American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  The B-52s that bombed Vietnam were refitted to hold conventional bombs on pylons attached under the enormous swept-back wings. Additional modifications of the internal bomb bays allowed each plane to carry 60,000 pounds of bombs—30 tons. A single B-52 could drop eighty-four 500-pound bombs from its belly, and another twenty-four 750-pound bombs from under its wings. Each bomb could produce a crater about fifteen feet deep and thirty feet in diameter. Each explosion sent shrapnel flying two hundred feet in every direction.

  The B-52 strikes over South Vietnam were code-named Operation Arc Light. Ordinarily, a “cell” of three B-52s attacked a target “box” that was 1.2 miles long and 0.6 miles wide. Many targets were hit by a wave of seven or eight “cells.” That degree of carpet bombing ensured nearly total destruction of an area roughly the size of the National Mall in Washington, DC.

  In addition to high-explosive bombs and napalm, B-52s dropped enormous quantities of cluster bombs—little bombs packed inside one big one. Every big bomb contained hundreds of smaller bomblets, each one containing hundreds of steel pellets or razor-sharp darts (fléchettes). For example, the tiny BLU-26B “Guava” fragmentation bomblet was only 2.3 inches in diameter, but upon impact it released an explosion of three hundred steel pellets. The Defense Department ordered some 285 million Guava bomblets from 1966 to 1971—roughly seven bomblets for every person in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

  Cluster bombs are prototypical antipersonnel weapons (weapons intended to destroy people rather than structures). The steel pellets or fiberglass darts did not always kill, but they often burrowed deep into the body, where they were impossible to remove and could cause long-term suffering and eventual death. A single B-52, loaded with cluster bombs, could cover a square mile with 7.5 million steel pellets firing out in every direction. Bomblets that failed to explode on contact could explode years and even decades later when inadvertently dislodged by farmers or picked up by children. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians have been killed or wounded since the war by ordnance left behind by U.S. air strikes.

  High-flying B-52s were invisible and silent to those on the ground. They usually dropped their bombs from an altitude of five or six miles. In heavily bombed areas, Vietnamese learned to suspect an imminent B-52 attack when oft-sighted helicopters and other low-flying aircraft did not appear for an extended period of time, a sign that the Americans might be clearing airspace for the giant bombers. “When everything was very calm overhead, we moved to the deepest parts of the tunnels,” recalled Duong Thanh Phong, a Viet Cong veteran who lived northwest of Saigon in a region with an enormous network of underground tunnels. Many people who hid underground were crushed, buried, suffocated, deafened, and brain damaged. But more people survived than anyone might have thought possible.

  When the bombs hit, there was no mistaking an Arc Light strike. CIA analyst George Allen was having dinner in Saigon the night of the first B-52 strikes in 1965. Although the bombs were falling thirty-five miles away, he suddenly felt adrenaline flowing through his body. “Then I noticed that the shutters of the house had begun to rattle, and the drapes were fluttering. In the distance we could hear the faint, ominously deep, and sustained rumble of explosions.” To anyone within three miles, the thunderous concussions were terrifying. The explosions created enough turbulence to make clothing slap against skin as if a hurricane were approaching.

  Given that scale of destruction, it’s surprising that B-52s are not a more iconic symbol of the Vietnam War. In American memory, helicopters are far more commonly linked to the war, and for obvious reasons. Thousands of Hueys, Chinooks, Cobras, and Loaches were almost constantly visible over South Vietnam. Choppers appeared in countless TV reports. Perhaps the single most common TV war footage showed American troops, bent at the waist, jogging toward or away from helicopters, the rotors whipping up so much wind the nearby grass is flattened.

  The B-52s, by contrast, flew far above and beyond the war zone. You might see occasional shots of B-52s releasing dozens of bombs that looked like harmless sticks of wood falling out of the giant planes. But the aftermath on the ground remained invisible. Newspaper accounts of B-52 attacks in Vietnam were as routine and bloodless as the missions were to the crews. And since the strikes became so common, reporters required to file daily dispatches could always use a formulaic B-52 story on slow news days. The B-52 “lead” became one of the easiest and most predictable press reports of the war. A few samples:

  Giant United States B52 bombers pounded the dense Red-infiltrated jungle 35 miles northwest of Saigon today (AP, July 5, 1965).

  A flight of 25 to 30 B-52 bombers Wednesday saturated a Viet Cong stronghold near Saigon with an estimated 500 tons of bombs (UPI, July 22, 1965).

  Guam-based B-52 bombers, newly modified to hold 60,000 pounds of bombs each, jackhammered a Viet Cong radio and communications center 35 miles northeast of Saigon (New York Times, April 15, 1966).

  Waves of United States B-52 jet bombers droned over South Vietnam today and smashed three suspected Vietcong targets on the fringe of the Michelin rubber plantation, about 40 miles from Saigon (New York Times, November 30, 1966).

  However many colorful synonyms reporters found for “bombed”—pounded, smashed, jackhammered, plastered, rained, saturated—the overall impact of these stories was numbing. And for years, virtually every B-52 report automatically parroted the official claim that the bombs fell strictly on military targets—on Viet Cong base areas, strongholds, positions, redoubts, and installations, or at least suspected Viet Cong targets.

  A more probing media would have raised obvious questions about the use of B-52s. The most obvious would address the likelihood of major civilian casualties. Carpet bombing was indiscriminate by definition. And why were strategic bombers, designed for wholesale destruction of the enemy homeland, used in South Vietnam? After all, the Johnson administration had insisted that North Vietnam was the clear, external aggressor against an independent South. The intense and massive bombing of suspected Viet Cong strongholds just a few miles from South Vietnam’s capital demonstrated a reality Washington was not willing to concede—that the most imminent and dire threat to the American-backed government in 1965 was posed by the homegrown guerrillas of the South, not North Vietnamese regular troops coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. LBJ and his advisers believed major bombing near Saigon was essential simply to forestall defeat.

  The major media did raise some doubts about the effectiveness of the B-52 attacks. Was this blunt instrument really a smart way to fight a counterinsurgency? One common source of insider criticism, Colonel John Paul Vann, had been criticizing the bombing of South Vietnam since 1962, three years before the B-52s came on the scene. Bombing, he often said, was the worst way to fight a counter-guerrilla war. It was cruel, indiscriminate, and self-defeating. It killed more civilians than combatants. In a war that depended on political allegiance, bombing enraged the people, helping the enemy recruit a new fighter for every one that was killed.

  Yet officials continued to defend the bombing. The B-52s were so terrifying and dislocating, they insisted, the enemy would eventually become demoralized. At the very least, the strikes would keep him “on the run” and destroy his jungle hideaways. But nothing in the American arsenal, including its most powerful bomber, could destroy the enemy’s ability or willingness to continue fighting.

  As the war went on, however, policymakers did find a justification for B-52 bombing that had some basis in reality. It couldn’t bring victory, but it could delay defeat. On the few occasions Communist forces massed together in large numbers near U.S. positions such as Dak To (1967), Khe Sanh (1968), and An Loc (1972), heavy bombing could prevent large bases from being overrun. Similarly, when Hanoi launched the Tet Offensive of 1968 and the Easter Offensive of 1972, B-52 strikes produced especially massive body counts that effectively prevented Communist military victories. Indeed, the sheer killing power of the bombers eventually led John Paul Van
n to reverse his position on air strikes. Having once criticized the entire U.S. air war as excessive and counterproductive, by 1972 Vann was relying so heavily on massive bombing his Vietnamese staff started calling him “Mr. B-52.”

  Vann’s conversion to bombing rested more on desperation than faith. It could at least defer defeat. As long as you ruthlessly pounded every major Communist advance, you could occupy South Vietnam indefinitely. But it intensified Vietnamese hostility toward the United States and the U.S.-backed regime in Saigon.

  The bombing also eroded public support for the war at home. Many Americans eventually found it intolerable that the world’s greatest superpower was bombing a small, poor, mostly agricultural nation that posed no threat to U.S. national security. At antiwar demonstrations, signs reading “Stop the Bombing” were as common as “Stop the War” or “Peace Now.”

  The criticism reflected a growing American empathy for Vietnamese civilian victims, a remarkable degree of emotional identification coming from a people that had never experienced the sustained bombing of its own homeland. In the United States, a deep-seated sense of invulnerability to foreign attack has been an important, but sometimes neglected, aspect of national identity. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of 2001 were great challenges to that sense of security, but those attacks, horrible as they were, lasted a few hours, not years. And even the underlying dread caused by the nuclear arms race hardly compared to the anxiety of people living under daily bombing.

  American empathy with Vietnamese victims was not widespread when the bombing began, but it grew. Near the end of the war, the mainstream media began to reflect some of this public concern. Time magazine, for example, had for years echoed official reassurances that civilians were never targeted and rarely hit. By 1972, however, even Time expressed skepticism. That summer, B-52s were bombing the heavily populated Mekong Delta with wave after wave of daily attacks. “The most heavily hit region of the current campaign has been Dinh Tuong province, where 600,000 Vietnamese, mostly small farmers, are crammed into a tiny area one-third the size of Rhode Island. . . . The U.S. maintains that civilians are not being bombed in the Delta [but] in fact the bombing has claimed numerous civilian casualties . . . the bombs are dropping night and day on the friendly Vietnamese of Dinh Tuong.”

  The sustained air war in South Vietnam (1962–1975) was far more destructive than the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam (1965–1968, 1972). The United States dropped four million tons of bombs on the South, one million tons on the North. And while the air war quickly intensified in the South with the beginning of the B-52 strikes in 1965, the bombing of the North began much more gradually, moving northward from the 17th parallel, and did not include B-52 carpet bombing until Nixon renewed and intensified the air war over North Vietnam in 1972.

  Yet public debate and the media tended to focus more on the bombing of North Vietnam. In part, that was because there was a lot of controversy around LBJ’s graduated escalation of the bombing there, his close control over bombing targets, and his fruitless effort to use bombing “pauses” as a diplomatic card to encourage the North to drop its firm commitment to reunite with the South.

  Attention on the North was also raised by the media’s greater interest in the navy and air force pilots who bombed North Vietnam. Among U.S. pilots, their stories were often the most dramatic because North Vietnam had a formidable air defense system. With antiaircraft artillery, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), and MiG fighter jets provided by the Soviet Union and China, the North Vietnamese were able to shoot down more than sixteen hundred U.S. aircraft. In the South, the Viet Cong shot down hundreds of helicopters, but did not have the weapons to pose much threat to fighter-bombers, and they were completely unable to shoot down the high-flying B-52s.

  Magazine articles offered colorful accounts of naval aviators taking off from aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Roaring off the deck with “an unforgettable outburst of raw power,” they would soon be over North Vietnam “jinking and diving” to avoid North Vietnam’s surface-to-air missiles—those “28-foot ‘flying telephone poles.’” When airmen were forced to eject, journalists raised public concern about their plight (“two more comrades faced indefinite imprisonment in North Vietnam”). And sometimes there was a dramatic rescue to report:

  Streaking out of low cloud cover just seaward of Haiphong, the U.S. Air Force Voodoo flew smack into a sky full of flak. As his reconnaissance fighter belched flame from its starboard engine, Captain Norman Huggins, 36, of Sumter, S.C., knew his search for North Vietnamese SAM sites was over for the day. . . . Whoosh went the canopy, pow went the 37-mm. cartridge under his seat, pop went the parachute. . . . Huggins splashed down west of [an] island. . . . Onto the scene fluttered a revamped “Silver Angel”—the stubby-winged HU-16 sea-rescue amphibian of Air Force Captain David P. Westenbarger. . . . Dropping down through the cloud layer to 100 ft., Westenbarger saw an oncoming 30-ft junk spitting machine-gun bullets just short of Huggins. “Dunk that junk,” he ordered four fighters circling overhead. As they complied, Westenbarger splashed down [and] pulled the downed aviator aboard . . . Huggins needed only a minute to regain his breath, then grabbed a rifle himself. “Come on,” he said with understandable vengeance, “let me do some of that shooting.”

  Stories about American pilots could sound like comic books—“pop went the parachute”—but accounts of the actual bombing were often as dry as dust and relied on details provided by military briefers who made the U.S. air war sound like a surgical procedure. As journalist Zalin Grant recalled: “In reality the air briefing was a bore. . . . Normally reporters yawned and wrote their stories from the blue mimeographed press release, often quoting it word for word.” Briefings about air strikes on the “Phu Ly-Co Trai military complex,” for example, implied that U.S. forces had cleanly wiped out a major center of munitions factories and military bases. In fact, the target was a single bridge that ran through a thickly populated area in which civilian casualties were nearly inevitable.

  Even America’s most sophisticated aircraft routinely missed their targets. Take the air force’s F-105 Thunderchief. Flown from bases in Thailand and South Vietnam, the F-105 dropped almost three-quarters of the one million tons of bombs used against North Vietnam. According to military statistics, the F-105 missions had a “circular error probability” of 447 feet, meaning that half the bombs they dropped fell at least 447 feet away from their target. Only 5.5 percent of the F-105 bombs were “direct hits.”

  Moreover, there were few targets of military significance in North Vietnam. The Pentagon could identify only ninety-four, and even those paled in comparison to the vast transportation networks, military bases, naval shipyards, and munitions factories of industrialized military powers. Vietnam was overwhelmingly agricultural and rural. The third-largest city in North Vietnam—Nam Dinh—had a population of only about ninety thousand. War-related manufacturing and storage were also dispersed throughout the land. Briefers in Saigon talked about bombing strikes on “POL” storage areas as if North Vietnam had hundreds of gigantic tanks of petroleum, oil, and lubricants. In fact, most of those products (along with guns, ammo, and everything necessary to carry on the war) were distributed in small quantities throughout the country. In a tiny village two hundred miles from Hanoi you might stumble upon a few well-hidden fifty-five-gallon drums of oil and boxes of ammunition.

  Even the “significant” targets proved not to be very significant. If U.S. bombs destroyed a bridge, for example, the movement of troops and supplies from North Vietnam to the battlefields in the South might be interrupted, but never permanently halted. Within hours, alternative crossings were devised—ferryboats were moved in or pontoon bridges were created out of lashed-together flat-bottom canal boats covered with bamboo. Or, if bombs knocked out a section of railroad tracks, hundreds of Vietnamese would arrive at the stalled railroad cars to transfer the cargo onto bicycles. They had figured out a
way to load up to six hundred pounds on a single bicycle. The loaded bikes, steered with a long wooden pole across the handlebars, were walked to the undamaged side of the tracks where another railroad car would be waiting to continue the journey.

  Even when the United States finally succeeded in knocking out North Vietnam’s most important rail and highway link to the South—the Thanh Hoa Bridge—it had no impact on the war. But to the U.S. military, the bridge had become an obsession. Nearly nine hundred American warplanes attacked Thanh Hoa. And because the North Vietnamese surrounded the bridge with antiaircraft guns, more than a hundred airmen were shot down near the site. Finally, in 1972, the U.S. managed to destroy the bridge using new laser-guided bombs. Yet it was a meaningless triumph. Communist forces quickly found alternative routes over the Song Ma River before repairing the bridge a year later. The story of the Thanh Hoa Bridge vividly reveals the failure of U.S. airpower in Vietnam, despite official claims to the contrary.

  Some of these realities came to public light in the winter of 1966–1967, when Harrison Salisbury became the first U.S. reporter to gain admission to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). The fifty-eight-year-old Salisbury was a seasoned journalist. He had been the New York Times bureau chief in Moscow from 1949 to 1954 and had traveled to many other Communist countries prior to his arrival in Hanoi. During his two-week visit, his dispatches for the Times were picked up by newspapers around the world and represented the first major media challenge to Washington’s claim that U.S. bombing was effectively curbing the North’s support for the Viet Cong while avoiding civilian casualties.