Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  A chronic shortage of competent junior officers and NCOs became compounded by departures of career officers who quit the service in despair: 148 of the 596 graduates of West Point’s class of 1965 resigned their commissions in 1970. Major Michael Barry, an unwilling draftee doctor who served at Danang’s 95th Evacuation hospital, said he became depressed by the responsibility of repeatedly handling victims of fraggings. Moreover, he himself had no belief in the cause: ‘We were backing the wrong people.’ Drugs constituted a ‘very serious problem … the heroin they were getting was so pure, about 80 per cent compared with the stuff Stateside that was 5 per cent’. One day six black corpsmen brought in a dead buddy. Barry said: ‘They had been having a heroin party. They were so stoned nobody realized that he had stopped breathing.’

  At Christmas, the 101st Airborne’s commanding general wished a black soldier compliments of the season, then saw the man reject his outstretched hand. The platoon Landen Thorne inherited was ‘a complete and utter mess. They were good kids, but they had evolved into three sections racially – all the black dudes in one, white southerners in another, city boys in the third. I scrambled them. That was a dangerous time, the kind when you can get fragged, but the platoon sergeant sorted it out. These platoons and companies became almost like street gangs, very close-knit. New people were vulnerable, particularly lieutenants.’ While blacks constituted 13 per cent of Marine strength, they were defendants in half the corps’ Vietnam courts-martial. There is no reason to suppose this disproportion represented racial victimisation: rather, it reflected the depth of black alienation. The desertion rate became the highest in modern history, twice that of Korea and almost four times that of World War II. In 1969, 2,500 military absentees were loose in country, most engaged in crime. The historian of army lawyers describes an extraordinary escalation in their role: ‘Judge advocates … wrestled with … a soldier population beset by drug addiction, racial strife and mutinous behavior.’

  In February 1969, Gunnery-Sergeant Joseph Lopez returned for a third Vietnam tour, and was appalled by the prevailing indiscipline: ‘Tell a man to square his cover away, the man looks at you like he was gonna kill you … Never did I see anybody give a superior NCO the looks that these young people give us nowadays.’ Between April and September that year, the watch committee monitoring racial tensions recorded an average of one ‘large-scale riot’ a month in the Marine Corps operational area, as well as many lesser incidents.

  Sgt. Harold Hunt, the black soldier from Detroit who had been badly wounded near Cu Chi in 1966, had insisted upon remaining an infantryman, and was posted back to Vietnam in May 1969. His old wounds sometimes troubled him, but he was uncommonly fit and exercised hard. Once back in country, he was shocked to discover how much had changed: ‘The soldier was different. My platoon had 50 per cent draftees. You had the racial strife, doping, indiscipline. It was hard to lead, to give people an order and get them to just do it.’

  Hunt was as different as could be from most black soldiers of that time and place, because his own loyalty was unequivocally to the army and not to any soul brother. When he told them fiercely that he would stand no crap, and especially no dope in the field, one day he found a note pinned to the door of his hooch: ‘WE FRAG MOTHER-FUCKERS LIKE YOU.’ Somehow Hunt got through his time, by persuading his men that their best chance of survival was to do what he said. ‘But my focus was totally different from my previous tours. I wasn’t trying to keep South Vietnam free – just to keep myself and my men alive.’ Career Marine Walt Boomer said: ‘The racial issue came close to destroying the fabric of the US Army and Marine Corps. It was ugly, ugly, ugly – ripped units apart. We always said: a Marine is a Marine. But suddenly black Marines were not only unhappy, they were mad about being in Vietnam.’

  Australian special forces officer Andrew Freemantle thought the best Americans ‘very good indeed’, but like many others he was appalled by the indiscipline he witnessed in 1970–71: ‘Even at some special forces camps you’d see people smoking pot, women queuing at the gate.’ Lt. Tim Rohweller commanded a company of the 3/9th Marines. Determined to tighten discipline, he displayed no patience with men who sought excuses to remain at base rather than go into the field. Pte. Reginald Smith and other blacks pretended to convince themselves that the lieutenant was responsible for unnecessary deaths in combat. Late on the night of 20 April 1969, as Smith and his buddies smoked marijuana in their hooch, the Marine announced that he was ‘going to “do” that motherfucker as soon as he crashes’. At 2.10 a.m. a fragmentation grenade exploded under the lieutenant’s bunk, inflicting multiple injuries from which Rohweller died next day. One of Smith’s companions later testified that the Marine had returned to their hooch flourishing a grenade ring, saying, ‘I did that motherfucker. He won’t fuck with nobody else no more.’ Smith died in prison after serving thirteen years of a life sentence.

  A white captain one day asked a black soldier named Davis what sort of car he planned to buy when he got back to the States. Davis answered: ‘I’m not gonna get a car, sir. I’m gonna get me a Exxon station and give gas away to the brothers. Let them finish burnin’ down what they leave.’ Both whites and blacks thought that line hysterically funny – only of course it was not, because of the undercurrent of real menace: two white majors were shot for ordering blacks to turn down their music.

  Racial abuse went both ways. Whites described blacks as maumau, reindeer, spooks, brownies, coons. A Southern surgeon affected an Ole Miss T-shirt to wind up the brothers. Meanwhile the Appalachian John Hall, who his platoon dubbed ‘Hillbilly’, felt that he got a hard time from his black sergeant, who had no time for white Southern boys. That same NCO always stayed in the rear when they went into the bush, and Hall once lashed back at him: ‘Don’t give me bullshit, you nigger lifer. You’re not man enough to go in the field!’ Hall made the further point, common to most combat units, that on operations racial hostilities were suspended: ‘Once the platoon got outside the wire, we were all in it together.’

  Black Marine Jeff Anthony formed a close relationship with a Texan buddy, ‘Bojo’ Tyler, who introduced him to C&W. Tyler told his parents about his new friend in a letter. They wrote back saying, ‘Don’t you go bringing no niggers here with you when you come home.’ Anthony said: ‘Much as I loved this guy, there was no way I was going home with him.’ Col. Sid Berry wrote about the fate of a fellow-officer seriously wounded in action. Describing him as ‘a negro from North Carolina’, Berry mused bitterly: ‘I wonder if some self-righteous white bigots objected to his children attending school with theirs while Capt. Williams was being wounded in action for his country – and theirs.’

  One day in 1969 an infantry company returned to their firebase from the boonies with the promise of a USO entertainment show. Racial tensions ran as high in its unit as most. That evening, assembled before an improvised stage, the soldiers were dumbfounded to find themselves watching seventy-one-year-old Georgie Jessel perform a 1920s Al Jolson nigger-minstrel turn. A soldier described his fear that there would be a riot: ‘I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This old white Jewish vaudeville entertainer sang “Mammy Mine”. Yet the really weird thing was that we didn’t mind.’ Black and white alike were merely grateful for the diversion: ‘He was from the world.’

  Black soldier Arthur ‘Gene’ Woodley went home to Baltimore an embittered man following a 1969 tour with special forces: ‘This country befell upon us one big atrocity. It lied. They had us naïve, young, dumb-ass niggers believin’ the war was for democracy and independence. It was fought for money. All those big corporations made billions on the war, and then America left.’ Woodley’s view was widely held among black soldiers who served in the war’s later years. Despite the fraggings, racial aggravation, drug abuse, many soldiers and Marines, both white and black, continued to do their duty, to fight their corner on the apparently interminable succession of Vietnam battlefields. But no witness doubted that from 1968 until the end, the effectiveness of American fo
rces was in relentless decline. While the enemy was always out there, it became progressively harder to persuade Abrams’ men to match the communists’ commitment and warcraft, even in the interests of their own survival.

  2 AUSSIES AND KIWIS

  When a historian afterwards suggested to Australian Lt. Neil Smith that by the time he started his 1969 tour the war was obviously a mess, the former infantryman responded with professed astonishment: ‘It wasn’t a mess where we were.’ Although the three Australian infantry battalions that served in south-eastern Vietnam with support arms, special forces and a New Zealand contingent constituted a tiny element of allied strength – peaking at eight thousand in mid-1969, with 543 New Zealanders – they achieved a notable reputation. Creighton Abrams considered the Australians and New Zealanders ‘really first-class people’ – indeed, the only foreign contingent worth its salt: ‘The rest of them will take Uncle Sam for anything they can.’ American Lt. John Harrison spoke almost with awe of the Australian Special Air Service team that handled a company of montagnards on his patch: ‘They were unbelievable – run by their warrant officers. They didn’t give a shit for anything.’ In the course of the war the SAS claimed some five hundred enemy dead for just seven operational deaths of their own, and those statistics are credible. They attributed them chiefly to a fanatical emphasis on fieldcraft. An SAS officer said with wry satisfaction: ‘We always heard them’ – the enemy – ‘before they heard us.’

  An ARVN officer wrote that Vietnamese considered the Aussies the most sympathetic of their allies, because the most disciplined in using firepower: ‘The 1966 Long Tan battle – in which the Australians killed 257 communists for the loss of just eighteen of their own – proved that there was at least one way to fight the war successfully.’ The same major said that the Australians and Thais were the only foreign soldiers whom he never heard reported as wantonly firing on bystanders. Australian Lt. Rob Franklin said: ‘I really worried about killing civilians. One night a party of bloody woodcutters walked into our ambush. Thank God, our guys didn’t open up – I was really proud of them for that.’

  Yet his country’s commitment divided Australia more deeply than any other issue in its modern history – at times almost as painfully as the war racked the US. Robert Menzies, prime minister until January 1966, defied his civil servants’ advice and the Labor Party’s opposition to dispatch a modest contingent, sharing Washington’s conviction that this was the place to stop the ‘thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans’. A draft was introduced, and soon after a second Australian battalion reached Vietnam, the first conscript was killed: nobody was told that Pte. Errol Noack was a victim of friendly fire. From the outset there was vociferous domestic opposition. A hundred thousand young Australians a year turned twenty, and one-tenth of them were chosen by ballot for military service. Mothers formed an anti-conscription group, SOS – Save Our Sons. Future Labor cabinet minister Jim Cairns published an influential book entitled Living With Asia, which argued that his country must learn to co-exist with the continent’s revolutions and revolutionaries, rather than to fight them. When 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (1RAR) paraded through Sydney amid crowds of more than 300,000 people, a woman protester drenched herself in red paint, then threw herself on their colonel and as many of his men as she could smear.

  Following Britain’s 1967 decision to withdraw its armed forces from east of Suez, a traumatised Australian government concluded that it must bond with the US more closely than ever before. Menzies’ successor as prime minister Harold Holt visited Washington and physically embraced LBJ; he attacked British leader Harold Wilson for criticising US bombing. Late that year, Canberra reluctantly acceded to a Washington request for more troops, dispatching a third infantry battalion and some tanks. The government of neighbouring New Zealand was always uncomfortable about Vietnam. When Australia committed, however, the Kiwis felt obliged to follow suit. Phuoc Tuy province, south-east of Saigon, became their designated turf. Most of its hundred thousand population were either neutral or pro-communist, and until the NVA arrived the Anzacs’ adversary was the Vietcong’s D445 mobile battalion, together with two regular regiments. The Anzacs established a base at Nui Dat – as far as they could contrive from any town – with helicopters and logistics outside the port of Vung Tau.

  Opposition grew to extravagant proportions in Melbourne and Sydney. Though smaller cities and rural areas were less agitated, the Australian seamen’s union refused to service ships destined for the war zone. When Harold Holt mysteriously drowned in December 1967, some suggested that he had committed suicide as a result of the stresses induced by Vietnam. Demonstrations became increasingly violent, with the New Left enlisting astonishing youth support in a country that was traditionally conservative. Monash University Labour Club raised funds for the NLF; Melbourne Maoists applauded the Chinese Cultural Revolution; students chanted ‘One side right, one side wrong – victory to the Vietcong!’ Postal workers for a time declined to handle mail for Australian troops. In August 1969 polls for the first time showed a majority of voters wanting out of Vietnam; after the October national elections, one battalion was withdrawn.

  Until the last stage of the war, however, Australian soldiers on the battlefield remained little troubled by the tumult at home, indeed almost oblivious of it. Lt. Neil Smith, adopted son of a Perth labourer, said afterwards: ‘I wouldn’t have missed the experience for quids. It’s what every professional yearns for. You want to test yourself. I guess it’s all part of young men’s stupidity.’ Australians found themselves pitched into some bitter battles: on 12 May 1968 the newly-arrived 1RAR deployed to FSB Coral with a supporting New Zealand artillery battery. On its first night the battalion faced an NVA surprise attack which its men were ill-organised to meet. The communists were repelled by mortars and guns firing over open sights, which killed fifty-two NVA at a cost of eleven Australian dead and twenty-eight wounded. Three nights later the communists came again, inflicting twenty-four casualties for the loss of thirty-four of their own dead. The Australians emerged from these encounters impressed by the NVA, whom they described as ‘a race apart’ from the local VC they were accustomed to meet further south. After years in which the Australian Army had prided itself on its prowess at counter-insurgency, honed by experience in Malaysia and Borneo where almost everything happened in company strength, suddenly its men understood that they were involved in a much bigger, increasingly conventional war.

  The Aussies and Kiwis did things in their own way, wearing bush hats rather than helmets; carrying the semi-automatic 7.62mm rifle which they preferred to the M-16 because its heavier bullet had more stopping power. Some men got their parents to send out garden secateurs, which they found handier for breaking trail than army-issue machetes. While every American base employed an army of local cooks, cleaners and laundry staff, the Australians refused to allow Vietnamese labour inside their wire – for security reasons, even the dirtiest tasks were undertaken by their own personnel. They regarded some of their allies in the field as suicidally careless, especially about noise. Neil Smith, overnighting on a US firebase, was surprised to discover that officers slept apart from their men, and even more startled by the racket: ‘On an Australian position at night, you could hear a pin drop.’

  American Capt. Arthur Carey, who worked with the Australians in 1968, was impressed by their radio discipline. Whereas most US units provided R/T sitreps every few minutes, Carey reported with approval, ‘It was not uncommon for the [Australian] command net to go two, three hours with nobody talking. [They were] very calm on radio. I can’t recall hearing the words “body count” the whole time I was with them.’ This last was one of the reasons that, while such junior Americans as Carey thought well of the Australians, some senior ones did not. Westmoreland deplored their modest kill scores and thought the practice mistaken whereby they rotated units through the theatre, rather than constantly refilling them with individual replacements. 7RAR recorded a visit f
rom Lt. Gen. Julian Ewell, who criticised the unit’s ‘painstaking patrolling … He emphasised the importance of statistics and body count. The atmosphere of his discussion with [the Australian battalion’s CO] was cold and one of overbearing disagreement. His visit was not one to be remembered with either respect or affection.’ The Australians decided that Ewell was unaccustomed to frank, informal debate: he sought instead an unquestioning obedience such as their nation has never favoured, least of all on its battlefields.

  Australian successes were not attained by displays of suicidal courage, but rather by junior leaders picking their moments. In the midst of a firefight before a VC bunker system, SAS patrol leader Andrew Freemantle made a decision: ‘I thought – if we get up and advance, do a banzai charge, a lot of people are going to get killed, and is this really worth it?’ Instead he ordered withdrawal. That night, one of his men came into his hooch and said, ‘Boss, we thought you might be feeling bad about what you did. We wanted you to know we were bloody grateful. We wouldn’t be here now if you hadn’t done that.’ The young officer felt better about himself, yet this was the sort of tactical decision that caused some US generals to suspect the Aussies of faint-heartedness.