American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  The body count was the paramount measure of success. Every month, General Westmoreland required a massive collection of statistical data from all units, and no number was more important than the body count. Commanders reporting low body counts were routinely punished with poor fitness reports and passed over for promotion. Careers were on the line. High body counts, on the other hand, led to medals, rapid promotion, and plum assignments.

  Given the stakes, many officers did exactly what you might imagine: they lied, sometimes flagrantly, about the number of enemy their units had killed; and they were not scrupulous about proving the “enemy” status of the bodies. Even officers who insisted that their men take care to distinguish between combatants and civilians knew that most superior officers were more worried about military results (high body counts) than developing the trust of civilian villagers. In truth, there was an incentive to kill civilians so long as they could be included in the count of “enemy” dead. And most of the time, they could. “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s Viet Cong” was the cryptic battlefield summary of the practice.

  This carrot-and-stick approach to killing ran all the way down to the infantrymen in the field. Many battalions kept body count “scorecards” and encouraged competition to see which units produced the highest tallies. Rewards for killing included official commendations, ice cream or beer, and even a few extra days back in the rear for R&R. As former Ninth Infantry Division combat medic Wayne Smith recalls: “I could not believe my country was capable of going in and killing people and counting their bodies and claiming a victory because we killed more of them than they did of us. But there was a real incentivizing of death and it just fucked with our value system. In our unit guys who got confirmed kills got sent to the beach at Vung Tau.”

  Civilian casualties were also exacerbated by the primary U.S. tactic—search-and-destroy missions. American troops were sent out on foot, loaded down with sixty to eighty pounds of ammo and gear, to hunt for the enemy. The “grunts” walked endless miles in baking humidity through some of the toughest terrain in the world; they “humped the boonies” through villages, swamps, rice paddies, jungles, and mountains. Days and sometimes weeks would pass without a firefight. The enemy was usually invisible and always elusive. The troops grew increasingly exhausted, frustrated, and angry.

  For all the firepower at their disposal, the grunts felt exposed and vulnerable. When firefights began, they were almost always initiated by the other side. The Pentagon quickly realized that the enemy determined the time, place, and duration of at least 75 percent of the firefights. The most typical battles in Vietnam started in two ways: either a unit of American infantrymen, moving through the countryside, was suddenly ambushed by the enemy or, in the middle of the night, at a remote base, enemy troops would charge into the U.S. perimeter in a wave attack.

  Because the enemy initiated most firefights, American soldiers began to think of themselves less as hunters and more as “bait” used to lure the other side into combat. In his 1978 novel, Fields of Fire, Vietnam veteran and future senator James Webb described search-and-destroy missions this way: “Somebody said it was an operation with a name, but it had its own name: Dangling the Bait. Drifting from village to village . . . inviting an enemy attack much as a worm seeks to attract a fish: mindlessly, at someone else’s urging, for someone else’s reason.”

  Once the enemy took the bait, and contact was made, the Americans were then able to take advantage of their massive firepower. All hell would break loose. Whenever possible, the U.S. ground troops would call in air strikes and artillery on enemy positions. The American arsenal was virtually bottomless. In the end, U.S. firepower almost always prevailed. When the body counts were reported, the math repeatedly claimed—sometimes falsely—that Americans had far out-gunned and out-killed their opponents. The body count was the only evidence that the United States was “winning” the war.

  But the built-in frustrations of counterinsurgency warfare were an ever-renewing cycle. American troops would “win” a firefight, only to continue the hunt elsewhere. Their movements had no discernible rhyme or reason. To the grunts it felt like mindless movement, as if they were wandering in circles, with no sense of progress or purpose, no sense that all the killing was leading to victory. They would gain control of a battlefield and move on. Sometimes they found themselves fighting again on the sites of previous firefights.

  The numbing routine took its toll, especially during stretches when U.S. units lost men from sniper fire or booby traps without making contact with enemy troops. Anger and bitterness fell on top of exhaustion and frustration. Many grunts wanted revenge, a chance for “payback.” But the armed enemy was hard to find.

  Villagers were easy to find. Why not take it out on them? After all, U.S. jets were allowed to pulverize villages considered pro–Viet Cong. Why should ground soldiers adhere to stricter rules? Why not kill anyone and everyone who supports the other side? If a GI stepped on a booby trap within sight of a Vietnamese village, shouldn’t the villagers be punished? Why didn’t they warn the Americans? Why didn’t any of them step on the explosives? They surely knew where booby traps were planted. One of them may well have planted it.

  What did the generals expect an ordinary soldier to do? The high command could not have been more hypocritical. General Westmoreland distributed a card to all American soldiers in Vietnam listing nine rules of conduct, including: “Treat women with politeness and respect”; “Make personal friends among the soldiers and common people”; “Always give the Vietnamese the right of way.” Yet these same generals sanctioned brothels and massage parlors, forced millions of common people off their land, soaked the land with toxic chemical defoliants, bombed and shelled indiscriminately, and measured everyone’s fitness by the number of kills they reported. So although Westmoreland and most other generals did not directly order the abuse and killing of civilians, or the execution of prisoners, the policies they established gave moral legitimacy and license to every sort of brutal behavior. As Nick Turse persuasively argues in his book Kill Anything That Moves, “Murder, torture, rape, abuse . . . were virtually a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam . . . they were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military.” It was not inevitable that every soldier would commit an atrocity—most soldiers did not—but they were commonplace nonetheless.

  Violence against civilians was also fueled by racism. In boot camp, if not before, American soldiers were taught to think of their enemy as “gooks.” In Vietnam, Americans routinely used racist slurs in reference to all Vietnamese, not just enemy fighters. “Gooks,” “dinks,” “zipperheads,” “slopes”—these words saturated American language in Vietnam, used without hesitation or self-consciousness. Even Americans of color were not immune. African American medic Wayne Smith: “All through training, and even my first six or seven months in Vietnam, I never called the Vietnamese gooks because I knew intuitively that it would be the same as saying nigger. And it was. Yet in combat I began to call them gooks.” Journalist Michael Herr once heard a GI in Vietnam offer his opinion on the domino theory: “All that’s just a load, man. We’re here to kill gooks. Period.”

  But all the killing could not bring victory. The body counts piled up, but the political failures continued. That reality was dramatically exposed by the Tet Offensive of 1968 when Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces initiated a massive, coordinated surprise attack all over South Vietnam. Never before had the Communist troops come out of the countryside to fight against the Americans in the major towns and cities. Now they were pouring into the streets by the thousands, out in the open, hitting almost everything at once—five of the six largest cities, thirty-six provincial capitals, sixty-four district capitals, and dozens of military bases, airfields, and government installations. A Viet Cong commando squad even broke into the grounds of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

  It was
stunning news, especially since U.S. officials had spent the previous year bragging that the Communists were on the ropes, that the tide was turning, that the war’s end was coming into view. This public relations campaign was orchestrated from the White House by National Security Adviser Walt Rostow. Every Monday, he convened the Psychological Strategy Committee to coordinate their plans—which reporters to cultivate, what upbeat statistics to circulate, which officials to send out for speeches and talk shows, what should be said—how, in other words, to win the hearts and minds of the American public, some 50 percent of whom had already concluded that the United States had made a mistake getting into Vietnam.

  To buttress the PR campaign, four-star general William Westmoreland was twice ordered home to offer his personal assurance that the war was going great. In April 1967, he addressed both houses of Congress. Westmoreland looked like Hollywood’s idea of a perfect general—jut-jawed, square-shouldered, with campaign ribbons lined up in an impressive stack. Most of America’s elected officials applauded every drumbeat of progress (“Two years ago the Republic of Vietnam had fewer than 30 combat-ready battalions. Today it has 154. Then there were three jet-capable runways in South Vietnam. Today there are 14”). Finally the big finish: “Backed at home by resolve, confidence, patience, and continued support, we will prevail in Vietnam over the Communist aggressor!” This, according to the New York Times, “produced shouts and cheers from the floor and the galleries and finally became a standing ovation.”

  Six months later, the general was home again and sounding the same message. He had barely debarked at Andrews Air Force Base before saying: “I am very, very encouraged. I have never been more encouraged in the four years that I have been in Vietnam. We are making real progress. Everybody is encouraged.” Later at the National Press Club, Westmoreland claimed that “the enemy has not won a major battle in more than a year . . . he can fight his large forces only at the edges of his sanctuaries. . . . His guerrilla force is declining at a steady rate. Morale problems are developing within his ranks. . . . The enemy’s hopes are bankrupt.”

  General Westmoreland said he had the numbers to back up his claims. The aggressive war of attrition, he announced, had killed enemy forces faster than they could be replaced. Their forces were “thinning.” The public did not know that Westmoreland’s estimates of enemy strength were based on a fraudulent count.

  The deception was intentional. In its official reports on enemy forces, the military command only counted regular troops from North Vietnam and the full-time Viet Cong guerrillas of South Vietnam. It excluded the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who gave crucial, but part-time, support to the Communist forces.

  Some officials pushed back against the low-ball estimates. The most dogged was CIA analyst Sam Adams, who told colleagues that Westmoreland’s figures were a “monument to deceit.” The U.S. commander and his staff did not include in their count of enemy forces all the part-time, local paramilitary militias that offered crucial support to the major guerrilla and North Vietnamese units. In addition to participating in combat, these local forces manufactured mines and booby traps, dug underground tunnels, transported messages and supplies, evacuated the wounded, and served as guides and scouts. Also largely uncounted was the vast Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI)—the political apparatus that in many parts of South Vietnam created provisional governments to supplant Saigon’s authority. The VCI levied taxes, administered jungle hospitals, policed and punished political dissent, and oversaw recruitment and political propaganda. All of these uncounted people were crucial to the success of Communist forces.

  Evidence of this enormous network was so ample, Sam Adams was stunned that his reports were met with so much resistance. “Can you believe it?” he complained to a fellow analyst. “Here we are in the middle of a guerrilla war, and we haven’t even bothered to count the number of guerrillas.” By the end of 1966, when MACV claimed 280,000 enemy forces, Adams reported that a more accurate estimate would be “closer to 600,000 and perhaps more.” But Westmoreland and his top deputies stuck to the numbers that allowed them to announce “progress.” There was great pressure to do so. In early 1967, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle Wheeler, cabled Westmoreland demanding that he bury a report that showed a spike in Communist forces: “If these figures should reach the public domain they would, literally, blow the lid off Washington. Please do whatever is necessary to insure these figures are not—repeat not—released to news media.” By late 1967, Westmoreland claimed enemy forces were below 240,000 and falling.

  Just a few months later, the Tet Offensive exploded any idea that U.S. victory was just around the corner. Communist forces were simultaneously hitting targets all over South Vietnam. How could their numbers be diminishing? If their hopes were “bankrupt” and their morale was weakening, why were they fighting with more intensity than ever? How did they manage to raise their flag over the Citadel in the ancient capital of Hue and hold it for almost a month? And why was Westmoreland soon requesting 200,000 additional American troops? Americans concluded that the war’s end was nowhere in sight and the ever-mounting human and material costs were not about to diminish. The Tet Offensive was indeed the watershed moment when public opinion turned decisively against the war.

  And it did so despite the fervent claims by the war’s supporters, then and ever since, that the United States “won” the Tet Offensive. It was, they insisted, an astonishing military victory. The U.S.-directed counteroffensive successfully drove the Communists out of all the provincial capitals. The enemy had suffered horrific casualties—tens of thousands of dead.

  The counteroffensive did indeed produce a body count to beat all body counts. But that was irrelevant. The U.S. objective required a political triumph. The creation of a stable and independent non-Communist South Vietnam depended on broad political support for the American-backed government in Saigon. Only then could that government survive without vast U.S. military and economic support.

  In fact, the Tet Offensive and the U.S. counteroffensive actually made the odds of political victory all the worse, both at home and in Vietnam. In the United States, most Americans viewed the Tet Offensive as conclusive evidence that the administration had lied about progress in Vietnam. CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite famously concluded that the war had become a bloody stalemate with no end in sight. The American counteroffensive merely proved that a superpower can prop up an unpopular regime indefinitely.

  In Vietnam, Tet made South Vietnamese civilians more insecure than ever. Those who supported the Saigon regime, or at least depended on it for their livelihood, tended to live in the cities and large towns of the South. A good many had prospered from the wartime economy and U.S. aid. The war had not yet directly touched these urban elites. Then came Tet, and the war was suddenly and brutally at virtually every doorstep. The immediate threat came from the attackers who regarded Vietnamese who served the “puppet regime” as traitorous collaborators. In Hue city, Communist forces captured, killed, or executed a great many people who had served the Saigon government and its American backers. The death toll of the massacre may never be precisely known, and continues to be debated, but it is certainly possible that several thousand people were killed.

  Tet demonstrated that the United States was unable to protect these people. That itself was profoundly troubling to urban Vietnamese whose lives had become enmeshed with the United States. But the South Vietnamese learned another, even more troubling, lesson from Tet. They learned that the United States did not regard the security of any Vietnamese people—even their closest allies—as equivalent to the security of American troops. To drive the Communists back, U.S. forces launched a brutal and indiscriminate counteroffensive. To defend themselves, the Americans made no effort to distinguish “friendly” Vietnamese from the enemy. They bombed and shelled wherever Communist forces had penetrated, including downtown Hue and, during the “mini-Tet” of early May, the affluent Distri
ct Eight in Saigon where so many middle-class Catholic government employees lived. To those “allies,” the military “success” of the counteroffensive did not bolster their allegiance. Tet was the most dramatic revelation of how irrelevant military power was to the political reality and outcome of the Vietnam War.

  Tobias Wolff, an American lieutenant, described the devastating impact of the American counteroffensive in his 1994 memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army. As a Green Beret, Wolff had received a year of training in Vietnamese, allowing him “to speak the language like a seven-year-old child with a freakish military vocabulary.” In Vietnam, he served as an adviser to a South Vietnamese (ARVN) artillery battalion near the Mekong River town of My Tho.

  In response to the Tet attack, Wolff participated in the effort to drive the Viet Cong out of My Tho with massive, sustained artillery fire:

  We knocked down bridges and sank boats. We leveled shops and bars along the river. We pulverized hotels and houses, floor by floor, street by street, block by block. I saw the map, I knew where the shells were going, but I didn’t think of our targets as homes where exhausted and frightened people were praying for their lives. When you’re afraid you will kill anything that might kill you. Now that the enemy had the town, the town was the enemy.