by Max Hastings
All through the schools, he was terrified Vietnam would finish before he could get there. It did not, of course. Hickman arrived in September 1968 and was posted to Di An, near Tay Ninh. He was heartened by finding himself among people who obviously knew what they were doing, but jarred by the abruptness with which he was thrust into combat. A flight commander said: ‘You can sleep in this cot here. You wanna take a mission tomorrow?’ Yes, he wanna. ‘You can fly co-pilot on a Cobra rescue.’ Next morning when he walked out to the flight line with his new comrades, one asked another, ‘Did you kill anybody yesterday?’ ‘Yeah, three.’ Hickman thought: ‘These guys are crazy.’
Thereafter, he sometimes flew thirteen hours a day: ‘You were always overloaded, and landings were the problem because in the last few feet the dust threw up a brown fog that hid the ground. You had to look at the plexiglas beneath your boots until a hole appeared.’ The flying nonetheless seemed to him fabulous, because there were no power lines, no meaningful restraints. Much later, when as a brigadier-general he took a National Guard unit to Iraq in 2004, he was shocked to discover how risk-averse the army had become: ‘It had taken all the fun out of war.’
In his cavalry troop there were ten OH-6 light observation helicopters armed with mini-guns; six ‘slicks’ with door-mounted M-60 machine-guns that pumped out 550 rounds per minute; ten attack Cobras; an airmobile infantry platoon. They flew either at 1,500 feet or on the deck, brushing trees and leaping over houses. ‘We were living by our reflexes – I wouldn’t take medication of any kind.’ A tank of J-4 jet fuel kept a Huey aloft for 150 minutes, then they were usually ‘hot refuelled’, turning over fifteen others coupled by hoses to huge rubber bladders: during battles, engines were seldom shut down. Hickman found that the helicopters were much more carefully maintained than those at flight school: engine filters, prone to choke with dust, were checked daily; machines received twenty-five-hour intermediate and hundred-hour full inspections – the latter took eight hours.
They lived on powdered egg, corned beef, powdered milk, coarse bread; drank liquor in the evenings, when it was available. During the night hours Hickman wrote to a girl named Carol back in Savannah. As a warrant officer he was paid $500 a month: on R&R in Hong Kong he spent $1,700 in four days, some of it on buying six suits, six pairs of shoes and a big stereo kit. They had cold-water showers, and hated the morning stink of burning crap, as barrels from the previous day’s latrines were set ablaze with aviation spirit. They craved American food, and when they heard of a place in Saigon that did real hamburgers, one day a bunch of them took the crazy risk of driving a lone jeep thirty miles across country to get to it. They paid next day, with vomiting and bowel explosions which caused them to spend hours sitting on a plank in the latrine: Hickman thought he was going to die.
Other than the grunts, nobody got closer to the action than Huey people. ‘One guy was kill-crazy,’ said Hickman wonderingly. A fair proportion of his own flight-school class were killed or wounded – in all, four thousand helicopter aircrew perished in Vietnam. Once, Hickman’s crew chief’s helmet shattered under fire. The pilot assumed that was the end of the man, but a bullet had merely grazed his skull. On another mission, Hickman hung close enough to the ground to toss a grenade from the cockpit window into a hooch a couple of yards away. He saw a grunt slump, hit, even as the man loaded casualties into their cargo compartment. Their crew chief in a careless moment shot a hole through the helo with his own .45: like naughty schoolboys they hammered the punctured metal inwards, so that it looked as if they had taken an enemy round.
‘My best friends were Jim Newman and Elmore Jordan, a black guy from Washington DC. We had a running joke that if one of us realised he was not going to make it back, he would throw out his wallet for the others.’ One day, Hickman heard Jordan on the radio reporting his ship on fire, then as he struggled towards the field, he voiced again: ‘I’ve lost my hydraulics.’ His crew chief crammed into the cockpit with the pilots, and the Huey was trailing black smoke. Finally Jordan radioed, ‘There goes our engine.’ Hickman thought wretchedly: ‘Well, I guess Elmore is throwing out his wallet.’ They saw a sudden plume of black smoke erupt beyond a treeline, where the Huey had crashed a few hundred yards from the airstrip. Miraculously, however, Jordan survived: his crew chief jumped out as the chopper struck, then ran back to drag the two pilots from the flaming wreck. On another occasion Jim Newman got shot in the neck. He too somehow failed to get around to throwing out his wallet.
‘One day Jim shot me down. We were going into an LZ when we started taking fire. I said to the Cobras, “Put me in some rockets close.” There was a lot of noise, and we got Jim’s shrapnel through our console. We made it to a little field before coming down. I said to him, “Shoot down four more, and you’ll be an enemy ace.”’ The unit’s best pilot was Harley Goff, but all his skill failed to save him from a transmission failure and a devastating crash. Goff emerged unrecognisable, having broken three of four limbs and lost all his teeth – testament to the huge part played by luck in all events of war.
On each Huey the crew chief manned one door gun, an infantryman the other. ‘They were your eyes,’ said Hickman. The M-60s jammed unless kept meticulously clean, and the port-side man needed to guard against wind blast blowing his ammunition belt all over the countryside. For the psychological effect Hickman made his gunners load solid tracer, in defiance of SOPs which decreed one round in five. ‘Tracer burned out the barrels pretty quick, but in an assault you wanted to keep the enemy’s heads down.’ He anyway knew how seldom a door-gunner hit what he aimed at, from a platform shifting all ways at once.
Though Cobras and Hueys were the same loaded weight, 9,500 pounds, the latter were quieter and smoother in the gunship role, carrying sixty-two rockets and four thousand mini-gun rounds. Never in history had so many tactical helicopters been deployed – nor would be again. ‘There were times when over a hundred were in the air over a battle,’ said Hickman. ‘When you saw a ten-ship lift going into an assault with four supporting gunships and a smoke ship, it was just awesome.’ Vietnam’s clammy heat never bothered the North Carolinan, who had grown up without air-conditioning. On a night flare drop, however, the contrast was shivery between the warmth on take-off and the icy cold at six thousand feet. Moreover, Mk24 million-candlepower flares were risky loads. ‘I hated those missions,’ said Hickman: several ships were lost when flares ignited in the cargo compartment.
After a relative lull during the winter of 1968, with enemy hard to find, ‘by January the war was back on again’. Sometimes Hickman flew three-day missions out towards the Cambodian border, guided into night landings by flaming barrels filled with sand and oil, sleeping on the ground by his machine. There always seemed to be the odd VC poking a few tracer into the air, but no serious opposition. Then, suddenly, things got serious, and they once more experienced in the air what they called ‘hot flushes’. One night they were sent to rescue survivors of a long-range recon team, hard-pressed by enemy on the ground. They radioed a circling Vietnamese spooky gunship to put down suppressive fire, but the VNAF plane declined to get close. Two Cobras were also flying in support, but since even in good hands their weapons had a twenty-yard margin of error, they could not risk firing in darkness. Hickman spent an hour circling, struggling to coordinate the rescue. At last the beleaguered men switched on a strobe light masked in a helmet, to guide the Hueys into an ever-so-slim gap in the jungle: Hickman’s crews got the Rangers out. Another night they sank twenty-three sampans coming out of Cambodia: ‘We marked them with tracer, then the Cobras came in from up high and rocketed. At briefings, they told us we were killing more enemy than the rest of 9th Division.’
Of three hundred men in the unit, some forty aircrew flew missions. Rank never decided who commanded: ‘There were very few “sirs” – we were mostly twenty-one-year-olds trying to do the right thing without adult supervision.’ One unit commanding officer was himself unwilling to operate below two thousand feet, while his succes
sor ‘was courageous, but could never fly well’. Hickman handled mostly day missions on Hueys, night ones on Cobras. Once when he was detailed to take a slick through darkness to extract a stranded recon team, he asked his flight commander, ‘Why me?’ He was flattered by the answer: ‘Because you’ve got the best chance of getting back alive.’ They lost several aircraft flying into trees – ‘just the sort of thing that happens with aggressive young men’. Cobras had the lowest casualty rate, LOHs the highest: ‘They were fighting the war from twenty feet.’
Although the unit suffered a few cases of self-inflicted wounds and pilot requests for transfer to ground duties, ‘Most people can buck up and do what has to be done.’ Hickman remained convinced that Vietnam should have been won: ‘But by 1969 it was obvious that we either had to go into North Vietnam, or forget it. I felt let down by the anti-war movement. They were a bunch of college kids who knew nothing. I believed in the army. Within it, a lot of individuals were trying to do the right thing.’
4 VIETNAMISATION
In the first months of the Nixon presidency, the incumbent and his advisers groped for new approaches to ending the war. Defense secretary Melvin Laird, a former Wisconsin congressman, told Creighton Abrams during a March 1969 visit to Saigon that the change of administration had bought a breathing space: ‘I think we’ve got some time, and … We’ve got to develop a national policy that we can go to the [American] people with.’ There must be a programme, he said, ‘to reduce the United States contribution, not only in the form of men, but in casualties and materiel and dollars … I’m going to be asked a lot about the use of the B-52.’ Abrams, alarmed, immediately made the case for this supremely efficacious weapon: ‘There’s nothing really as responsive … It only takes a couple of hours to change the whole weight and put it wherever you want, in whatever quantity you want it.’
The role of national security adviser assumed an unprecedented importance, at first unperceived by the media or the Washington establishment. Until the election, Dr Henry Kissinger had been an adherent of Nixon’s Republican rival Nelson Rockefeller. Now he became the president’s principal foreign policy instrument. An exponent of the historic and wherever necessary cynical concept of realpolitik, first articulated by Ludwig von Rochau in the mid-nineteenth century, Kissinger had never supposed Vietnam winnable. He shared with Nixon the conviction that, whatever the merits of the allied cause, the war was draining wholly excessive political attention, material resources and moral authority from the pursuit of US vital interests elsewhere. This brilliant, charismatic figure overcame his employer’s dislike of both Jews and intellectuals by displaying first his loyalty, then an unscrupulousness to match the president’s own. Though essentially an ice-cold human being, he was skilled at simulating warmth and geniality. Arthur Schlesinger wrote in those early Nixon days: ‘I like Henry very much, and respect him, though I cannot rid myself of the fear that he says one thing to me and other sorts of things to say [conservative ideologue] Bill Buckley.’
White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman once noted: ‘Henry made the point that the President’s best course is brutal unpredictability.’ This was the view of Nixon’s mindset that from the outset Kissinger sought to establish in Hanoi. He believed the North Vietnamese could only be induced to compromise ‘by being confronted by insuperable obstacles on the ground’. A first step was to launch massive but secret B-52 bombings of communist sanctuaries. On the afternoon of Sunday, 16 March, Haldeman recorded without apparent irony that after attending church, Nixon authorised the bombing of Cambodia: ‘Historic day. K[issinger]’s “Operation Breakfast” finally came off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P[resident].’ During the three years that followed the USAF poured 108,823 tons of bombs onto Sihanouk’s hapless country. When one B-52 crew made an error which precipitated the near-annihilation of the population of a Cambodian village, the US ambassador visited the area and distributed $100 apiece among survivors. The airman who had miscalculated was fined $700.
The White House was fiercely angered by a renewed display of communist aggression at Tet 1969, when over a hundred South Vietnamese cities and towns suffered pinprick attacks. Nixon viewed these almost as a personal insult, a gesture designed to show that Hanoi proposed to treat him no differently from Lyndon Johnson. So the bombing became part of what Kissinger called ‘coercive diplomacy’. In the same spirit, the National Security Council propounded a case for Operation Duck Hook, a four-day intensive blitz of North Vietnam which might include tactical nuclear weapons. Kissinger informed Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin about the Duck Hook concept, and in July Nixon wrote a personal letter to Ho Chi Minh, threatening ‘measures of great consequences and force’ if Hanoi declined to deal. On 13 October 1969 he initiated a nuclear alert embracing US forces worldwide, designed to convince the communist bloc that he was a trigger-happy commander-in-chief, prone to act dangerously – even recklessly – if crossed. Yet the Russians scarcely noticed the alert, and none of the other presidential posturing appeared to impress the enemy. They perceived Nixon not as a madman, but instead as a rational politician, desperate to find means of evading not American defeat, but an explicit admission of it.
So much has been said about Kissinger’s ‘genius’ that it bears emphasis how importantly wrong he and Nixon were, in supposing that the route to peace lay through Moscow. The president in his first autumn of office told Dobrynin: ‘I want you to understand that the Soviet Union is going to be stuck with me for the next three years and three months … We will not hold still for being diddled to death in Vietnam.’ Yet it was a source of chronic frustration to the Soviets, how little leverage in Hanoi their annual half-billion dollars of aid secured. Before Pham Van Dong flew to Moscow in 1970, the Soviet ambassador in Hanoi urged upon the Vietnamese Russia’s desire that the Northern delegation should show itself ‘more constructive … and more sincere’ at the Paris peace talks. He wasted his breath.
And even as the White House sought fulcrums with which to shift the communists, it identified an incompatible domestic imperative: to reduce the US troop commitment. Before the NSC, Kissinger endeavoured to persuade others, and perhaps also himself, that such a course did not represent a contradiction of the rest of administration policy. Force reductions, he said, ‘by making US presence more sustainable, could be another form of pressure’. This was nonsense, though Kissinger was right when he also asserted that his nation could not just walk away from South Vietnam ‘as if we were switching a television channel’.
While both Nixon and his national security adviser treated the defense secretary with scant respect, it was Melvin Laird who articulated a decisive, even drastic change of US direction, and also gave this a name that stuck, though Vietnamese hated it: Vietnamisation. The administration renounced the strategy implemented since 1965, of delegating the serious war-fighting to Americans. Instead, MACV would merely support the ARVN in their own struggle. On 14 May 1969 Nixon delivered a national television address in which he asserted a continuing commitment to ensuring that the Vietnamese people could choose their own destinies. To achieve this, and to secure peace, it would be necessary for all foreign forces – meaning the NVA as well as the Americans – to quit the South. The first fruits of Vietnamisation should be the withdrawal of fifty to seventy thousand US troops. The White House decreed that American casualties must forthwith fall, though May 1969 witnessed the extraordinary folly of Operation Apache Snow, successive assaults on Ap Bia Mountain – Hill 937, better known as Hamburger Hill – in which seventy-two members of the 101st Airborne Division were killed, a further 372 wounded, with additional ARVN losses, merely to assert American commanders’ determination to prevail. Its principal consequence was to intensify anti-war fever: Sen. Edward Kennedy branded the battle ‘madness’.
Vietnamisation was officially launched on 8 June, at a mid-Pacific meeting on Midway between the two presidents, Nixon and Thieu. A twenty-five-thousand-man initial US troop drawdown was set for August. Conservati
ve columnist Joseph Alsop likened it to the cynical deed of the Russian woman who throws her children off a sledge fleeing through the snow, to distract pursuing wolves. Creighton Abrams voiced dismay at a September 1969 NSC meeting attended by Nixon: ‘Where we are in South Vietnam is due to the application of raw power … When you turn off the power, you have got an entirely new ball game.’ Abrams saw in 1969 what historian Ken Hughes observed long afterwards: ‘Vietnamization was not a strategy Nixon seriously pursued; it was a fraud he perpetrated.’ On 19 November Melvin Laird told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Saigon government had been consulted before the policy was introduced. He lied, as Kissinger also lied on the same issue: Thieu was merely informed after it was decided.
On 4 August in Paris, Kissinger began what became an apparently interminable round of secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Averell Harriman, still conducting the formal talks, had despaired of a successful outcome as long as successive administrations remained wedded to sustaining both the Thieu regime and a US army in the South. Kissinger held almost no cards. He had opposed unilateral troop reductions, because he knew these must relieve the communists of any obligation to yield concessions. But the national security adviser bore no responsibility – at this stage, anyway – for the administration’s domestic political trajectory, and thus was overruled.
