
As a 1967 company commander, Walt Boomer said: ‘I realised that I only became effective after several months. But as soon as that happened, you were pulled out.’ In his last weeks, up near the DMZ, ‘our mission was to find North Vietnamese. It was pretty brutish living. We were always on the go – once out for forty-five days with no shower. We lived like animals – and didn’t accomplish much. The enemy would either find us on their terms, or occasionally we’d find them on ours: the North Vietnamese soldier knew that if he came square on with us he was going to die. We didn’t understand that no matter how many we killed, it wasn’t going to be enough.’
4 GUNS
In close country, American firepower superiority achieved little. There, the infantryman’s personal weapon was what counted, and cost Westmoreland’s army a crisis of confidence. The most technologically advanced nation on earth equipped its infantrymen with a gun inferior to that which armed most of Hanoi’s soldiers. This assertion demands qualification: on a range, the US rifle was much better. Not in the boondocks, however. The supreme virtue of the communist AK lay in its empowerment of an ill-trained peasant to deliver automatic fire after the immersion of himself and his weapon in sand, mud or water, despite a paucity of maintenance that would cause most M-16s to refuse duty.
The AK-47, numbered for the year of its prototype, was invented by Russian designers led by Sgt. Mikhail Kalashnikov, a Red Army tank veteran wounded in 1941 who was thereafter employed as a small-arms specialist. The gun’s inspiration was an intermediate 7.62 x 39mm cartridge devised by the Germans for medium range – fifty to two hundred yards. Kalashnikov and his collaborators took this relatively light round and built around it an absurdly simple assault rifle, of which the firing mechanism owed something to the American M-1. Its reliability derived from having only eight big, heavy moving parts, assembled so loosely that grit did not trouble them. Chromium-plating of the barrel lining, gas chamber and piston increased the gun’s durability. Its only vices were a tendency to shoot slightly left, and a loud ‘clack’ when the change lever was shifted.
The AK-47’s inaccuracy was unimportant; it enabled guerrillas to deliver heavy fire, usually semi-automatic or in short bursts. Approaching a hundred million copies have been manufactured since 1947, at factories throughout the communist world. The Kalashnikov has proved the most influential firearm in history, the revolutionary’s weapon of choice from Angola to the Philippines, instantly recognisable by its banana-shaped magazine. In 1963 the Chinese began to supply North Vietnam with their Norinco-56 variant, which became responsible for killing or wounding more American and South Vietnamese soldiers than any other weapon in the theatre.
In the Korean era the US Army viewed the AK with contempt, as a mere sub-machine-gun. The Pentagon rejected a 1953 British proposal to equip NATO with a similar .280-calibre light-assault weapon, preferring its own M-14 long-range semi-automatic rifle, almost four feet long and weighing 12lb. In October 1962, however, McNamara wrote to army secretary Cyrus Vance: ‘I have seen certain evidence … which appears to indicate that with the M-14 rifle, we are equipping our forces with a weapon definitely inferior in firepower and combat effectiveness to the assault rifle with which the Soviets have equipped their own and their satellite forces worldwide since 1950.’
The army had nothing on its shelves with which to respond to this call for a new American weapon. It turned to Colt, manufacturers of a small-calibre rifle designated the AR-15 or ArmaLite. This was originally created in a workshop in the Hollywood garage of George Sullivan, a Lockheed aero-engineer fascinated by small arms. Sullivan hired Eugene Stoner, an ex-Marine with an ordnance background, to lead a design group. Fairchild Aviation bought their company, which produced several guns that never entered mass-production, but roused armed forces interest. Stoner’s AR-15 evolved into a handy 5.56mm weapon weighing 6.35 pounds unloaded, thirty-nine inches long, clad in black plastic. In 1959 Fairchild sold ArmaLite to Colt, which began to promote the AR-15, manufactured at its Hartford, Connecticut, plant.
First field trials in Vietnam generated enthusiasm, especially for its accuracy and lightness, but there were concerns that the ArmaLite’s high-velocity bullet was prone to shatter on impact, creating a dum-dum effect and thus possibly breaching international law. Macabre secret experiments were performed at the army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland on live angora goats, severed human heads and limbs imported from India. These concluded with the good news that the AR-15 did more cranial damage than the AK-47 or M-14. In January 1963 Earle Wheeler reported that the new gun was plainly superior to the Kalashnikov. He admitted some doubts about its reliability, but said these could be ‘readily corrected’. In December the Pentagon placed a first big order for 104,000 rifles, now designated M-16s, though hesitation persisted about their general issue: the Marines wanted a different model from the same stable, the Stoner 63.
By 1965 the M-16 was still under field testing, and earning mixed reports. Lt. Col. Hal Moore gave the gun a rave review after the 1/7th Cavalry used it in the Ia Drang valley battle, and this persuaded Westmoreland to get be
hind it. Colt meanwhile lobbied on Capitol Hill, exploiting media reports that soldiers in the field felt undergunned fighting against the AK-47 with the old M-14. The influential Sen. Richard Russell phoned McNamara on 7 December and said laconically, ‘Buy 100,000 rifles today, or I’m releasing the story to the press.’ Contracts were signed. Colt had posted a financial loss in 1963, but the M-16 launched it into boom times: the new weapon would eventually sell eight million copies.
Yet general field issue began just as grievous design flaws were becoming apparent. The army’s insistence on a weapon capable of long-range fire, effective at five hundred yards, imposed huge strains on the working parts of a light automatic weapon, especially when its cartridge was filled with so-called ball powder, which caused super-energetic detonation and heavy barrel fouling. The Shooting Times, civilian gun enthusiast’s bible, experienced repeated malfunctions with a test M-16. Its published report assumed that these would be corrected before military issue – only they were not. The gun’s historian C.J. Chivers has written: ‘The army and Colt’s had effectively put a prototype into mass production, and were fine-tuning it as it failed in the troops’ hands.’
Through 1966, soldiers fighting in Vietnam suffered insistent problems with their new weapons, which corroded fast in tropical conditions. After a round was fired, the empty case often jammed in the chamber. It then had to be extracted by a soldier pushing a rod – if he was fortunate enough to have one – down the barrel, maybe under fire. There was a chronic shortage of cleaning kits, which caused many men to rely on phone wire or nylon cord to pull through. Some men wrote home, asking their families to buy and send out cleaning rods. Of two thousand early M-16s tested by armourers, 384 malfunctioned.
The real scandal of the rifle began here. Behind closed doors, the US Army knew it faced a crisis: it was equipping infantrymen with a tool unfit for mortal combat. For months, however, it strove to hide this. ‘Teething troubles’ were blamed on soldiers’ sloppy cleaning practices. Col. Richard Hallocks of the army’s Advanced Research Development Agency led a campaign to conceal the M-16’s deficiencies, above all from Congress. He placed a ‘SECRET KEEP CLOSE’ stamp on an Agency memorandum about the rifle. An institutional cover-up was launched, to ensure that the M-16’s roll-out could continue uninterrupted. In February1967, Marines began to receive the weapons in Vietnam. When users protested about jams, these were blamed on their own clumsiness. At a Danang press conference, Lt. Gen. Lew Walt insisted that his men were ‘100 per cent sold’ on the new rifle. MACV warned its information officers to admit nothing about M-16 malfunctions.
Angry Marines and soldiers nonetheless began writing home. On 26 March 1967 the Washington Daily News broke the story, asserting a growing belief among grunts that the communists’ old gun was superior to the Americans’ new one. Extraordinary tales began to seep back, of firefights during which scores of men found themselves grappling with jammed weapons. After one action a Marine was quoted in a US local paper, the Asbury Park Evening News, saying: ‘You know what killed most of us? Our own rifle … Practically every one of our dead was found with his rifle tore down next to him where he had been trying to fix it.’ This was surely hyperbole, but Congress started taking notice. On 20 May 1967 a representative from New Jersey sent the Asbury Park clipping to McNamara, who could not thereafter plead ignorance.
This was the time when Marines were engaged in the so-called Hills battles, in which more than 150 died – some of them carrying guns that would not shoot. In July, the 2/3rd Marines suffered crippling losses amid continuing difficulties with M-16s. Capt. Gerry Turley described his own battalion’s changeover as ‘a disaster … We were just told, “Put the M-14s on this pile, and take M-16s out of that one.” There was a 75 per cent increase in weapon malfunctions. We complained and they just shrugged “Clean ’em better.”’ When the battalion lost all five of its company commanders in thirty days of intensive action, some officers blamed the high casualties explicitly on the new weapon. Turley said: ‘Can you imagine the effect on that infantry battalion? The morale factor was absolutely disastrous.’
A twenty-three-year-old lieutenant named Michael Chernevak wrote home detailing how in one firefight forty weapons malfunctioned in the company of which he was executive officer. He dispatched copies to his congressman, to Bobby Kennedy, and to newspapers headed by the Washington Post, which published the letter on 29 October. The Marine Corps responded by investigating not the rifle’s flaws, but instead the alleged crime of the letter-writer: Chernevak received a formal reprimand. Yet a Colt representative in Asia, Kanemitsu Ito, wrote to his employer stating that the allegations about its product’s shortcomings were justified. He himself had addressed a meeting of Marines which he likened to encountering ‘a den of angry, ferocious lions’. Ito said that most of the men hated their new rifle, ‘and had a right to hate it’. Colt responded to such private intelligence, and to published allegations, with a barrage of lies. They stubbornly refused to admit that there was anything wrong with their rifle. Late in 1967 M-16s were dumped from helicopters onto one Marine battalion in the field, without benefit of familiarisation training. Walt Boomer said: ‘That was a nightmare. In one ambush half the rifles malfunctioned. I’ve always loved the Marine Corps, but I’ve also held them accountable for stupid things.’ Likewise, Judd Kinne ‘always thought the M-14 was a better weapon’.
Enthusiasm for the rival AK-47 was not universal: a South Vietnamese officer whose men tested the guns reported that most eventually relinquished them, saying that it was hard to change magazines on the move, they were prone to rust, and the gun became rapidly less effective when intensively fired. The US Army and Marine Corps learned to live with the M-16, and to fight with it; more cleaning equipment was issued. Some of the issues identified in 1966 were sorted, two years on: a modified version with a new buffer and a chromium-plated bore worked better. Yet the fundamental fact remained, that while the M-16 was a much more sophisticated tool than the Kalashnikov, it was not as robust. It is also debatable whether issuing US forces in Vietnam with a rifle which squirted off a magazine in three seconds when set to ‘rock ’n’ roll’ promoted their best interests. In significant respects, the M-16/AK-47 story may be considered a paradigm for the military difficulties that beset US efforts to preserve South Vietnam.
Like many unsophisticated people, William Westmoreland enjoyed the limelight, at least until its glare destroyed his reputation. One day when MACV’s chieftain visited the 1st Air Cav, Don Graham travelled for a few hours with the great man and his three aides. He asked one, ‘Sir, what exactly do you do for the general?’ The answer came: ‘I carry his cleanly-pressed uniforms so he does not look disgusting when he meets the troops.’ In November 1967, at the behest of Lyndon Johnson the general paid a high-profile visit home, to lend his weight to assurances that the war was going fine.
Privately, Westmoreland thought nothing of the kind – he was demanding many, many more soldiers. He nonetheless did the job that his commander-in-chief wanted. The Washington Star used his words in a 7 November report headlined ‘In a Military Sense the War is Just About Won’. Bob Considine of the Philadelphia Inquirer echoed the general’s song when he wrote: ‘Stop griping. We’re winning this lousy war. It is not, repeat not, a stalemate.’ On 21 November Westmoreland told the National Press Club: ‘The enemy has not won a major battle in more than a year … He can fight his large forces only at the edges of his sanctuaries … His guerrilla force is declining at a steady rate. Morale problems are developing.’ Even James Reston, a longtime sceptic, felt obliged to treat with respect Westmoreland’s expressions of confidence. Following the National Press Club appearance, loyalists and patriots across America rallied behind their commander-in-chief and his general. More than that, they grew increasingly strident in denouncing nay-sayers. At the AFL-CIO union convention on 2 December, secretary of state Dean Rusk compared anti-war protesters to Hitler’s stormtroopers.
Yet Capt. John McNamara wrote home
: ‘Between the VC/NVA and myself there is an honest and mutually shared respect … We’re approaching a situation frighteningly like the French – militarily indomitable [but] politically hopelessly fragmented.’ Don Graham exchanged letters with his mother Kay back home, where she owned the Washington Post. He said afterwards: ‘I was confused then about what we should have done, and I’m confused now. By the time I went home [in July 1968] I thanked God I was out of there, and I would not have recommended to anyone else that they should go. We could be there twenty years without making any difference. The central fact was that we couldn’t find the enemy.’ Graham viewed the war from what might be called a privileged low level, but he was right.
NVA officer Pham Phu Bang was awed by the American assaults in Tay Ninh province during August 1967’s Operation Junction City: ‘they just kept coming and coming’. His men found themselves running out of food, medical supplies, weapons, ammunition. Bang was convinced his last hour had come when his unit was ordered to serve as rearguard in a blasted forest while the rest of the division pulled out. Hour after hour they lay over their weapons waiting to fight, and to die. Yet the Americans passed them by. Slowly and almost disbelievingly, Bang and his men understood that they would live to fight another day – indeed, many more days.
Neither the communists’ energy nor savagery seemed much diminished by all their foes’ sweeps, patrols, their cutely code-named air assaults. In December 1967, having occupied the montagnard community of Dak Son in the Central Highlands, they killed more than 250 of its two thousand people before burning the village. And at Dragon Court, North Vietnam’s generals were planning much bigger things.
