Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  Kim Phuc, who ripped off her burning clothes during a napalm raid, runs down the highway. At left is her younger brother who lost an eye in the attack and, at right, other members of her family. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)

  Instead of intimidating or frightening the North Vietnamese, the American bombing raids of 1964 and early 1965 stiffened their resolve, convincing them that the United States was intent on their destruction. Whatever political opposition Ho Chi Minh faced at home disappeared. The flow of supplies and personnel into South Vietnam increased. Until the fall of 1964 the Vietcong had been an independent unit in South Vietnam, composed primarily of Vietminh regroupees born in the south and recruits from recently alienated peasants. They armed themselves with American weapons stolen or purchased from ARVN. By the end of 1964 North Vietnam was shipping Soviet and Chinese weapons down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, along with weapons specialists, trainers, and logistical experts from the People’s Army of Vietnam: regular North Vietnamese troops. Hanoi had dispatched the first northern-born regulars in August 1964. Instead of dispersing them among the Vietcong as it had done with the regroupees, Hanoi let them operate as the independent 808th Battalion. The 95th Regiment reached South Vietnam in December, and by the spring of 1965 three more regiments were there—a total of 65,000 northern-born regular troops. The refrain “born in the North to die in the South” began to be heard in North Vietnam.

  Early in 1965 the CIA reported that the Vietcong were stronger than ever before and were on the eve of a military victory in South Vietnam. The CIA and MACV also informed Johnson that the Vietcong posed a serious threat to American air bases. To make sure that South Vietnamese pilots participated in the air strikes, Taylor insisted that the air force pilots from Danang, not navy pilots from carriers, conduct the strikes against North Vietnam. That meant a sharp increase in the number of air force personnel, aircraft, and munitions. The buildup made Danang a primary Vietcong target, the perfect place to humiliate the American war machine. ARVN troops could not be trusted to defend Danang adequately.

  On February 21, 1965, General Westmoreland asked for two marine battalions to protect Danang. He estimated that there were at least twelve Vietcong battalions with 6,000 troops in the area. The marines would improve security and permit ARVN troops to go out into the jungles after the Vietcong. Westmoreland routed his request through Maxwell Taylor, but the ambassador opposed the introduction of American ground troops. In a cable to President Johnson, Taylor argued: “Intervention with ground forces would at best buy time and would lead to ever increasing commitments until, like the French, we would be occupying an essentially hostile foreign country. . . . The white faced soldier. . . is not a suitable guerrilla fighter. . . . The French tried to adapt their forces to this mission and failed. I doubt that the U.S. forces could do much better.” But Johnson was afraid of another Bien Hoa or Pleiku. American airmen at Danang needed security, and on February 26, 1965, he approved the request for two marine battalions.

  Johnson’s decisions stirred the souls of the Marine Corps. Out in Hawaii, where he had assumed command of the Fleet Marine Force, Pacific Command, General Victor Krulak ordered the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade to Danang. Plans were already under way to change the unit’s name to the 3rd Marine Amphibious Force so that no comparisons would be made. On March 8, 3,500 troops stormed the beaches in full battle regalia, complete with M-14 rifles, landing craft, naval air support, amphibious tractors, helicopters, 105-mm howitzers, M48 tanks, and 106-mm recoilless rifles. But instead of a firefight, they encountered young South Vietnamese women waiting on the beaches with flowered leis to put around their necks. The smiling mayor of Danang welcomed the troops to his city. The marines clambered into trucks for the ride to the airbase, and all along the way waved at thousands of schoolchildren lining the highway and welcoming them.

  When the news of the successful deployment of the marines reached Lyndon Johnson, he smiled broadly and remarked to an associate, “Now I have Ho Chi Minh’s pecker in my pocket.” The arrival of the marines created, in William Bundy’s description, a mood of “disaster avoided or postponed. . . . But on the whole it was a period when no move seemed right, and the outcome remained wholly murky.” George Ball, still playing devil’s advocate, wrote that the presence of ground troops would make the American position “approach that of France in the 1950s. We would incur the opposition of elements in Viet-Nam otherwise friendly to us. Finally, we would find ourselves in la guerre sale with consequent heavy loss of American lives on the rice paddies and [in the] jungles.” Events would soon vindicate George Ball.

  6

  Into the Abyss, 1965–1966

  When the day comes for me to meet my Maker... the thing I would be most humbly proud of was the fact that I fought against... the carry-out of some... tactical schemes which would have cost the lives of thousands of men. To that list of tragic accidents that fortunately never happened I would add the Indochina intervention.

  —General Matthew Ridgway, 1956

  Maxwell Taylor's prediction that“it will be very difficult to hold the line" came true sooner than he thought. The marines in Danang were there only three weeks when General William Westmoreland decided to establish another air base at Phu Bai south of Hue. In mid-April two more battalions arrived to establish and defend Phu Bai. That brought the marine contingent in I Corps to more than 8,600 troops. Deployed around Phu Bai and Danang, sitting in stationary placements, they itched for a fight. It was not going to be difficult to find one. The Vietcong were steadily gaining power. By the spring of 1965 no American could venture more than a few miles outside any major city without an armed convoy. The Vietcong were everywhere. When Nguyen Cao Ky called for an invasion of North Vietnam in 1965, John Paul Vann wrote,“The goddamn little fool can't even drive a mile outside Saigon without an armed convoy and he wants to liberate the North! How damned ridiculous can you get?”

  Few Americans harbored any real hope of transforming ARVN into a reliable fighting force. ARVN suffered from desertion, absenteeism, cronyism, and nepotism. Too many officers were promoted because of political connections, not tactical abilities. Many officers capable of fighting a war were immobilized by fear of failure, which meant taking too many casualties, and by fear of success, which posed a political threat to their superiors. Doing nothing was the surest way to promotion. Corruption was rampant. In some ARVN units half the roster consisted of“potted- tree soldiers," men who had bribed their way out of active service. They were safe behind the lines, like a plant in its own pot. The government still sent monthly pay and allowance checks in their names, which ARVN officers pocketed. Peasant soldiers—underpaid, far from home, and commanded by officers on the take—deserted in record numbers. ARVN troop levels increased from 243,000 in late 1963 to 514,000 a year later, but they were paper troops. The desertion rate of 6,000 a month in 1964 increased to 11,000 in 1965. The desertion rate at ARVN draft induction centers reached 50 percent. Creating a disciplined, highly motivated army takes a generation, not a year. The United States had such an army, and so did the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. South Vietnam did not.

  Behind ARVN lay corruption, assassination, fraudulent elections, and constant political intrigue. The February 1965 coup of the Young Turks that brought Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu to power did nothing to change the situation.

  Nguyen Cao Ky was born in Son Tay, a city near Hanoi, in 1930. When he was twenty, France drafted him into the Vietnamese National Army, and three years later the army sent him to pilot training. Ky rose quickly in the ranks, one of the few promoted for ability rather than connections. His personality was perfectly consistent with the stereotype of a jet pilot. Ky liked fancy jumpsuits and purple scarves, and he carried two pearl-handled revolvers in holsters. In 1961, when he was“just a colonel," Ky wanted to prove his flying skills to William Colby, the CIA station chief in Saigon. Ky got Colby into the cockpit and took him on a roller-coaster, mountain-hopping, wave-skimming flight from the Central H
ighlands to the South China Sea. Ky later laughed to another Vietnamese pilot that Colby was going to“have to go and clean the shit out of his pants.” In 1962 Ngo Dinh Diem awarded him his general's star. Ky hated Nguyen Khanh. At one point in 1964, during a flight from Bien Hoa, he almost carried out an incendiary raid on Khanh's headquarters. The coup must have been doubly gratifying to him.

  From left, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky, and U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge meet in Saigon. (Courtesy, National Archives.)

  For his first meeting with Maxwell Taylor after assuming power, Ky showed up wearing a white sharkskin dress jacket, tight silk black pants, bright red socks, and a purple scarf, prompting an American official to describe him as a“saxophone player in a second-rate night club.” Ky was thoroughly Westernized. A well-trimmed mustache gave him an American look, and he walked with a swagger, imitating John Wayne, drinking Budweiser beer, and watching reruns of Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel on armed forces television. William Bundy's later comment sums the administration's initial reaction to Ky: It“seemed to all of us the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel.”

  The chairman of the National Leadership Committee and the chief of state was Nguyen Van Thieu. Born in Ninh Thuan Province in 1923, Thieu had won a degree from the Vietnamese Military Academy in 1949 and distinguished himself fighting the Vietminh. After graduating from United States Command and General Staff College in 1957, Thieu commanded the ARVN Twenty-first, First, and Fifth Infantry Divisions. During the 1963 coup overthrowing Diem, Thieu led a brigade against the presidential guard. He was one of the Young Turks on the Armed Forces Council in 1964 who desired an end to Khanh's reign.

  Except in his lust for power, Thieu was different from Ky. American military leaders appreciated his conservatism, proper dress, and political caution. Thieu seemed more astute than Ky, with little of Ky's hostility toward Buddhism. And he was ready to forge a political and military alliance with the Americans in order to defeat the communists. The Americans also found Thieu more circumspect. While Ky was talking about building luxury hotels along the coast once the Vietcong were destroyed, Thieu focused on more immediate problems—how to locate and attack the Vietcong, undermine their control over rural peasants, and intimidate the North Vietnamese.

  But like Ky, Thieu was part of the corruption of Saigonese politics. American money created opportunities for graft at every level—sales of weapons, marketing of opium and heroin, kickbacks on military construction projects, licensing fees for American businesses operating in Saigon, and payments from thousands of potted-tree soldiers. Americans knew about the corruption. Between 1965 and 1972 the United States ambassador or MACV commander questioned Thieu more than a hundred times about official corruption in his government, but each time, after a warning, let him off. It was Ky's impulsiveness that most bothered Americans. They wanted to maneuver Thieu into the role of chief executive, with Ky switched to military czar, where his impetuous- ness could be controlled.

  The corrupt, illegitimate government of South Vietnam, with its incompetent, ineffectual military, could not handle the Vietcong. The choice Lyndon Johnson faced was simple: Escalate American involvement and rescue Saigon or get out before the collapse. After a White House breakfast early in March 1965, the president told General Harold K. Johnson,“You get things bubbling, General.” The general toured Vietnam a few days later and learned just how desperate the situation was. Two marine battalions guarding Danang were not going to make much difference. Westmoreland asked for two full divisions of American combat troops, one to go to the Central Highlands and the other for Saigon. In what the press corps regarded as the understatement of the year, General Johnson argued that“what the situation requires may exceed what the Vietnamese can... do.”

  On March 15 General Johnson recommended deploying an international force near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Established at Geneva in 1954, the DMZ was a five-mile-wide buffer zone dividing North Vietnam from South Vietnam. It extended from the South China Sea to the Village of Bo Hu Su along the Ben Hai River, and from there due west to Laos along the seventeenth parallel. Westmoreland also proposed that to stop the infiltration of troops and supplies from North Vietnam, the United States send large numbers of ground troops. Engineering and logistical battalions should be set to preparing for their arrival. Finally, Westmoreland wanted a full infantry division to defend United States installations. Maxwell Taylor demurred. He worried that American troops were inadequately prepared for guerrilla warfare in Vietnamese jungles, that ARVN might do even less with more American soldiers around, and that even a few infantry troops would greatly alter the American mission in Vietnam. But Vietcong attacks undercut Taylor's caution. As if to confirm American fears, on March 30, 1965 two Vietcong agents drove a gray Renault up to the United States embassy in Saigon. When an embassy guard approached the car, another Vietcong agent on a motor scooter shot and killed him. In the trunk of the Renault were 300 pounds of plastic explosives connected to an American-made brass detonator. At 11:00 A.M. the bomb exploded, gutting the embassy's first three floors and wounding 52 Americans. The blast killed 20 Vietnamese and wounded 130 others in the street. President Johnson was at a dinner party when he heard the news. The next morning at an impromptu press briefing he proclaimed,“Outrages like this will only reinforce the determination of the American people... to strengthen their assistance and support for the people and government of Vietnam.”

  Johnson lied when he reassured the reporters that he knew of“no far-reaching strategy that is being suggested or promulgated.” Before the attack Johnson had called Maxwell Taylor home for consultation. In meetings on April 1 and 2, the administration developed what became known as National Security Adviser Memorandum 328 authorizing deployment of 20,000 engineering and logistical troops to South Vietnam and the beginning of offensive operations against the Vietcong. John McCone, head of the CIA, reacted strongly to NSAM 328. Intelligence reports indicated that the Rolling Thunder air strikes“have not caused a change in the North Vietnamese policy of directing Vietcong insurgency, infiltrating cadres and supplying material. If anything, the strikes to date have hardened their attitude.” McCone believed that without a significant escalation of the air war over North Vietnam, American ground troops would fail:“We will find ourselves mired down in combat in the jungle in a military effort that we cannot win.... If we are to change the mission of the ground forces, we must also change the ground rules for strikes against North Vietnam. We must hit them harder, more frequently, and inflict greater damage.” Operation Rolling Thunder had to be escalated.

  The president still hoped for another way out. In a speech on April 7 at Johns Hopkins University, he offered to hold“unconditional discussions” to end the conflict. He also offered billions of dollars of assistance to develop the Mekong River Delta once peace was achieved. Johnson viewed the proposal as his strongest enticement. The American labor leader George Meany“would jump at that offer in a minute,” he told Mc- George Bundy. Early in May, Johnson launched Operation Mayflower, suspending the bombing raids over North Vietnam to see whether Ho Chi Minh was ready for talks, warning that if“this pause should be misunderstood... it would be necessary to demonstrate more clearly than ever, after the pause ended, that the United States is determined not to accept aggression without reply in Vietnam.”

  The bombing pause did not provoke the desired response. Ho Chi Minh insisted that peace would come only after all American troops left South Vietnam, the National Liberation Front participated fully in the government of South Vietnam, all bombing raids over North Vietnam stopped, and the two countries enjoyed a“peaceful reunification... without any foreign interference.” The United States wanted a peace settlement based on the withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from South Vietnam as well as the elimination of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. The impasse had not changed. Pham Van Dong had been through it all before:“We entere
d into negotiations with the French colonialists on many occasions, and concluded with them several agreements in an effort to preserve peace. To them, however, the signing of agreements was only designed to gain time to prepare... for furher aggression.... This is a clear lesson of history... which our people will never forget.”

  Both sides were prisoners of history. For American policymakers, the recollections of Munich—of Britain and France's giving in to Hitler's demands only to see him take over much of Europe—were overpowering. American policymakers saw Ho Chi Minh as just another bully, not a national hero, who would back down in the face of brute power as the Nazis might have done. But the North Vietnamese were in their own way just as blind. They saw the Americans as merely another foreign power, a later version of the Chinese and the French, intent on colonizing Vietnam. Nothing the Americans said could be trusted. There could be no negotiations. On May 18, 1965, the president ended Operation Mayflower and resumed the bombing.

  A few weeks earlier, Johnson had dispatched Robert McNamara, Earle Wheeler, William Bundy, and Maxwell Taylor to Honolulu to meet with General Victor Krulak of the Marine Corps and Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief of the United States Forces in the Pacific. They agreed to send another 40,000 marines and army infantry to South Vietnam. But they also decided to keep American troops out of the Central Highlands, confining most of them to the northern coast of I Corps. Johnson approved the decision. Early in May the 173d Airborne Brigade, the first army combat troops, arrived to protect the Bien Hoa air base. Another marine battalion went to Chu Lai. By the end of May 1965 there were nearly 50,000 American troops in South Vietnam.