Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  But three developments were propelling the United States toward war: the instability of the South Vietnamese government, the increasing aggressiveness of the Vietcong, and the dramatic escalation of North Vietnamese transfers of troops and supplies into South Vietnam.

  Nicknamed for his six-foot height, uncommon among Vietnamese, Duong Van ("Big”) Minh was in control of the government after overseeing the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu. He had been trained in the French colonial army and was responsible for crushing the Binh Xuyen in 1955. Minh replaced the Diem government with a Military Revolutionary Council, of which he served as chairman. He repealed Madame Nhu’s morality legislation and released most of Diem’s political prisoners incarcerated at Poulo Condore. His closest associates on the council were Tran Van Don and Le Van Kim. Tran Van Don was born in France in 1917, served with the French army in World War II, and joined the Vietnamese National Army in 1951. He rose to become a commander of I Corps, the northern military district of South Vietnam. Le Van Kim, commandant of the National Military Academy, had spent years in Paris with the French police and came back home to join the Vietnamese National Army. Don and Kim were French citizens, and like Duong Van Minh they were Roman Catholics. From the very beginning, Minh, Don, and Kim faced repeated plots to overthrow them, some coming from their own military subordinates and others from the Buddhist majority. The change in rule was to initiate a series of governments by members of the old elite with French educations, hardly different from Diem, while Buddhist factions struggled for power, hostility between Catholics and Buddhists worsened, and student protest against political and social injustice grew.

  On January 29, 1964, after only three months in office, the South Vietnamese government collapsed. Nguyen Khanh, a thirty-six-year-old ARVN officer whose baby fat appearance contrasted to a tiny goatee, carried out a bloodless coup that pleased the Johnson administration. Washington hoped that Khanh’s strong-arm, one-man rule would be more decisive than Minh’s rule by committee and that Khanh’s Buddhist faith would mute the antigovernment movement among the Buddhist clergy. Johnson called Khanh “my American boy.” Cursed with a paranoia matched only by that of Diem, Khanh inclined toward not government but intrigue. More than once he called for a “March to the North,” a farfetched mass popular invasion of North Vietnam. When American bombers attacked North Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, Khanh was euphoric. Anticipating full war, he declared martial law on August 7 and banned freedom of speech, press, and assembly. Two weeks later Khanh issued the infamous Vung Tau Charter, a constitution he wrote overnight declaring himself president and dictator of the Republic of Vietnam. The reaction was swift. Buddhists and students took to the streets protesting Khanh’s government. At one point an enraged mob surrounded Khanh on a Saigon street and forced him to climb up on a tank and shout “Down with dictatorships!” At the end of the month he backed down, losing face and credibility among the people he needed the most—his own generals.

  The scheming and plotting commenced once again, and early in September, Khanh brought Big Minh back into power, along with Tran Thien Kheim, ARVN chief of staff. Together they ruled Vietnam as a triumvirate for two weeks until General Lam Van Phat overthrew Khanh. The United States managed to restore the triumvirate to power a few days later. At the end of October, Khanh established the High National Council, representing a variety of political groups, to draft a new constitution. It was ready on October 20, and Khanh voluntarily stepped down in favor of a civilian government headed by Phan Khac Suu, a devout Cao Daist who had opposed the French, the Vietminh, and Diem. For prime minister Suu appointed Tran Van Huong, a former schoolteacher and Vietminh soldier. Maxwell Taylor said he was “glad to get rid of that troublemaker Khanh.”

  The new civilian government was no more successful than its military predecessors. Plotting and conspiracies were endemic, and Nguyen Khanh yearned for power again. In December Khanh, supported by a number of young military officers including Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, dissolved the High National Council and replaced it with the Armed Forces Council. Three weeks later the Armed Forces Council dissolved the civilian government, ousted Tran Van Huong, and ordered Khanh to form a new government. Khanh kept Phan Khac Suu as chief of state and named Nguyen Xuan Oanh as prime minister. George Ball called it the “Government of the Week Sideshow” in Saigon. The president was, as usual, the most blunt, telling anyone who would listen, “I’m sick and tired of this coup shit.”

  Vietcong tactics that were drawing the United States toward war, however, made Johnson sicker. Up to then, most American advisers killed had fallen in combat operations accompanying ARVN. Far more common were Vietcong tricks at American installations, which guerrillas infiltrated at night, leaving behind Vietcong flags or painting messages on the wall letting the Americans know that they were not safe. Still hoping that the United States would eventually see their side of the war, the Vietcong had been loath to alienate American policymakers by killing American soldiers. But after the Gulf of Tonkin and the American bombing raids on North Vietnam, Vietcong tactics changed. Intentional attacks on Americans increased steeply. On November 1, 1964, several sampans moved up a stream near the American air base at Bien Hoa and dropped off mortar-carrying guerrillas. They set up several 81-mm mortars and shelled the base, killing four Americans, wounding seventy-two more, and destroying or damaging thirteen B-57 light bombers. Almost as soon as the attack started it was over. The Vietcong got back on the sampans and drifted away downstream.

  Maxwell Taylor recognized the attack for what it was, a dramatic shift in Vietcong tactics, and he believed that Ho Chi Minh was orchestrating it all. Taylor cabled Johnson that the assault “is a deliberate act of escalation and a change in the ground rules. . . . It should be met promptly by an appropriate act of reprisal against a DRV target. . . . The ultimate objective should be to convince Hanoi to cease aid to the VC (and not merely lay off us).” But with the presidential election just two days away, Johnson was being careful. He asked William Bundy to draft a policy response. On November 3, Johnson defeated Goldwater by a landslide, taking 61 percent of the popular vote and 486 of the 540 electoral votes. That same day Bundy offered three options to Johnson, including widespread bombing of North Vietnam, but the president ultimately decided to continue the existing policy of “tit-for-tat” in response to Vietcong and North Vietnamese attacks in South Vietnam.

  Most Americans had not noticed the increased number of American military advisers being deployed to South Vietnam. Opposition to the war was still confined to vocal elements of the peace movement. David Dellinger and A. J. Muste, leaders of the War Resisters League (WRL), had been calling for de-escalation of the war in Vietnam since early 1963. In the pages of Liberation, an influential radical magazine supported by the WRL, they asked the American people to take a careful look at what was happening in Southeast Asia. In the spring of 1964, when President Johnson dispatched several thousand more military advisers to South Vietnam and modestly increased draft calls, the WRL began to organize a formal protest movement against the war. On May 16, it sponsored a demonstration in New York City in which twelve young men burned their draft cards. The event received widespread coverage in newspapers and television. The War Resisters League was highly skeptical of the administration’s account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and vigorously opposed the subsequent bombing of North Vietnam. In December 1964, the WRL sponsored the first nationwide demonstrations against the Vietnam War. President Johnson disregarded the protest, comparing the War Registers League to “summer gnats in the hill country. They fly around a lot but never bite.”

  Some of Johnson’s closest advisers suggested that only a sustained bombing of North Vietnam and Laos could stop the infiltration and demoralize the enemy. George Ball still opposed the scheme. He did not think bombing would break Hanoi’s will, and he feared raising the ire of Moscow or the Chinese. “Once on the tiger’s back,” he said, “we cannot be sure of picking the place to
dismount.” But Ball was a minority of one in the inner circle. Early in January 1965 Maxwell Taylor cabled Johnson from Saigon: “We are faced here with a seriously deteriorating situation characterized by continued political turmoil, irresponsibility and division within the armed forces, lethargy in the pacification programs. . . and deepening discouragement and loss of morale. . . . The situation will continue to go downhill toward some form of political collapse unless new. . . elements can be introduced.” For Taylor, Westmoreland, Rusk, the Bundys, Rostow, and McNamara, “new elements” meant massive bombing of North Vietnam. commitment of American troops, or both. Since ARVN was doing little to stem the growing power of the Vietcong, and the United States was not yet prepared to take over the war, bombing. North Vietnam became increasingly attractive. What stopped Johnson late in 1964 from adopting the proposal for large-scale bombing of North Vietnam was fear about reprisals. He did not think that if the communists escalated the war, South Vietnam would be able to handle it. “The political base in the South. . . was probably too shaky to withstand a major assault,” he later observed.

  When Johnson asked about bombing Vietcong targets in retaliation for the attack on Bien Hoa, the joint chiefs passed the question on to General Westmoreland in Saigon. Westmoreland found himself in a quandary. For months he had been requesting the deployment of more aircraft and pilots to MACV, but now he had to tell General Earle Wheeler that jungle cover, the problem of differentiating guerrillas from civilians, and the mobility of the enemy made it impossible to locate suitable Vietcong targets.

  On Christmas Eve in Saigon, a Vietcong agent drove a car bomb into the basement parking lot of the Brinks Hotel, bachelor quarters for many American officers. The bomb exploded and blew out the entire bottom floor of the hotel, killing two Americans and wounding fifty-eight. Once again the president’s advisers called for a retaliatory air strike against North Vietnam, but Johnson overruled them. Such a reaction during Christmas might offend much of the American public, and a massive air strike would be a disproportionately hostile response to the Brinks Hotel incident.

  Johnson’s caution disturbed his advisers, especially Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. In a memo to the president on January 5, 1965, they wrote that they were utterly certain “that our current policy can lead only to a disastrous defeat. . . . What we are doing now, essentially, is to wait and hope for a stable government. . . but there is no real hope of success in this area unless and until our own policies and priorities change.” The two argued that American indecisiveness was undermining the anticommunist effort in South Vietnam. “The Vietnamese see the enormous power of the United States withheld and they get little sense of firm and active U.S. policy.” To bludgeon North Vietnam into submission and stabilize South Vietnamese politics, the United States should begin a concerted air war above the seventeenth parallel. Still Johnson hesitated.

  Westmoreland’s claim that MACV could locate no Vietcong targets worthy of air attack had a stunning confirmation on January 2, 1965, when Vietcong troops destroyed two companies of ARVN Rangers and tanks near Binh Gia, a village outside Saigon. More than two hundred ARVN troops died in the engagement, and five American helicopter pilots were wounded. One American officer, after praising the enemy’s toughness, said that the “big question for me is how its troops, a thousand or more of them, could wander around the countryside so close to Saigon without being discovered.” The Vietcong had the equivalent of three full divisions in the field, but MACV operational planners could not pick any bombing targets that could hurt the guerrillas.

  Five weeks later the Vietcong struck again, this time at Camp Hollo-way outside of Pleiku, where the 52nd Combat Aviation Battalion was stationed. In the middle of the night on February 7, they rained mortar shells on the base and attacked a camp of 180 United States advisers about four miles away. In fifteen minutes seven Americans were dead and another hundred wounded. McGeorge Bundy was in Saigon on a fact-finding mission, and the next day he toured Camp Holloway with Westmoreland and Taylor. Deeply affected by the wounded men, Bundy wanted blood, prompting Westmoreland to think that, like so many civilians in positions of authority, Bundy “smelled a little gunpowder and. . . developed a field marshal psychosis.” Still he joined Bundy in urging Johnson to retaliate. “Old Mac’s really got himself stirred up,” Johnson told George Ball. “Those poor wounded boys in the hospital sure as hell got to him.” The attack on Pleiku stirred Johnson to action: “They’re killing our men while they sleep in the night. I can’t ask our American soldiers to continue to fight with one hand tied behind their back.” On February 8, Johnson ordered American aircraft carriers to attack guerrilla bases in Dong Hoi, above the seventeenth parallel, while South Vietnamese pilots attacked similar sites at Vinh Linh and Chap Le. The air strike was known as Flaming Dart I. Johnson also ordered the evacuation of 1,800 American dependents from South Vietnam.

  Three days later the Vietcong struck again, attacking the Viet Cuoung Hotel in Qui Nhon, which served as quarters for the American 104th Maintenance Detachment. While staging a brief firefight, the guerrillas planted two hundred pounds of plastic explosives around the foundation of the four-story hotel. When they were detonated, the building collapsed in rubble, burying forty-three American soldiers, only twenty-two of whom were dug out alive. President Johnson unleashed another air strike—Flaming Dart II. Within the next several days, the United States began Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam that would last, off and on, until the end of 1968. When Vice President Hubert Humphrey wrote a memo opposing the raids, the president banned him from Vietnam planning sessions. Johnson’s need for consensus, especially in a deteriorating situation, was becoming an obsession. At first the president kept tight control of the bombing, bragging that the pilots “can’t even bomb an outhouse without my approval.”

  But in the early spring he relaxed that control, authorized the use of napalm, allowed pilots to drop their bomb loads on alternate targets without prior approval, and increased the frequency of the attacks. In April American and South Vietnamese pilots flew 3,600 sorties against North Vietnam.

  In South Vietnam, political restlessness had continued. Buddhist monks organized hunger strikes, protest marches, and immolations; rumors of plots and coups were constant; and late in January 5,000 students destroyed the library of the United States Information Agency in Hue. Military confidence in Nguyen Khanh declined, especially among a group of younger officers on the Armed Forces Council. Led by Nguyen Van Thieu, the forty-one-year-old commander of the ARVN Fifth Division, and Nguyen Cao Ky, a thirty-four-year-old general in the Vietnamese Air Force, in February the “Young Turks” drove Khanh into peaceful exile as “roving ambassador.” In fourteen months, the government of South Vietnam had changed hands seven times.

  The bombing strikes were supposed to convince North Vietnam that its attempt to seize control of South Vietnam would be too expensive. But those assumptions came from a cold war mentality, the conviction that the war in Vietnam was just another example of communist aggression, and that if the United States brought its economic and political power to bear, the communists would back down. It had worked with the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and at least in part the Korean War. From the American perspective, the struggle in Indochina was simply a case of external communist aggression. But from the perspective of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese, it was a war to end foreign domination and reunite the two Vietnams. For most Americans, the war was a military struggle to be decided on a battlefield, but for Ho Chi Minh, it was a political struggle to be decided in the minds of the Vietnamese peasants. For the United States, Vietnam was a limited war to be escalated in carefully orchestrated stages until the communists broke. For Ho Chi Minh, it was a total war, the culmination of centuries of struggle, a cause worthy of risking complete annihilation. It “took us eight years of bitter fighting to defeat you French in Indochina,” Ho Chi Minh had pointed out in an interview in 1962 with the French journalist Bernard
Fall: “The Americans are stronger than the French. It might take ten years, but. . . I think the Americans greatly underestimate the determination of the Vietnamese people. The Vietnamese people have always shown great determination when faced with an invader.”