In 2002, Bing West returned to Binh Nghia. In a new epilogue he writes:
Once a year, the villagers gather to pray for good crops and no floods [by]…a cement wall bearing a Vietnamese inscription to the Marines who built the well and the shrine in 1967….The Village remembers.
Across the Fence: The Secret War in Vietnam (2003), by John Stryker Meyer, is even more compact, technical, and intense than The Village. Like Bud Day’s Duty Honor Country, it was published by a tiny press, in this case Real War Stories Inc., and went unreviewed. It was recommended to me by a Green Beret sergeant major from rural Pennsylvania, Jack Hagen, whose friend had fought in the unit Meyer writes about. The book constitutes an intimate memory in its own right, another example of stories that warriors tell themselves.
The cheap and slightly out-of-focus jacket design suggests a term-paper-quality manuscript that will be a chore to read. Yet as combat writing goes, Across the Fence is pure grain alcohol. It is not replete with rich, unforgettable descriptions, but rather a work of dry realism that makes no attempt at profundity, and is thus unburdened by doubt—the warrior’s great strength. There is bitching about physical discomfort, but no complaints about the purpose of the war. So little emotion is there that the author allows himself only a brief and passing broadside against Johnson’s cease-fire and what he considers the antagonism of the media.
John Stryker Meyer and the men in his unit, as he writes, “were triple volunteers.” They had volunteered for Army parachute jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia; then for Army Special Forces training at Fort Bragg; and finally to serve in the Command and Control element of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam—Studies and Observation Group). This was a joint unit engaged in classified, unconventional warfare in Laos and Cambodia: places known respectively as the “Prairie Fire” and “Daniel Boone” AOs (areas of operations), or just plain “Indian Country” in Meyer’s own words. The book’s title is military lingo for across the border from Vietnam, where “the North Vietnamese Army,” as the author writes, “had moved soldiers, supplies, rockets, guns, and propagandists south into the eastern provinces” of these so-called “neutral” countries, whose territories were an integral part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail Complex.
Across the Fence was published only in 2003. Meyer had “signed a government document in 1968 pledging never to write or talk publicly about SOG for 20 years.” After that, he explains, “anti-Vietnam” sentiment “made it difficult to find a publisher who would buy the concept of a Vietnam book that dealt with real people striving against unbelievable odds in a politically handicapped war.” Encouraged by his writing teachers at Trenton State College, Meyer eventually produced a battlefield diary of daily forays into Laos and Cambodia in 1968 and 1969.
Arriving at a SOG base in Vietnam, the author was shown into a barracks, where on “one double bunk, sweaty and naked, was a couple heavily involved in the rapture of the moment.” Nearby, he “found an SF [Special Forces] trooper showering, while a naked Vietnamese woman squatted in the water, washing herself.” Seeing that he was an FNG (fucking new guy), a sergeant explained to him that the prostitutes were given weekly health checkups and what the prices were. These were men away from home for many months: A significant percentage of them were soon to die. Meyer himself was momentarily to enter an existence where life was “a matter of inches”:
Three rounds slammed into the One-Zero’s [recon team leader’s] head, blowing off the right side of his face….Nothing in the months of pulling garbage detail could prepare ST [spike team] Alabama for the grisly horror unfolding at that moment. The One-one [assistant recon leader] buried his face in the dirt and started praying. Black and the remaining ST Alabama…returned fire. The Green Beret stood there, firing on single shot, picking off NVA [North Vietnamese Army] soldiers on top of the rise….Both the NVA and ST Alabama tended to their wounded while the living combatants slammed loaded magazines into their hot weapons….
Enemy troops quickly reinforced the ambush site. It was always thus. As Meyer documents—through his own experiences, as well as through interviews he conducted for years afterward to re-create the combat sequences—whenever SOG units crossed the border into Cambodia and Laos, they uncovered a beehive of North Vietnamese Army concentrations. The border truly meant nothing. The battlefield overlapped it. Meyer spends eighteen pages describing a savage, daylong firefight in Laos that ends with many dead, as well as beer in the canteen for the survivors near midnight, before another insertion that meets another enemy troop concentration the next morning. From beginning to end, Across the Fence is a record of extreme heroism and technical competence that few who fought World War II surpassed.
Every time Meyer crossed the border it was with South Vietnamese “indigs” (indigenous troops) integrated into his unit. He writes about their exploits and personalities in as much detail as he does about the Americans. He identifies with them, and with the enemy whose skill he admires, more than he does with elements of the home front.
Thanksgiving is just another day “across the fence,” this time in Cambodia, once again surrounded by North Vietnamese troops, once again saved by the Air Force and the five-second fuses on the claymore mines. “The gods of recon had smiled on ST [spike team] Idaho one more time,” he concludes near midnight of that fourth Thursday in November 1968.
There is little sense here that the war was lost. While historians cite 1968 as a turning point because of the home front’s reaction to the Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre, and the protests at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, on the ground in Vietnam, 1968 marked a different trend: William Westmoreland was replaced by Creighton Abrams, population security rather than enemy body counts became the measure of merit, “clear and hold” territory replaced the dictum of “search and destroy,” and building up the South Vietnamese army became the top priority. “There came a time when the war was won,” even if the “fighting wasn’t over,” writes Lewis Sorley, a West Point graduate and career Army officer, in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (1999). By the end of 1972, Sorley goes on, one could travel almost anywhere in South Vietnam in relative security, even as American ground forces were almost gone. Retirees I know in the armed forces affirm how much more benign an environment South Vietnam was during this period than the Iraq of today. Still, as one veteran told me, everyone has different memories of Vietnam, depending upon where they served, and what time they were there.
Sorley’s book was reviewed prominently by the major liberal newspapers and foreign policy journals. They gave it generally respectful write-ups, a sign of a reassessment of Vietnam based less on ideology than on paying more attention to the second half of a war: a period to which, as Sorley notes, Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History (1983) devotes only 103 out of 670 pages, and Neil Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Bright Shining Lie (1988) devotes 65 out of 790 pages. Sorley told me he isn’t sure what would have happened had Congress not cut off aid to South Vietnam at about the time the ground situation was at its most hopeful. He felt that a respectable case might be made that it would have survived. His book has seen a rise in sales among military officers eager to know how the ground situation in Iraq might be improved to the level it had been in Vietnam, thanks to General Abrams’s change of strategy.
A similar thesis emerges in The Battle of An Loc (2005), by retired Army Lieutenant Colonel James H. Willbanks, who describes a sixty-day siege in mid-1972, in which heavily outnumbered South Vietnamese troops and their American advisors (including himself) rebuffed several North Vietnamese divisions. This gave Nixon the fig leaf he needed for a final withdrawal. Optimism then might not have been warranted, but it wasn’t altogether blind. Lieutenant Colonel Willbanks said he wrote his book, published by Indiana University Press, for the same reason Sorley did: to give more attention to the second half of the war.
Another book that those in the
combat arms community pressed me to read is Once a Warrior King: Memories of an Officer in Vietnam (1985), by David Donovan (a pseudonym). This is the story of a young Army civil affairs officer in a remote part of South Vietnam near Cambodia, which, as he too documents, was used as a major staging post for the North Vietnamese Army. Herein is a series of feverish accounts of horrific firefights that alternate with the struggle to establish schools, maternity clinics, and agricultural projects. It is as though the author were writing about today’s Iraq: a corruption- and faction-plagued central government that exists officially but has little reality outside of the capital; a regular U.S. Army that he despises, confined too often to big bases and which the locals hate; and small units like his with life-and-death control over civilians. “Terribly frustrated,” he realizes that his own countrymen “would never understand about all the small but very important things that were needed….” Take soap: Just plain old bars of soap, he informs us, would do more to win over the villagers in his district than guns and bullets. He ends his Vietnam saga thus: “I do not believe it was an immoral war at all, rather a decent cause gone terribly wrong.”
You cannot approach Vietnam and Iraq, or the subject of counterinsurgency in general, without reference to Jean Larteguy, a French novelist and war correspondent who, in a very different way than Stockdale, is an example in his own person of the civilian-military divide. Larteguy inhabits the very soul of the modern Western warrior, alienating some civilian readers in the process. Stockdale quotes him. Sorley told me that several editions of Larteguy’s The Centurions (1960) have passed through his hands in the course of a professional lifetime dominated by Vietnam. Alistair Horne, the renowned historian of the Algerian War, uses Larteguy for epigrams in A Savage War of Peace (1977). Some months back, General David Petraeus—now commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq—pulled The Centurions off a shelf at his home in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and gave me a disquisition about the small-unit leadership principles exemplified by one of the characters. For half a decade now, Green Berets have been recommending Larteguy’s The Centurions and The Praetorians (1961) to me: books about French paratroopers in Vietnam and Algeria in the 1950s.
Almost half a century ago, this Frenchman was obsessed about a home front that had no context for a hot, irregular war; about a professional warrior class alienated from its civilian compatriots as much as from its own conventional infantry battalions; about the need to engage in both combat and civil affairs in a new form of warfare to follow an age of what he called victory parades and “cinema-heroics”; about an enemy with complete freedom of action, allowed “to do what we didn’t dare”; and about the danger of creating a “sect” of singularly brave iron men, whose ideals were so exalted that beyond the battlefield they had a tendency to become woolly-headed. Larteguy dedicates his book to the memory of centurions who died so that Rome might survive, but he notes in his conclusion that it was these same centurions who destroyed Rome.
Born in 1920, Jean Larteguy—a pseudonym; his real name was Jean Osty—fought with the Free French and afterward became a journalist. Because of his military experience and resistance ties, he had nearly unrivaled access to French paratroopers who fought at Dien Bien Phu and in the Battle of Algiers. His empathy for these men, some of whom were torturers, made him especially loathed by the Parisian Left, even though he broke with the paratroopers themselves, out of opposition to their political goals, which he labeled “neofascism.”
Larteguy eventually found his military ideal in Israel, where he became revered by paratroopers who translated The Centurions into Hebrew to read at their training centers. He called these Jewish soldiers “the most remarkable of all of war’s servants, superior even to the Viet, who at the same time detests war the most….” By the mid-1970s, though, he became disillusioned with the Israel Defense Forces. He said it had ceased to be “a manageable grouping of commandos” and was becoming a “cumbersome machine” too dependent on American-style technology—as if foreseeing some of the problems with the 2006 Lebanon campaign.
Recently I walked into the office of the chief of staff of Army Special Forces in South Korea, Colonel David Maxwell of Springfield, Massachusetts, and noticed a plaque with Larteguy’s famous “two armies” quote. (The translation is by Xan Fielding, a British Special Operations officer, who, in addition to rendering Larteguy’s classics into English, was a close friend of the British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, to whom Fermor addresses his introduction in his own classic, A Time of Gifts [1977].) In The Centurions, one of Larteguy’s paratroopers declares:
I’d like…two armies: one for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, fanfares, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals, and dear little regimental officers…an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country.
The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage battledress, who would not be put on display but from whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That’s the army in which I should like to fight.
But the reply from another character in The Centurions to this declaration is swift: “You’re heading for a lot of trouble.” The exchange telescopes the philosophical dilemma about the measures that need to be taken against enemies who would erect a far worse world than you, but which, nevertheless, are impossible to carry out because of the “remorse” that afflicts soldiers when they violate their own notion of purity of arms, even in situations where such “tricks” might somehow be rationalized. They win the battle, but lose their souls.
Rather than a roughneck, Colonel Maxwell epitomizes the soft, indirect approach to unconventional war that is in contrast to “direct action.” The message that Maxwell and other warriors have always taken away from Larteguy’s famous quote—rooted in his Vietnam experience—is that the mission is everything, and conventional militaries, by virtue of being vast bureaucratic machines obsessed with rank and privilege, are insufficiently focused on the mission, regardless of whether it’s direct action or humanitarian affairs. (One of the complaints of the Misty forward air controllers was that their own Air Force bureaucracy was a constant hindrance, more interested in procedure than results. The same complaint has occasionally been made against the regular Army in Iraq by Marines and Green Berets.)
The conventional officer would reply that the warrior’s field of sight is so narrow that he can’t see anything beyond the mission. “They’re dangerous,” one of Larteguy’s protagonists says of the paratroopers, “because they go to any lengths…beyond the conventional notion of good and evil.” For if the warrior’s actions contradict his faith, his doubts are easily overcome by belief in the larger cause. Larteguy writes of one soldier: “He had placed the whole of his life under the sign of Christ who had preached peace, charity, brotherhood…and at the same time he had arranged for the delayed-action bombs at the Cat-Bi airfield….‘What of it? There’s a war on and we can’t allow Hanoi to be captured.’ ”
Vietnam, like Iraq, represented a war of frustrating half measures, fought against an enemy that respected no limits. Bud Day, half-starved and broken-limbed, writes of seeing a long convoy of trucks heading out of Hanoi, safe because of our own self-imposed bombing restrictions. “I found it mind-boggling that the United States, the strongest nation in the world, would permit this flea on the buttocks of humanity to conduct a war this way.” More than almost any writer I know, Larteguy communicates the intensity of such frustrations, which, in turn, create the psychological gulf that separates warriors like Bud Day from both a conscript army and a civilian home front.
The best units, according to Larteguy, while officially built on high ideals, are, in fact, products of such deep bonds of brotherhood and familiarity that the world outside requires a dose of “cynicism” merely to stomach. As one Green Beret wrote me, “There are no more cynical soldiers on the planet than the SF [Special Forces] guys I work with, they snort at the platitudes w
e are expected to parrot, but,” he went on, “you will not find anyone who gets the job done better in tough environments like Iraq.” In fact, in extreme situations like Iraq, cynics may actually serve a purpose. In the regular Army there is a tendency to report up the command chain that the mission is succeeding, even if it isn’t. Cynics won’t buy that, and will say so bluntly.
Larteguy writes that the warrior looks down on the rest of the military as “the profession of the sluggard,” men who “get up early to do nothing.” Yet as one paratrooper notes in The Praetorians:
In Algeria that type of officer died out. When we came in from operations we had to deal with the police, build sports grounds, attend classes. Regulations? They hadn’t provided for anything, even if one tried to make an exegesis of them with the subtlety of a rabbi.
Dirty, badly conceived wars in Vietnam and Algeria had begotten a radicalized French warrior class of noncommissioned officers, able to kill in the morning and build schools in the afternoon, which had a higher regard for its Muslim guerrilla adversaries than for regular officers in its own ranks. Such men would gladly advance toward a machine gun nest without looking back, and yet were “booed by the crowds” upon returning home, so that they saw the civilian society they were defending as “vile, corrupt, and degraded.”
The estrangement of soldiers from their own citizenry is somewhat particular to counterinsurgencies, where there are no neat battle lines and thus no easy narrative for the people back home to follow. The frustrations in these wars are great precisely because they are not easily communicated. Larteguy writes: Imagine an environment where a whole garrison of two thousand troops are “held in check” by a small “band of thugs and murderers.” The enemy is able to “know everything: every movement of our troops, the departure times of our convoys….Meanwhile we’re rushing about the bare mountains, exhausting our men; we shall never be able to find anything.”
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