Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  On 5 March, Myron Harrington and the 1/5th Marine survivors who had fought in Hue were dispatched into reserve, at a camp that had a shower unit. By the time the captain’s turn came around, it had broken down. Instead he threw himself gratefully into the nearby South China Sea, before receiving orders to get on with the war. Joe Allen, the young lieutenant who had joined Delta Company in the midst of the Hue battle, proved a fine officer – and was dating Harrington’s sister-in-law Perrin. Harrington said sadly later: ‘I should have asked for him to be transferred out of my command.’ One night in May, he sent Allen’s platoon out on an ambush. A communist force bumped the neighbouring company, recoiled, and crashed into Allen’s position, which was overrun. The lieutenant was killed. Harrington said, ‘My relationship with my sister-in-law was never the same again.’ He himself succumbed to a spasm of such intense emotion, manifested in tears, that he was almost relieved of his command. When he left Vietnam a few months later, ‘I felt a sense of relief, that this heavy responsibility was suddenly lifted from me, but also a strong sense of guilt.’

  It was plain that neither the American people nor Congress would support the huge force increase sought by the military. On 12 March Eugene McCarthy emerged from the New Hampshire presidential primary election with just 350 fewer Democratic and Republican votes than the write-in for the incumbent president. Johnson’s old friend and former war supporter Clark Clifford took only a few weeks at McNamara’s old desk in the Pentagon to join the ranks of the sceptics. On 25 March the ‘Wise Old Men’, including George Ball, Henry Cabot Lodge, together with Generals Ridgway, Taylor and Bradley, assembled at the president’s behest to hear the latest briefings, then offered their own recommendation. Dean Acheson led the group in reporting its change of heart: most no longer believed that the war could be won. Only Abe Fortas, Max Taylor and Omar Bradley favoured fighting on.

  On the evening of 31 March Lyndon Johnson delivered a national television address that began: ‘Good evening my fellow-Americans. Tonight I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam … No other question so preoccupies our people.’ He announced a unilateral cessation of bombing beyond the 20th Parallel, and his commitment to open negotiations. Earlier, when speechwriter Harry McPherson saw the president reworking the draft, he asked a White House colleague, ‘Is he going to say sayonara?’ Yes, he was. Johnson concluded his TV speech: ‘… I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.’

  Many viewers had become deeply cynical about their chief executive. They listened in stunned silence, then some decided that this was a trick, dodge, gambit, stunt. It was not. That night, Johnson acknowledged the collapse of his presidency, which had achieved so much at home only to founder in the Big Muddy of South-East Asia. His enemies, the likes of Kennedy intimate Arthur Schlesinger, branded his decision to quit as ‘political cowardice’, because he had become convinced – like Harry Truman after the 1952 New Hampshire primary, during the Korean war – that he would be beaten on polling day. Schlesinger later quoted the explanation of Bill Moyers, former White House press secretary, for Johnson’s ‘Vietnam obsession’: ‘an atrocious marriage of ego and nationhood, so that Johnson saw himself as America involved in some sort of challenge to manhood’. President Eisenhower wrote disdainfully in his personal diary: ‘To me it seems obvious that the President is at war with himself and while trying vigorously to defend the actions and decisions he had made in the past, and urging the nation to pursue those purposes regardless of costs, he wants to be excused from the burden of office.’

  Many people linked the president’s announcement of abdication to the humiliations inflicted by the Tet offensive. In truth, Johnson had for months been contemplating withdrawal. It was nonetheless indisputable that his spirit had been broken by Vietnam. He had become an object of hatred and mockery to many, especially young Americans, because of deceits, failures, and killings for which most blamed him, rather than their nation’s enemies. Here was a triumph for Hanoi; here was an outcome that enabled Le Duan to clamber over the new mountain of corpses created by his militarily crazy initiative, and hail Tet as a ‘killer punch’. Nobody seemed to notice the American heroism that finally vanquished the assailants, the fifteen Medals of Honor awarded to those who had seen off the would-be occupiers of Saigon, the mass murderers of Hue. Dean Rusk admitted sorrowfully: ‘It was a brilliant political victory for [the communists] here in the United States.’

  The NLF’s Tran Bach Dang said that the Tet offensive was decisive in forcing the US to de-escalate the war – ‘no other evaluation is possible’. Le Duan’s authority and historic reputation were thereafter secure within his own society. On 5 April 1968 North Vietnam’s foreign minister told CBS interviewer Charles Collingwood – Walter Cronkite had declined the offer of a Hanoi visa, rightly judging that acceptance would present a propaganda coup to the other side – that his country was ready to talk. The president nominated Averell Harriman to lead US negotiators. Though the war still had a further seven years – seven years – to run, the outcome that was no longer plausible was North Vietnam’s defeat.

  20

  Continuous Replay

  1 DYING

  In the aftermath of Tet, communist fortunes seemed at a low ebb. Again and again, US and ARVN forces struck battered Vietcong units. One morning in the delta, a guerrilla command group entered the village of My Loc only to collide with an American sweep. Shells killed a seventeen-year-old whose name was Khang, son of a VC cadre who wrote: ‘I sat beside the body with my heart breaking, and spoke to him as if he was still alive: “Rest in peace, my son, you have done your duty for the revolution.”’ In later years, the boy’s two brothers also joined the Vietcong. Their mother shrugged that if they did not fight for one side, they would be conscripted by the other, and thus find themselves shooting at their father. He wrote: ‘I cannot count the number of women who lost three, four, even seven or eight sons and daughters as martyrs for our cause.’

  In May 1968, orders from COSVN to launch new attacks on towns and cities roused scant enthusiasm. Cadres complained that they were offered neither reinforcements nor new weapons, instead simply invited to reprise the February missions in which comrades had sacrificed so much blood. Groups attacking Saigon were urged to ‘bring the flames of war right into the enemy’s lair’, but Huynh Cong Than recalled: ‘We went into the second wave of Tet assaults feeling like suicide squads.’ On the night of 5 May, VC forces advancing from the north and east were stopped by ARVN and Americans on the outskirts of the capital, while those in the west and south became locked in street battles which they quickly lost. By the seventh day, said Than, ‘we recognised that the situation had become extremely unfavourable … I still do not understand why we attacked the cities again, when the balance of forces had tilted so heavily against us … What led our leaders to believe that millions were boiling over with revolutionary zeal and ready to sacrifice everything?!! We found this was not so. The masses hated the US and puppet regime … but this anger had not reached boiling point.’ With the Vietcong’s eclipse, hereafter the NVA overwhelmingly dominated the battlefield struggle.

  Yet the Americans and the ARVN never shared much sense of success, of the war getting easier. On 20 June the Thieu government decreed a general mobilisation. Mutual confidence between the allies was low: following the May attacks, rumours spread among South Vietnamese, seeping through some barracks, that the Americans had deliberately stood aside, so that Saigon’s troops were forced to fight. In the 2012 words of a Vietnamese officer: ‘[People] argued that the sophisticated US electronic intelligence networks … must have been closed down, to let the enemy infiltrate the capital so easily. Some even alleged that US helicopters delivered food to communist soldiers … that US Army trucks were moving communist troops. Although the rumours were not credited by all Vietnamese, many still believe them.’

  Hundreds of thousands of combat deaths from 1968 onwards were especially tragic, because th
ey took place after the US had abandoned hopes of victory, and was battling merely to escape explicit defeat. For those who recalled the Second World War, the Vietnam narrative became baffling. While it entailed movement, most of this was circular. There was no sense of physical progress, as from Sicily into Italy, or Iwo Jima to Okinawa. A vast array of power seemed bewilderingly impotent. Consider the 11th Armored Cavalry, deployed north of Saigon, which with its supporting engineers, medical, supply and service personnel, military police, chemical, transport, signal, intelligence, radio security, psychological operations, USAF liaison teams and division artillery mustered 4,600 men. The regiment possessed fifty helicopters – Hueys, Cobras and OH6A light observation ‘Loaches’ – together with four hundred tracked vehicles – M-48A2 tanks, 155mm howitzers and personnel-carriers. One of its officers described the 11th as ‘a magnificently organized, equipped, and trained instrument. For World War II.’

  Creighton Abrams deplored the inability of such juggernauts to prevent – for instance – the VC’s abduction of twenty peasants who refused to build a roadblock: ‘It’s kind of a sad thing. When the people try to make a little stand … we are not able to secure them. I’ll always remember this district chief who said, “You should never overtly take information from a civilian unless you can guarantee his safety.” Pretty good rule … But this trouble that nobody can see and hear … is meaner than hell – just [VC] going around collecting taxes, quietly snatching somebody … and shooting him.’

  This was a Groundhog Day conflict, in which contests for a portion of elephant grass, jungle or rice paddy were repeated not merely month after month, but year upon year, with no Andie MacDowell as prize in the last reel. All that changed were the names and numbers of those who sweated, feared, fought, died. Pfc Jeff Anthony said: ‘You find yourself doing the same thing again and again in the same place, and it becomes obvious it is not working. There were some really sad moments, when one was trying to figure out what on earth we were doing there.’ Likewise Sgt. Jim Stevens: ‘Sometimes you’d hit an LZ you’d dropped on two weeks before – your old trash was still there. You’d say: Why don’t we fight this war properly, hit these people with everything – or get out?’

  In 1968 the communist military presence was most conspicuous in the three northernmost provinces below the Demilitarized Zone. The main burden of combating four NVA divisions deployed there fell upon the US Marine Corps. In the first days of May a battle took place that attracted negligible attention yet wrecked a battalion, which suffered losses worse than those of the notorious Hamburger Hill clashes a year later. American armed strength was close to its peak – 543,000 men – yet in a northern corner of Vietnam, on a battlefield barely two miles square, embracing a cluster of abandoned hamlets, the NVA was able to leverage violence more effectively than their foes. The story of Daido merits recounting in detail, as an exemplar for scores of other such battles, bloodier than any that took place in twenty-first-century Iraq or Afghanistan, and probably more futile.

  The Marine 2/4th battalion landing team had fought several significant actions during the previous months, and bled heavily. The unit had its share of the brave and conscientious – even some heroes – but also duds, members of ‘McNamara’s 100,000’ – men enlisted after the defense secretary lowered service mental and educational requirements, to feed the insatiable demand for infantrymen. L/Cpl. James Lashley, an M-60 gunner who had been eight months in the bush, thought ‘we were just going through the motions’. His own platoon moving at night ‘sounded like a herd of water-buffalo with tin cans on their backs’. The chaplain’s wife had become a fervent anti-war campaigner, and started divorce proceedings against her husband for accepting duty in Vietnam.

  When Capt. Jim Williams arrived to command one of the 2/4th’s companies, he found himself without a flak jacket. A supply sergeant gestured to a heap outside the morgue: ‘You can maybe find one without blood on it.’ Williams thought his new unit was ‘in a terrible state – they’d lost so many people’. Such was the turnover through rotations and casualties that officers could not identify all their Marines: Williams knew that his driver was nicknamed ‘Bull’, but never learned the rest of the man’s name before he was killed. In an action on 11 September 1967 the battalion suffered sixteen dead and 118 wounded; on 14 October twenty-one men were killed, twenty-three wounded; in November and December six were killed and seventy-eight wounded. Late on the afternoon of 12 March 1968, Foxtrot Company lost eighteen killed in an ambush. The following day five more Marines were shot while retrieving the dead, and one corpse fell out of a helicopter while being ferried to the rear.

  A young lance-corporal wrote a letter home couched in almost hysterical terms, asserting that everybody around him was dying. The boy’s father, understandably distressed, wrote to his representative on Capitol Hill about his son’s plight, prompting a ‘Congressional’ – a formal enquiry to the Marine Corps. CO Bill Weise was dragged from his cot at 3 a.m. to take a radio call from Division, which gave him two hours to produce an appropriate response. Weise summoned the letter-writer, who promptly burst into tears and said, ‘I’m sorry, Colonel.’ In March 1968 the battalion suffered fifty-nine dead and 360 wounded, while being credited with killing 474 NVA. This last figure was phantasmagorical, but Weise had learned that he was expected to balloon body count if he wished to keep his job.

  The battalion commander was thirty-nine years old, son of a blue-collar worker from a tough district of Philadelphia. He caught the tail end of the Korean war, thereafter became a qualified ranger, scuba-diver and master-parachutist. He had assumed command of the battalion six months earlier when his predecessor was wounded, and had since worked hard to rebuild discipline and morale. He said: ‘There were so many things that weren’t right. My men were not fully trained: they were sloppy. When I asked for a fire support plan, the operations officer didn’t know how to put one together.’ Weise was not the type destined to command armies, but instead a courageous, decent, conscientious officer who chain-smoked cheap cigars because they did not glow at night like cigarettes, and worried somewhat that his wife Ethel might not be waiting when he went home, because she was furious with him for soliciting assignment to Vietnam.

  When the unit was redeployed north of the Cua Viet River near the DMZ, the Marines were impressed by how quickly the enemy knew about it, probably through wireless intercepts. ‘Hanoi Hannah’, the English-language propaganda broadcaster, announced that the 2/4th was up there, commanded by Bill Weise. They had spirit enough not to be rattled when she added: ‘All you Marines are going to die!’ On the night of 27 April, half Weise’s battalion was engaged on a sweep for an NVA unit known to be nearby. G Company was led by Capt. Robert Mastrion, a small, dark, bespectacled New Yorker commissioned from the ranks, twenty-eight years old but only a month with the battalion, whom few of his people liked or trusted. One Marine said: ‘We were worn out, but here’s this prick who wanted to “get some”.’ Golf Company first knew it was in trouble when a grenade exploded at a man’s feet. Somebody shouted, ‘Jesus, gooks!’ Within seconds devastating fire dropped eight of the leading squad. Gunnery-sergeant Billy Armer, with fragments in his face and chest, kept mumbling, ‘Sonofabitch, I’m hit … sonofabitch, I’m hit.’ They had bumped an NVA column crossing their front: the enemy’s green tracer clashed with their own red, amid a chaos of shouts and shadows. Mastrion called for reinforcements, but Weise responded, ‘You’re on your own’: he feared that if he pushed more men forward through the darkness, Americans must shoot each other.

  A corpsman told Mastrion he had a head-wound case who would die without medevac. At 0130 a CH-34 Sea Horse clattered in from the assault ship Iwo Jima. The Marines radioed that the NVA were four hundred yards away, and risked illuminating a strobe light to guide the chopper. This proved a bad decision: the enemy was much closer, and as the Sea Horse set down and began loading wounded, there was a thunderous explosion. An RPG7 shattered its windscreen and blew out the pilot’s left e
ye. The helicopter lifted off, swung south and staggered three hundred yards before thudding back to earth. The co-pilot took over and somehow reached Iwo Jima, but the Marine with the head wound had been left behind, screaming incoherently. His buddies wished desperately that a corpsman would administer a morphia overdose, but instead Capt. Mastrion and a squad stayed through the five hours he took to die, while the rest of the company pulled back.

  At daybreak the battalion was secure, but traumatised. Radioman Cpl. Peter Schlesiona wrote home: ‘It was without doubt the most hair-raising night I have spent in Nam.’ Mastrion was medevacked with excruciating back pain. Capt. Jay Vargas, a twenty-nine-year-old Mexican-American from Arizona whom G Company knew and respected, took over. After such intense experiences, Weise’s men might have been forgiven for thinking that they had seen their share of action for a while. Unfortunately, war is mean with respites. Division identified two NVA battalions moving in the 2/4th’s area, just north of the Bo Dieu tributary along which supplies were carried the last of the seven miles between the sea and the big US logistics base on its south bank at Dong Ha. Col. Milton Hull, the regimental commander to whom Bill Weise reported, was morbidly nervous that the enemy intended to attack Dong Ha. He thus spread his available forces perilously thinly along the banks of the Cua Viet and the Bo Dieu, as a screen against such an enemy movement, which intelligence guessed might climax on May Day, a big date in communist calendars.

  In truth, the NVA were not ambitious enough to try for Dong Ha: instead they planned merely to use rockets and machine-guns to harass river traffic. Unusually, their 6/52nd Infantry had access to supporting fire from two heavy guns positioned beyond the DMZ. They completed digging bunkers and laying field-telephone lines between the adjacent hamlets of Daido, An Lac and Dong Hoang, at 0500 on 29 April, twenty-four hours before the 2/4th Marines came into their lives. It was their explicit purpose to provoke the Americans to attack, on what they considered favourable terms for themselves.