Our Year of War

by Daniel P. Bolger

  Running the timeline, it all amounted to a plan to win the war with about 300,000 U.S. troops by the end of 1967. Later Westmoreland tried to walk it back, because he didn’t exactly say when Phase II would end and when Phase III would start. It was rather imprecise for a lifelong artilleryman. But back in Washington, Johnson and his team heard what they wanted to hear. Give this general the tools—300,000 Americans—and he’ll finish the job, probably by the end of 1967.

  The American buildup went very rapidly. Protected by a steady flow of combat battalions, engineers, logisticians, and contractors erected a network of new bases, ports, roads, and air fields. By the end of 1965, there were already 184,310 U.S. troops on the ground. A year later, there were 385,300. By the end of 1967, 485,600 served in Vietnam, with about 40,000 more en route.14 What the general wanted, the general got. And he wanted a lot. The U.S. passed the initial 300,000 estimate during 1966 and didn’t even slow down. The pace of deployments developed momentum. The Americans were committed.

  As U.S. troops surged into the country, the North also had to change course. Any idea of a war-winning push went out the window. Rather, the Hanoi leaders reverted to their long game. It was right out of the Mao Zedong guerrilla playbook:

  Enemy advances, we retreat.

  Enemy halts, we harass.

  Enemy tires, we attack.

  Enemy retreats, we pursue.15

  The NVA and VC still fought, all right. But in most cases, they chose the time and place. By one reliable estimate circa 1967, the enemy initiated 88 percent of ground contacts.16 Put another way, the opposition, not MACV units, held the initiative. The foe let the Americans chase and chase, walk and walk, search and search, and then… enemy tires, we attack.

  Finding the elusive Cong stymied MACV. As an artillery officer, William Westmoreland understood well what to do in war, to include this kind of war: x (weight of explosives) divided by y (targets) equals z (kills). It was all about solving for y. The Americans tried and tried. Unable to pinpoint many targets, they went hard after those they did find. They bombed, brought in attack helicopters, shot artillery, and banged away with rifles and machine guns. But as one MACV intelligence chief later put it: “The VC/NVA refused to defend any terrain feature. They would abandon even their base areas under a United States attack.”17 Sometimes the Americans got lucky. Now and then, a VC or NVA unit stumbled. But typically, if a fight occurred, it happened because the opposition wanted it.

  By 1967, there had been fighting, lots of skirmishes and smashups in remote areas as Americans sought to find, fix, and finish NVA and VC units. The enemy backpedaled, with the NVA regulars withdrawing into the border wilderness fronting Laos and Cambodia and the VC in black pajamas melting into the village woodwork. American troops hunted NVA battalions, and caught them now and then. But the enemy units were bloodied, not destroyed. Enemy advances, we retreat.

  U.S. firepower took its toll, all right. In a 1969 interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, the great NVA commander Vo Nguyen Giap admitted to 500,000 dead. Hanoi gutted through that horrific cost—for the North, this was total war, victory or death. But Giap also knew the United States had not embraced total war, not at all. For the Americans, each week brought what Giap termed “coffins going home,” to the tune of 19,641 killed and nearly 134,000 wounded from 1965 through 1967.18 Those were high prices to pay for limited success in a limited war.

  Was that the master plan unfolding? Was that winning? In his Saigon headquarters, in between daily trips by helicopter all over the country, Westmoreland studied the comparative numbers. He did his artillery calculations—x divided by y equals z—and convinced himself that his troops were approaching, and might have even passed, the crossover point: the fabled juncture when we killed more of the hostiles than they could replace. Well, that all depended on the number of enemy. MACV, the Central Intelligence Agency, and various Washington agencies could never quite agree how many there were: 300,000? 400,000? 500,000?19 How many were arriving each month in the South after marching down the Ho Chi Minh Trail? And how many were dead? Hanoi refused to tell. It sure wasn’t obvious on the ground.

  One of Westmoreland’s best commanders reached his limit. He vented anonymously to CBS reporter Martin Fromson, who shared it with New York Times reporter R. W. “Johnny” Apple Jr. “I’ve destroyed a single division three times,” the general said. “I’ve chased main force units all over the country and the impact was zilch.” He also offered that “the war is unwinnable” and that “we’ve reached a stalemate and should find a dignified way out.” He summarized: “Westy just doesn’t get it.”

  Confronted with Johnny Apple’s damning article, Westmoreland dismissed it as a journalistic fabrication. “No general of mine would ever have said that,” he wrote in a message back to Washington.20 Four decades passed before this unknown soldier identified himself: Major General Frederick C. Weyand, a man who led the 25th Infantry Division and then II Field Force, the corps-level contingent shielding Saigon. Weyand later rose to four stars, commanded MACV in its final days, and served as the U.S. Army chief of staff. But he knew it wasn’t working and said so.

  Like Fred Weyand and a lot of others in country, the great minds in Washington, DC, smelled failure. Korea had been bad enough. That whole thing ended up as a fumbling, embarrassing effort for the superpower that had just crushed the Germans and Japanese so handily five years before. Instead of an abject surrender by foes literally with hats in hand, Korea resulted in a tie at best, with the enemy holding fast to half the country and laughing at us across the most fortified “demilitarized zone” on earth. Yet, by 1967, confronted with the morass of Vietnam, such an unhappy outcome would have been taken and banked by President Johnson and his coterie.

  LBJ’s administration leaders on the Potomac, the McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara types, the ones David Halberstam labeled the “best and the brightest,” the peerless Ivy Leaguers whom Southwest Texas State Teachers College graduate Johnson sometimes categorized as “you Harvards,” well, they were headed for the tall grass. If you were looking for a Vietnam War cheerleader in Washington by late 1967, you’d have had little luck. The polling on the war had gone sour. Sure, a majority of the U.S. people still backed the effort, about 60 percent to 40 percent.21 The trend looked bad, though, bending down. And that 40 percent opposed was getting noisy, gaining strength as 1967 was grinding on. There was a crossover point in America, too. It was getting closer by the day.

  Thus Johnson turned to the one man who certainly still believed. At the president’s direction, Westmoreland returned to America, put on his dress greens, and made the case for impending victory. He spoke to a joint session of Congress on April 28, 1967.22 He made the rounds in Washington again in July. Finally, in the big one, on November 21, he went into the lion’s den at the National Press Club. There he saw the light. He did his best to help others see it, too.

  BASKING IN THE LUMINESCENCE, Westmoreland spoke confidently. His text was dense with qualifiers and heavy with policy-speak. It included laundry lists of achievements and a lot of numbers. But the money lines sure stood out. Reporters with notebooks wrote them down. Cameras rolled tape. The man was on the record, all right.

  “I am absolutely certain,” the general intoned, “that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing.” He went on: “There are indications that the Viet Cong and even Hanoi know this.” After reviewing various logistical and operational efforts, he offered that “we are making progress.” Then in his boldest prediction, he offered not just a forecast, but an assurance: “With 1968, a new phase is now starting. We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.” Westmoreland was talking about victory. He concluded: “It lies within our grasp—the enemy’s hopes are bankrupt.”23 George Patton would have been shorter and earthier, but the message came through. We’ve got this. It’s almost over, not quite two-plus years and 300,000 troops, but good enough. A win is a win.

  In
years after, many Americans thought the general referred to light at the end of the tunnel, the same fateful phrase once spoken by General Henri Eugène Navarre in the autumn of 1953, not long before France’s catastrophic, war-ending defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Despite contentions by some, Westmoreland never uttered those words aloud. No light and no tunnel were mentioned. But the image seemed to fit the moment.

  Maybe the light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t the dawn of victory glimpsed by Westy Westmoreland, hoped for by Lyndon Johnson, prayed for by so many Americans, in and out of uniform, all weary of this bloody rinse cycle of attrition. No, it wasn’t sunrise up there in the tunnel mouth, but the glow of a smoldering pyre, a flame that, when it flared up, went rolling down the chute as an all-consuming fireball. It would burn them all.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Hole in the Prairie

  Hell, I even thought I was dead ’til I found out that it was just that I was in Nebraska.

  LITTLE BILL DAGGETT, Unforgiven1

  In Vietnam, American soldiers filing out through the barbed wire around the firebase used to say they were headed into “Indian country.” The nineteen-year-olds, with a few notable exceptions, were neither historians nor anthropologists, and thus they were not drawing some abstract academic analogy. No, the troops borrowed the term from hundreds of western movies and television shows. The GIs all knew the deal. Leaving the wire was like marching through the wooden palisades of some Hollywood frontier fort. Inside, we owned it. Out past that boundary lay the unseen enemies—the Indians.

  So it had been in the Nebraska Territory. Before there was a Nebraska Territory, or a Nebraska state, or any United States, the Indians were there. They weren’t just any Indians, either. They were the dangerous ones, the unbroken ones, the Great Plains warriors feared and respected most: the Arapaho, the Cheyenne, the Pawnee, and the fearsome Sioux. That last group of people called themselves Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota, but not Sioux. The name came from a corrupted French term for “little snake,” or more colloquially, an enemy, and a treacherous one at that. Whatever you called them, they lived there on the broad grasslands, following the great buffalo herds along the meandering shallow rivers that scarred the dry prairie. The Indians called this region Nbraske, “flat water.” 2 That’s a pretty good description of the Platte River that bisects the modern state from east to west.

  Today, trendy people, go-getters who live and work in New York and Washington to the east or San Francisco and Los Angeles to the west, refer to places like Nebraska as “flyover country,” that expanse of nothing between the parts of America that really matter (or think they do). Before the Civil War, only birds and an odd balloon or two flew over Nebraska, but those Americans who went there pushed through as quickly as they could. Civilization, or what passed for it in antebellum America, lay back east of St. Louis. The gold was out west in California. And the Nebraska Territory, part of what nineteenth-century mapmakers helpfully designated the “Great American Desert,” well, the best idea there involved getting through it posthaste in your Conestoga wagon with enough supplies and all your bodily parts. Roaring grass fires, howling tornadoes, and marauding Indians sometimes made that a very sporty proposition. Still, for the Indians, and their numerous buffalo prey, the less settlers, the better. Moving on through suited all parties.

  After the Civil War, that changed. One of the laws pushed through the Union Congress in 1862 encouraged settlement out west. The Homestead Act granted land, typically a 160-acre plot, to any citizen “head of a family,” male or female, over twenty-one years of age. Union military veterans could also apply, even if they didn’t have a family or were not yet age twenty-one. Freed African American slaves were included, too, by a later provision, although Confederates (“who had borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies”) were not. To gain permanent ownership, the applicant had to engage in “actual settlement and cultivation” for at least five years.3 This act opened the Great Plains to many, including waves of immigrants arriving from Europe.

  With the homesteaders came the railroads, designed to link the eastern United States with the bustling boom towns of the Pacific coast. Coincidentally, the lattice of west-bound rails provided the means to sustain those who chose to take their chances on the prairie. Along with the Homestead Act, the Union Congress also passed Pacific Railroad Acts in 1862 and 1863, both of which granted land rights and federal financial backing for a transcontinental railroad line. In the Nebraska Territory, the Union Pacific commenced construction in earnest after the Civil War. The line passed through Omaha and paralleled the Platte River.4 By March 1, 1867, the combined numbers of railway workers and sod-busting farmers provided enough population to allow Nebraska to gain statehood.

  That year also saw a series of clashes with the Plains Indians. Those would go on for the next decade or so. History and Hollywood remember the one big battle, the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux victory over Lieutenant Colonel (brevet Major General) George A. Custer and the bulk of the 7th Cavalry Regiment on the Little Big Horn River on June 25–26, 1876. Yet that major engagement was atypical both in its scale and its results. The era’s U.S. Army records reveal much more pedestrian data. From 1865 to 1898, the military counted 943 firefights. In these, 948 soldiers were killed and 1,058 were wounded. Indian losses, admittedly an estimate (and probably inflated by optimistic officers; some things never change), totaled 4,371 killed, 1,279 wounded, and 10,318 captured. This meant the usual encounter resulted in two soldiers killed or wounded, six Indian casualties, and eleven Indian prisoners.5 An average year on the Great Plains, the entire United States between the Mississippi River and the eastern reaches of the Rocky Mountains, saw twenty-nine such skirmishes. If you blinked, you missed the “war,” such as it was.

  In the usual pattern in places like Nebraska, the soldiers followed the Indians here and there, rarely caught up, but over time wore them out. With wives and children exhausted, ponies tired, and braves despondent, one by one, the main chiefs accepted confinement to the great reservations: Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Spirit Lake, and Yankton. Most of the Indians survived.6 But their way of life was gone.

  Why did it end this way? The Indians were better fighters, man for man, than the young volunteer Regulars who chased them. The Indians moved faster. They shot well. They knew the prairies as their homes for centuries. They could subsist off the buffalo and stay ahead of the weather. And yet… and yet, in the end, it wasn’t about that.

  It wasn’t about soldier versus brave. That was a symptom, not a cause. The fatal displacement wasn’t done by advancing ranks of Regulars—there were far too few in uniform for that, 25,000 at best—but by the determined sod-busting of hundreds of thousands of plodding agrarians and herdsmen, drawn west to stake their homesteads: family farms without any elbow room for wandering warriors. The decisive penetration didn’t come from cavalry troopers picking their way up creek beds, but from steel rails heading west, ever west, bearing commerce and passengers aplenty, none of them much interested in tenting on the prairie, nor all that interested in those who did. Even the slaughter of the buffalo reflected an urge for hides in America’s teeming eastern cities, a tribute to modern weaponry, and the sad fact that the lumbering beasts reproduced too infrequently and grew up far too slowly to compete with the pitiless bark of thousands of repeating rifles, some in Indian hands by the 1870s.7 Each 160-acre plot claimed, each rail line spiked down, and each buffalo killed wore away the life of the Plains Indians as surely as any shot from an army trapdoor Springfield rifle. The human wave from the east never let up. The Lakota called these numerous new arrivals wasichus, “uninvited visitors” who refused to leave.8 They had that right.

  The Plains Indians survived, penned and sullen, existing after a fashion on remote reservations. Six Indian reservations, all established in territorial days, remained in Nebraska. All were small, all underpopulated, all out of the way, and all well to the east, carved off the fringes of the state, home to a f
ew thousand Indians hanging on by their fingernails. In the greatest stretch of Nebraska, the endless productive prairie, just the names endured, pinned to small towns and shallow rivers. Those fragments of Indian language mark the footsteps of ghosts.

  This is what winning looks like in a people’s war.9 The side that prevails—the wasichus—moves in and never looks back. And the side that loses gets prodded, pushed, and squeezed by political, economic, cultural, military, and above all demographic pressures that do not stop. In later days, anguished national leaders pointed to Vietnam, and eventually Iraq and Afghanistan, too, and wondered if America could ever hope to win a war against insurgents. They might have done well to look at Nebraska. All that was left of the Indians was a hole.

  LIEUTENANT GENERAL CURTIS EMERSON LEMAY looked at Nebraska. He didn’t see the fading signs of the Indians. He wasn’t concerned with them. What interested LeMay about Nebraska was what always interested him: winning America’s wars. After the tremendous victories over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in 1945, Americans all over the country, including those in Nebraska, figured the war was over. But LeMay was already thinking about the next one. That was his job.

  Now the potential enemy was the Soviet Union. Along with atomic weapons, Russia had big bombers, too. After getting caught on the ground at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, no American air force general was willing to do anything but assume the worst case. Hundreds of Soviet bombers with atomic bombs—that amounted to a hell of a threat. And those planes could arrive any hour on any day.

  When LeMay took over the Strategic Air Command (SAC) on October 19, 1948, he took charge of America’s nuclear bomber fleet, the country’s Sunday punch. LeMay reported for duty at Andrews Air Force Base, ten miles from the center of Washington, DC, and less than a hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.10 The Pentagon, the White House, the U.S. Capitol—all of those useful destinations for a SAC commander could be reached easily by air force limousine. Around SAC headquarters, Andrews featured nicely manicured lawns, a palatial officers’ club, and a wonderful golf course. Any weekend, in less than two hours, you could motor to the beach to fish or frolic. Duty at Andrews was pleasant. Most generals loved it. Not LeMay.