by Peter Arnett
“I think they understand,” the lieutenant replies, “but some of them simply have had enough. They are broken. There are boys here who have only 90 days left in Vietnam. They want to go home in one piece. The situation is psychic here.”
“Are you talking about enlisted men or are NCOs involved,” the colonel asks.
“That’s the difficulty here. We’ve got a leadership problem,” replies the company commander. “Most of our squad and platoon leaders have been killed or wounded.” I learn that at one point in the fight A Company was down to 60 men, half its assigned combat strength.
Colonel Bacon quietly tells his company commander, “Go talk to them again and tell them that to the best of our knowledge the bunkers are now empty. The enemy has withdrawn. The mission of A Company today is to recover the dead. They have no reason to be afraid. Please take a hand count of how many really do not want to go.”
Lieutenant Shurtz comes back a few minutes later, saying, “They won’t go, Colonel. And I did not ask for the hand count because I’m afraid they will all stick together even though some might prefer to go.”
By late afternoon, with some coaxing from the most experienced men in the battalion who fly to A Company’s location and make personal appeals, A Company does move. They are led by a seasoned veteran, Sergeant Okey Blankenship of Panther, West Virginia, who, quick tempered and argumentative, talks the reluctant soldiers into rejoining the war.
The A Company story gets a lot of attention from editors and readers who have stopped thinking much about the soldiers still left in Vietnam. There is much editorial comment. The Washington Star newspaper in an editorial tends to dismiss the implications. “There have been suggestions from some quarters that Alpha company’s brief ‘mutiny’ may presage a revolt among young draftees serving in Vietnam who are unwilling to die in an admittedly unwinnable war in which many Americans feel this country never had any business. There is not a scintilla of evidence to support this, and those who suggest it display little knowledge of what soldiering is all about. There have been similar incidents in every conflict since the Punic wars.”
James Reston of The New York Times is more concerned, writing, “This is something that President Nixon needs to be worried about as he plans his Vietnam policy. He has been worried about the revolt of the voters against the war and even a revolt of the generals if he humiliates them by pulling out too fast. But now he must also consider the possibility of a revolt of the men if he risks their lives in a war he has decided to bring to a close.”
In late March 1972, the North Vietnamese launch a conventional invasion against the south. The objective, it is later learned, is not to win the war but to gain as much territory and to destroy as many units of the South Vietnamese army as possible. In this Easter Offensive they gain substantial territory and influence the peace negotiations coming to a head in Paris.
I have a last visit with John Paul Vann during the offensive. He is now the senior American official in the Central Highlands, a strategic region the Saigon government must hold to have any hope of enduring as a legitimate state. I hear some reporters dismiss Vann as “the last American hawk in the war.” He tells me he gets upset by what he describes as the “triviality” of the questions thrown at him at press conferences. I advise him that he can’t win a war with the media.
I notice Vann is more animated than usual. He’s just returned to Pleiku from three days in the besieged provincial capital of Kontum. To blunt the frequent enemy attacks, he says he has orchestrated around-the-clock U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber strikes. It is probably one of the most enormous concentrations of firepower used in the war. Vann insists that it’s working. He praises the Vietnamese general in command in Kontum, Ly Tong Ba, whom I had heard Vann scolding 10 years earlier at the disastrous battle of Ap Bac for not being sufficiently aggressive with his armored patrol. “You should see him now,” he says proudly.
Vann says he’s traveling down to the coastal city of Qui Nhon and offers me a ride. He directs the helicopter pilot to fly over Mang Yang, a twisting, jungled, narrow pass that opens the highlands to the South China Sea. In an infamous battle during the French war, an elite mobile infantry unit was ambushed there and destroyed by the communists. Vann shouts at me over the helicopter clatter, “They say the French dead were buried right here, standing up and facing France. If I’m to die, that’s what I want, standing upright here and facing east to Texas.”
Vann did die here a few weeks later, on Jun. 9, 1972. His helicopter crashed on a night flight to Kontum with the loss of everyone on board. Vann was a maverick, an anti-establishment outsider who forced his way inside, one of the last Americans who believed in victory in Vietnam, and died trying to achieve it. Vann received a hero’s funeral in Washington, D.C., with some in attendance who had derided his earlier efforts in Vietnam and who now came to mourn. It was great for his family. My thought was that if Vann had anything to say about it, he would have preferred being buried standing up in his beloved Vietnam, and facing east across the great Pacific Ocean to Texas.
In mid-August of 1972, I’m invited to visit the other side, a rare trip to Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital, to cover the journey of a prominent group of peace advocates. They’ve been promised the opportunity to bring back home three captured Navy pilots to be released from the “Hanoi Hilton” prison on the occasion of their visit. The mother of one prisoner and the wife of another will go. I want to go. I know it’s a propaganda ploy by the communists to win sympathy for their side as the peace talks drag on in Paris. But I figure that I can outwit them enough to give credibility to my coverage. AP president Wes Gallagher is concerned about my participation because both Jane Fonda and Anthony Lewis of The New York Times have incurred storms of criticism for their visits to North Vietnam earlier in the year. He looks at me under furrowed brows. “Peter, it’s your reputation and mine on the line this time.”
Two of the travelers are national figures. One is David Dellinger, a shaggy-haired, fervid peace activist, known as one of the Chicago Seven anti-war protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He turns out to be a gentle man with a wry sense of humor. The second is the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, a boisterous former CIA operative who was undercover in a small town for years in the Soviet Union after World War II, later the chaplain at Yale University, and currently a Christian clergyman. A third member is Richard Falk, a professor at Princeton University, author of 20 books on international law. And there’s Cora Weiss, a peace activist headquartered in a handsome home in the upscale Riverdale section of the Bronx. She arranges the trip through her Hanoi connections. While I am visiting Cora the phone in her kitchen rings often. She tells me she is bugged by the FBI and other government agencies because of her anti-war activities. In Martha’s Vineyard where she says she had a home, “the tap was so loud the phone spluttered and jumped on the hook all night, and imagine that when you’re lying in bed with your husband.” She protests to a State Department security officer, who tells her, “That’s not my bug, mine’s not so powerful. That’s Laird’s.” Melvin Laird is secretary of defense.
We arrive in Hanoi from Vientiane, Laos, on a regular flight of the International Control Commission, a body that loosely supervises previous political agreements between the two Vietnams. I am assigned a young woman named Lien as an escort and I walk through nearly empty, noiseless streets, the silence sometimes broken by the sharp tinkle of a bicycle bell. I pass the dust-covered old French colonial buildings, and in the more densely populated areas the paint is peeling off the walls of the little shops and the timbers are rotting. The people are dressed mostly in somber garments, usually black trousers and white or gray shirts and blouses. I think of Saigon, where I had been just the week before, its economy swelled by American dollars, with its atmosphere of a boom town, sidewalks crowded with soldiers but also beautiful young women, its highways congested with flashy motorcycles, sporty cars and jeeps.
In Saigon, the action seems far
away, the crackle of distant gunfire sometimes the only indication there is a war on. In Hanoi, fear floats in on the dust. I hear the squawk of loudspeakers. My escort translates, “American planes 70 kilometers out,” the first warning to the population of approaching airstrikes. Soon after, the announcement, “American planes 50 kilometers out.” The sirens start to wail when the planes are within 40 kilometers. People search out the single-berth bunkers built like cisterns, with steel lids, along every street. Wardens alert people in houses to move into roomier shelters. Then a quiet settles over the city as people wait to see how close the bombers come. The siren wails the all-clear. The planes are active elsewhere in the country this day.
The three U.S. pilots are released to our care: Navy Lieutenants Mark Gartley and Norris Charles, and Air Force Major Edward Elias. Elias bunks with me at our hotel, and at first he is disconcerted to discover I’m a reporter, but then he settles down. He’s had worse conditions at the Hanoi Hilton prison. One day we all travel to the countryside, where the pilots observe that years of American bombing have failed to achieve significant results. We repeatedly encounter vehicle convoys, rows of stacked ammunition along the roadsides and piles of gasoline drums. We pass scores of transportation trucks casually parked under trees, and to me they look vulnerable to airstrikes. Norris Charles tells me, “We could never see those things from the air, and the moment someone comes down for a better look, blam, blam, blam.”
The peace advocate group has good connections in Hanoi. We are invited to visit with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong at his palatial government residence near Ho Chi Minh’s tomb. He’s a handsome, silver-haired figure, and friendly, giving bear hugs to all. At a formal meeting in his office where tea and cookies are served, he reiterates Hanoi’s hard line on the war. Afterward, he insists we go walk with him informally on the grounds of his residence. He radiates confidence and determination.
As Vietnamization is speedily upgraded, so do the North Vietnamese respond with a military upgrading of their own. The legendary Ho Chi Minh Trail infiltration gateway stretching across mountainous border regions is engineered into a two-lane highway, allowing military supply trucks just a day or so to make the journey from north to south; a few years earlier, it could take foot soldiers dragging bicycles weighed down with ammunition 60 days to travel over the then primitive path.
Gearing up to fight a stronger Vietnamese army supported for the time being by the American troops and their firepower still in-country, the communists do not match the eventual American troop withdrawal with one of their own. Hanoi’s forces remain in the south in the scores of thousands, the ceasefire agreement allowing them to do so. Nixon’s strategy has paved the way for his historic opening to China in 1972, and détente with Russia. But with America increasingly absent from the battlefield, it leaves the South Vietnamese with an almost overwhelming burden of survival.
Arnett and an American military photographer assist a wounded South Vietnamese soldier to an ambulance south of Hue, 1969. (Peter Arnett Collection)
Reunion of Pulitzer Prize winners from AP in New York on May 10, 1966. Fifth from left is Peter Arnett. (AP Photo)
Arnett talks with North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong during visit to Hanoi, August 1972. (Peter Arnett Collection)
Arnett on patrol with South Vietnamese paratroopers in the province of Binh Dinh, Vietnam, circa 1965. (AP Photo)
Arnett, third from left, poses with members of President Carter’s Commission to Hanoi in March 1977. The Commission was there to investigate missing American soldiers and seek better relations. (Peter Arnett Collection)
South Vietnamese military police with fixed bayonets escort AP reporter Peter Arnett, center, and cameraman Larry Bedford away from the Chu Van An high school in Saigon, September 1963, where Vietnamese troops arrested scores of high school boys. (AP Photo)
Sitting in a Vietcong tunnel system used during the war, but now turning into a tourist attraction at Cu Chi east of Saigon, 1985. Arnett was visiting Vietnam for the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. (Peter Arnett Collection)
9
False Peace / False Hopes
In 1973, the AP sends me back to Saigon from New York, where I have moved with my family after years of covering the war. I’m to write about how South Vietnam can survive alone without American troops and with cuts in Congressional funding. The attention of the American public and the government is centered on the Watergate scandal swamping President Nixon. Internationally, the Middle East shuttle diplomacy of Henry Kissinger is in the news. The Vietnam story, our new foreign editor, Nate Polowetzky, tells me, has moved to the back pages of America’s newspapers, “amidst the truss ads,” and he hopes I can stir up some editorial interest.
I take my wife, Nina, and our children, Elsa and Andrew, with me, to where they were born and where their relatives live in the shadow of an uncertain future. Saigon itself seems unwilling to face up to the consequences of a decade of inconclusive war and an ambivalent peace agreement. The morning traffic quietens for early afternoon siesta time, speeding up in the evening when the restaurants and nightclubs flourish. I get a first impression that an Indian summer has arrived in South Vietnam, a false peace like the one I read about in the 1930s in Europe that preceded World War II.
Deciding to take advantage of it, I rent a serviceable Chevy van and driver, borrow an interpreter from the AP bureau and head up national Route 1 as far as I can go. I take my 9-year-old son, Andrew along, so he can see where his dad spent much of the previous 10 years covering the war. Over the next two weeks, I interview Vietnamese provincial government officials, visit regional military headquarters and combat bases, and talk with local people. Andrew enjoys playing in the roadside dumpsites among the abandoned battle tanks and artillery pieces, and he shoots down imaginary enemy planes from rusting anti-aircraft guns.
We reach the old imperial capital of Hue, where white-flannelled tennis players are competing in the Northern Provincial Invitation Meet at the local Cercle Sportif club. Just 40 miles north up Route 1, opposite the ruins of Quang Tri city on the banks of the Thach Han River, I see a tent city, a forward command post of the enemy, flying clusters of Communist flags.
After traveling to other parts of the country, I begin to see that the communists are establishing a “third Vietnam” of interconnecting highways and embryonic towns in the third of the country that fell to them in North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive the previous year. It stretches 600 miles inside South Vietnam, from the 17th parallel border in the north to the Seven Mountains near the Gulf of Thailand to the south. The sites of battles I had covered in the Central Highlands and the northern border during the war are now in the enemy’s hands: Khe Sanh, the Ia Drang Valley, Dak To, firebases Duc Co and Kate, the Rockpile, and many others.
My analyses appear in the Asian editions of the Stars and Stripes military newspaper still available in Saigon, and displease Vietnamese officials including the information minister, Hoang Duc Nha, who calls me to his office for a dressing-down. Nha takes exception to a quote in my stories from Colonel Vo Toan, a regimental commander in the 1st Infantry Division at Hue. The quote: “If a major communist offensive begins I’ll be pushed away from the western defenses of Hue and into the city within 48 hours if the U.S. doesn’t send in B-52s, and I want everything else, F-4s, A-1s, the whole lot.” He is referring to the most effective ground support aircraft in America’s arsenal.
Nha is also uncomfortable with my quote from a longtime U.S. Embassy acquaintance in Saigon, Frank Scotton, well known for his insights on the war, who tells me the United States is not trying to win in Vietnam anymore, nor prevent the inevitable communist takeover. “Anti-communist Vietnam today is like ice in a river. You can walk across the ice right now, you can spin stones across it, but the river underneath is flowing swiftly and melting the ice,” Scotton says.
Nha scoffs. “You listen to people who don’t see the big picture,” he tells me. “We are confident we will survive.” Not k
nown publicly at the time, and revealed during the South’s last desperate days in April 1975, was the reason for the Saigon government’s confidence. It arises from South Vietnam’s bitter opposition to the Paris peace agreement’s permitting North Vietnam to leave many of its combat units in the south. President Nixon, impatient to have President Thieu sign the agreement, applies pressure. Nha recalls in an interview for this book that Nixon writes “many letters” to Thieu, including one that threatens, “If you don’t sign it we will go it alone.”
Nha tells me after the war, “This was when we became pragmatic. We’re not dumb enough to stand in front of a steamroller. If we don’t agree, we’ll have to get out, and then someone else will become president. But we still love our country, we can still do something. We can ride on the steamroller not under it.” The threat is cushioned by Nixon reminding Thieu of the $1 billion shipment of military hardware the he’d rushed to Saigon a month or so earlier. Nixon also makes a commitment to have American military forces re-enter the war if the North Vietnamese launch an overwhelming invasion.
Nha’s comments are confirmed in an interview I have with Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker after the war, who tells me, “Thieu received assurances which I gave him personally, written assurances from the president, that in case of a violation of the Paris Agreement by the other side we would come to their [South Vietnam’s] assistance. As a result of these commitments, the South Vietnamese signed the Paris Agreement.”
By mid-1973 the U.S. Congress is asserting a role in the war. The War Powers Act of 1973 becomes law despite Nixon’s veto, the legislation imposing restrictions on the executive branch and requiring consultation with Congress on future war actions.