In an emerging surprise it turned out that quitting the war, coming home, abandoning the effort, admitting mistakes, owning the disaster, and realizing that we couldn’t inflict our will on a third-world nation — all that was not only difficult but provably not doable. In addition, what did a government or even the approving press say to explain that the large number of American war dead, and the even larger number of horribly wounded, had been sacrificed for essentially nothing, or at least no worthwhile gain? The really dangerous question that would rattle around for decades, and cost many people their careers, was: Who thought this was a good idea? The mistakes made by the US government and the military leaders at the Pentagon and the academies had been effected and propounded against obvious and solid counterarguments. Historians compared the brainless tactics of the generals in the First World War, ordering their troops forward against machine guns, to the steady increase of bombing, the escalation of troop levels, and the shameless lying about how things were going.
After 1968 half of the conflict was at home. The country was disgusted by the number of deaths, the horrible wounds, and the bottomless expense. And there were the social inequities asking which classes, economic and even geographic classes, did the fighting. (William F. Buckley pointed out that during the operative years of the war, 1965 to 1975, the Ivy League universities graduated in excess of twenty thousand men, of whom eleven were killed in Vietnam.) Not only were the Pentagon’s assumptions wrong but also, it later turned out, the Pentagon knew they were wrong. This was kept secret. One bad idea followed another. The draft was a bad idea. The reliance on commandeered allies, Australia and Korea, was a bad idea. The reliance on massive aerial bombing attacks, dropping bombs into endless tracts of impenetrable jungle, was a bad idea. And of all bad ideas, the most incomplete and self-delusional thinking was the Pentagon’s thinking about China.
A brief glance at a map shows that China was North Vietnam’s immediate neighbor and main ally, supplier, and backup. It was the largest nation, the most populated, the most dictatorial, and the most resentful of Western invasion. It was quite close to North Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi. China was never, repeat never, going to permit an invasion, certainly not an anti-communist invasion, or anything that might be construed as an invasion, to succeed. And if the US could in effect wind up fighting China, where would it all end? Should anyone have concluded that the Maoist government would allow an American victory against a country that bordered their own? Wasn’t China the inventor of military maneuvers such as the human wave attack? And wasn’t China’s main problem overpopulation? Didn’t Chairman Mao say that China’s main problem was “too many Chinese”?
For a time after my period with the ARVN forces, and their wives and children, I was assigned to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Armored cavalry means the infantry rides in heavily shielded tracked vehicles, called M113s. Bullets will bounce off, but road mines will destroy the M113 and kill everyone inside. Men riding these things usually rode on top rather than inside, giving them a little more protection from mines, but none from anyone shooting at them. These were difficult decisions — inside or on top — and I didn’t enjoy my time with the 11th ACR. They were brave men, but their assignments were stupidly dangerous.
Here was one of the worst of a list of bad ideas. At the ambassadorial level, a shameful agreement had been struck between the South Vietnamese government and the American advisers. It was a money deal. It was ordered that no artillery would be fired into rubber plantations. Rubber was one of the few cash crops that South Vietnam produced, and the plantations were amazing. Most were the property of the Michelin tire company. They were huge affairs, square miles of countless rows of tall rubber trees, perfectly straight, hundreds of thousands of trees with endless one-lane roads between them. The milky rubber sap was drained from chevron cuts in the trees by crews of ladies. They emptied the little collection cups every day into donkey-drawn tank carts, a labor of such mindless tedium that they welcomed the sight of the 11th ACR roaring by, waving and shouting at them. The collected rubber sap was heated and coagulated so the solid latex floated and was skimmed off. Part was smoked into a semi-translucent stretchy rubber, and part steamed into crepe rubber. The rubber was packed into wooden crates and had the word MICHELIN stenciled on the side. The management at the processing plant was French. They were welcoming enough, probably to the Vietcong as well as to us, and they always had a supply of beer and ice available for guests.
But because of the suicidal proscription against using artillery that the US had agreed to, the rubber plantations became the perfect place for the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese to hide. And they did. They also built tunnels and sleeping holes among the trees. The only way to fight them was to send in infantry, on foot or riding along with the 11th ACR.
Few of the troops I met riding on these wild and dangerous patrols knew who Michelin was, and it was a little late to try to teach my fellow soldiers anything about the shameful history of French Indochina and the tire industry. They did know that without the threat of artillery the enemy was much more bold and willing to come out into the open and shoot at us. The tracked M113s were junk but they were fast. An allowable tactic was the strategic retreat. But retreat to where? Farther back down the road, where additional enemy waited safely among the trees? Or where mines had been planted? Or was it better to stay and meet the attack by shooting back and running, here and there, on foot between the endless rows, dodging from tree to tree, without effective communication other than shouting, watching for pit traps and trip wires? There was little doubt in my mind that I was in a Smedley Butler situation and that I was risking my precious life for an industrial concern, a tire company, and not even an American tire company.
(Smedley Butler, it’s important to know if you don’t already, was a veteran of the Mexican Revolution and World War I and the most highly decorated marine in US history at the time of his death. But while he was still alive, he wrote a little book called War Is a Racket in which he decried the obvious profit motive behind military action more than twenty-five years before Eisenhower, on his way out of the White House, warned about the “military–industrial complex.”)
The reason for my assignment to the 11th ACR was that the South Vietnamese government was going to have to control the rubber plantations if they were going to control their country when the US left. The M113s were unreliable vehicles, made by a large American company called FMC. (FMC stood for “Food Machinery Corporation,” and the main product had always been industrial bread-making machinery among other useful items. This was funny depending on your definition of bread.) The M113s stalled in the midst of fighting at times, and their failures had to be figured into the tactics and strategies. They became unleavable fighting positions in the middle of the plantations until one side or the other ran out of ammunition. If we couldn’t get the M133s out of the plantations we were ordered not to leave them for the enemy. They weren’t easy to destroy, and the destruction took risky time exposed to the enemy. I don’t remember how the actual fighting began or ended. I just fired at everything with everyone else. But I do remember one soldier, new in country, who, in the middle of all the firing, beshat himself. He kept on firing.
We took some ARVN people along with us on our patrols into the rubber. I could see that no confidence was gained by our tactics or by the unreliable M113s. I was there to say something convincing about how, when the Americans left, the South Vietnamese would be able to continue the fight. There was, of course, nothing to be said. The obvious fact was that most of the vehicles were worn and near the end of their useful or reliable lives.
I returned to the 1st Cavalry headquarters in Phuoc Vinh. The North Vietnamese had replenished their supply of mortars and rockets. Each evening they shot fifty or sixty mortar shells into the air, along with half a dozen 122 mm rockets. Unless you were in the clear and near the target of the 82 mm mortars there was not much chance of getting hit. The rockets
were a different matter. The explosions were huge. They were of Chinese manufacture, clumsy and inaccurate. Sometimes they blew up early and killed the people who were preparing to fire them. Chinese weapons are much more reliable today. The North Vietnamese were now the main enemy for us, and they had increased in number and weaponry by 1969. The backing by the Chinese government had also increased.
Every night mortars fell out of the sky, usually in brackets of three. The 1st Cavalry commander was amazed at how destabilizing such a simple weapon could be. The mortar itself is little more than a tube and a base plate. There is a sighting device in the side, but someone with experience can be accurate just by eyesight reckoning. The targets are usually not killed, at least not by the 82 mm shells, but they are wounded. During the attack everyone dives under shelter. The greatest fear was that the enemy would cut through the wire and gain entrance to the base, running around, spreading terror and confusion, and setting satchel charges. An attack like that would be predicted by a long mortar barrage.
We answered mortar attacks with artillery. Hundreds of shells would race out into the lowering darkness in search of the mortars. But where were they? By this time in Vietnam, I was even more blood-sworn to my own preservation and determined not to do anything risky. I was assigned to something called a target acquisition squad, made up of me and three enlisted men. There was a theatrical portion to this staffing. You couldn’t send out just enlisted men — that would look like you didn’t value their lives as highly as the officers. So an officer had to be sent as well. Again, I realized that all my plans were failures, including my acceptance of a commission solely to gain more time stateside. Feeling like an even greater fool than before, I stayed with the target acquisition squad.
When mortars began to fall in the evening the target acquisition squad were ready to jump in a jeep and rush to the site of the first explosion. Mortars make craters, but these craters, unlike bomb craters, are not perfectly round. They are very slightly oval since the mortar shell comes in at an angle. In theory if you could find the longest diameter of the oval and plot it against the shortest diameter you could find the line of azimuth, in degrees, at which the mortar fell. Further, and this is theory as well, if you found the deepest part of the crater and compared it with the center of a crisscross made up of the shortest and longest diameters you could, with a plumb line, approximate the vertical angle of the falling mortar. Well, actually you could on a nice spring day in broad daylight, but not at night when other mortars were coming in. Besides, all this was based on the additional theory that mortars traveled in parabolic curves, meaning that the beginning of the arc was the same as its descent. Maybe they did on the nice spring day.
If we could find the first mortar crater, we set up a four-legged tripod, a quadrapod, and quickly oriented it to true north with the compass supplied on the top. All the numbers were then radioed back to the artillery batteries so they could, at least generally, start firing in a supposed direction. The greatest problem to finding a mortar attack source was that the calculation was, as I say, being done in the middle of a mortar attack. Further, this was being done by four people on the squad who didn’t want to be there doing anything. To make up for the accurately evaluated inaccuracy of target-acquisition-squad-reported numbers, the artillery fired a large number of shells. A very large number of shells. The noise was deafening, but reassuring somehow. If you could hear it, it hadn’t hit you.
I went on some crazed rides into the night. I don’t think we reported any numbers or facts that added to the accuracy of the artillery. But we did have an accident. The driver of the jeep, who for some reason hadn’t turned on the headlights, ran the jeep into a revetment, a short wall meant to shelter helicopters from shrapnel. The jeep turned over and we all, except the driver, were flung out. The driver and the other enlisted men were badly hurt, but I, using skills I didn’t know I had, maybe left over from high school tumbling exercises, went into a somewhat graceful roll and was unhurt. The others all received Purple Hearts, but I got nothing for my troubles.
Two incredibly bizarre assignments followed. The first is more difficult to explain because many Americans have forgotten who Bob Hope was. American humor at present is as vicious and destructive as any in the world, but in the 1950s and ’60s, Americans were relatively gentle in their application of sarcasm and ridicule. Bob Hope was a comedian who was thought to be the last word in sophisticated smart-assitry. In actual practice he was pretty harmless. During World War II and the Korean War, Bob Hope was part of the entertainment provided for the troops. He seemed to make young soldiers feel that the folks back home were thinking of them and understood their sacrifices. His jokes were a little bit tough on the commanders, but not too much. His sarcasm was in an ain’t-that-the-truth, nudging sort of way. He had some mild putdowns of American politicians and the president, but nothing deeper or anything that might hurt people in power. And he never, at least as far as I could tell, figured out, until it was too late, what was wrong in the Vietnam War. His job was to bolster esprit de corps, and in a way, I felt sorry for him. He could have shown some understanding of the stupidity and viciousness of the politicians and commanders who were running the war, but he didn’t. A possible explanation was that he was preserving his own personal appeal for future use, or maybe he was too old or uncaring to side with the troops and tell the truth. In his later years he was repeatedly honored in Washington. I don’t think he ever realized what being honored in Washington actually meant.
I was told to produce a roster of enlisted troops who wanted to make a trip to a huge Bob Hope show in Saigon. No one wanted to go to a huge Bob Hope show in Saigon. I knew this would be difficult to explain so I made it a list of persons who would go whether they wanted to or not. There were benefits. A day off, a trip away from the stink and mortars of Phuoc Vinh, and possibly some beer. And a chance to ogle the dancing girls that Hope brought with him — Raquel Welch and some other grinning pneumatic cretins. The show had always been a success on aircraft carriers and at air force bases, but for the army, hard against the shit and misery of the actual fighting, it was simply awful. I went with my contingent to Saigon, but I didn’t go to the show itself. The army was treating the soldiers as if they were dull, insensate brutes who would be grateful if allowed to have a few jokes and see some girls to drool over, and have a beer, and then go back to the war. The army paid no attention to wise advisers who warned that Hope and his shows for the troops were at best tolerated, and usually loathed.
I’ll get to the second bizarre assignment presently, but I want to mention that in all these assignments there was nothing resembling a theme or a mission for an officer who spoke the language of the people whom the US was trying to help. No thought was given to what should be done with Lieutenant Danziger to improve the chances of victory. But that was not a special piece of neglect reserved for Lieutenant Danziger. By 1969, George Aiken’s advice to say we won and leave was the only real possible way forward. Operations went on day after day: US troops were killed, maimed, blinded, and driven mad; Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed, maimed, blinded, and driven mad. Billions of dollars were wasted. Large parts of Vietnam were destroyed, plowed under, poisoned, and burned. The war was to last another five years, and all this without anything resembling a plan for victory, or even a plan for a plan. The army fought, the air force bombed, the navy…well, I don’t know what the navy did.
I tried to avoid the worst of ideas, but since, as shown, I was a failure at most things, I was also a failure at avoiding the worst ideas. I have mentioned that the army is more or less structured on the German General Staff, with four basic staff divisions. To these was added a fifth group — civil affairs. In civil wars and in wars for the allegiance of the population, someone has to think up activities to help secure good relations with the people. Passing out food and medicine, building water systems and bridges, and generally being helpful around the house all contributed to gaining t
he respect if not the acquiescence of the bedraggled and shell-shocked citizens. But what activities could the army offer to rural people and at the same time keep itself aware and secure? Infantry officers wanted nothing to do with civil affairs. Some wanted to get going on the basic task of killing the enemy and ending the war. Some simply liked fighting. Civilians, even civilians who supported the American soldiers, were simply in the way. But killing civilians by accident is sure to produce bad publicity.
Even so the civilian administrations have standing in civil wars, and they can’t simply be swept aside. Most difficult for many American commanders is the task of understanding other cultures. Some cultures are very strange. Asian cultures are the hardest and, for Americans, the strangest. At the very top of the American government, Lyndon Johnson tried manfully to understand what Ho Chi Minh wanted. He failed mostly because he failed to listen to anyone except the Pentagon, and all they listened to was one another. Every so often, however, the Vietnamese culture, with its strange religions, its history of battling the French and the Chinese, its brutal experience with the Japanese during World War II, and its underlying very tough stubborn gentleness, had to be countenanced. Added to all this were some absolutely bizarre superstitions. One such widely held belief was that of the Wandering Soul.
14
The Wandering Soul superstition held that if a Vietnamese person, a soldier for example, died, and the body was not returned to its proper burial ground to be in the company of dead family members, the soul might wander through the forests and the mountains forever. While wandering, and this is the shivering part, the soul might call out for help finding its way home, something you didn’t want to hear in the dark. If you were hundreds of miles from your home in North Vietnam, with death a possibility from American bombs and artillery, and you were young and credulous, you might lose a lot of sleep if you heard a Wandering Soul moaning in supplication. You might go mad and refuse to fight further. You might go madder and influence your fellow soldiers to refuse to fight further. You might go completely off the rails and shoot yourself or your commanders. These dreadful possibilities all seemed like good ideas to the American commanders, so a plan was hatched, and I was involved in its execution. I thought the plan was crazy, but craziness was relative.
Lieutenant Dangerous Page 11
