They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  There was, it turned out, not much substance to the argument that antiwar groups were part of—or unwitting dupes of—a worldwide red conspiracy, though a few antiwar leaders had “close Communist associations,” and contacts between some leaders of the movement and Hanoi were “almost continuous,” the CIA determined. That September, in a well-publicized event, a group of forty American activists had met with representatives from North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front at Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. The U.S. delegation was leaderless and diverse, including academics and magazine editors along with such better-known leftist figures as old-line radical David Dellinger and SDS leader Tom Hayden. The Vietnamese representatives made it clear that they were not interested in negotiating with the U.S. government, at least not before American troops were withdrawn and the bombing of North Vietnam was permanently halted.

  Phom Van Chuong, who three and a half decades later would be serving as the deputy director of the foreign relations commission of the party central committee in Hanoi, was then stationed in Prague as a youth and student representative of the NLF and attended the Bratislava meeting. He remembered that the antiwar activists gave a briefing on what “they were planning to do in America against the war—the mass mobilization and march on Washington [planned for October].” The Americans, he said, “asked a lot of questions” about the intentions of the Vietnamese and NLF, citing reports in the western press and asking “for verification.” It was clear to him that his visitors were more willing to believe the Vietnamese than what they read in their own newspapers. “The U.S. administration had talked a lot about peace and negotiations and from the Vietnam side there had been no positive response,” Chuong recalled. “So the Americans present in Bratislava asked what was the position of the NLF to a peaceful solution, and we explained our position based on national independence.” At the time, preparations were already under way for the massive Tet Offensive that would come little more than four months later, but those plans were still a fairly tightly held secret in the top echelons in Hanoi and unknown to Chuong and his comrades who dealt with the American activists.

  News of the Bratislava gathering—including Tom Hayden’s bravado comment that “now we are all Viet Cong”—was a source of tension within the larger antiwar community back home. The mainstream peace movement, including such groups as Americans for Democratic Action and SANE, believed that the way to end the war was through negotiations, not by openly supporting the other side. But even the contacts with the NLF and North Vietnamese by some American radicals did not, in the CIA’s analysis, mean that the antiwar movement was part of a worldwide communist conspiracy. There were very few contacts between antiwar groups and the Soviet or Chinese governments, and the peace movement was too diverse and freewheeling to be under anyone’s control. With or without Communist support, “most of the Vietnam protest activity” would go on in any case, the CIA noted. “Diversity is the most striking single characteristic of the peace movement at home and abroad,” the agency concluded. “Indeed it is this very diversity which makes it impossible to attach specific political or ideological labels to any significant section of the movement.”

  In their intensive investigation of “the peace umbrella,” the CIA analysts wrote, they found “pacifists and fighters, idealists and materialists, internationalists and isolationists, democrats and totalitarians, conservatives and revolutionaries, capitalists and socialists, patriots and subversives, lawyers and anarchists, Stalinists and Trotskyites, Muscovites and Pekingese, racists and universalists, zealots and nonbelievers, puritans and hippies, do-gooders and evildoers, nonviolent and very violent.” What brought them all together was not outside money or manipulation but “their opposition to US actions in Vietnam.” They did not join for a single reason—“there are as many motives as there are groups”—and they operated on different levels, some driven by political impulses, some by more personal motivations. “Out of such diversity comes much confusion and more than a little disagreement.” A few key activists had found ways to move between the various groups and coordinate the action to some degree, but the movement was “too big and too amorphous to be controlled by any one political faction.” And some of the factions, especially among students on the New Left, seemed to exert as much energy “countering each other” as dealing with anyone else.

  The CIA assessment painted a realistic picture of the antiwar movement in all of its messy urgency, the broad colorful splash of American dissent, nothing simplistic in black and white, though CHAOS was also churning up just enough gossipy morsels about individual activist leaders to hold Johnson’s attention. But there was a corollary of sorts to the question of who controlled the antiwar movement: who controlled the war? That is, specifically, who controlled the war being fought by the liberation forces in Vietnam?

  One theme often used by the American peace movement was that the National Liberation Front was an indigenous and autonomous entity and that the war in the South was driven by nationalism more than revolutionary ideology. There were, to be sure, antiwar radicals, many of them at universities such as Wisconsin, who rhetorically at least supported the North Vietnamese Communists and hoped that they would win the war. The argument made by some, refuted by later events, was that Ho or his successors would not impose a doctrinaire totalitarian state. But the primary focus of the antiwar movement was more benign and focused on the NLF, not the North Vietnamese. The liberation front, established in 1960 at the dawn of the war, was presented as a broad-based organization that could accommodate progressive noncommunists and anyone else who opposed the Saigon regime. It was maintained that the NLF would run the South if the liberation forces prevailed, or be part of a coalition government if negotiations succeeded. One of the most popular chants on campuses in the United States was “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!” The slogan said NLF, not North Vietnam.

  Nationalism and patriotism were definitely part of the mix, but history would show that the North, not the NLF, was stirring the bowl. Some antiwar activists were as naïve and mistaken about the lines of power in Vietnam as some supporters of the war were cynical and mistaken about the lines of power in the American antiwar movement. But who controlled whom in Vietnam was still an open question in 1967. For two years the Johnson administration had been trying to prove that North Vietnam controlled the NLF and the Viet Cong and virtually all the key decisions of war and peace, and in October 1967 the State Department had accumulated enough captured documents—“several million pages”—to make a strong case. As part of the larger public relations battle, it prepared a footnoted, seventy-four-page white paper entitled “The North Vietnamese Role in the War in South Vietnam.”

  “While the insurgency has been in part South Vietnamese from the start, the North Vietnamese involvement has been determining at every stage,” the white paper asserted. “The scope of this northern involvement is all-encompassing. It extends from the power of decision to make war, which the Lao Dong Party Politburo exercised in 1959, to the power of decision to make peace, which the Politburo has so far chosen not to exert. It includes the definition of strategy, and the provision of the indispensable means—human as well as material. In both the political and military sphere, the authority of Hanoi is final.” Captured documents showed that the North Vietnamese were astute about how they would present a less threatening public face. Great care was taken to scrub revolutionary rhetoric from directives that the people of the South might see and to replace it with patriotic messages. A captured party letter in 1966 criticized the movement’s Liberation News Agency for referring openly to “Uncle Ho, party leadership, class struggle, etc.” and said revealing propaganda of that sort was “not appropriate.” Provincial committees were told they could hang party flags and portraits of Ho “only in conferences held by party chapters”; at any conferences attended by noncommunists they should hang the NLF flag and a portrait of the chairman of the front, Nguyen Huu Tho.

  The organizational structure North
Vietnam set up to control the war in the South was complex, but all flow charts pointed north to south. The main link—“the one to which all others are ultimately subordinate”—ran from the Central Committee and Politburo of the Lao Dong Party in Hanoi to its southern branch, known as the Central Committee of the People’s Revolutionary Party, which was said to comprise “30 to 40 high-ranking Communists,” although its size and composition varied. The real power to make decisions within that committee fell to an elite group of its highest-ranking members, known as COSVN, the Central Office for South Viet Nam. COSVN itself had “two major arms”—military and political, and the military arm was the equivalent of MACV under General Westmoreland, overseeing both the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops, with the general staff “heavily weighted with prominent North Vietnamese officers.” North Vietnamese General Nguyen Chi Thanh had been the chief officer of COSVN, with both military and political status, until July 1967, when he died of a heart attack while attending a party function in Hanoi.

  Although some antiwar members of Congress and leaders of the peace movement were calling on the Johnson administration to negotiate with the NLF, the Lao Dong Party in Hanoi in fact had full authority in that realm. Ho Chi Minh, the symbolic link between the nationalist and socialist impulses, was ailing. He had turned seventy-seven in May of that year and spent much of the summer and fall convalescing in a mountain retreat outside Beijing. Most of the key letters and communiqués from Hanoi regarding negotiations were coming from Le Duan, the party’s chief executive under Ho. “There are those who hold the view that the political struggle is of major importance, but such a view is different from ours as to degree and time to use this strategy,” Le Duan wrote in one party letter. “At present the U.S. imperialists…are trying to force us to the negotiation table for some concessions,” but the time for negotiations had not come yet, he added. Another document from Lieutenant General Nguyen Van Vinh, who was both a military man and a political leader, appraised the negotiating climate from various perspectives. The Americans, he said, “find it necessary to negotiate.” A number of other countries, including East European socialist countries, “hold the view that conditions for negotiations do prevail, and are ripe for achieving success. (The Americans would withdraw their troops, and we will continue the struggle to achieve total success.)” China, on the other hand, “holds the view that conditions for negotiations are not yet ripe, not until a few years from now, and even worse, seven years from now. In the meantime, we should continue fighting.”

  The decision, in any case, would rest with the Lao Dong politburo, Vinh wrote. The future “may lead to negotiations,” he said, but even while negotiating his side would “continue fighting the enemy more vigorously.”

  “DEAN, I WANT TO KNOW all you know and think about Pennsylvania,” President Johnson said to Dean Rusk at a meeting of his war council on October 16. Pennsylvania was the code name for Henry Kissinger’s back channel operation.

  “We haven’t seen any serious response from Hanoi,” Rusk replied. “They are not in the business of talking about negotiations at this stage. It has been a one-way conversation.” It was Rusk’s hunch that Bo wanted the talks about the talks to continue, and not just because that meant the United States would maintain its ten-mile limit on bombing around Hanoi.

  McNamara agreed. He said he expected nothing to develop in the next few weeks. “What does matter is what we do in the next three to four months.”

  LBJ wanted to know about the joint chiefs. “What was General Wheeler’s reaction to all this?” he asked. Earle G. Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was just returning to action full time after recovering from a heart attack. His staff was finishing a long report on how the military wanted to fight the war that would be presented to Johnson the next day.

  McNamara said, “General Wheeler’s reaction was one of concern if we pause and the North Vietnamese take advantage of it. He is not concerned if they do not take military advantage, although he does not believe it will bring about negotiations. General Wheeler was tolerant of our views given the domestic situation we have.”

  “What damage would we suffer with a pause?” Johnson asked.

  “There is a possibility we will suffer no damage. We could develop our own talk-and-fight strategy,” McNamara said. “I would recommend a pause because of the domestic plus it would be.”

  “How long a pause?” Rusk asked.

  “You will never have a long enough pause to satisfy Fulbright and others,” said McNamara. “A pause of at least a month would be necessary.”

  Rusk said he had just talked with Hedley Donovan of Time-Life. “As you know, they are coming out with an editorial next week in Life which calls for a halt in the bombing.” (In fact the issue was hitting the newsstands that day.) Donovan, Rusk said, “thinks a lot of people will have their minds changed with a pause. We would not get much out of a short pause with international public opinion.”

  What if the enemy resumes military operations? Johnson wondered.

  “We would resume military operations if they did,” McNamara said.

  The CIA’s Richard Helms joined the discussion. “I do not think anything will come out of the Pennsylvania channel,” he said. “It will get information back to Hanoi. But I do not expect to get anything out of it.”

  “The proposal we made to them was almost too reasonable,” Rusk said.

  IN MADISON AT THAT HOUR antiwar leaders were positioned outside the Memorial Union and along the paths leading up Bascom Hill, passing out leaflets with the bold headline: “Dow: The Predictable Explosion.”

  In Vietnam, twelve time zones ahead, October 17 had already arrived, and in the predawn darkness at the Black Lions’ night defensive position, Clark Welch was restless, upset that he had lost a tactical argument with his battalion commander, Terry Allen.

  In Washington President Johnson looked around the room at his war council and asked, “How are we ever going to win?”

  Chapter 12

  No Mission Too Difficult

  THE FOURTEENTH HAD BEEN A MISERABLE DAY out there. No men were killed, no search-and-destroy patrols went awry, no ambushes were set up, barely any ammunition was expended, nothing more than a few random M-16 sprays into the menacing jungle. Still, things seemed relentlessly difficult from morning to night. It was moving day for Terry Allen and his 2/28 Black Lions, who had been working the Long Nguyen Secret Zone for six days when the decision came to relocate their field camp several kilometers to the north and east along the Ong Thanh stream.

  First they had to close the night defensive position they were abandoning. That meant burying the battalion’s junk to prevent industrious Viet Cong from putting every recovered scrap of tin and plastic to productive use, filling in the bunker holes, smoothing the ground, and emptying the canvas sand bags so they could be carried to the next spot, twenty to forty per man. The ground was muddy, the bags were soaked, and the cleanup took more time and muscle than usual. When they finally went out, Bill Erwin’s scout platoon led the way, followed by Jim George’s Alpha, Jim Kasik’s Bravo, and Clark Welch’s Delta. (Charlie Company was breaking in a new commander and not yet in the field.) They walked with the stream on their left and the jungle to their right. It was what Erwin described as “a ball buster” of a march. He was constantly rotating his point man, who often had to use a machete to clear the way through heavy, entangling brush—“wait-a-minute brush,” some infantrymen called it—wielding the sword two-handed as the next man in formation carried his M-16.

  The October sun pounded down on them and the temperature shot to ninety-four. Many of the soldiers moved sockless through the soggy marshland. Their boots were wet and itchy, the black shine long since washed to gray, but at least the boots could crack-dry in the sun; nothing seemed more uncomfortable than soggy socks that never fully dried. Now and then someone slipped waist-deep into a buffalo hole filled with monsoon rainwater. Their shirts were drenched with sweat from the stifling humi
dity. One man collapsed from heat exhaustion and had to be helped the rest of the way. Lieutenant Colonel Allen, hobbled by an ankle sore, observed the march from his little command-and-control bubble helicopter circling overhead. Travel on the ground looked so deceptively easy from that airborne perspective. He thought his battalion was moving too slowly and radioed down to Erwin to pick up the pace.

  Walk two steps, stand around for half a minute, move ten yards, wait five minutes, the companies now stacking up, breathing heavily, now spreading out. It took all day to negotiate a curved and uneven route that ended up only six kilometers from where they started. Gerald Thompson of Maryville, Tennessee, a squad leader in Delta Company, was in agony the entire time, his boots waterlogged, both his big toes swollen and black and blue, sharp pain streaking up his body whenever an ingrown toenail scraped against boot leather. They walked along the earthen dikes of fallow rice paddies and found traces of old enemy camps on the edges of their route but no stores of food or ammunition. Every hour or so, from his company’s position in the rear, Clark Welch sent out small squads on cloverleaf patterns to scout the nearby jungle and make sure no one was following them. A few times his men thought they saw flashes of movement and fired into the trees. No contact, so they kept going, cautiously following the stream as it meandered up and across the uneven terrain of lower Binh Long Province.

  The new night defensive position was being set up when the rear forces of Delta arrived. Welch was disappointed by the location. The ground was low, swampy and exposed. The site was as bad as the last one, which none of the men had liked—or worse. To build fighting position bunkers here was no easy task. Many of the holes started filling with water as they were being dug. There were ants everywhere, even falling from the trees like nasty little bombers. Private Frank McMeel was miserable from ant bites; he had misplaced his towel, which he usually draped around his neck to ward off the falling ants. Darkness coming in a rush, exhausted men shoveling in the gloaming drizzle of the open field, sometimes having to use C-4 explosives to blast open hard laterite soil, not enough time to bring in resupply helicopters for a hot meal, C-rations for dinner instead, guard duty after all that, two hours on, two hours off—the fourteenth was a long day that did not end well.