Those who had been members of the front organization came forward after the war to testify that Hanoi had from the start planned and orchestrated a war of conquest against the South. In December 1975, Nguyen Huu Tho, a former president of the National Liberation Front, remarked in a speech that his organization had been “wholly obedient to the party line.” After he escaped from Vietnam, Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the front, wrote that “we discovered that the North Vietnamese Communists had engaged in a deliberate deception to achieve what had been their true goal from the start, the destruction of South Vietnam as a political or social entity in any way separate from the North.”
North Vietnam’s war might have been justified if it advanced the wishes of the people of South Vietnam. Many critics of American policy argued that the National Liberation Front could operate as freely as it did in the countryside because Communist ideology was in tune with Vietnamese culture and because the humanitarian policies of the guerrillas had won the support—the “hearts and minds,” in the fashionable phrase—of the villagers. The Communist revolution in South Vietnam, they said, was as legitimate as the American Revolution.
To compare the two in any respect is a ludicrous libel of America’s Founding Fathers.
Love of communism did not dwell in the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese. Hatred of it ran in their veins. In Vietnamese tradition, a leader should win power by his virtue, but the Communists sought to control by virtue of their power. In Vietnamese culture, the individual does not exist merely to serve the community; instead, society should maximize the freedom of each individual. A tenacious belief in private property, a deep desire for individual freedom, and a resentment of power not based in moral authority are all part of the Vietnamese character. Communism, on the other hand, completely subordinates the individual to the state. It destroys freedom of expression, abolishes private property, and demands blind obedience. The Communists were well aware that their ideology was antithetical to Vietnamese culture. One of the main reasons they set up the National Liberation Front was to keep the people from learning that the Communists were behind the revolution.
The Communists won converts by cultivating not hope but hatred. Even a prominent antiwar writer observed that one key to the success of the National Liberation Front was its “systematic encouragement of hatred.” Like almost all developing nations, South Vietnam had problems in providing social justice and avoiding governmental abuses. The Communists made it their mission to exacerbate the problems in order to help them whip the Vietnamese people into a frenzy of hatred. “Promotion of hatred,” stated one National Liberation Front directive, “must be permanent, continuous, and directly related to the struggle movement as closely as a man is to his shadow.” To Communist leaders, positive reforms were a danger. Where these were instituted, they warned, Communist agents “have tended to be self-satisfied with their records and less eager to continue promoting hatred among the masses, and thus . . . the Revolution does not boil and remain violent.”
Violence was the other key to the successes of the National Liberation Front. Communist forces systematically attacked not only the government and its army but also South Vietnamese civilians. Their purpose was to promote instability and insecurity, to destabilize the government by killing its most able officials, and to intimidate the people by demonstrating that they could not be protected.
For the National Liberation Front, terror and atrocities were calculated policies.
In Long An, after failing to persuade a man to ask his sons to desert the South Vietnamese army, the Communists coldly shot him in the back as he turned to go back to his home. When they captured the village of Cai Be in 1967, the Communists murdered forty wives and children of the members of the local militia. In Dak Son in 1967, they killed 252 civilians, two-thirds of whom were women and children, by incinerating the hamlet’s straw huts one by one with flamethrowers. They buried mines on roads used only by villagers taking goods to market; threw grenades into crowded public squares, pagodas, and schools; shelled crowded refugee camps; and fired 122mm rockets indiscriminately into Saigon, Danang, and other major cities. This continual terrorism killed thousands of South Vietnamese civilians every year.
Isolated atrocities committed by American soldiers produced torrents of outrage from antiwar critics and the news media. When it was revealed in December 1969 that United States troops killed 175 civilians at My Lai during the Tet Offensive of 1968, it dominated the front pages and the television news for weeks. Communist atrocities, on the other hand, were so common that they received hardly any attention at all. Certainly we should not have ignored the war crimes on our side. But it also is vitally important that we keep one distinction in mind. The United States sought to minimize and prevent attacks on civilians. North Vietnam made attacks on civilians a centerpiece of its strategy. Americans who deliberately killed civilians received prison sentences. Communists who did so received commendations.
The National Liberation Front also had a systematic policy of assassination or abduction of anyone likely to stand up to it and provide anti-Communist forces with leadership. Its secret service, operating out of North Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security, was present throughout South Vietnam. The Communists drew up lists of victims and then deployed specially trained teams to kidnap or kill the targets. From 1957 to 1973, they assassinated 36,725 South Vietnamese and abducted another 58,499. The real figures are much higher; accurate statistics could not be kept during the Tet Offensive in 1968. Some of those kidnapped were returned after indoctrination, but many were never seen again. They were either forced to fight with the guerrillas or executed as enemies.
The death squads of the National Liberation Front focused on leaders at the village level. The guerrillas cynically differentiated between honest and corrupt hamlet chiefs. One National Liberation Front defector explained that when faced with dishonest leaders “the Communists will publicly denounce the government and demand that it be overthrown, but actually they will support and encourage the corrupt hamlet chiefs. On the other hand the honest hamlet chief who has done much for the people and who has a clear understanding of the party is classified by the party as a ‘traitor of major importance.’ He is eliminated.”
The target lists also included anyone who improved the lives of the peasants, such as medical personnel, social workers, and schoolteachers, whether he had any links with the government or not. When asked why teachers were assassinated, one Communist defector said, “Because they were people with a profound understanding about politics, people who were pure nationalists, who might be able to assume anti-Communist leadership in their area. Such people are very dangerous and hence are classed as traitors.”
Those labeled “traitors” faced a grim fate. Once, the Communists occupied a village whose chief had cooperated with the Saigon government. Guerrillas assembled all the villagers outside, including the chief and his family. While everyone watched, they disemboweled the chief’s wife and dismembered his children one by one, cutting off their arms and legs despite their screams. Then they castrated the village chief. After witnessing these grisly executions, no one in the village dared cooperate with the central government.
That was not an isolated incident. In February 1966, United States forces were ordered to liberate a coastal village in Binh Dinh Province. A young woman who was working for the South Vietnamese government urged the peasants not to resist. The Communists captured her, tied her to a coconut tree, and gathered the villagers. First, the leader of the Communists screamed accusations against her. Then, as she struggled against the ropes, he raised a broad, long-handled knife with a curved point that peasants used to open coconuts. While two other men restrained her, he twice plunged the knife into her, leaving her lower body in tatters. Her entrails seeped out and dripped onto the ground. “Death to traitors of the people,” he read from a piece of yellow paper. “The same will happen to all who betray the just cause of our liberation struggle.” He stuck a small bamb
oo stick through the paper and shoved it into her gaping wound. The Communists left her there to die as an example for the others.
• • •
That we became preoccupied with the insurgency in South Vietnam, which was instigated and controlled by the real aggressors in North Vietnam, showed that Ho Chi Minh was a master of the art of political magic. A magician depends on sleight of hand, and the essence of sleight of hand is diversion. At the moment he switches the ball from the first shell to the second, he must be sure that the attention of the audience is focused on the third. That North Vietnam was engaging in aggression against South Vietnam was clearly evident to anyone who bothered to look carefully. The United States was aware of the facts, but failed to draw the logical conclusions. We focused on Ho’s diversion—the insurgency in South Vietnam—and like a master magician, he played us for suckers.
American military and political leaders fell for Ho’s diversion because they were wearing strategic blinkers. In the early 1960s, the Communist tactic of “revolutionary war” obsessed our strategists. Mao had used it to win power in China; Fidel Castro used it in Cuba. In January 1961, Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev announced that he intended to support “wars of national liberation.” The Soviets now would seek to take over countries from within by sending military supplies to Communist movements in the target countries rather than by attacking across a border.
President Kennedy believed the Communists saw revolutionary war as the wave of the future. He remarked to an aide that he would wager with nine-to-one odds that the next war would be a revolutionary war and considered the Vietnam War a classic example. His aides urged him, and later Johnson, not to attack North Vietnam until we had defeated the revolutionary war in South Vietnam. Their advice was based on the naïve premise that if we could counter the causes of insurgency in the target country, it would not be necessary to attack those outside the country who were directly responsible for it.
Kennedy’s advisers displayed not only appalling naïveté but also fundamentally poor judgment. They failed to understand the vitally important distinction between revolutionary war and guerrilla war. Guerrilla warfare is a military operation; revolutionary warfare is a political operation. Guerrilla warfare supplements normal conventional military operations by infiltrating small units behind enemy lines to disrupt his communications, interrupt his supplies, and harass his forces; revolutionary war aims to subvert the enemy’s control by leading the people to rise up against him. Guerrilla war helps regular armies achieve victory by weakening the enemy; revolutionary war achieves victory on its own through a popular uprising.
In Vietnam the insurgency was not primarily a revolutionary war, because the people as a whole were not rising up against the government. The real war in Vietnam was an invasion from North Vietnam that came in the guise of a guerrilla insurgency. While we treated the symptom, the disease went unchecked.
• • •
Because we failed to understand the nature of the war, the chances were small that we would choose the correct strategy to fight it. Our first error probably doomed us to follow the wrong path, but we sealed our fate by committing three more.
The first resulted from events half a world away from Vietnam. In April 1961, 1,400 anti-Communist Cubans, who were organized, trained, armed, and directed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, landed in the Zapata Swamp of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs with the mission of leading an anti-Castro revolution. Within three days, they capitulated after a valiant effort against vastly greater and better-supplied enemy forces. It was a debacle for the United States. The freedom fighters had been promised American air cover, and never would have gone forward with the plan without such a commitment. When we did not deliver it, their attack stalled quickly. Without air support, they could neither advance nor even be resupplied. As a result, they literally ran out of ammunition on the beaches.
After this disastrous failure, President Kennedy ordered Robert Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor to undertake an investigation. They concluded that the CIA was not equipped to handle large-scale paramilitary operations and that the Pentagon should be put in charge of them. Our involvement in Vietnam fell into this category, even though at the time we were only training and advising South Vietnam’s army.
This decision had enormous consequences. The CIA’s political sophistication and on-the-spot feel for local conditions went out the window as people who saw the world through bureaucratic and technological lenses took over the main operational responsibility for the war. Our armed forces were experts at mobilizing huge resources, orchestrating logistic support, and deploying enormous firepower. In Vietnam, these skills led them to fight the war their way, rather than developing the new skills required to defeat the new kind of enemy they faced. They made the mistake of fighting an unconventional war with conventional tactics.
• • •
The second critical mistake took place in Laos. For years the Laotian people had been fighting a three-cornered civil war. The Communist Pathet Lao controlled two northeastern provinces bordering on North Vietnam. Neutralists held the central plain. Rightists ruled the areas bordering on Thailand along the Mekong River in southern Laos. The fighting had never been intense—until North Vietnam began to intervene.
Running through Laos were the best routes around the demilitarized zone between the two Vietnams for infiltrating men and arms into South Vietnam and Cambodia. Hanoi therefore set up Group 559 in May 1959 and Group 959 in September 1959. According to the North Vietnamese history of the war, the task of Group 559 was “creating the first foot travel route connecting the North and South, and organizing the sending of people, weapons, and supplies to the revolution in the South.” Group 959 was set up for providing military specialists for the Pathet Lao, organizing “the supplying of Vietnamese material to the Laotian revolution and directly commanding the Vietnamese volunteer units” operating in Laos.
With these actions, Hanoi had set out to crush the Pathet Lao’s two non-Communist rivals and take total control of the country in order to facilitate their invasion of South Vietnam. By December 1960, the North Vietnamese had stationed 7,000 troops in Laos.
President Eisenhower believed that Laos was the key domino in Southeast Asia. Defending Laos was the major specific action Eisenhower urged on President-elect Kennedy when they met in January 1961. Eisenhower told Kennedy that if Laos were to fall into Communist hands, we would have to write off all of Indochina. But in the event that efforts to reach a political solution failed, he advised, the United States should intervene militarily with its allies if possible, or alone if necessary.
Kennedy’s initial moves in Laos were promising. On March 23, 1961, he said forcefully that unless Communist attacks on its neutral government were stopped, “those who support a truly neutral Laos will have to consider their response.” He warned that no one should doubt his resolution on this point. “The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence,” he said. “I know that every American will want his country to honor its obligations to the point that freedom and security of the free world and ourselves may be achieved.”
He instructed the CIA to supply arms to the neutralists and rightists who were fighting against the expansion of Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese control. It was a limited commitment, involving fewer than 700 American advisers, but it was enough to stalemate the war and keep North Vietnam’s larger forces off-balance.
One month later, however, Kennedy backed away from his commitment to keep Laos independent. He decided that Laos was beyond our security perimeter in Southeast Asia and that it was the wrong place to draw the line against North Vietnamese aggression. If he had to engage American forces in the area, he preferred to do so in South Vietnam.
His advisers provided him with persuasive arguments to support his reversal on Laos. Laos enjoyed little national unity. Its armed forces were small and poorly trained. Its terrain was forbidding. Its geography made it difficult to a
pply American air and naval power. Its common border with Communist China stirred fears that any American action might provoke Mao to intervene as he had in Korea.
The Bay of Pigs disaster on April 19, 1961, reinforced Kennedy’s reluctance to act. When I saw him at the White House on April 20, I pledged bipartisan support for any action he decided was necessary to prevent a Communist conquest of Laos. His response was that he did not see how we could make any move in Laos, which was thousands of miles away, if we did not make a move in Cuba, which was only ninety miles away. Kennedy also told an aide that one of the lessons he had learned from his defeat in Cuba was that the United States should pursue a political solution in Southeast Asia rather than a military one.
Accordingly, he instructed Averell Harriman to negotiate an agreement in Geneva that would neutralize Laos. The talks began in May 1961 and soon ran up against implacable North Vietnamese intransigence. Ho stalled because he sensed the United States would abandon Laos even without an agreement. After ten months of Communist delays, Kennedy sent 5,000 marines to Thailand and put American forces at Okinawa on standby. Ho appeared to back down, and within two months there was an agreement in Geneva. Fifteen countries signed a treaty in which they pledged to recognize a new neutralist coalition government in Laos, to withdraw any military forces they had in the country, and to stop any paramilitary assistance to the rival political factions. The agreement was hailed by foreign-policy pundits in the media as a significant contribution to peace in Southeast Asia.
All countries complied except one: North Vietnam.
The agreement had stated that all foreign troops would leave Laos through internationally supervised checkpoints. Ho never took any serious steps to remove his 7,000-man contingent from Laos. The total number of North Vietnamese soldiers recorded as leaving was forty.
No More Vietnams Page 6