Our Year of War

by Daniel P. Bolger

  The North understood Westmoreland’s American-led attrition strategy and used it against the United States and its South Vietnamese allies. For the last few months of 1967, NVA regiments forced major engagements in the sparsely populated north and northwestern border regions of South Vietnam. Eager to kill their enemy at remote places like Con Thien, Dak To, and Khe Sanh, Westmoreland’s MACV battalions went hard after the NVA. By early 1968, half of all U.S. combat battalions had shifted to the north and northwest, following the bait. The marine combat base at Khe Sanh became a focal point. The Americans thought they were taking out NVA soldiers faster than Hanoi could replace them, the long-sought crossover point. Yet for the NVA generals, MACV had done exactly as intended, leaving the hapless ARVN shielding their country’s major population centers to the south and along the coast. North Vietnam suffered heavy casualties. But as Giap stated: “The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, or tens of thousands of human beings, even if they are our own compatriots, represents very little.”6 The NVA had the aggressive Americans and the ineffectual ARVN right where they wanted them. The communists called this “preparing the battlefield.”

  With MACV and the ARVN in their places, some 84,000 Viet Cong, heavily reinforced by NVA cadres and selected units, drew the main tasks. The rest of the NVA (more than 400,000 strong), both in country and just outside, in Laos and Cambodia, waited to reinforce success. Stealthy VC assault detachments infiltrated into the vicinity of their carefully chosen urban objectives: 5 of 6 autonomous cities, 36 of 44 provincial capitals, 72 of 245 district centers, and numerous locations inside the national capital of Saigon, including the brand new American embassy, MACV headquarters, and the huge U.S. Army base at Long Binh. During January, the VC reconnoitered their many Tet targets. They rehearsed. They prepositioned key weapons and explosives. And then they waited for the order to go.7

  The men in Hanoi overreached. Like able military men everywhere, they looked for opportunities. But their assumptions stretched well beyond any sober wartime calculus. The communists believed the ARVN would fold up, quit, or maybe even turn coat. Worse, they trusted that the collapse of Saigon’s military would trigger a huge groundswell of politically motivated southerners, welcoming the VC and NVA as liberators and offering hearty assistance. Worst of all, they then leaped to the conclusion that this mass movement would take arms and, led by VC main force battalions and NVA regiments, drive the Americans into the sea, a supersized countrywide Dien Bien Phu. So the communists hoped.

  But hope is not a method, as experienced U.S. Army planners are wont to say. The wide-ranging VC attacks—yes, those could well happen, and might do a lot of damage. But finishing the 800,000-man ARVN? Rousing the sullen southern population? Running off 500,000 well-armed, well-trained Americans? Maybe a few too many May Day pep rallies, or too many ceremonial toasts, or too many puffs of the pungent local marijuana—no, those outcomes sure looked unlikely. The best the NVA might do, to borrow from General Erich Ludendorff and the German army in 1918, would be to punch a hole and see what happened next.8 And by the way, it didn’t work out too well for the guys from Berlin.

  One thing the Hanoi leadership did not intend at all was to cause some kind of domestic upheaval in America. The NVA general staff, Giap in particular, denigrated the influence of the peace movement in the United States. The North Vietnamese appreciated the sentiments and warmly welcomed various dissident delegations. But the Hanoi inner circle thought President Lyndon Johnson unlikely to knuckle under to throngs of hippies chanting outside the White House. It never occurred to those up north that a much bigger slice of American opinion-leaders and unhappy citizens, lulled by Westmoreland’s assurances of military progress, might react very strongly to the shock of the Tet Offensive. As NVA lieutenant general Tran Do noted, any such development would be, as he understated it, “a fortunate result.”9

  CHUCK HAGEL AND the other men of Company B expected trouble. The Tet holiday cease-fire started at 6 p.m. on Monday, January 29. Liberal leave for South Vietnamese soldiers allowed them to go home for family meals. Local street celebrations occurred in hamlets, towns, and cities. Firecracker strings popped and sparklers lit the night as all of Vietnam welcomed the Year of the Monkey.

  Monkey business followed. Somebody in the NVA, or more likely jumpy VC part-timers, got their days mixed up. American units up north reported eight attacks, and not the usual hit and run shenanigans, either. At thirty-five minutes after midnight, VC mortarmen plunked six rounds just outside a South Vietnamese navy site at Nha Trang; a battalion-sized ground assault followed. An hour later, two enemy battalions attacked into the center of Ban Me Thuot, the provincial capital. Another hostile battalion pushed into the little district capital of Tan Canh. About 2 a.m., three VC main force battalions assaulted the provincial capital buildings in Kontum. An hour after, another ground column assailed the district capital at Hoi An, just south of coastal Da Nang, South Vietnam’s second-largest city. In Da Nang proper, VC infiltrators struck the local AVN corps headquarters. At 4:10 a.m., two VC battalions took the government radio station compound at Qui Nhon. A half hour later, a major attack struck the highlands provincial center at Pleiku.10

  Those details, of course, never made it down to PFC Hagel and his guys. Across most of South Vietnam, U.S. and ARVN commanders read intelligence reports that some more concerted enemy strikes might be imminent. Naturally, the intel guys, nervous neddies all, predicted ten out of every three attacks that might hit you. Commanders did more or less to get ready. The Americans sure as hell weren’t on some kind of Tet holiday. And the ARVN cancelled the Tet furlough for South Vietnamese troops, although in their usual lackadaisical fashion, some units obeyed, some did not, and most got it about half right.

  But in the Saigon area, the word got out. Way up the chain at II Field Force headquarters at Long Binh, Major General Fred Weyand, reporter Johnny Apple’s unnamed critic of the attrition strategy, repositioned his American battalions to protect key sites around Saigon. Weyand had plenty of combat experience, to include service in the forbidding China-Burma-India theater in World War II, infantry battalion command in Korea, and two years in charge of the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam, fighting from just north of Saigon out to the Cambodian border. Weyand read the tea leaves well. The enemy was up to something. So Weyand moved his pieces around to block the bad guys. Westmoreland and many of the rest of the MACV staff would later claim they saw it coming, too. If so, they sure didn’t do much to get ready. 11 But Weyand did.

  Thus Chuck Hagel, Company B, and the rest of the 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry found itself fronting the jungle southeast of the barrier fence around Long Binh Post. On the maps at II Field Force headquarters, a blue rectangle marked the 2-47th’s lonely position. Inside the field force command post, ducking pieces of the ceiling lights raining down, dutiful sergeants marked red squares all around, reported locations of various elements of the “Bien Hoa” VC Sapper Company, 238th VC Local Force Company, U-1 VC Local Force Battalion, 274th VC Main Force Regiment, 275th VC Main Force Regiment—a division-scale attack.12 Nobody had ever seen anything like this. It promised to be a very interesting day around Long Binh. And it had started early.

  CHUCK HAGEL WAS right there. He’d come a long way from that well-lit office at Fort Dix, New Jersey, to a hot, humid defensive line in the small hours of the morning just outside Long Binh Post. His journey took him from Fort Dix to a five-day leave in Nebraska, to the Oakland Army Terminal in California, to Travis Air Force Base, to a contracted jet airliner over the Pacific, to the hot tarmac of Tan Son Nhut Air Base, to a ride on a green school bus with mesh over the windows—keeps the hand grenades out—that stopped for a few days at the 90th Replacement Battalion at Long Binh Post, one of the unhappy recipients of VC ire early on the morning of January 31, 1968. From the crowded tents of the 90th, Hagel boarded a sandbagged 5-ton cargo truck and, escorted by armed vehicles, rode in a long road convoy headed south on Highway 15. The convoy’s destinati
on was Camp Martin Cox at Bear Cat, home of the 9th Infantry Division, the Old Reliables, Westmoreland’s World War II outfit. A stint followed at the Reliable Academy, five days of intense jungle school, the “inside tips” on Vietnam tactics not covered at Fort Bliss and Fort Ord. Finally, after about ten days of all of those draining preliminaries, Hagel arrived at Company B, 2-47th Infantry. The company issued him an M16 rifle, helmet, flak jacket, and other field gear. The battalion sergeant major welcomed Hagel and the other new guys. Remarks by the company commander and the first sergeant came next. Then came chow and some fitful sleep on a cot inside a tent. At five the next morning, a week or so before Christmas, the rifle company, Hagel among them, moved out on a weeklong operation.13

  This long, tiring picaresque didn’t always make sense at the PFC level. For the U.S. Army it constituted business as usual. To the institutional army, Chuck Hagel equaled MOS 11B10. His arrival in country on December 4, 1967, filled a hole. And Company B, 2-47th Infantry had one.

  Hagel arrived in the same way his father Charles Dean Hagel showed up in Hawaii in 1942 and the way his brother Tom entered Vietnam on February 7, 1968—as an individual replacement. The U.S. Army formed units stateside and then sent them to war. When they took losses, like the 42nd Bombardment Squadron did in 1942, the system sent replacements, such as Charles Dean Hagel. In World War II, units and men fought for the duration. With few exceptions, nobody went home early except the severely wounded. When people got sick, or hurt, or died, the army sent in replacement soldiers, like feeding fresh bullets into a machine gun.14 It all had a certain logic in Washington.

  The army used the same system in the Korean War. At first, entire regiments and battalions deployed. But Korea was a limited war, and keeping troops in for the duration did not wash with hometown America. After a year or so, as the squalid Asian conflict settled into a static trench confrontation and casualty numbers dropped, soldiers were allowed to serve about a year and then go home, to be backfilled by individual replacements.15 As another limited war, Vietnam seemed tailor-made for this same method: units first, then individual replacements, soldier by soldier.

  When units entered Vietnam in strength starting in 1965, MACV smoothly established man-by-man rotations, set as twelve months for soldiers and, drawing on some arcane USMC arithmetic, thirteen months for marines. Experienced in World War II and Korea, Westmoreland never considered any other approach: “The one year tour gave a man a goal. That was good for morale.”16 So he thought.

  Thus units trained and deployed together, like the 1st Cavalry Division from Fort Benning, Georgia; the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky; and the 9th Infantry Division from Fort Riley, Kansas. Within a year after arrival, it all went to pieces. The division flags stayed in Vietnam, but the wholesale shuffling of people began and never let up. It resembled trading a finely forged steel sword for a glued-together collection of metal shards. All the leadership in the world couldn’t retemper that blade. The best you got might be a blunt instrument.

  Sending troops into Vietnam one by one, as individual replacements, may have satisfied the adjutant general officers and the efficiency experts surrounding Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Reams of thick studies proved again and again how training two-year draftees for several months in the United States and then sending them to spend a year in Vietnam constituted optimum use of manpower.17 All the number crunchers agreed.

  Frontline officers and NCOs did not. Men are not machine gun bullets, nor are they widgets or screws to be shuffled from drawer to drawer around the globe. People fight for the guys on either side of them. They willingly obey leaders they know and trust. Other armies—the British, the Canadians, the French, the Australians, all veterans of many wars in the more unpleasant corners of the world—have long deployed by battalions. The United States could have done so. Instead, we settled for war one soldier at a time. And somehow, even so, with a half million men in theater, units in Vietnam remained understrength, short on NCOs, and replete with individuals mismatched to their training, square pegs in round holes. MACV daily awaited their share of “the invisible horde of people,” as described by Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair as far back as 1944, “going here and there but seemingly never arriving.”18 When steady men like the Hagel brothers showed up, they went right to work.

  Chuck Hagel later commented on what he experienced in country. “We were terribly understrength at every level,” he said. “As I recall, we were even rotating cooks and clerks into the field to fill some of those gaps.” He went on: “You had guys rotating in and out daily. You would break the continuity of leadership. You’d break the continuity of confidence, of teamwork.” Soldiers near the end of their year, “short-timers,” avoided risks. They sought duty at the base camp. That meant others went out on more patrols, filling the gaps. Young soldiers like Chuck and Tom Hagel stepped up for the senior NCOs who were wounded or not assigned. “It was a very bad policy,” concluded Chuck.19

  You could make a case, and some wiser officers and NCOs did, that units in Vietnam fought most effectively in the first few months after deployment. Once the first year ended and the cohesive original organizations came apart—exactly what happened to the 9th Infantry Division in December 1967—things rarely went as well.20 Good leaders, even great leaders, inspirational figures like George Washington or George Patton, would be hard-pressed to pull together a mass of individuals. To do so under fire in a frontless war against guerrilla enemies? Well, forget it.

  The younger professional officers and NCOs in Vietnam saw the problem only too clearly. Men like General Colin Powell (captain and major in country) and H. Norman Schwarzkopf (major and lieutenant colonel at the time) insisted on unit deployments and unit rotations in the Iraq War of 1990–91. Unit swap-outs were the rule in Haiti in 1994–96, Bosnia starting in 1995, and Kosovo in 1999. U.S. Army vice chief of staff General Jack Keane (captain in Vietnam) ensured the unit approach in 2003 as it became evident the dual Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns required a long-term commitment.21 We may not be happy with the course of those indecisive wars, but our units held together year in and year out. So we got that right. Wars must be fought by units, by formed teams, not by a gaggle of strangers. Vietnam taught that hard lesson in blood. Some of it belonged to Chuck and Tom Hagel.

  CHUCK HAGEL MET his enemy on a day before Christmas of 1967. He and the rest of the riflemen had been out for days. The army referred to the mission as route security, code-named “Riley” and “Akron” and “Santa Fe,” keeping Route 1 and Route 15 open to traffic.22 The troops called these efforts “roadrunner operations” or “thunder runs.” Most U.S. units searched and searched to find the opposition. But if you spent enough time going up and down the major roads, the VC found you.

  Hagel’s 2-47th Infantry wasn’t elite. Not marines, not special forces, not paratroopers, not airmobile heliborne troopers, the 2-47th amounted to just another American infantry battalion, typical of them all. Indeed, for the 1994 movie Forrest Gump, when Vietnam veteran Winston Groom and screenwriter Eric Roth chose a unit for their fictional protagonist Forrest and his friends Bubba Blue and Lieutenant Dan, they selected Company A, 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry.23 The movie got many details right enough for Hollywood, but missed a big one.

  The real 2-47th brought something extra to the fight, and that capability made them ideal for roadrunning. In Vietnam, most U.S. Army and Marine infantry walked, even though often they went into action by helicopter. But 2-47th relied on the M113A1 armored personnel carrier (APC). This 12-ton tracked vehicle looked like the world’s largest shoe box, sixteen feet long, nine feet wide, seven feet tall. Behind its sloped flat bow squatted a 215-horsepower diesel engine. The vehicle’s aluminum armor ranged from a half inch to an inch-and-a-half thick, better than nothing, but not by much. An M113 could shrug off fragments and rifle bullets, although the heavier stuff punched right through. A heavy armored ramp on the back let eleven men get on or off. When the ramp dropped, those
inside ran off like troops leaving a landing craft on D-Day. The APC driver sat to the left front; a track commander handled a long .50-caliber machine gun centered in a little turret on top. Both men could keep their helmeted heads up (not very safe) or slam the hatch and peer out through a ring of thick glass vision blocks and try to drive that way (also not very safe). The 2-47th called their vehicles “one-one-threes” or “tracks.”

  Having four M113s per platoon made 2-47th “mechanized,” one of only ten such U.S. outfits among the 117 maneuver battalions in all of MACV; there were also ten armored cavalry squadrons (with tanks) and four tank battalions (two army, two marine). The 9th Infantry Division owned two mechanized infantry battalions, and used them to keep major highways open—and as quick reaction forces when trouble erupted unexpectedly. Heliborne troops flew only in good weather and arrived with hand weapons and the ammunition they carried on their persons. Helicopters were fast as hell, over a hundred miles an hour, but unarmored. On a hot landing zone, with the VC machine gunners blazing away, you could lose a lot of helicopters very quickly, and the survival rate in chopper crashes wasn’t good. M113s only moved at twenty-five miles an hour on good roads (not many in Vietnam), but they carried a lot of ammunition, those powerful .50 calibers on top, and a rack of riflemen aboard, and ran in all weather. Most importantly, M113s mounted long-range amplified radios, the lifelines to medical evacuation, resupply, reinforcements, artillery, and air support. If hit, M113 APCs could be towed out, and likely repaired. Nobody towed off a UH-1D Huey helicopter except to blow it up.

  Looking at the 2-47th, it seemed like Hagel belonged there, even though he’d had very little mechanized training before he showed up in country. His father, Charles, had certainly fought out on the far side of the Pacific, and now son Chuck was there, too. The .50 caliber, “a tremendous, effective machine gun” in Hagel’s words, just happened to be the same heavy weapon his father once used to defend B-24 Liberator bombers. In another coincidence, 2-47th Infantry, like Charles Dean Hagel’s 42nd Bombardment Squadron, used the black panther as the unit symbol. If you believed in fate, or karma, or the Lord moving in mysterious ways, you noticed such things. Chuck Hagel did.24