Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Nixon: ‘Yes.’

  Kissinger: ‘If we can, in October of ’72, go around the country saying we ended the war and the Democrats wanted to turn it over to the Communists …’

  Nixon: ‘That’s right.’

  Kissinger: ‘Then we’re in great shape.’

  He spoke freely about the likely fate of Saigon: ‘If it’s got to go to the Communists, it’d be better to have it happen in the first six months of the new term than have it go on and on and on.’

  Nixon: ‘Sure.’

  Kissinger: ‘I’m being very cold-blooded about it.’

  Nixon: ‘I know exactly what we’re up to.’

  On 13 June the New York Times began publication of what became known as the Pentagon Papers, the highly-classified report commissioned five years earlier by Robert McNamara which recorded with icy candour the deceits and misjudgements whereby the country had become entangled in Vietnam. Though the administration’s initial fury focused on Daniel Ellsberg, the official who had leaked them, their release increased the ever-deepening conviction of the American people that they never should have been in Vietnam, and now needed to leave that place of doom as swiftly as possible.

  Alexander Haig said it had become obvious that the US must accept a coalition government in Saigon, including communist representation. For Hanoi, however, this was not remotely enough: they insisted upon the removal of President Nguyen Van Thieu with an obduracy that prolonged the stagnation of negotiations. The State Department, in an absolute reversal of decade-old policy, urged South Vietnam’s president to reach out to the communists. Nixon told Kissinger in July: ‘They know they’ve got us by the balls.’ By the end of 1971, both the president and his adviser were ready to accept a ceasefire-in-place, rather than continue to insist upon an NVA withdrawal from the South.

  Probably the most important and certainly the most imaginative achievement of Richard Nixon’s presidency – and it is sometimes forgotten that there were achievements – was détente with China. It is hard in the twenty-first century to recall the immensity of the political, moral, strategic distance an American government was required to travel to seek a pragmatic reconciliation with a regime regarded by conservatives for almost a quarter of a century as a cradle of evil; Mao Zedong as architect of a historic US humiliation, the ‘loss of China’. In conceiving the initial approach to Beijing, made through East European intermediaries, Nixon and Kissinger had two objectives. First was to initiate a dialogue that would deepen divisions in the communist camp, isolation of the Soviet Union. Second, and even more important, was to advance a Vietnam peace settlement. The administration still believed that withdrawal of Chinese and Soviet support would render Hanoi’s war effort no longer viable.

  In a narrow sense, of course, they were correct. But they continued to underrate the overriding ideological pressure on Moscow to sustain support for North Vietnam. Soviet credibility would be devastated in the eyes of socialists the world over if Le Duan’s heroic revolutionaries were abandoned in their hour of trial, and it was never plausible that this would happen. Kissinger, especially, by now set the bar very low for an acceptable peace deal. He wrote in a briefing book on the plane to Beijing for his first secret meeting with premier Zhou Enlai in July 1971: ‘We want a decent interval.’ He meant that the Americans needed to be able to withdraw with dignity before Vietnam fell into communist hands. This message was repeated at his second, publicised Beijing rendezvous in October, which stunned the world and caused acute alarm in Hanoi. Thereafter all Vietnamese, Northerners and Southerners alike, shared a new predicament, created by the fact that the rulers of China and the US became vastly more interested in developing the bilateral relationship of their two huge nations than in the fate of either Hanoi or Saigon. This did not bring early peace to Vietnam, but became a critical factor in the diplomatic processes surrounding it.

  When South Vietnam held what proved to be its last ever presidential election in October 1971, to the embarrassment of Washington and to worldwide derision, Nguyen Van Thieu ran unopposed. Both his rivals, Vice-President Ky and ‘Big’ Minh, withdrew their candidacies, increasing the implausibility of branding the war as a crusade for democracy. Yet still decision-makers declined to countenance absolute defeat, US eviction from Vietnam. Neil Sheehan said wearily: ‘Americans could never get it into their minds that they had to go.’ When Tom Polgar was about to fly to Saigon as CIA station chief, he told Melvin Laird that he was uneasy about the safety of his family there. ‘Oh, don’t worry’ said the defense secretary. ‘We’re going to have a residual force in Vietnam for thirty years, just like in Germany.’ But American troop withdrawals continued apace, as did their malign consequences. When the 173rd Airborne Brigade quit Binh Dinh province, pacification collapsed and the communists secured political dominance. In July Bill Colby, mastermind of CORDS and Phoenix, left Vietnam. By the close of the year, although there were still 175,000 Americans in the theatre, most fulfilled support functions: only two US combat divisions remained, one of them deactivated.

  Even among the relatively steady Australian contingent, in the last months of Lt. Rob Franklin’s 1971 tour he thought, ‘I’m just about over this.’ He had developed a deep respect for the communists – ‘really senior soldiers’ – matched by a keen personal desire not to die at this point of the war. ‘They might call the missions “search and destroy”, but by then I felt it was more like “search and avoid”. You could tell this thing was all over.’ One day Franklin was leading a rifle platoon that bumped a couple of Vietcong whom they pursued into a rubber plantation. It was late in the day, and light was fading. Franklin signalled a halt. His sergeant, Arthur Francis, asked: ‘What’re we stopping for, boss?’ The lieutenant replied: ‘Franger’ – Francis’s nickname – ‘these guys have got this far. Let ’em go. Let’s go home.’

  24

  The Biggest Battle

  1 LE DUAN FORCES THE PACE

  Many histories of the war view everything that happened beyond Tet 1968 as aftermath, because from that moment American extraction was decreed, and thus South Vietnam’s doom was sealed. The latter proposition is possibly true, yet a towering reality persists: 1972 witnessed the largest battles of the entire conflict – all-arms clashes on a scale and of an intensity dwarfing those of 1968, with massive casualties on both sides. Meanwhile in that year also, the world’s greatest nations conducted historic summits; negotiations in Paris languished, then began their tortured dalliance with an outcome; Richard Nixon secured re-election.

  Le Duan did his serious thinking either at the coastal resort of Do Son or in Hanoi’s Quang Ba Guest House. In the autumn of 1971 he spent time at both, before making a momentous decision: the NVA would launch a conventional offensive, to lay bare before the world the failure of Vietnamisation. He dismissed the objections of some comrades, who believed that American air power would prove fatal to this ambition. Implacable as ever, he saw his country engaged in a battle of wills with the United States, in which exposure of the debility of the Saigon regime would strengthen Hanoi’s hand, perhaps precipitate the fall of Thieu. He was indifferent to the prospect that tens of thousands more of his own people must perish, at a time when US withdrawal was already assured. If America’s war leadership often flaunted its inhumanity, that of North Vietnam matched it cruelty for cruelty.

  Because preparations could not be concealed for a ten-division offensive such as the communists intended – of which the northern arm was code-named Nguyen Hue in honour of an eighteenth-century Vietnamese ruler who vanquished the Chinese – the Americans received unusually explicit warnings. Following a briefing on 22 December 1971, Creighton Abrams mused that the enemy was obviously ‘working at something. The signs are all there … I just don’t like the smell of it.’ He summarised at another meeting ten days later: ‘We don’t know when or where … The only thing we know is that [the enemy] has decided … that at an appropriate time … he’s willing to commit the whole damn thing’ – he meant all but tw
o of North Vietnam’s regular formations. On 20 January 1972 a MACV briefer told commanders: ‘There is no doubt this is to be a major campaign. Main thrust is expected to be against [Central Highlands and northern Quang Tri province].’ He added two days later: ‘For the first time since 1965 we face a situation in which a major enemy offensive must be defeated largely by [South Vietnamese] resources.’ He concluded: ‘No one will have all the assets he would like.’ This prompted a gale of laughter, ironic and apprehensive.

  On 2 February Abrams himself said, ‘The show is on! The curtain’s drawn, and we’re in it.’ At a briefing for a visiting South Korean delegation, he suggested presciently that the communist objective would be ‘to go to the weakest thing in the whole set-up, the will of the American people … If they can capture Ben Het, or Kontum City, for a week … and threaten Quang Tri, the press will say Vietnamization has failed. And the last few remaining members of Congress who would support continuing economic assistance, would have lost their faith.’ The above record makes it all the more astonishing that when the North Vietnamese struck, they achieved a large measure of surprise. This was partly because Abrams expected them to move at Tet; after they failed to do so, he was derided by the media for crying wolf. Moreover, nobody in Washington wished to hear the warnings. The national security adviser, especially, seemed confident that he was successfully managing the communists in Paris, and was preoccupied with other geostrategic issues.

  On 21 February the president began his historic visit to China, which proved a triumph for both himself and his travel agent: Kissinger made the cover of Time magazine, though the inspiration for the initiative was Nixon’s. The two sides spoke with considerable frankness, agreeing to differ about Taiwan. The president made plain his determination to get out of South Vietnam, and his indifference to what took place thereafter, so long as before the communists took over there was a ‘reasonable interval’, ‘sufficient interval’, ‘time interval’ – all phrases used at various times by Kissinger to Zhou Enlai. The Chinese asserted a desire, which proved sincere, for an end to their isolation; a new working relationship with the US for which they were prepared to make political sacrifices. They would not, however, cut off aid to Hanoi, and it was naïve of the two Americans to fantasise that they might. While Nixon’s visit secured him magnificent headlines, he had flown to China hoping to secure peace in Vietnam, and failed to get it.

  Nonetheless, he returned home confident that he could now do almost anything he liked to the North, with the decade-long spectre of Chinese intervention banished. His Indochina policies would hereafter be constrained by the American people, represented in Congress, rather than by China – or the Soviet Union. Le Duan and his comrades in Hanoi grasped this shift in the strategic balance, and were furious about what they perceived as a betrayal by Mao, who might with warning words to the US president have spared them from a new rain of bombs. A senior cadre grumbled that for China’s chairman to receive Nixon was ‘throwing a liferaft to a drowning pirate’. Hanoi’s sense of grievance was not assuaged by a deluge of fresh Chinese military aid.

  Since 1968, vacuous formal talks between North Vietnam and the US had continued in Paris, successively fronted by Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge and David Bruce. Fred Weyand, who served a stint as military adviser to the American delegation, recalled with distaste: ‘The communists were just implacable foes. No give in them at all. When [Madame Nguyen Thi Binh] was sitting at that table, you just knew there was someone there filled with hate.’ The only meetings that mattered, however, were intermittent secret sessions, held in a white-stuccoed villa owned by the French Communist Party, between Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho. These stagnated because of Hanoi’s insistence on the removal of President Thieu, matched by the US demand for an NVA withdrawal from the South – though from the summer of 1971 onwards the Americans knew that, at best, they would secure only gestures towards this end. In the year of Nixon’s presidential re-election campaign, he was determined not to be seen to surrender, repeatedly asserting ‘We cannot lose this war.’ Yet he had originally intended to bring home all armed forces personnel well before Americans voted, and was dissuaded only by Kissinger, who insisted that some forces must linger even past election day. Interestingly, throughout many Nixon–Kissinger conversations recorded on the White House tapes, the national security adviser emphasises the centrality of the 1972 presidential election more insistently than does the candidate himself, while indulging his master’s vanity in a fashion that King Louis XIV might have found a trifle fulsome. ‘I’m probably the toughest guy that’s been in this office – probably since Theodore Roosevelt,’ asserted the president. Kissinger concurred: ‘No question.’

  Nixon viewed aerial bombardment as a means of exerting pressure on the North that American voters – as reflected in polls which he studied assiduously – found palatable and even curiously praiseworthy, as ground troops were not. Much later in 1972, it would become a moot point how far the president’s escalation of bombing was driven by diplomatic imperatives, and how far by a manic personal determination to be seen to prevail. Scholars continue fiercely to debate the nuances and timings of US shifts of position during the Vietnam peace process. It seems unnecessary to choose between their rival views. The key realities were clear, and only admission of them was deferred: the American people were determined to escape from Vietnam; they now cared almost exclusively about the fate of their own men in communist hands, on which much verbiage was expended – gratuitously, since Hanoi would obviously surrender the prisoners once the last American forces went home. B-52 gunner Jack Cortel wrote: ‘Getting our PoWs back was the only thing that gave us a sense of purpose.’

  Meanwhile the South Vietnamese will to fight, and their soldiers’ enthusiasm for the Saigon regime, were now tenuous. ARVN Major Nguyen Cong Luan discussed his country’s hundred-odd generals with fellow-officers, who concluded that around twenty were competent and honest, while ten were both monstrously corrupt and irredeemably incompetent. In the midst of a discussion with the Americans about how Southern troop morale might be improved, Gen. Ngo Dzu’s contribution was to propose reintroduction of the French army system of mobile field brothels. A young Vietnamese officer wrote to a British correspondent expressing delight that both he and his closest friend were in non-combat branches of Saigon’s army: ‘So we are not forced to kill anyone – and that gives us great joy.’

  Once the Americans were gone it was extraordinarily unlikely that South Vietnam could survive, and neither Kissinger nor Nixon deluded themselves otherwise. They were concerned merely to maintain through an intermission of eighteen months to two years a pretence of commitment to the country’s future. Kissinger, especially, was far more honest with China and Russia, America’s foes, than with its friends. Apologists for the two men argue that they were saddled with responsibility for extricating America from a war not of their making, and played a losing hand as skilfully as possible. At least the first of these propositions is valid. The historic charge against them is, instead, that they presided over gratuitous years of carnage, merely to conceal from the American electorate, for their own partisan purposes, the inevitability of humiliation in Indochina.

  Early in 1972 Maj. Walt Boomer was serving at Firebase Sarge in Quang Tri province as adviser to a Vietnamese Marine battalion. Back in Bethesda, Maryland, his wife Adele said in weary bewilderment before he took off, ‘I can’t understand why you’re doing this.’ Boomer replied, ‘It’s what I do. It’s what I am.’ Arrived at Danang, however, he was shocked by its desolation, with so many Americans gone; cavernous facilities crumbling. He found that his predecessor had made himself hated by the Vietnamese for his bullying ways, and it took a while to create a better understanding. Boomer was troubled by the chasm between officers and men: ‘The major would dish out discipline with a big stick. I sensed that if we ever got into a world of trouble, this could be an issue. I was lonely – read a lot, worked out a lot. I was not comfortable being wi
th them. They were not looking for a fight, they were kind of worn out.’ In the days before the North Vietnamese assault came, the American urged aggressive patrolling, but after one such mission got into a firefight, the major declined to send his men out again. Boomer said: ‘We’ve got to disrupt their build-up.’ The Vietnamese shrugged: ‘We don’t have the strength.’ The American did not think them cowards, ‘but they were in a mindset where they wouldn’t take any risk they didn’t have to’. Now, however, South Vietnam’s million men under arms found themselves confronting real and present danger, stark and inescapable.

  2 THE STORM BREAKS

  Lt. Col. Gerry Turley, on a familiarisation visit to 3rd Division headquarters in Quang Tri, was due to fly back to Saigon on 29 March 1972, but his helo was delayed. At noon next day ‘the world came apart’. The communists achieved surprise by trampling the last tatters of the 1954 Geneva Accords, racing tanks south through the Demilitarized Zone, while also attacking from the west. The enemy had registered heavy guns on northern firebases that were soon tottering. As the offensive developed, Northern chief of staff Gen. Van Tien Dung also launched major attacks in the Central Highlands and towards the key town of An Loc, just sixty miles north of Saigon, while the Vietcong and NVA spread further havoc in the Mekong delta. The Americans and South Vietnamese were shocked not merely by the weight of the assaults, but by the enemy’s new Soviet and Chinese weapons: six hundred light and heavy tanks; state-of-the-art SA-7 Strela shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles; anti-tank missiles including the wire-guided Sagger, for which thousands of communist personnel had been trained abroad, most in Eastern Europe.

  In the north, a season of disasters unfolded. The egregious Hoang Xuan Lam, commanding I Corps, declined to avow the strength of the enemy thrust. ‘Lam would not report bad news,’ said Gen. Vien at Tan Son Nhut. Ellsworth Bunker, the ambassador, had left the country for Easter, likewise Creighton Abrams. The MACV chief was in Bangkok with his wife, in the process of converting to Catholicism, so that Fred Weyand, his deputy, was in temporary command. Weyand sought to stem panic talk, yet ‘In this case, no matter how you described it, it was a human wave attack, because there was just a hell of a lot of people coming across into your wire.’ The communists had timed their assault for Quang Tri’s monsoon season; especially in the first days, low cloud severely dampened the American air response.