American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  Salisbury’s initial look at the North Vietnamese countryside led him to assume that U.S. bombing could hardly fail. After all, there was only one major highway and one major railroad. How hard would it be for the world’s greatest superpower to destroy them? “The railroad and the highway, running side by side, across the completely flat terrain crossing and recrossing canal after canal and river after river” represented a “bombardier’s dream.” But after witnessing how quickly the Vietnamese repaired the bomb damage or created alternative routes, he could not ignore the obvious: “I could see with my own eyes that the movement of men, materials, food and munitions had not been halted. . . .The traffic flowed out of Hanoi and Haiphong night after night after night.”

  Salisbury was right. In fact, the more the United States bombed, the more troops went south. In 1965, when the United States flew 25,000 sorties against North Vietnam, some 35,000 North Vietnamese troops moved to the South. By 1967, the U.S. had quadrupled the air war against North Vietnam, flying 108,000 sorties. Nonetheless, some 90,000 NVA soldiers arrived in the South.

  Salisbury also documented North Vietnam’s extraordinary efforts to minimize the impact of the bombing. In his first Times dispatch, published on Christmas Day 1966, he described Hanoi as a city “going about its business briskly, energetically, purposefully . . . hardly a truck moves without its green bough of camouflage. Even pretty girls camouflage their bicycles and conical straw hats.” A few days later he reported that hundreds of thousands of individual bomb bunkers—concrete manholes—had been dug on sidewalks throughout the city and that many residents had evacuated to the countryside. “Everything dispersible has been dispersed. The countryside is strewn with dispersed goods and supplies. The same is true of the people.”

  Despite these measures, Salisbury reported, the bombing had taken a substantial toll on North Vietnamese civilians. Although U.S. officials had repeatedly insisted that only military targets were hit, Salisbury discovered that many residential neighborhoods had been struck, along with schools, shops, nonmilitary factories, Catholic churches, Buddhist temples, and dikes. And in many cases there were no discernible military targets in the area. “The bombed areas of Nam Dinh possess an appearance familiar to anyone who saw blitzed London, devastated Berlin and Warsaw, or smashed Soviet cities like Stalingrad and Kharkov.”

  In response, the administration and its supporters did their best to discredit Salisbury’s dispatches. They especially attacked him for reporting casualty figures provided by the North Vietnamese, as if that itself were an act of disloyalty. According to Time magazine, Salisbury presented a “distorted picture” that would “reinforce the widely held impression that the U.S. is a big powerful nation viciously bombing a small, defenseless country into oblivion, and thus spur international demands for an end to the air war.”

  Evidence of civilian casualties put the Johnson administration in an embarrassing position. Even as Salisbury’s reports were coming out, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy had an article in Foreign Affairs claiming that “the bombing of the North has been the most accurate and the most restrained in modern warfare.”

  A substantial number of Americans agreed with Bundy and were appalled. They wanted to eliminate all restraints. A Gallup poll in October 1967 found that 42 percent of Americans would support the use of nuclear weapons to win the war in Vietnam. That was the highest percentage ever recorded on that question, but other polls routinely found 20–25 percent willing to embrace atomic warfare against North Vietnam. Like retired air force general Curtis LeMay, who once recommended that the U.S. bomb Vietnam “back into the Stone Age,” many pro-war hawks railed against President Johnson for micromanaging the air war against North Vietnam and limiting the targets. Why weren’t American bombers allowed to blast and mine Haiphong harbor, where Soviet ships delivered crucial war supplies? What about the rail lines near the Chinese border? Or why not simply firebomb all of Hanoi as the United States had done to Tokyo and more than sixty other Japanese cities during World War II? Even during the Korean War, U.S. bombing had utterly destroyed most of the major population centers of the Communist North.

  By contrast, the bombing of North Vietnam was restricted, especially during the first two years of Operation Rolling Thunder (1965–1966). And LBJ did micromanage the air war in the North, once bragging, “I won’t let those Air Force generals bomb the smallest outhouse north of the 17th parallel without checking with me.” His personal oversight was based on one overriding fear: that a more aggressive campaign against North Vietnam might compel the Chinese, or even the Soviets, to enter the war. Johnson well recalled how 300,000 Chinese troops poured into Korea after the United States attacked past the 38th parallel and fought all the way up to the Chinese border.

  A gradual escalation of the bombing, LBJ believed, would prevent China from intervening. Explaining his reasoning to journalists, he said U.S. bombing was “seduction, not rape.” Only “rape,” he claimed, was likely to draw China into the war. When Senator George McGovern met Johnson in 1965 to express concerns about possible Chinese intervention, LBJ told him not to worry: “I’m going up her leg an inch at a time . . . I’ll get to the snatch before they know what’s happening.”

  Hawks were as appalled as antiwar critics like McGovern, and not just by Johnson’s bizarre and offensive metaphors. The idea that gradually escalating the bombing of the North would eventually convince Ho Chi Minh to back down struck many as senseless, if not insane. And along with the intensified air strikes came periodic bombing “pauses.” LBJ hoped that these temporary cessations of violence might extract concessions that the bombing itself had failed to produce. Predictably, they did not. Hanoi was not about to abandon its objectives. Besides, the bombing pauses only applied to the North. The United States continued to bomb South Vietnam relentlessly and increase its troop levels there. Hanoi also understood that LBJ used the bombing pauses as pretexts to intensify the bombing in the North. He would say, in effect, Hanoi isn’t backing down in spite of our peaceful overtures, so we must increase the pressure.

  By the time Lyndon Johnson finally ended the bombing of North Vietnam in 1968, the claim that Operation Rolling Thunder had been “restrained” was less and less credible. Every significant military target except the ports had been hit, many of them repeatedly. And when Nixon renewed the bombing of North Vietnam in 1972, it was even more systematic, with the ports mined and B-52s used in round-the-clock attacks. All told, according to air war historian Mark Clodfelter, the bombing killed about 55,000 North Vietnamese civilians.

  As destructive as it was, the bombing of the North was not nearly as sustained or deadly as in the South. South Vietnamese and U.S. pilots began bombing the South in 1962 and did not stop until the war ended in 1975. No other country in world history has been attacked with so many explosives. South Vietnam was struck by almost twice as many bombs as the United States dropped in all of World War II (four million tons). Nonetheless, many Americans believed—and still believe—that the major target of U.S. bombing was North Vietnam. Perhaps it was simply impossible to fathom that the United States would so massively bomb the country it claimed to be saving.

  One of the first writers to clarify this point was Bernard Fall, who had been studying and visiting Vietnam since 1953. A fearless scholar and journalist, Fall was especially well suited to understand the tactics and emotions of a guerrilla war. An Austrian Jew, Fall joined the French Resistance at age fifteen. Both of his parents were killed by the Nazis. In the early 1950s, Fall went to Syracuse University for his PhD and remained in the United States. He went on to publish a handful of vital books about the French Indochina War and the beginning of the American war in Vietnam. While maintaining a full-time career as a scholar (he taught at Howard University), he also worked as a journalist, publishing hundreds of articles about Vietnam. His knowledge was so widely respected, his work appeared in journals as varied as the Naval War College Review, Ramparts, Horizon,
and the New Republic.

  Fall was fervently anti-Communist, but he cast a critical eye on U.S. policy. By 1965, sooner than most journalists, he expressed strong moral objections to the American war. He was particularly distressed by the intensification of bombing over South Vietnam. “What changed the character of the Vietnam War,” he wrote in October 1965, “was not the decision to bomb North Vietnam; not the decision to use American ground troops in South Vietnam; but the decision to wage unlimited aerial warfare inside the country [of South Vietnam] at the price of literally pounding the place to bits.”

  Fall witnessed some of this destruction when he accompanied the U.S. pilot of a Skyraider, a World War II vintage bomber famous for its durability and bomb load capacity (7,500 pounds). On this mission, the Skyraider attacked a fishing village on the southern tip of South Vietnam with a population, Fall estimated, of 1,000–1,500 people. The plane made three passes over the village. On the first, the Skyraider dropped napalm to set the homes and buildings on fire and drive people outside. Then a second plane swooped in to drop conventional bombs “to hit whatever—or whomever—had rushed out into the open.” Then Fall’s plane made a second pass to drop more 500-pound napalm bombs. The wingman followed with yet another bombing strike. On their third pass, Fall’s Skyraider strafed the village with its four 20 mm cannons. “I could see some of the villagers trying to head away from the burning shore in their sampans. The village was burning fiercely. I will never forget the sight of the fishing nets in flame, covered with burning, jellied gasoline.”

  Fall had few illusions that the United States would change course. As he wrote in 1965: “The incredible thing about Viet-Nam is that the worst is yet to come. We have been bombing for a relatively short time and the results are devastating . . . [and] everything could be escalated vastly. . . . It is strictly a one-way operation in the South. The Viet Cong do not have a single flying machine. We can literally go anywhere and bomb anything. The possibilities of devastation are open-ended.”

  What would be left after all that devastation? A “prostrate South Vietnam, plowed under by bombers and artillery,” yet a country “still in the hands of a politically irrelevant regime.” Without popular support for the Saigon government, Fall argued, “no aircraft carrier and eight-jet bomber can provide a ready answer in the long run.”

  Fall did not live long enough to witness just how “open-ended” the devastation of South Vietnam would become. In February 1967, he accompanied a unit of American marines on Route 1 between Hue and Da Nang, a stretch of highway French soldiers fifteen years earlier had dubbed La Rue Sans Joie (The Street Without Joy). Fall had made that name famous by using it as the title of his 1961 book about the French Indochina War. Now, in 1967, as the marines began firing, Fall spoke into a tape recorder. “There is no return fire whatever,” he said. “By tonight we will know whether what we killed were genuine VC with weapons or simply people.” A few seconds later, Fall stepped on a land mine and was killed.

  About seven weeks before he died, Fall offered his help to a twenty-three-year-old aspiring writer named Jonathan Schell. “I was the very definition of a pest,” Schell recalled, “a graduate student who had no knowledge and who vaguely thought he might like to write something.” Fall gave him some crucial advice and helped him get a press pass. With that, Schell went on to write two of the best books about the war. In one of them, The Military Half, Schell examined the impact of U.S. bombing in two South Vietnamese provinces, Quang Ngai and Quang Tin. It was the kind of basic project you might imagine many journalists undertook—to focus on a specific place and examine the war in detail. Not so. Most journalists went here and there looking for attention-grabbing firefights or they stayed in Saigon and relied on official sources. As a result, Schell believed, the war’s most obvious story—the destruction of South Vietnam with American bombs—was being missed. “It wasn’t a subtle thing,” he recalled. “The fire and smoke was pouring up to the heavens. You didn’t have to be a detective or do any investigative journalism. The flames were roaring around you.”

  Schell made some of his most valuable observations from the backseat of a small, single-propeller Cessna flown by a forward air controller, who directed U.S. jet bombers to their targets. Schell learned to distinguish the variety of ways Vietnamese villages had been destroyed. Some had been leveled by conventional bombs, some by napalm, some by artillery shelling. Others had been bulldozed or burned down by ground troops using ordinary Zippo cigarette lighters or flamethrowers. The means of destruction could be identified by the degree of damage and the color of the remains.

  Schell carefully mapped Quang Ngai and Quang Tin provinces and discovered that 70–80 percent of the homes had been destroyed. His great contribution was to demonstrate that most of that wreckage was neither inadvertent nor accidental, but the direct result of the military’s official rules of engagement. It was standard operating procedure.

  The U.S. military authorized its forces to bomb South Vietnamese villages under any of the following circumstances:

  First, if American troops were fired upon from a South Vietnamese village, they could call in a bombing strike on the village immediately and without warning. Even a single round of sniper fire from the general vicinity of a village could lead to the destruction of the entire village.

  Second, if the United States had evidence that villagers were providing support to the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army (food, housing, information, etc.) the entire village could be destroyed. The rules required that the village be given a warning in advance “whenever possible.” The warning might come from helicopter loudspeakers or leaflets dropped from the sky. But since the “warnings” were often couched as a general ultimatum, villagers had no idea if or when they would be bombed.

  Third, areas from which civilians had been forcibly removed were declared free-fire zones. The U.S. rules of engagement authorized the random destruction of anything that remained or returned. Millions of South Vietnamese were forced from their ancestral villages. Most of those villages were then burned, bombed, or bulldozed. Yet many Vietnamese found their displacement so intolerable they returned to their destroyed villages despite the risk of living in areas the United States claimed a right to obliterate repeatedly.

  Quite obviously, the rules of engagement offered no protection to civilian lives and property. They sanctioned wholesale attacks. The millions of psychological warfare leaflets dropped as “warnings” often included gruesome cartoon pictures of American jets dropping bombs on Vietnamese villages with guerrillas and civilians alike heaped on the ground in pools of blood. Under these pictures were captions that read “If you support the Vietcong . . . your village will look like this.” One leaflet included this text:

  Dear Citizens:

  The U.S. Marines are fighting alongside the Government of Vietnam forces in Duc Pho in order to give the Vietnamese people a chance to live a free, happy life, without fear of hunger and suffering. But many Vietnamese have paid with their lives and their homes have been destroyed because they helped the Vietcong in an attempt to enslave the Vietnamese people. . . .

  The hamlets of Hai Mon, Hai Tan, Sa Binh, Tan Binh, and many others have been destroyed because of this. We will not hesitate to destroy every hamlet that helps the Vietcong. . . .

  The U.S. Marines issue this warning: THE U.S. MARINES WILL NOT HESITATE TO DESTROY, IMMEDIATELY, ANY VILLAGE OR HAMLET HARBORING THE VIETCONG. . . .

  The choice is yours. If you refuse to let the Vietcong use your villages and hamlets as their battlefield, your homes and your lives will be saved.

  But did Vietnamese villagers really have a “choice”? Did they have the power to reject the Viet Cong? Could armed and committed revolutionaries be persuaded to go away? Could anti-Communist or neutral civilians be expected to risk their lives by openly defying the guerrillas and their local supporters?

  What about pro–Viet Cong villages? Throughout much of
the South Vietnamese countryside the Viet Cong were not just a mobile group of fighters who came and went and “used” the villages “as their battlefield”; they were the village. They had effectively established an alternative government. Many provinces in South Vietnam, like those Schell examined along the central coast, had been sites of revolutionary fervor for decades. But was the United States justified in bombing pro–Viet Cong villages as their citizens went about their daily routines and took care of their children? The U.S. rules of engagement claimed that right.

  The indiscriminate bombing of South Vietnam epitomized the military’s underlying assumption that all Vietnamese were regarded as possible enemies and therefore as potential targets. The bombing policies made Vietnamese civilians responsible for proving that they were not Viet Cong or supporters of the Viet Cong. Simply trying to avoid American aggression was no guarantee of safety. As one propaganda leaflet put it, “The Marines are here to help you. Do not run from them! If you run, they may mistake you for a Vietcong and shoot at you.”

  The U.S. ground war in South Vietnam was committed to the same fundamental goal as the air war: to maximize the enemy body count. The objective was not to gain and hold territory or to defend the civilian population, but to kill as many enemy troops as possible. The approach was put most succinctly by army strategist and commander of the First Infantry Division, General William DePuy: “The solution in Vietnam is more bombs, more shells, more napalm . . . till the other side cracks and gives up.”

  This single-minded focus on killing was the military’s only answer to warfare in a country where the American side lacked the political support to wage a territorial campaign to drive the enemy from the field. As soon as U.S. troops gained military control of one area and moved on, the Viet Cong came right back to reassert its political control. With a million or more troops, the Americans might have established long-term military control of most villages, but to what end? For two thousand years, foreign occupiers had tried to control Vietnam—the Chinese, the Mongols, the French, and the Japanese. Some had managed by force to maintain their power for centuries. But none had gained the broad loyalty of the people. All were eventually defeated. American leaders believed they had something better to offer than all the other foreigners. But there were not enough Vietnamese customers. The only recourse was more bombs and more shells—to kill all who resisted.