A 1929 graduate of West Point, Harkins had earned the nickname “Ramrod” during World War II because of the ruthlessness with which he implemented every whim of General George S. Patton, whom he served as deputy chief of staff. When Patton died in 1945, Harkins attached himself to Taylor, who as a commander of the Eighth Army in Korea was a rising star. Harkins knew that military careers are built on successful efficiency reports, and immediately after arriving in Saigon in February 1962 he started issuing a daily “Headway Report” showing the steady progress being made against the Vietcong. There was a common theme in all the Headway Reports: The war was going well, but Harkins needed the “3Ms—more men, more money, more materiél.” It was not long before the Saigon press corps dubbed him “General Blimp” for his inflated success reports. Among American younger officers, the phrase “pulling a Harkins” became synonymous with bonehead decisions and bureaucratic foul-ups. But Harkins got his 3Ms. At the end of 1962 there were 11,300 American military personnel in South Vietnam, and the United States was spending $500 million a year to keep the war going. By mid-1962 huge Globemaster transport planes were arriving hourly at the Tan Son Nhut airbase delivering military equipment. Francois Sully, a veteran reporter on Indochina, had seen it all before when French troops poured into Indochina in 1953. He remarked to an American journalist that it “was déjà vu. The American planes bringing American equipment and confident young soldiers dressed in American green fatigues. It looks like 1953 all over again.”
As the number of military advisers exceeded 11,000, more and more troops came down with local diseases or suffered from accidents and combat wounds. To meet these medical needs, the army’s 8th Field Hospital deployed to Nha Trang in 1962; the unit included dozens of army nurses, most of whom were women. As the responsibilities of the embassy staff expanded during the Kennedy administration, several hundred female employees of the State Department were transferred to Saigon. All of the service branches, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency, had women employees in South Vietnam during the early 1960s. American women with the United States Army, the Agency for International Development, and the Peace Corps found themselves working in South Vietnam during the Kennedy years.
It “is fashionable in some quarters,” observed General Earle Wheeler in November 1962, “to say that the problems in Southeast Asia are primarily political and economic rather than military. I do not agree. The essence of the problem is military.” Harkins agreed. He placed American officers and noncommissioned officers at every level in ARVN, where they planned and provided tactical advice for military operations. At the battalion level, advisers accompanied ARVN in the field.
In February 1962 two Vietnamese pilots attacked the Norodom Palace in strafing runs trying to kill Diem. He became so paranoid that he kept the best ARVN units near Saigon, where they could quickly suppress any uprising. But that left the countryside to the Vietcong. Harkins wanted ARVN to “take the war to the enemy,” but Diem was terrified that losing battles or sustaining heavy casualties would create political discontent and undermine his regime. Nor was he much more enthusiastic about victories, which produced popular generals who might pose a political threat. Caution and conservatism infected ARVN at every level.
The military advisers on the ground, then, had much prodding and nagging to do. So did the 4400th created in April 1961 and nicknamed “Jungle Jim.” Crew members trained Vietnamese pilots in tactical air support, dropped propaganda leaflets over Vietcong territory, and supplied ARVN outposts along the Cambodian and Laotian borders. When the Vietnamese pilots proved less than aggressive, American pilots began assuming greater initiative than had been allowed them at the beginning. By 1962 and 1963 they were flying combat missions on their own.
In 1961 the Marine Corps launched Operation Shufly. From bases at Soc Trang in the Mekong Delta and Danang along the northern coast of South Vietnam, marine helicopters carried ARVN troops into battle, while marine advisers instructed ARVN in amphibious assault tactics. But the real entrance of the navy and Marine Corps to Vietnam began with Victor Krulak’s brainchild—Operation Plan 34-A, Oplan 34-A in Pentagonese.
For years the navy and marines had conducted clandestine “DeSoto Missions” against the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea—covert intelligence gathering by commando teams and naval vessels. Krulak thought that North Vietnam, with its long coastline, was perfect for even more aggressive activities. He wanted PT boats to attack radar sites in North Vietnam while Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, and Filipino mercenaries blew up highways, bridges, and ammunition dumps, before being quickly extracted. The plan struck Kennedy’s fancy: PT boats, commandos, blackened faces, frogmen, secrets, passwords, adventure. He approved Oplan 34-A on November 20, 1963, three days before his assassination. By mid-1963 the number of American military personnel in South Vietnam had approached 15,000 people.
The men, money, materiél, and training bore some fruit. By late 1962 ARVN forces totaled 210,000 troops augmented by 142,000 militia. Equipped with M-14 rifles and M113 armored personnel carriers, backed by tactical air support from Farmgate pilots, informed by good intelligence reports from the CIA and Special Forces, and enjoying MACV operational planning, some ARVN units—particularly the ARVN Airborne Division, the First Infantry, and the ARVN marines—began to attack the Vietcong. They even had some unexpected success in War Zone D north of Saigon, in the U Minh Forest on the Gulf of Thailand, and in the Plain of Reeds west of Saigon.
Harkins thought he was creating a killing machine, a mobile army force to do what George Patton’s Third Army had done to the Germans in World War II. The word was “attrition,” wearing down the Vietcong to the point at which they could not keep fighting. Harkins started adding up the numbers of combat operations, search-and-destroy missions, tactical air sorties (round-trip attacks run by one aircraft), bombing tonnages, weapons captured, ARVN troop increases, and weapons distributed to militia. By the end of 1962, the numbers looked good. “Every quantitative measurement we have shows we’re winning this war,” Robert McNamara assured the reporters at a press conference. The most important statistic of all was the “body count,” the number of Vietcong killed. General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1960–1961, viewed the American mission as teaching ARVN “to kill Communists.” One day in 1961 when Douglas Pike, a psychological operations officer with the United States Information Office in Saigon, remarked that the French had killed or wounded more than a million Vietminh, Lemnitzer had a simple answer: “Didn’t kill enough then. We’ll teach’em to kill more.”
Harkins also wanted to improve the morale of South Vietnamese peasants, strengthen their loyalty to Diem, and reduce their vulnerability to Vietcong recruiting. Counterinsurgency rested on two fundamental principles, both of which had evolved out of the experiences in the Philippines and Malaya and Rostow’s theories about economic development. Peasants needed security against Vietcong attack; they needed to be able to go to sleep at night in peace. And when they awakened in the morning, they needed land, jobs, and schools with which they could build economic prosperity. People enjoying the good life would not fall prey to communistic rhetoric.
The American military arm of counterinsurgency in Vietnam was the Special Forces. During the 1950s the Michigan State University Advisory Group had launched economic development projects in South Vietnam, and the CIA formed local militias—Civilian Irregular Defense Groups among Montagnard tribesmen. Organized in 1952 to allow the army to fight covertly behind enemy lines, the First Special Forces Group had sent a few advisers into South Vietnam in 1957. But in 1961 they caught President Kennedy’s fancy. An avid reader of Ian Fleming’s “James Bond” novels, Kennedy was fascinated by the paraphernalia of espionage, covert action, double agents, and guerrilla war. Against the wishes of army brass, in 1961 he authorized the Special Forces to wear the Green Beret. He increased them from 2,500 to 10,000 men and sent the 5th and 7th Special Forces Groups to Vietnam. Late in 1962 the Green Berets took ove
r CIDG training from the CIA.
While the Special Forces were replacing the CIDGs, and MACV was trying to get ARVN to fight its own war, Roger Hilsman and Robert Thompson were putting in motion the Strategic Hamlet Program. It was a new version of the older Agroville program. “Strategic hamlets” were peasant villages surrounded by barbed wire and mine fields. Inside the strategic hamlets there would be schools, a community center, a small hospital and pharmacy, and homes for the peasants. American pilots could then open fire on the Vietcong, who by definition were all the people outside the hamlets. Unable to hide, the Vietcong would be crushed by the killing machine. The job of building the strategic hamlets MACV turned over to Diem, who just as promptly turned it over to Nhu, who went about the construction process with a vengeance. By the end of the summer of 1962, Nhu claimed to have built 3,225 hamlets and placed 4.3 million peasants behind the barbed wire. Robert Thompson was appalled by Nhu’s slipshod approach: “No attention was paid to their purpose. Their creation became the purpose itself.”
Harkin’s daily Headway Reports were contradicted by pessimistic dispatches from journalists in Saigon. For an independent look, Kennedy asked Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana to go to Saigon in December 1962. Mansfield, a devout Roman Catholic and former professor of Asian affairs, had been an early supporter of Ngo Dinh Diem. But in Saigon he received alarming information from the press corps, and he gave Kennedy a pessimistic report: “Vietnam, outside the cities, is still... run largely by the Vietcong.... Out of fear or indifference or hostility the peasants still withhold acquiescence, let alone approval of the [Saigon] government.... In short, it would be well to face the fact that we are once again at the beginning of the beginning.” The report caught Kennedy off guard. He lashed out at Mansfield, accusing him of defeatism. When a reporter asked Kennedy whether Mansfield’s opinion did not justify a withdrawal, Kennedy replied, “For us to withdraw would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam but of Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there.” Mansfield was still gloomier with his congressional colleagues, to whom he declared that the war “could involve an expenditure of American lives and resources on a scale which would bear little relationship to the interests of the United States or, indeed, to the interests of the people of Vietnam.”
Kennedy was growing more and more frustrated. He wanted out of Vietnam but did not know how. “I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely,” he commented to one of his aides, “and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him.” Still, he dreaded anything resembling the defeat at the Bay of Pigs. But he did not want the war to become a large-scale conflict. That was why Mansfield’s report had been such a blow. The war was already costing a fortune, and, according to someone Kennedy trusted, the investment made no difference at all. Now, in 2006, we have the word of fifteen contemporaries that Kennedy hoped to withdraw after defeating the Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Kennedy asked Roger Hilsman and Michael Forrestal, a White House Far Eastern affairs adviser, to evaluate the situation. They returned from Saigon in January 1963 with an optimistic report. Two weeks later Kennedy sent Victor Krulak and General Earle Wheeler, the army chief of staff, to Saigon. They castigated Mansfield and predicted early victory. All the heavy brass worried Harkins, so he issued his most optimistic prediction of all: Kennedy could withdraw 1,000 troops from South Vietnam at the end of 1963, and all the rest by the end of 1965.
But in 1963, as the general’s statistical cloth began to unravel, North Vietnam brought nearly 13,000 infiltrators down the Ho Chi Minh Trail that bypassed the division between North and South Vietnam by going in Laos. In 1959 and 1960 it had sent 4,500 and in 1961 it added 6,300. From 3,000 people in 1960 to 10,000 in 1961 to 17,000 in 1962, the Main Force Vietcong now stood at 35,000. Most were former Vietminh, native southerners regrouped to North Vietnam after 1954. They were highly motivated, well trained, and anxious to go home. Secret intelligence reports indicated that the Vietcong were gaining strength, that they were fielding 600- to 700-man battalions supported by communications and engineering units, and that the 9th Vietcong Infantry Division would soon be ready for full deployment.
And they were well armed. Homemade shotguns and World War II vintage rifles were a thing of the past. Between early 1962 and mid1963, MACV distributed more than 250,000 weapons to CIA and Special Forces irregular troops—M-14 carbines, shotguns, submachine guns, mortars, recoilless rifles, radios, and grenades. Most of them ended up with the Vietcong. Some ARVN outposts were particularly notorious for losing weapons. Americans called them “Vietcong PXs.” The American cornucopia of death was so reliable that in mid-1963 Vietcong commanders relayed messages north that it was easier to capture American weapons than to bring Chinese and Soviet arms down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Nor were the Vietcong having any trouble finding recruits. The Strategic Hamlet Program was a bonanza for them. Within a matter of months the Diem regime herded millions of peasants into hastily constructed hamlets that were more concentration camps than villages. Peasants were forced to build the new hamlets, dig the huge, waterfilled moats around them, string the barbed wire, and knock down their old homes. Millions of peasants left ancestral villages at gunpoint for the confinement of the strategic hamlets. The Vietcong used a simple response: “When the Diem regime falls and the Americans leave, you will be able to go home again.” The peasants listened. The Vietcong also infiltrated the Strategic Hamlet Program. Nhu gave control of the program to Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, who ruthlessly implemented it. What Nhu did not know was that Thao was a Vietcong agent. His instructions were to be brutal in building the strategic hamlets, to alienate as many peasants as possible. He was eminently successful. According to the historian Larry Cable, “The United States had about as much effective control over the... Strategic Hamlet Program, as a heroin addict has over his habit.”
No less successful in lining up peasants behind the Vietcong was American air power. Between early 1961 and the end of 1962 air force personnel in South Vietnam increased from 250 to 2,000, and the number of monthly bombing sorties from 50 to more than 1,000. By the middle of 1963 the air force was conducting 1,500 sorties a month, dropping napalm, rockets, and heavy bombs and strafing the Vietcong. The problem, of course, was that air power was indiscriminate. Guerrillas died, to be sure, but so did peasants.
Between the bombing runs and the strategic hamlets, the Vietcong were able to recruit as many new soldiers as they could equip and supply. In 1960 main-force Vietcong soldiers had been supported by only 3,000 village and regional self-defense troops, but that number increased to more than 65,000 in late 1963. At the end of the year the communists had more than 100,000 troops—main force and militia—at their disposal.
More than anything else, the battle of Ap Bac in January 1963 exposed the limits of the American ability to control the fortunes of battle. Late in December 1962, two hundred troops from the Vietcong 514th Battalion dug in along a mile-long canal at the edge of the Plain of Reeds in Dinh Tuong Province, near the village of Ap Bac. Hidden by trees, shrubs, and tall grass, they had a clear view of the surrounding rice fields. When intelligence reports revealed the Vietcong, MACV felt it finally had an opportunity to engage the elusive enemy in a set-piece battle. More than 2,000 troops from the ARVN 7th Division, advised by Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, went into battle. The operational plan was simple. Two ARVN battalions would approach from the north and south, while a company of M113 armored personnel carriers came in from the west. The eastern approaches would be left unguarded, so that if the Vietcong tried to escape, they would be destroyed by tactical air strikes and heavy artillery. In previous battles, the Vietcong had fled when they saw the M113s and CH-21 helicopters, but this time they held their positions. With small-arms fire they brought down five helicopters and nearly destroyed nine more, and they methodically killed the machine gunners on the M113s. ARVN troops refused to attack, and the ARVN command refused to reinforce them. The Vietcon
g escaped with twelve casualties, leaving behind two hundred dead or wounded ARVN troops and three dead American advisers.
The battle of Ap Bac had immediate repercussions. Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam were among the reporters who knew they had a story; after a year of Headway Reports, Ap Bac showed how the war was really going. The military tried, of course, to discredit the journalists. Admiral Harry Felt, commander of the United States Pacific fleet, went to Saigon after the battle and announced in a press conference: “I don’t believe what I’ve been reading in the papers. As I understand it, it was a Vietnamese victory—not a defeat, as the papers say.” Harkins nodded and agreed: “Yes, that’s right. It was a Vietnamese victory. It certainly was.” Robert McNamara’s confident proclamation, “We have definitely turned the corner toward victory,” was predictable. But the only people turning any corner were the Vietcong.
The eccentricities of Diem’s coterie hastened the deterioration brought on by the Strategic Hamlet Program. The president’s elder brother Ngo Dinh Thu, archbishop of Hue, used his political clout to augment church property. One critic charged that his requests for contributions “read like tax notices.” He bought farms, businesses, urban real estate, rental property, and rubber plantations, and he employed ARVN troops on timber and construction concessions. Ngo Dinh Can, the dictator of Hue, accumulated a fortune as head of a smuggling syndicate that shipped huge loads of rice to Hanoi and large volumes of opium throughout Asia. Ngo Dinh Luyen, the South Vietnamese ambassador in London, became a multimillionaire speculating in piasters and pounds using insider information gleaned from his brothers in Saigon. More bizarre still were the antics of Ngo Dinh Nhu. By 1963 Nhu was smoking opium every day. His ambition had long since turned into a megalomania symbolized by the Personalist Labor Revolutionary party, or Can Lao—secret police known for torture and assassination. Can Lao troops, complete with Nazi-like goose-step marches and stiff-armed salutes, enforced Nhu’s will. Madame Nhu had her own stormtroopers, a group known as the Women’s Solidarity Movement and Paramilitary Girls, which worked at stamping out evil: dancing, card playing, prostitution, divorce, and gambling. The Nhus amassed a fortune running numbers and lottery rackets, manipulating currency, and extorting money from Saigon businesses, promising “protection” in exchange for contributions. After reading a CIA report on the shenanigans, President Kennedy slammed the document down on his desk and shouted, “Those damned sons of bitches.”
Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995 Page 14