by Max Hastings
In that turbulent, bloody election year, America was divided as never since the Civil War. Lyndon Johnson now regretted his abdication, and nursed vain hopes of being belatedly drafted as Democratic candidate. Bitterness about his own plight intensified the disdain, even contempt, he harboured towards his vice-president. Across America, hostility to the armed forces became a widespread and unprecedented phenomenon: USN Cmdr. Jim Koltes, serving as a staff officer at the Pentagon, became as unwilling as were most of his colleagues to wear uniform in the streets of Washington: ‘You were liable to get into a fight.’ Yet even now, no serious presidential candidate, not even Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy, dared to advocate unconditional US withdrawal from Vietnam – explicit acknowledgement of defeat. There also remained a few dogged escalators, advocates of a formal declaration of war on the North, though such a proposition would never have passed Congress.
In 1968 Americans saw death all around them: Kennedy and Martin Luther King martyred; race riots in the cities. As for Vietnam, on 28 May Michael Minehan, a young machine-gunner in Quang Tri province, wrote home: ‘Today we are ninth day in the field and there isn’t much to say because all we are doing is walking in the mountains looking for gooks … I thought I would drop you a line to say everything is fine.’ Five days later, however, it stopped being fine. Minehan’s parents in Marlborough, Massachusetts, received a telegram: ‘From Marine Corps commandant Deeply regret to confirm that your son … died on 2 June 1968 … He sustained fragmentation wounds to the body from friendly air strikes which fell short of the target area … His remains will be prepared, encased and shipped at no expense to you accompanied by an escort either to a funeral home or national cemetery selected by you. In addition you will be reimbursed to an amount not to exceed five hundred dollars towards funeral and interment expenses. Please wire collect to Marine Corps headquarters your wishes in this respect.’
By the end of 1968, 16,899 such telegrams had been received in homes across the land – over three hundred a week – and Americans were tiring of them. MACV fumed that nobody would give commanders credit the soldiers believed they deserved for having smashed first Tet, then mini-Tet. Pacification chief Robert Komer said during a weekly intelligence update meeting on 29 June: ‘We won a campaign and nobody knows it.’ The army’s new field commander Gen. Creighton Abrams concurred, saying of the media, ‘They’re calling you out before the throw is made to the plate. The umpire out there, represented by the [news] bureau chiefs, he’s swinging his thumb over the shoulder and, hell, the left fielder still hasn’t thrown the ball … The umpires are all against us.’
One of Abrams’ senior staff officers lamented: ‘It seems to me we’ve jockeyed ourselves into a funny position in Paris … If anything goes well for the enemy and he’s able to mount [an] offensive, then he gets credit in the headlines for power and so on, like he did at Tet. On the other hand, if by virtue of our efforts here, we succeed in pre-empting him and prevent his offensive, he gets credit for de-escalation.’ Abrams concurred.
In August, provincial NLF and Vietcong chiefs received terse, arbitrary, wirelessed orders from COSVN, decreeing that there was to be a ‘third wave’ of Tet. Some of the tactical instructions were absurd: fighters were told to conceal themselves in tunnels and bunkers in the midst of Saigon, hiding the excavations with wooden covers carried for the purpose. This order was belatedly cancelled, mere local commando attacks substituted. Elsewhere in the region, groups launched sporadic bombardments of American bases, using rockets left from February’s stockpiles. The August attacks concentrated on Tay Ninh province, and most were easily repulsed.
These were bad days for the Vietcong. Across the Mekong delta, guerrilla river and canal communications were impeded or cut by intensive American and Vietnamese boat patrolling, aided at night by searchlights. The guerrillas were too depleted to challenge renewed sweeps. Traditional sanctuaries suddenly became vulnerable. Units were obliged to disperse, and most withdrew towards Cambodia. Their aid stations suffered repeated attacks. The delta Vietcong’s best battalion commander, Muoi Xuong, was dispatched to Saigon to discover the fate of a unit with which contact had been lost. He himself was promptly killed after US troops discovered his underground hiding-place. Desertions from VC units became endemic.
On 31 August, with American commanders seeing themselves on a roll, ‘Blowtorch’ Komer expressed alarm at the possibility that Hanoi might propose an unconditional ceasefire before the US election: ‘Both candidates would support it: “How can you be against a ceasefire? It’s like motherhood.”’ Earle Wheeler told the president in October: ‘Abrams’ assessment is highly favourable. If we haven’t won the war militarily, we are well on the way to it.’ The chief of staff of the notorious US 9th Division in the delta described how his formation tallied its achievements for 1968: ‘The retail concept of returns on operations, that is, a large number of small enemy eliminations, as compared to the wholesale concept … was the way to go. For example, if all thirty-nine [rifle] companies would eliminate just one VC a day, that would amount to 1,170 a month.’ Here was a vivid example of the statistical lunacy, the mountain of gobbledegook, that passed for strategy.
Yet the men who fought at Daido; those who saw more than a hundred helicopters being lost a month; who knew that in 1968 the communists mounted 1,500 ground attacks and the depleted Vietcong contrived 9,400 recorded terrorist incidents which cost the lives of 5,400 civilians; who noticed the ARVN record of 139,670 desertions by Christmas; were no longer convinced that the war was either being won, or winnable. Maj. William Haponski wrote: ‘My experiences, I believe, are important as a reflection of the whole war, its instances of what appeared to be American successes … We were plowing what seemed like new ground, hopeful of a good harvest, but in fact the fields had been almost entirely ruined by what had happened earlier, and very little good could grow there.’
A man in Pfc John Hall’s infantry company suddenly announced: ‘I ain’t going in the field no more.’ His comrades begged and pleaded with him, urging that he could not want a dishonourable discharge, but he stayed stubborn: ‘I don’t give a shit. I don’t want to die.’ He was duly dispatched to the rear for disciplinary proceedings, but there were plenty more like him coming. Draftees who caught planes for Saigon after witnessing the strife on the streets of Chicago during August’s Democratic Convention were hard to persuade that they were joining a war worth dying for.
The bewilderment besetting Americans of every political hue was reflected in a letter published in the New York Times on 2 September, from an upstate history professor. He said that although a registered Democrat for twenty-four years, he proposed to abstain in November, because ‘It seems to me that an electorate which could conceivably go for Hubert Humphrey deserves to end up with Richard Nixon.’ The Republican presidential candidate knew that his own prospects of victory hinged on a sufficiency of voters believing that he, and he alone, could end the war without exposing the United States to humiliation. He allowed it to be supposed – though a misguided reporter, rather than Nixon himself, originated the story – that he had a secret peace plan, ready to be unveiled when he entered office. This was a fiction: in truth, he intended merely to exploit communist fears that he, the implacable Cold Warrior, was willing to embrace every extreme of violence if the enemy declined to cut a deal. On 25 October he attempted to torpedo LBJ’s bombing-halt plan, through duplicitous secret manoeuvres designed to frustrate a settlement ahead of polling day, notably by urging South Vietnam’s President Thieu – using Madame Chennault, widow of Claire Chennault, the legendary World War II air chief in China, as an intermediary – to boycott the Paris talks.
A week later, on the 31st, in a belated counter-stroke timed to scupper the Republican candidate, Lyndon Johnson delivered a national TV address in which he announced a cessation of all US bombing of North Vietnam. It is unlikely that any of this changed the election outcome, but certain that in January 1969, with less than a 1 per cent edge of th
e popular vote over Humphrey, Richard Nixon became US president. Johnson’s war thereafter became Nixon’s war. As the latter wrote in his memoirs, however, ‘It was no longer a question of whether [I] would withdraw our troops, but of how they would leave and what they would leave behind.’
21
Nixon’s Inheritance
1 A CRUMBLING ARMY
One evening in December 1968, Frank Scotton walked into Saigon’s Continental Palace Hotel to behold a group of distinguished Vietnamese being casually insulted by three drunken grunts. Scotton persuaded the Americans to move on, but one of the Vietnamese, a senator, asked in distress, ‘How can this happen, how can this happen?’ Scotton answered that here was a symptom of a country unable to defend itself. Young communist doctor Dang Thuy Tram celebrated Tet 1969 with an NVA unit which passed by her hospital. Their coming, at this third new year of her service in the South, prompted a spasm of melancholy which caused her to walk alone through the early evening to her quarters: ‘A cold breeze sighs … An immense sadness and longing make me stop. Instead of being used to the loneliness of living in an unfamiliar land, instead of feeling cheered by the warmth and friendship of the folks … I feel as though it were my first day here. My only true wish is to live with Mom and Dad in our warm family nest … still a little girl wanting to be spoiled.’ A few miles away, thousands of her capitalist contemporaries could have succumbed to matching outbursts of sentimentality.
Neither Vietnamese nor Americans discerned much early change in their battlefield circumstances following the ascent of a new US president and a change of MACV commanders. President Nixon wanted a settlement, but had no intention of being branded a quitter: in his January inauguration speech, he did not mention Vietnam. His national security adviser, Dr Henry Kissinger, wrote later: ‘The overriding issue was to keep faith’ – he might more justly have said ‘to appear to keep faith’ – ‘with the tens of millions who, in reliance on American assurances, had tied their destinies to ours.’ The war continued to cost $2.5 billion a month and over two hundred American lives a week – one-third fewer than in 1968, but still more than 1967. US forces consumed an average of 128,400 tons of munitions a month through 1969. In June, Dan Bullock from Brooklyn, New York, became the war’s youngest American to die. Having lied about his age to enlist, the fourteen-year-old black kid wrote home to his sister: ‘I think I joined the Marines at the wrong time. Pray for me, because I won’t be coming home.’ Just twenty-one days after landing at Danang, he was killed by a communist satchel charge tossed into his bunker.
Gen. Creighton Abrams was a rumpled bear of a man, in contrast to the lean, immaculately-creased Westmoreland. A former Springfield, Massachusetts, high school football star and World War II armoured brigadier under Patton, the fifty-four-year-old received an enthusiastic welcome from the US media as something fresh on the block. Nonetheless, even if ‘search and destroy’ was supposedly supplanted by ‘clear and hold’, Abrams’ coming signalled no meaningful change of strategy. Westmoreland’s successor realised that, in the face of fading will at home, everything must be done fast. Many VC and NVA units aspired to avoid headlong collisions with US troops, thus the energetic Abrams emphasised the importance of making the most of opportunities. He ordered that any US officer commanding a company or more who lost contact with the enemy must explain why.
He railed against demands from Washington to reduce civilian casualties: in 1968 the monthly tempo of B-52 sorties against targets in South Vietnam and Laos almost doubled to fifteen hundred, and in March 1969 the giant planes offloaded 130,000 tons of bombs. MACV remained chronically short of tactical intelligence: Fred Weyand acknowledged that ‘allied forces had no information base in the local population’. In April 1969 Abrams nonetheless told a reporter, ‘When we have maintained the initiative … our kill ratio is spectacular.’
The most aggressive of his subordinates, and the most notoriously indifferent to Vietnamese interests, was Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell, a tigerish Airborne veteran of World War II. In 1968–69 Ewell commanded 9th Division in the Mekong delta, then took over II Field Force. He wrote: ‘The “hearts and minds” approach can be overdone. In the Delta the only way to overcome VC control and terror is by brute force.’ Ewell rejected the findings of the MACV inspector-general, that seven thousand civilians perished in his formation’s six-month-long Operation Speedy Express. In April 1969, illicit fuel drainage from the army pipeline north to Phu Cat reached 600,000 gallons a month, and national losses hit four and a half million gallons. At MACV’s weekly command conference there was discussion about making an example of some thieves. One officer protested, ‘You can’t shoot people for petty larceny.’
Ewell responded, ‘B-u-l-l-shit.’ Abrams expressed his own discomfort about promiscuous killing. Ewell said: ‘I don’t agree with you, General. You get a sapper unit mining the road and you kill two or three, and they’ll knock it off. These people can count. And boy, when you line up them [bodies] their enthusiasm is highly reduced. That’s the way we opened up Highway 4 – just killing them.’ Abrams prompted laughter around the table by saying, ‘All right, we’ll study it.’ He nonetheless urged care in handling civilians: ‘We don’t want to get a US terrorism rate that’s higher than the VC.’ Ewell carried on regardless. A Huey gunship pilot found himself working for one of 9th Division’s brigadiers, John ‘Mal Hombre’ Geraci: ‘His orders were: kill everything that moves.’ Geraci affected a swagger stick with which he was wont to poke officers in the chest to emphasise ‘I want kills.’ The 9th Division perfected a technique of sealing an area with infantry, then pounding everything inside it with air and artillery. Body counts were assuredly impressive, but not remotely matched by weapons captures, the most plausible indicator that the right people were dying.
On 12 November 1969, Associated Press wires carried the first report by freelance investigator Seymour Hersh, indicating that men of the 23rd Americal Division had carried out a massacre of civilians at My Lai, a few miles inland from the sea in Quang Ngai province, for which courts-martial were to be convened. During the months and years that followed, it emerged that on 16 March 1968 at least 504 peasants of all ages and both sexes had been murdered without provocation by C Company, 1/20th Infantry – most of them in ‘My Lai 4’, a hamlet properly called Tu Cung.
My Lai – known to some grunts as Pinkville – is believed to have been the largest of the war’s many unprovoked killings, though there are allegations that South Korean troops accomplished worse things. Capt. Ernest Medina, commanding C Company, had earlier ordered the shooting in cold blood of two offshore fishermen, and men of the unit murdered other civilians without incurring censure. Rapists were not subjected to disciplinary action. The day before the massacre, chaplain Carl Creswell attended a divisional briefing at which a major played the mood music for the impending sweep by saying, ‘We’re going in there and if we get one round we’re going to level it.’ Creswell said fastidiously, ‘You know, I didn’t really think we made war that way.’ The major shrugged: ‘It’s a tough war, chaplain.’
This was the view adopted by every senior officer in the region: during the months following My Lai, even more shocking than the killings was the institutionalised cover-up. Commanders ignored a vivid, immediate report made by helicopter pilot W/O Hugh Thompson, who courageously raised hell on the day about what he saw, and kept raising hell afterwards. Task Force Commander Lt. Col. Frank Barker dismissed expressions of unease about the 1/20th’s claims to have killed 128 enemy without capturing a single weapon, saying: ‘It was tragic that we killed these women and children, but it was in a combat situation.’ In March 1969 helicopter door-gunner Ronald Ridenhour wrote to thirty members of Congress, describing atrocities credibly recounted to him by buddies, which stirred a small bow wave of dismay back home that much later swelled to a flood tide. Nonetheless, 23rd Division staff officer Maj. Colin Powell, later US secretary of state, produced a memorandum for the adjutant-general which was an uncompromising whitewas
h, asserting that ‘Relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.’ Powell failed to interview Pte. Tom Glen, a twenty-one-year-old from Tucson who had written a brave letter to Creighton Abrams about Americal atrocities.
The inquiries into My Lai produced evidence of other war crimes committed at the same period by Bravo Company of 4/3rd Infantry, for which no one was ever convicted. When Lt. Gen. William Peers belatedly conducted a full investigation in November 1969, his findings named twenty-eight officers, including two generals and four colonels, whom he accused of 224 serious military offences, ranging from false testimony and failure to report war crimes to conspiring to suppress information, and participation in or failure to prevent war crimes. More than forty of C Company’s 103 men were found to have taken part in the massacre, and not one infantryman sought to halt it, or the accompanying gang rapes. Although 23rd Division commander Maj. Gen. Samuel Koster was belatedly demoted to brigadier, no court-martial conviction was secured for any serious offence, save that of 1st Platoon commander Lt. William Calley, on 29 March 1971. Though Calley was sentenced to imprisonment, the president immediately intervened to order that he should merely be ‘confined to quarters’.
When Capt. Medina was acquitted, the judge wished him a happy birthday. Five thousand telegrams sent to the White House about Calley’s conviction ran a hundred to one in the stubby lieutenant’s support, and the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars said: ‘For the first time in our history we have tried a soldier for performing his duty.’ Nixon exclaimed repeatedly to a White House aide in November 1969, as the press headlined the My Lai story, ‘It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.’ Recruits marching at Fort Benning chanted ‘Calley … Calley … He’s our man.’ AFN Saigon repeatedly played a ballad recorded by an Alabama vocal group that called itself C Company: ‘My name is William Calley, I’m a soldier of this land/I’ve vowed to do my duty and to gain the upper hand,/But they’ve made me out a villain/they have stamped me with a brand.’ MACV eventually ordered the radio station to stop running the disc, which sold 200,000 copies, but could not suppress grunt graffiti in Saigon such as ‘Kill a gook for Calley’. In September 1974 a federal judge ordered Calley to be released on parole on the grounds that his trial had been prejudiced by adverse publicity. He was released after serving just forty-two months’ confinement to quarters.
