Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Former Marine Gen. Al Gray says that he refuses to visit Vietnam ‘until I’m sure all our people are out of their jails’. America has been racked for years by rumours, accusations, alleged scandals surrounding the fate of missing men. Yet there remain victims of every war who cannot be accounted for, including a host of Vietnamese: across the South lie many NVA headstones marked only Liet Sy Vo Danh – ‘An Unknown Martyr’. There is no credible evidence that Hanoi retained American prisoners against their will.† Bob Destatte, who spent twenty-three years researching MiA and PoW cases for the Defense Intelligence Agency, says: ‘We left no one behind.’ He is an intelligent man with enormous personal experience of Vietnam; there is no reason to doubt his conclusion.

  Counter-factuals are seldom profitable either to historians or readers, but two seem to merit notice. First, the North Vietnamese never carried their fight to the West, and explicitly to the American continent, through terrorism, as do modern Muslim insurgents: it probably never occurred to Hanoi to do so, in those days before globalisation. Forbearance served the communists well, because it denied Americans any immediate and visible cause to consider Ho’s people as direct enemies – a threat to their own polity.

  It is also interesting to speculate upon the consequences, had the North Vietnamese refrained from sponsoring armed struggle in the South. Plausibly, the indigenous National Liberation Front could have been contained. In many other Asian countries between 1960 and 1990, authoritarian military rule gave way to democracy. In the absence of war, Vietnamese energy and ingenuity could have enabled the Southern economy to prosper. The Hanoi regime would have struggled to weather the typhoon of economic and political change that swept the world in the last decades of the twentieth century, discrediting Marxism.

  Success justifies all: nobody outside Pyongyang today questions the legitimacy of South Korea as a state, because it is a functioning democracy with a dynamic economy. Meanwhile its old adversary North Korea is a showpiece for the failure of totalitarian communism. Yet for decades after the 1953 armistice the South was ruled by a dictatorship almost as repressive as its Northern counterpart. The Seoul regime was fortunate enough to retain American military and economic support, together with just sufficient popular consent to survive this experience and move on to better things. South Vietnam was no more and no less a credible independent state than its Korean counterpart. Granted the same opportunities, it too might have preserved its status and prospered – but we shall never know.

  Meanwhile only the ‘Liberation Struggle’, and Hanoi’s military triumph, conferred the prestige and legitimacy that have enabled the old Northern regime to retain power to this day, clinging to figleaves of the trappings of revolution. Oxford Professor Archie Brown, no friend of communism – ‘as an alternative way of organising human society … a ghastly failure’ – nonetheless notes that the mere fact of the successful reunification struggle has empowered Hanoi’s old men ever since: ‘In spite of the harshness of the regime … it has not been difficult to project the “enemy” image of the US or to evoke terrible memories of the war and a measure of gratitude to Vietnam’s peacetime rulers for rebuilding the country.’ The conflict continues to define Vietnam as surely as the Second World War does Russia, victories in the respective struggles being the Communist Party’s only conspicuous successes since 1917.

  In 1993 David Rogers returned to Vietnam as a reporter, and was taken to the area near Tay Ninh where his unit had fought. He found himself fêted by former Vietcong cadres: ‘They were under orders to be really nice to Americans, because they needed Congress to pass a trade deal.’ He found himself musing: ‘If all you guys wanted was a McDonald’s, surely we could have worked this out a long time ago?’ Many modern American tourists are disarmed by the warmth of the welcome they receive in Vietnam, from people mostly unborn when the war was fought. This is partly because an overwhelming majority now recognise the virtues of liberal democracy, the limitations of the alternative. President Barack Obama received a rapturous reception when he visited Vietnam in 2015, contrasted with the bleak attitude displayed a year later towards China’s President Xi Jinping.

  Visitors impressed by the glitzy towers of Saigon, the natural beauty of the countryside, often fail to notice the harsh rural poverty and the denial of freedom of speech. The rulers of twenty-first-century Vietnam concede to their people some latitude to make money, but none to express political opinions, nor frankly to debate the past. Many American histories are flawed by treating the war as if it was the consequence solely of the actions of one party, the US: this is partly because a vast body of evidence is available about its doings, while information on North Vietnam’s wartime processes is spooned forth as meanly as gruel in a poorhouse. Much has been said above about MACV’s wartime ‘credibility gap’; yet in Hanoi, mendacity remains institutionalised.

  A conspicuous lesson of the past century is that economic forces are at least as important as military ones in determining outcomes. North Vietnam’s dead revolutionaries would recoil in disgust from the spectacle of modern Saigon – the name Ho Chi Minh City is falling from favour, and will probably vanish in the way that Leningrad has become St Petersburg again. Its glittering shops, each one a temple of consumerism, burst with brand names, jewellery and designer clothes. It may plausibly be argued that while the United States lost the war militarily almost half a century ago, it has since seen its economic and cultural influence reverse this outcome. Where the US armed forces failed with B-52s, defoliants and Spooky gunships, YouTube and Johnny Depp have proved irresistible.

  If fighting the war became the principal rationale for the defunct Saigon regime’s existence, the same proved true for that of Hanoi. Within a few years of the fall of Saigon, communist veterans developed a nostalgia for the struggle’s perceived virtues. The more apparent became the failure of other policies, the more reverently Northerners sanctified the unification struggle: David Elliott remarks that an older generation looks back on it as ‘a time of simplicity, belief, focus, equality of poverty. People helped each other. There was a sense of mission.’ Bao Ninh concludes his war novel by evoking the nostalgia of his fictional self, Kien, common among veterans of every conflict: ‘He returns time and time again to his love, friendship, comradeship, those human bonds which had helped us overcome the thousand sufferings of war.’ Kien envied his lost self, with its inspiration and optimism: ‘they were caring days, when we knew what we were living and fighting for, and why we needed to suffer and sacrifice. Those were the days when all of us were very young, very pure, and very sincere.’

  Yet today the author himself rejects such sentimentality: ‘The vision of humanity and solidarity is much overstated, indeed has become a myth. The bond between soldier and soldier was real enough, but there was also plenty of social injustice in the North. The poor people went to fight while others with political privileges were able to send their sons abroad to study, and some of them to enjoy luxurious lives. Those times were incredibly brutal: the war went on far too long, and people became terribly weary. So much was destroyed – not just buildings but institutions, the social compact.’ Bao Ninh notes that the British people were fortunate enough to enjoy the freedom in 1945 to evict from office at a general election their great war leader Winston Churchill, ‘whereas in Vietnam the generals have clung to power’.

  Truong Huy San was a thirteen-year-old boy wrestling playfully with a friend on a hillside in North Vietnam on the day in 1975 that his village loudspeakers announced triumphantly that Saigon had been ‘liberated’. ‘According to what we had been taught at school,’ he wrote long afterwards in his book The Winning Side, ‘this would be the end of two decades of misery for South Vietnam. I thought: “We must quickly set about educating its misguided children.”’ Yet in 2012 that same boy observed: ‘Many people who have carefully reviewed the past … are stunned when they realize that it feels like the side that was really liberated was the North.’ South Vietnam, he argues, has proved the historic vic
tor, because its values increasingly dominate the entire country.

  ‘What was it all about?’ muses Walt Boomer. ‘It bothers me that we didn’t learn a lot. If we had, we would not have invaded Iraq.’

  * To the author in 2006.

  † Cpl. Robert Garwood chose to remain in the North until 1979, when he returned to the US and was court-martialled.

  Picture Section

  Tonkin, 1896: entrance to the pagoda of the Great Buddha. (© BnF, département des Cartes et Plans, Société de géographie, Sg XCm 707)

  ‘La mission civilisatrice’ – Tonkin, 1908: French officers with the heads of Vietnamese suspected of poisoning French troops. (Apic/Getty Images)

  1945: victims of the catastrophic famine that swept northern Vietnam. (Special Collections & University Archives Department, University of Central Florida Libraries, Orlando, Florida)

  OSS officers with Vietnam leaders – Giap sits front left. Ho third from the right.

  ‘La sale guerre’ – French troops with a Vietminh suspect. (Photo by adoc-photos/Corbis via Getty Images)

  Exhausted French troops bring in a casualty. (©Daniel Camus/ECPAD/Défense)

  Dienbienphu, November 1953. (Keystone/Staff)

  Giap and Ho. (Collection Jean-Claude LABBE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

  Cogny, de Castries and Navarre with subordinates. (Ullstein bild Dtl./Getty Images)

  The implacable, victorious enemy: following the July 1954 ceasefire French officers escort a Vietminh unit into their lines. (PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

  A puppet-master with the puppet who declined to dance in step: Lodge and Diem. (Larry Burrows/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

  Nguyen Thuy Nga with her husband Le Duan in the U Minh forest in 1950.

  Mao Zedong shakes the hands of Le Duc Tho. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

  Lou Conein, the spook for all seasons.

  Max Taylor and Paul Harkins in Saigon. (Larry Burrows/Getty Images)

  The Trail. (© Le Minh Truong/Another Vietnam)

  Hueys: a classic image of troop carrying ‘slicks’. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

  Special forces camp at Plei Me under Vietcong assault in 1965. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

  Americans and allies: Walt Boomer. (Courtesy of Walter Boomer)

  Americans and allies: Tim O’Brien. (Courtesy of Tim O’Brien)

  John Paul Vann (second left) with Doug Ramsey (foreground) in 1965. (Courtesy of Doug Ramsey)

  All-American SEAL Bob Kerrey.

  Leon Gouré, the RAND Corporation’s influential evangelist for bombing. (State Archives of Florida)

  Australian private Tom Blackhurst cools off tracker dog Justin. (© Australian War Memorial C36943)

  Mike Eiland at special forces camp Long Thanh with Khmer recruits, 1972. (Courtesy of Mike Eiland)

  A classic combat image taken by Don McCullin, among the greatest recorders of the war. (© Don McCullin)

  Doan Phuong Hai (left of picture).

  Bao Ninh. (© 1993 The Sorrow of War)

  Nguyen Cong Luan.

  Truong Nhu Tang.

  A radio-operator’s war – 1st Air Cav at An Thi in 1966. (AP/Shutterstock)

  Gen. Maxwell Taylor (left) with Gen. William Westmoreland (right). (Silverwell Films)

  Why so many foreigners fell in love with Vietnamese women: Duong Van Mai in her days as a RAND researcher. (Courtesy of Duong Van Mai Elliott)

  Nguyen Thi Chinh, who became film star Kieu Chinh. (Courtesy of Kieu Chinh)

  Vietcong doctor Dang Thuy Tram. (Courtesy of Dang Thuy Tram)

  Dan Hickman. (Courtesy of Dan Hickman)

  Jeff Anthony. (Courtesy of Jeff Anthony)

  Body count. (Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty Images)

  Bob Nelson. (Courtesy of Bob Nelson)

  David Rogers. (Courtesy of David Rogers)

  American displays of compassion did not suffice to prevent many Vietnamese from blaming their would-be saviours for their condition.. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

  Hue 1968: Marine officer Myron Harrington (top) with British photographer Don McCullin. (Nik Wheeler/Corbis via Getty Images)

  Creighton Abrams. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

  Three images that crippled the US cause in Vietnam: A bonze immolates himself on a Saigon street in 1965. (Malcolm Brown/AP/REX/Shutterstock)

  South Vietnamese police chief Brig. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Vietcong prisoner during Tet 1968. (Eddie Adams/AP/Shutterstock)

  Children flee the consequences of a 1972 napalm strike. (Nick Ut/AP/Shutterstock)

  ‘How long do you Americans want to fight, Mr Salisbury? … One year … Twenty years? We shall be glad to accomodate you.’ New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury in Hanoi with premier Pham Van Dong, 1966. (Black and White Photograph of Harrison Salisbury and Pham Van Dong, Hanoi, 1966–67. MS#1509, Box 210, Folder 23, Harrison E. Salisbury Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York)

  Fallen hopes: North Vietnamese salvage wreckage from a downed US aircraft. (© Doan Cong Tinh/Another Vietnam)

  Leaders: Dean Rusk, John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara. (Bill Allen/AP/REX/Shutterstock)

  Lyndon Johnson harangues journalists in the White House cabinet room in January 1968 – the author sits right. (Author’s collection)

  (Clockwise) Henry Kissinger, Nguyen Cao Ky, Ellsworth Bunker, Nguyen Van Thieu and Richard Nixon in 1969. (VA004679, Douglas Pike Photograph Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University)

  Daido May 1968: Bill Weise, with inevitable cheroot, after being hit. (Courtesy of William Weise)

  Marines attack. (Courtesy of William Weise)

  Jim Livingston, the committed warrior who won the Medal of Honor. (Courtesy of James E. Livingston)

  This communist image is staged, but vividly represents the battlefields both sides knew in Vietnam’s wet places. (© Hoang Mai/Another Vietnam)

  Ho Chi Minh, at the end of his life with Le Duan. (© Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos)

  Frank Snepp. (Courtesy of Frank Snepp)

  Innocent bystander – twenty-year-old Catherine Anne Warnes, shot dead while performing in Danang in 1969 by a US soldier thought to have been aiming at one of his own officers.

  Gen. Van Tien Dung, NVA chief of staff who commanded the final assault on Saigon. (AP Photo/Vietnam News Agency/REX/Shutterstock)

  The last acts: Doug Ramsey at his 1973 release after seven terrible years in Vietcong hands, with Frank Scotton on the right. (Courtesy of Doug Ramsey)

  Desperate fugitives during the April 1975 collapse of the South Vietnamese army and evacuation by sea from the north. (Anonymous/AP/REX/Shutterstock)

  ARVN defenders of Saigon, 1975. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

  NVA troops approach Saigon atop a tank on their triumphant drive to victory. (Hervé GLOAGUEN/Getty Images)

  The price of defeat: ARVN captives attend a reindoctrination session in one of the vast concentration camps the victorious communists established and sustained for decades across the country. (© Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos)

  Boat people. (Courtesy National Archives, photo no. 428-N-1175389)

  Acknowledgements

  In the course of researching this book I travelled widely in both the United States and Vietnam, interviewing scores of contemporary witnesses who were generous with their time and understanding. I garnered rich prizes from the archives of the US Army’s Heritage and Education Center at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., and those of the US Marine Corps at Quantico, Va.: I am grateful to Con Crane and his staff at Carlisle, and to Jim Ginther’s team at Quantico. I have also consulted the Vietnamese Oral History Archive at the University of California’s Irvine campus. Erik Villard of the US Army’s Historical Center gave me some significant introductions, foremost among them to Merle Pribbenow. Merle, who served with the CIA’s Saigon station from 1970 until the final evacuation, has made a unique contribution to my research, by providing hundreds of thousands o
f words of translated Vietnamese documents, histories and memoirs, a treasure trove for which he has declined to accept any reward whatsoever. The work itself is his prize, he says. My debt to him extends to the pleasure of his company, and he has provided many corrections to the text.