Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  North Vietnam’s army was suffering a manpower crisis, the effects of which pervaded its entire society: security police staged one of their periodic crackdowns on expressions of anti-war sentiment. Such was the NVA’s shortage of recruits that it felt obliged to accept in its ranks such men as thirty-three-year-old Nguyen Hai Dinh, for decades an outcast as the son of a landlord. Dinh had only one military ambition – to defect: ‘In the North, I had nothing.’ He cherished a distant dream of getting to America. He suffered the usual privations on the Trail with the NVA’s 28th Battalion, and laboured so assiduously at doctrine that he was appointed an acting political officer: ‘It was all in my head, not my heart. Everybody who thinks for himself but wishes to survive in a communist society becomes a good actor.’

  Dinh suffered a perforated eardrum in a B-52 strike before the Cambodian maelstrom provided his chance to slip away from his unit and hide in a school. On 23 May, waving a white cloth, he cautiously emerged to surrender to the US 25th Division. He had not eaten for two days, but when presented with rice and canned meat, he could not get them down. Dispatched to the chieu hoi centre in Saigon, he felt uneasy among the peasants who made up most of its residents: ‘Some were genuine anti-communists, but many had simply got sick of fighting.’ After a year’s re-education, they were granted six months’ liberty before being obliged to join the ARVN. Dinh had no interest in further fighting for either side. Denied any prospect of migration to America, he used a remote family connection to secure an introduction to a local Catholic seminary. There he spent the ensuing four years, serving as an altar boy and supposedly training to be a priest. A droll fellow, as he read the Bible, with which he became intimately familiar, he was amused that the seminary was located immediately behind the home of CORDS chief Bill Colby. Most important, ‘for the first time since 1954 I had enough to eat’: Dinh’s weight increased by a comfortable sixty pounds, making him one of the few beneficiaries of Nixon’s Cambodian adventure.

  2 COUNTER-TERROR

  Over 200,000 ex-NVA and Vietcong fighters chieu-hoied by 1972, most in the same spirit as Dinh, because they wanted out of the war, rather than from enthusiasm for the Saigon regime. One evening the CIA’s Frank Snepp and an interpreter took a defector whom he was wooing to a Saigon bar, where there was the usual crowd of girls and drunken GIs. After a while, the communist muttered something. With some reluctance the interpreter told the American that the man had said: ‘I’ve made the wrong choice. I don’t belong here.’ Snepp never again made the mistake of embarking on such a night out: ‘He didn’t want wine, women and song. The experience just convinced him that our side didn’t have what it took.’

  A more potent force in undermining the Southern communist nexus was Phoenix, conceived by William Colby as an intelligence/action programme, empowering the South Vietnamese to capture or kill key cadres. Between 1969 and 1972 its chiefs claimed to have neutralised eighty thousand, a quarter of them killed. Phoenix’s so-called Provincial Reconnaissance Units were made up of Vietnamese funded by the CIA and paid three times ARVN salaries. Some Americans assert that if the allies had embarked on such a programme earlier, matching the Vietcong’s targeted terrorism, they might have changed the war’s outcome. Marine Capt. Andy Finlayson loved his time working with a PRU, based in a CIA villa at Tay Ninh where the food and living conditions were palatial: ‘I thought I was living a Graham Greene novel.’ The teams ‘marshalled intelligence at local level in a way that had never been done before’, and exploited this to devastate NLF cells. Frank Scotton agreed that Phoenix was effective, ‘though I would have preferred a less lethal approach’. The PRUs achieved an exceptional reputation for ruthlessness: Australian SAS officer Andrew Freemantle described them as ‘absolute savages … I once saw them use secateurs to cut off a man’s ring finger.’

  What is certain is that when the excesses of Phoenix were publicly revealed, they drove another nail into the coffin of US domestic support for the war. Before a Senate committee in February 1970, Colby denied that this was a counter-terror operation, but scarcely anyone believed him. Frank Snepp agreed that it ‘really hurt the communists’, but ‘Colby lied and lied, when he declared that Phoenix chiefly captured Vietnamese. It was always a killing programme.’ It could justly be said that the Vietcong did worse things: US researcher Guenter Lewy claims that the Ban-an-ninh ‘security’ or terror arm of the NLF killed 36,725 Vietnamese and abducted 58,499, and such figures are credible. But Americans yearned to believe that their own side behaved better. Like Lt. Bob Kerrey, for instance.

  Kerrey, a former college football star from Nebraska, was justifiably proud when he graduated as a member of the US Navy’s elite SEAL Team One in the summer of 1968. He nonetheless hoped that Vietnam would be over before he had to participate: ‘My reasons were personal and not geopolitical … I just preferred to miss this one without my having to refuse to go … My real romantic ambition was to command a destroyer.’ He accepted his duty to serve, however, ‘and I would serve enthusiastically’. Kerrey was twenty-five when he landed at Camranh Bay with his platoon early in 1969. Their commanding officer was uncertain what to do with SEALs. The young lieutenant grasped merely that he was supposed to help the Saigon government defeat the communists in the fashion Phoenix was making fashionable, by killing some. On his own initiative, Kerrey launched a programme of Swift boat landings at beaches on the east coast, from which they patrolled and laid ambushes inland. When no contacts resulted, they transferred themselves to the Mekong delta, where they planned a patrol out of Cat Lo into an area of Kien Hoa province [now Ben Tre] controlled by the Vietcong. Intelligence reported that, on a given date, communist cadres would meet in Thanh Phong, some seventy-five miles south-east of Saigon, now identified as a landing site for VC supplies. Kerrey and his team had been in country just five weeks: Mike Ambrose, an enlisted member with experience from a previous tour, urged against undertaking the operation – their Vietnamese scout/interpreter was on leave. Kerrey determined to go ahead anyway; he described in a later memoir how he was assured by the district chief that Thanh Phong lay in a free-fire zone.

  On the night of 25 February 1969, a Swift boat carried the SEALs up a canal to a landing place a thousand yards from the hamlet. When they reached the first house, ‘I did not have to give an order to begin the killing, but I could have stopped it and I didn’t. In truth, I remember very little of what happened in a clear and reliable way.’ After eliminating the occupants of one hooch, ‘we were certain there were armed cadres in the village now on full alert. We had two choices: withdraw or continue to search houses in the dark. Before we could make the decision, somebody shot at us from the direction of the women and children, trapping them in a crossfire. We returned a tremendous barrage of fire, and began to withdraw. I saw women and children in front of us being hit and cut to pieces. I heard their cries and other voices in the darkness as we made our retreat.’ The Americans rendezvoused with their boats, and were back in Cat Lo within the hour. Kerrey wrote later: ‘Our actions were not considered out of the ordinary for guerrilla warfare where the number of civilian casualties is quite high.’ He admitted: ‘I felt a sickness in my heart for what we had done,’ yet testified in an official navy after-action report that he and his men had killed twenty-one Vietcong, a feat which won him a Bronze Star.

  A week later, the SEALs learned that a defector was willing to lead Americans to the camp of a sapper group bivouacked on Hon Tam island, off Nha Trang. Their landing in deep darkness on 14 March 1969, and a subsequent 350-foot cliff climb, went as planned. The guide led the Americans to a soundly sleeping enemy detachment. Kerrey left four of his seven men to watch, and led the other three in search of more VC they knew to be nearby. They met oncoming enemy a few minutes later, and Kerrey fired only a single burst before being blown flat by a grenade explosion. He fell back, knowing himself seriously wounded. In agonising pain he groped down his right leg, and realised that his foot was all but severed. Kerrey’s corpsman, himself stric
ken by splinters in one eye, could do nothing.

  The lieutenant tied a tourniquet above his knee while gunfire and explosions raged around him, then with difficulty hauled himself upright to direct his men’s fire. When the action at last subsided, he injected a morphia syrette into his leg; a fellow-SEAL stuck a Camel between his lips. Their radioman summoned a medevac helicopter, for which they waited in a silence broken only by city noise from Nha Trang across the water. When at last the chopper came, its crew chief lowered a sling, in which Kerrey was winched upwards. At dawn he landed in dizzy semi-consciousness, vaguely aware that his war, and his brief career as a SEAL, had ended after just fifty days.

  One morning at the White House more than a year later, the laconic Nebraskan was among twelve veterans who received the Medal of Honor from Richard Nixon. He wrote that he felt uncomfortable when the president told them that they were heroes, because the war by then seemed to him such a mistake. He nonetheless decided that there was indeed something heroic ‘about American men who were willing to travel to that strange country and fight for the freedom of people they did not know or understand’.

  So much for Kerrey’s account, published when he had become a very famous American – former governor of Nebraska, US senator and lover of film star Debra Winger, of whom he said memorably, ‘She swept me off my foot.’ This stunningly handsome and personable hero had morphed into a prominent anti-war campaigner. Only much later was the extent of Kerrey’s memory loss revealed. In April 2001 the New York Times published jointly with CBS TV an investigation into the Thanh Phong episode, much at variance with Kerrey’s contemporary claims. First, they showed that he was disingenuous in claiming ignorance of the village his team had assaulted: the SEALs had reconnoitred the place ten days earlier. Thereafter, systematic killing appears to have taken place, in which no attempt was made to distinguish victims. Kerrey told the New York Times: ‘Standard Operating Procedure was to dispose of the people we made contact with.’ His men killed the occupants of the first hooch with knives, in an attempt to preserve silence. When they approached the hamlet proper one patrol member, German-born Gerhard Klann, testified that the SEALs herded together and shot another fifteen inhabitants, mostly women and children. A screaming baby was the last to die. Klann said: ‘There were blood and guts everywhere.’ Another SEAL, William Tucker, told the New York Times that he had turned to Kerrey in the boat on the way home and said unhappily, ‘I don’t like this stuff,’ to which Kerrey responded, ‘I don’t like it, either.’

  Other patrol members disputed the newspaper’s claim that Vietnamese had been slaughtered without provocation, asserting that they heard incoming fire before starting the massacre. Whatever the truth of this, a 27 February 1969 report was uncovered, recording how an elderly Vietnamese had presented himself before US Army officers to demand retribution for an alleged atrocity at Thanh Phong, in which unknown Americans had killed twenty-four people, of whom thirteen were women and children. The same army document noted that navy SEALs were known to have been operating in the area. After being confronted with this evidence Kerrey said: ‘It’s far more than guilt. It’s the shame. You can never, never get away from it. I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you, and I don’t think it is. Killing for your country can be a lot worse.’ During Kerrey’s political career, colleagues on Capitol Hill were often baffled by enigmas about him they could not unravel. Thirty years after those events in Vietnam, a possible explanation became apparent.

  Precise details of what took place at Thanh Phong remain disputed, but the fundamentals seem plain. A group of gung-ho commandos raided an undoubted VC landing site in an area of which they knew little, and wherein they were granted a licence to kill, of a kind not infrequently abused by special forces of all nationalities in all wars. They used this to murder civilians, then lied about what they had done. The US Navy as an institution emerges worse from the story than do those who attacked the village. It empowered its SEALs to act as they did, then distributed decorations in a fashion that suggested an eagerness to identify American heroes greater than its commitment to a responsible or even civilised contribution to operations against the enemy.

  Moreover, such operations as Thanh Phong – and there were many – exacted a political as well as moral toll. The Vietcong exploited their own excellent local intelligence networks to eliminate enemies, often with conspicuous sadism. Yet none of the villagers assembled to witness beheadings and live burials doubted why appointed victims were killed: for opposing the revolution. By contrast, when Americans or ARVN killed civilians, while some were communist activists or sympathisers – as was almost certainly the case at Thanh Phong – others were not. The indiscriminate nature of American-led terror, caused by ignorance about the identities, never mind loyalties, of many of those whom its warriors killed, inflicted as much damage upon US strategic objectives as upon the moral legitimacy of its war effort.

  The operations of Kerrey’s SEAL team were supervised by the US Navy’s Capt. Roy Hoffman, who kept a chart on his office wall recording enemy KIAs. In Kerrey’s words, ‘they needed bodies’: the admirals were seeking to increase their market share in the war, and in any glory that was available: ‘Our story came out publicly right after Kent State, and was a godsend to the US Navy.’ He says that he almost returned his Medal of Honor, feeling unjustly traduced by the 2001 allegations made about Thanh Phong, but adds, ‘I make no appeal for sympathy. I survived.’ He also makes the point that whatever his SEAL team did or did not do at Thanh Phong, US Navy patrol boats were roaming the waterways of the delta free-fire zones, killing at will, as did US aircraft overhead. Implicit in these remarks is a claim that it is unjust to denounce excesses committed by himself and his men, head to head with the enemy, when the vast American war machine was carelessly killing by the hundreds, without those at the helms of patrol boats or the controls of aircraft being held accountable, as his accusers sought to make him accountable all those years afterwards.

  When Andy Finlayson interrogated a senior NVA prisoner captured in Cambodia, the man portrayed the communist predicament as grave, not least because of Phoenix. The American asked if that meant Hanoi’s forces were doomed to defeat. The enemy officer smiled, shook his head and responded: ‘You are far from home and you do not understand the strategic realities of this country. Your people will grow weary as they see more and more Americans dying without anything to show. Your president has already said that you are leaving. We will wait until you are gone and then we will attack, attack, attack until the puppet regime falls from its own weight. Victory for us is inevitable.’ The CIA’s Frank Snepp said: ‘I became fascinated by the [communists] I interrogated. One man in particular seemed the most perfectly disciplined human being I ever met. I was bemused by how much he hated us. Americans aren’t used to that. I was looking at somebody willing to do absolutely anything to achieve his objectives. That made a huge impression on me.’

  In November 1970, Fred Weyand attended the handover to the ARVN of his old 25th Division headquarters, and confessed to profound discomfort: ‘We were going, and they were not ready to take it over. We just no longer had much leverage on the North once we started that withdrawal.’ RF and PF militias were accepting heavier losses than their regular brethren, losing 15,783 dead to the ARVN’s 5,602 in 1970, with proportionately worse casualties in the following year. South Vietnam’s armed forces were the fourth largest in the world, yet their will and skill remained problematic.

  At every turn, the Americans seemed doomed to have luck run against them. Nixon was desperate to display his own concern for the fate of PoWs held in the North, an increasingly emotive domestic issue: he feared that some prisoners’ families would make common cause with the anti-war movement. Thus, he authorised a November 1970 raid on Son Tay, twenty miles north of Hanoi, in hopes of liberating some Americans said to be held here. Three days ahead of the mission, aerial surveillance showed the compound empty – the PoWs had been moved
out. Washington nonetheless ordered that the heliborne raid should be executed anyway, on the night of the 20th–21st. The raiders returned empty-handed.

  Admirers of Gen. Creighton Abrams assert that by late 1970 the struggle was going America’s way, and that only the collapse of domestic political will prevented exploitation of newly-established dominance on the ground. Historian Lewis Sorley, foremost standard-bearer for MACV’s chieftain, has written: ‘The fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won.’ Even at the sharp end, there were still some true believers. Lt. Mel Stephens left Vietnam late in 1969 having won a Silver Star, Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts and assorted commendations serving with the USN’s riverine operations, and thereafter became personal aide to Adm. Bud Zumwalt as chief of naval operations. After leaving the navy he joined John Kerry and some other veterans publicly to endorse the Vietnam commitment, and indeed testified to that effect to the Senate Foreign Relations committee. He said: ‘For me, it was the good war. I had extraordinary experiences, and my combat record opened extraordinary doors for me. I believed that Vietnamization could work, and that the ducks were falling into line.’

  What may well be true is that with the Vietcong drastically depleted by Phoenix and battlefield attrition, South Vietnam might have been stabilised under the control of a non-communist regime, albeit an unloved one, save for the continuing commitment of the North Vietnamese, together with the American people’s disenchantment. Unfortunately for the Nixon administration, however, Le Duan and the NVA were as much immutable realities as were monsoons and scorpions. Abrams, recalling his 1944–45 experiences, said ruefully that the North Vietnamese were ‘just like the Germans – you give them thirty-six hours and, goddamn it, you’ve got to start the war all over again’. By the end of 1970 he was seeking to achieve this with a much smaller army than he had started with: 140,000 US troops had gone home. In Paris, Kissinger withdrew his demand for a matching NVA drawdown: he no longer believed in Santa Claus.