North Vietnam’s Communists, who were masters at the art of physical and psychological torture, worked overtime in trying to force their captives to turn against their country. But it did not work. Our POWs would not break. When Captain Jeremiah Denton, the first American prisoner of war to get off the plane that had brought the POWs out of North Vietnam, stepped up to the microphone, he did not complain about his hardship or issue an antiwar manifesto. He said, “We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances. We are profoundly grateful to our Commander in Chief, and to our nation for this day. God bless America.”
• • •
In the time we won through our Cambodian operations, our new military strategy in Vietnam took hold. Starting in 1968, with the close cooperation of President Thieu, we had replaced the strategy of attrition with one of pacification. We also had begun making steady progress toward turning the fighting over to South Vietnamese forces. By 1972, South Vietnam’s government had consolidated its control of the countryside, and its army conducted virtually all of the day-to-day fighting against the North Vietnamese.
Pacification did not begin in earnest until after the Tet Offensive in 1968. Kennedy and Johnson administration officials regularly turned out policy papers that called for mobilizing the South Vietnamese people behind the war. But very little came of these proposals because the United States preoccupied itself with looking for a quick military fix to the war. Pacification programs were little more than misguided political reforms or start-and-stop economic development programs. These well-intentioned efforts read like a laundry list: Reconstruction, Civic Action, Land Development Centers, Agglomeration Camps, Argovilles, Strategic Hamlets, New Life Hamlets, Rural Construction, Rural Reconstruction, and Revolutionary Development. Some, particularly the Strategic Hamlet program in its early years, met with limited success. But none adequately addressed the problem of providing the South Vietnamese with security at the village level.
The decisive defeat of the 1968 Tet Offensive changed the balance of power in South Vietnam. Communist forces lost 37,000 troops by the end of February and compounded these losses by launching unsuccessful small-scale offensives in May and August. In late 1969, General Giap said that his army’s casualties totaled more than a half-million men over the last two years; an equivalent loss for the United States would have been 5 million men. In addition, the Communists had sacrificed their political infrastructure; it was exposed during the Tet Offensive, and United States and South Vietnamese forces uprooted it once the tide of battle had turned. North Vietnam’s defeat had destroyed its ability to control the countryside. This victory had created a vacuum of power. Winning the war meant winning the race to fill it.
American and South Vietnamese strategies shifted to exploit this new opportunity. Immediately after the Tet Offensive, the United States moved tentatively. American forces regrouped to defend the towns and cities. President Thieu ordered a general mobilization and the formation of local militias in rural areas. General Abrams put a higher priority on pacification. A campaign to retake rural areas in late 1968 met with great success. Some officials in the Johnson administration advocated the abandonment of the strategy of attrition. But in the final analysis, the United States made a few marginal adjustments in tactics, but no fundamental changes in strategy.
When I came into office, I recognized that we needed a new strategy. The Johnson administration had sent more than a half-million troops to Vietnam, dropped over a million tons of bombs a year, and killed nearly a quarter-million enemy troops in three years. Yet immediately after the Tet Offensive, the United States and South Vietnam controlled no more territory than before the American intervention in August 1965. All the United States had won through our strategy of attrition was a costly stalemate.
We therefore put new strategic emphasis on pacification in 1969. It required us to separate the enemy from the population, reestablish Saigon’s control of the countryside, and help the South Vietnamese government win the loyalty of its people through economic and political reforms. Our first step was military. “The key strategic thrust,” our new Strategic Objectives Plan read in 1969, “is to provide meaningful continuing security for the Vietnamese people in expanding areas of increasingly effective civil authority.” Our previous goal of destroying North Vietnam’s regular forces was subordinated to those of providing security at the local level—during both the day and the night—and eliminating the Communist infrastructure. Our next steps were political and economic. I ordered a step-up in our Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program. By 1970, we had over 6,000 military and 1,000 civilian advisers helping to reconstruct South Vietnam’s government and economy. These advisers worked with almost a million South Vietnamese throughout the country. Their efforts were the key to solidifying our military gains in the countryside.
President Thieu supported our plans wholeheartedly. After the Tet Offensive, he mobilized his country behind the war. In June 1968, Thieu had announced the conscription of all men between the ages of sixteen and fifty, with those between eighteen and thirty-eight going into the armed forces and the others forming the new People’s Self-Defense Force. Confident that the South Vietnamese people opposed a Communist victory, Thieu decided that the best way to wage the war in the countryside was to give weapons to the people. His self-defense force, a part-time unpaid militia designed to combat small enemy units, was filled with peasants, traders, and local craftsmen. Its ranks soon numbered 1.5 million and later grew to over 3 million.
Thieu devoted most of his new draftees to the task of pacification. South Vietnam’s military was divided into regular forces, which were composed of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps; and territorial forces, which were made up of the Regional Forces and the Popular Forces. Recruits for the Regional Forces fought in their own provinces and those for the Popular Forces defended their own villages. Both were tailor-made for pacification. In four years Thieu increased their ranks from 300,000 to 532,000 troops, and by 1971 these forces represented 51 percent of South Vietnam’s military strength. Though they consumed only 20 percent of the military budget, the territorial forces accounted for 40 percent of enemy troops killed in action. Combat effectiveness was uneven in both the self-defense force and the territorial forces—which was to be expected for any military force assembled so quickly—but they effectively secured the countryside for Saigon.
Thieu recognized that while protecting the rural population was critical in the short term, it would not be enough in the long term. Defeating the Communist revolution required a counterrevolution—not in the sense of just suppressing the insurgency with force but in the sense of countering their revolution with one of his own. He knew that the South Vietnamese people, like those of most poor Third World countries, would probably not fight indefinitely simply to preserve the status quo. Thieu therefore took steps to give them a stake in the war. He turned local administration over to elected village councils, instituted a massive land-reform program, and overhauled South Vietnam’s social programs. From 1970 through 1973, Saigon redistributed 2.5 million acres of land to over 800,000 tenant farmers, reducing the proportion of arable land worked by tenant farmers from 60 percent to 10 percent. American aid helped build schools, hospitals, and public works of all kinds. By 1972, over 80 percent of South Vietnamese children of primary-school age were attending classes, and enrollment in secondary schools was expanding rapidly.
Pacification worked wonders in South Vietnam. In 1969, we set ambitious goals. We sought to bring 90 percent of all hamlets under government control, with 50 percent having a high degree of security and the other 40 percent having a significant but lesser degree of security. We reached our goals by October. From 1968 through 1971, the proportion of the population living in secure areas increased from 47 percent to 84 percent, while that figure for those living in contested areas or under Communist control dropped from 23 percent to less than 4 percent. Over a milli
on refugees were returned to their homes. Enemy ground attacks fell to almost half their previous level and were limited to ten sparsely populated provinces. Over 75 percent of South Vietnam’s essential roads and waterways were safe for civilian travel. Life for most of South Vietnam returned to normal.
We had won the political struggle for the allegiance of the South Vietnamese people. For years, Communist propaganda had trumpeted that theirs was the winning side, but now our side appeared to be the wave of the future. We were in control of areas that we had previously not dared to enter. We were resettling thousands of refugees displaced by the fighting. We had produced unprecedented economic prosperity.
Even the Communists took note. During 1969, their troops defected to our side at a rate of 4,000 a month. In many areas the Popular Forces were composed entirely of former Communist soldiers. Kien Hoa Province had been a stronghold of the Communists since World War II. In October 1970, when the local Communist leader defected to our side, he said that his troops had dwindled from 10,000 to 3,000 and that he was abandoning his comrades because he realized that they were on the losing side.
While our pacification strategy was designed to deal with the political aspect of the war, our Vietnamization program readied our allies to handle the military part of it.
During the mid-1960s, South Vietnam’s army was a mediocre fighting force. A commonly heard quip was that while United States forces tried to “seek out and destroy” Communist troops, those of South Vietnam sought to “search out and avoid” them. During nine months of 1966, battle reports indicated that 90 percent of American large-scale operations resulted in direct fighting with the enemy, compared with only 46 percent of South Vietnamese army missions. American commanders rated almost a third of South Vietnam’s military units as having a marginal or unsatisfactory combat effectiveness. And during this period more than a fifth of Saigon’s troops deserted.
There were two reasons for the ineffectiveness of South Vietnam’s armed forces: They had little to fight for, and inadequate weapons to fight with. Soldiers go to war to defend the state. It is hard to imagine risking one’s life so that a group of pompous incompetents masquerading as generals could continue to play musical chairs in the cabinet room of the Presidential Palace. From Diem’s death in 1963 to Thieu’s ascent to power in 1965, South Vietnam’s armed forces fell into such a pitiful state that it took years to rebuild them into a fighting force that could match the North Vietnamese Army. When the United States intervened in 1965, we complicated the problem. Our troops did more than just take part in the war—they took it over. The more we Americanized the heavy fighting, the more our ally’s military muscle atrophied.
But it was a misconception to say that the South Vietnamese were not shouldering their share of the war’s burden. From 1965 through 1968, our ally suffered more killed in action than we did in all but three weeks. Generally, our troops fought better than theirs did. But Americans had more firepower and were backed up with more artillery and air support. Shortages of M-16 rifles, machine guns, mortars, radios, trucks, recoilless rifles, and artillery pieces meant that none of these became available in large numbers for South Vietnamese troops until late 1968. Armed only with semiautomatic M-l rifles of World War II vintage, they were outgunned by the Communists, who were equipped with automatic Soviet-made AK-47s. It was like sending someone armed with a squirt gun into a water fight against an opponent equipped with a fire hose.
When our Vietnamization program began, we knew it would take several years. We quickly redressed our ally’s disadvantage in firepower. We distributed automatic M-16 rifles to all regular South Vietnamese units by April 1969 and to virtually all territorial forces by February 1970. Under Thieu’s mobilization, South Vietnam’s regular army grew from 343,000 troops in 1967 to 516,000 in 1971. Its combat capability increased in every index of combat effectiveness. The South Vietnamese fought well during the Cambodian operations in 1970. From 1970 through 1971, South Vietnam’s armed forces conducted three times as many large operations and recorded twice as many enemy killed in action as they did from 1966 through 1967.
But problems remained. South Vietnam’s battlefield leadership was often poor. Thieu, who had witnessed firsthand the paralysis that resulted from political intrigue in the military after Diem’s fall, was understandably obsessed with preserving his support within the army. He therefore tended to promote officers who demonstrated not their ability to command but rather their personal loyalty to him. This may have helped maintain stability, but it had a severely detrimental effect on the combat effectiveness of South Vietnam’s army.
In early 1971, a critical test of Vietnamization took place: Operation Lam Son 719. In order to blunt North Vietnam’s offensive striking power, South Vietnam’s army conducted a ground assault on Communist supply routes in Laos, acting for the first time without the help of American ground combat forces.
From 1966 through 1971, North Vietnam had used the Ho Chi Minh Trail to transport into South Vietnam 630,000 Communist troops, 100,000 tons of food, 400,000 weapons, and 600 million rounds of ammunition. Because Lon Nol had denied North Vietnam access to the port at Sihanoukville, all Communist supplies now had to be shipped overland along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. By December 1970, North Vietnam’s 1,500 miles of roads in Laos were clogged with men and supplies en route to Cambodia for an offensive in either the spring of 1971 or 1972. To ensure South Vietnam’s survival when the offensive came, we had to do something to disrupt North Vietnam’s ominous buildup.
In January 1971, I authorized a military operation to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Congressional restrictions made it illegal for us to use American ground troops in Laos. But after studying the reports of my military advisers, I was confident that South Vietnam’s armed forces were ready to take on such a mission alone. Our only role would be to take up defensive positions below the demilitarized zone and along the border with Laos, ferry South Vietnamese troops and supplies in by helicopter, and provide air cover with gunships and bombing raids. Our plan called for South Vietnam’s forces to drive about twenty miles into Laos along Route 9 to capture the town of Tchpone—on which almost all of North Vietnam’s infiltration routes converged—and then to conduct further strikes in surrounding areas to disrupt the Communist buildup. Other South Vietnamese units were to conduct a simultaneous attack on a Communist base area in Cambodia.
On February 8, the operation began. South Vietnamese troops fought bravely and effectively, but some problems soon developed. Communist forces put up stronger resistance than we had anticipated, and American military commanders in Saigon failed to respond with a corresponding increase in air cover. When South Vietnamese forces sustained large casualties about ten miles into Laos, they made the mistake of temporarily digging in, which gave the North Vietnamese a sitting target to hit. Thieu became overly cautious and ordered his commanders to stop their offensive as soon as casualties reached 3,000. By the middle of March, soon after the South Vietnamese reached Tchpone, their casualties hit Thieu’s arbitrary ceiling, and they began to retreat to the southeast along Route 914.
American news-media reports presented a distorted picture of the operation by focusing almost exclusively on the failings of the South Vietnamese troops. Because of inadequate air support during the withdrawal, a few units took such a severe pounding from enemy artillery that they panicked. It took only a few televised films of soldiers clinging to the skids of our evacuation helicopters to reinforce the widespread misconception that South Vietnam’s armed forces were incompetent and cowardly.
Contrary to the news-media’s stories, the operation was a military success. South Vietnamese forces killed over 9,000 enemy troops and destroyed 1,123 crew-served weapons, 3,754 individual weapons, 110 tanks, 270 trucks, 13,630 tons of munitions, and 15 tons of ammunition for 122mm rockets. Of the twenty-two South Vietnamese battalions involved in the offensive, eighteen fought extremely well and four did poorly. Their withdrawal, though marred by some panic, was on the whole o
rderly. South Vietnam’s operation did not achieve all our objectives. But the bottom line was decisively positive: Despite the largest influx of matériel in the history of the war, there was no Communist offensive in South Vietnam in 1971.
Operation Lam Son 719 was a milestone in the Vietnam War. It marked the first time South Vietnam’s army had taken on the North Vietnamese in a frontal assault without American combat advisers. It also marked the last time United States forces were involved in the ground fighting in even a supporting role.
• • •
As our role in the fighting diminished, the news media’s opposition to our involvement in the Vietnam War intensified. Objectivity gave way to hostility. On June 13, 1971, when the New York Times began publishing a series of articles based on a classified 7,000-page Defense Department study, their conduct reached the height of irresponsibility.
Officially entitled The History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam, the study soon received a more dramatic label: “The Pentagon Papers.” Written at the direction of Robert McNamara, the study’s text described the history of our involvement in Vietnam from 1945 through 1968, and its appendixes contained dozens of verbatim documents from the files of the Defense Department, State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House. The documents had been illegally turned over to the Times. Now, its editors announced that they planned to publish not only portions of the study but also many of the original documents. Their story did not mention that all these materials were still classified a “Secret” and “Top Secret.”
My administration faced the difficult question of what to do about the most massive leak of classified documents in American history. We had only two options: We could either do nothing or move for a court injunction that would prevent the Times from continuing publication. Good policy argued for moving against the Times; safe politics argued against doing so.
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