Westmoreland faced obstacles in the command structure as well. MACV was a“subordinate unified command.” Though Westmoreland eventually directed 543,000 American troops fighting a land war in Asia, real authority over the war was in Honolulu with CINCPAC. During Westmoreland's four years with MACV, CINCPAC was Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp. To get requests to the president and the joint chiefs or to receive decisions from them, Westmoreland had to go through CINC- PAC. Command of air operations was even more complicated. Westmoreland controlled the air force sorties inside South Vietnam and on the southern parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, but CINCPAC controlled naval air strikes over North Vietnam and northern Laos.
The Marine Corps had misgivings about Westmoreland's strategy. Trained as assault troops, the marines at Danang found themselves holding static positions and defending territory. That had never been part of their historical mission. Their main purpose was to overrun the enemy, take heavy casualties, and evacuate, leaving army infantry to hold the positions. In instances that did involve holding territory for long periods, the Marine Corps was better at it than the army. For decades before World War II, marine detachments had occupied Central American and Caribbean countries, where they worked with local governments and emphasized pacification.
Prominent among the critics of Westmoreland's war was General Krulak, one of the few senior military officers convinced that the key to victory was political, not military. Big engagements between Americans, ARVN, Main Force Vietcong, and the North Vietnamese, he declared,“could move to another planet today, and we would still not have won the war because the Vietnamese people are the prize.” He wanted his marines together with the army to fight small-unit actions while investing most of their energies in pacification. Krulak proposed placing a marine rifle squad with a South Vietnamese local militia company in what he called a combined action platoon. The CAPs would provide security while pacification programs—health, education, economic development, and land reform—won over the peasants. But Westmoreland vetoed the plan; he was just going to solve the problem militarily.
While muddled strategic thinking bedeviled the American effort in Southeast Asia, North Vietnam had a simple political goal that enjoyed clear strategic expression: Expel the American military from Indochina, conquer South Vietnam, and reunify the two countries. The North Vietnamese knew they could not match American firepower. The war would be won or lost, Ho Chi Minh repeated over and over again, in the mind of the typical American citizen and the will of the typical South Vietnamese peasant.
Vo Nguyen Giap looked on the American buildup with incredulity— amazement at the wealth and technology but disbelief that such resources would be invested so poorly. In 1969, looking back on the first four years of the enlarged war, he remarked,“The United States has a strategy based on arithmetic. They question the computers, add and subtract, extract square roots, and then go into action. But arithmetical strategy doesn't work here… . If it did, they'd already have exterminated us… . When a whole people rises up, nothing can be done.” Giap was right. Westmoreland measured progress by adding up the dead, the“body count,” along with the numbers of prisoners taken, weapons captured, tonnages exploded, sorties flown, and“battalion days in the field.” But those statistics did not measure commitment. Even the American bombing of North Vietnam, originally designed to break the people's will, only made them more angry and resentful, more willing to sacrifice everything on Ho Chi Minh's bold course. Ho estimated that rural South Vietnam and all of North Vietnam could produce 250,000 to 300,000 new military recruits a year. For a war of attrition to erode Vietnam's ability to stay with the war, Westmoreland would have to kill that many people every year. American leaders could not imagine Vietnam's making such a sacrifice. But Ho Chi Minh was willing.
Just as critical were the American people. Vietnam had already waged one war against Westerners who grew tired of it. Ho Chi Minh expected Americans to be no different. Vietnam was a little place a long way from Main Street. Once the boys started coming home in body bags, the American people would insist on a settlement. While Westmoreland planned a war of military attrition, Ho Chi Minh waged a war of political attrition. When his generals pushed for more aggressiveness, Ho Chi Minh reassured them:“Don't worry. I've been to America. I know Americans. They are an impatient people. They will leave.”
Vo Nguyen Giap, though still an influential member of the Politburo in Hanoi, no longer controlled war strategy. Those decisions were firmly in the hands of Le Duan, the militant advocate of reunification who was now general secretary of the Lao Dong party. Late in 1964 Duan named Nguyen Chi Thanh head of the Central Office for South Vietnam, which controlled the Vietcong effort in South Vietnam. He argued that the North Vietnamese should engage the United States in big-unit, conventional battles before American firepower reached its peak. If the North Vietnamese inflicted heavy losses on the American army early in the war, Lyndon Johnson would stop the buildup. Giap countered that the North Vietnamese should not get into a slugging match with the American heavyweight. For a brief period, Thanh prevailed.
The battle of the Batangan Peninsula in August 1965 intensified the debate. The losses were heavy, but Thanh held the battle to be proof that“the Southern Liberation Army is fully capable of defeating U.S. troops under any circumstance, even though they [United States troops] have absolute superiority of … firepower.” To Giap's insistence that casualties were too high Thanh responded that the Americans had suffered 250 dead and wounded soldiers, a casualty rate that the United States would be politically unwilling to accept. Le Duan sided with Thanh. But then came the battle of the Ia Drang Valley.
The 1st Air Cavalry Division, deployed to Vietnam in September 1965, was the latest in tactical innovation. The helicopter was to airborne warfare what the tank had been to armored cavalry—a new tactical development providing mobility and firepower. The“air cav” deployed to II Corps in the Central Highlands to stop any enemy attempt to cut South Vietnam in half by driving to the South China Sea. Late in October, North Vietnamese troops attacked a United States Special Forces camp at Plei Me. Westmoreland sent in the air cav. But in mid- November, when 400 American troops went through what they thought was the unoccupied Ia Drang Valley southwest of Plei Me, the North Vietnamese 65th Regiment surprised them. Four days of fighting followed before the enemy withdrew. In the three weeks after the attack on Plei Me, American firepower buried the enemy in exploding shells: nearly 35,000 artillery rounds, more than 7,000 rounds of aerial rockets, and over 50,000 helicopter sorties. For the first time in the war, B-52 bombers flew in tactical support. When the battle ended, nearly 1,800 North Vietnamese were confirmed dead, with probably that same number wounded or soon to die. The American dead numbered 240.
In Hanoi the extent of the losses gave Vo Nguyen Giap the advantage in his debate with Nguyen Chi Thanh. To limit the effectiveness of American artillery and air power, Duan and Thanh now developed a tactic termed“clinging to the belt,” engaging the Americans at close quarters under heavy jungle cover—short-range firefights, ambushes, and hand-to-hand combat—and forcing officers to call in artillery and air strikes close to their own positions or even on them. The North Vietnamese had to keep the tactical initiative by staying out of the way of American search-and-destroy operations. From July to September 1965, the United States had inflicted forty deaths for every American death. That was clearly too heavy, and by determining when and where to fight, North Vietnam reduced those figures to fifteen to one by the end of the year. While Westmoreland expected the North Vietnamese to move into what Mao Zedong called the“third phase of revolutionary warfare"— large-scale conventional battles at the battalion, regimental, and division levels—North Vietnam had returned to engagement by small units.
In Saigon, Westmoreland used Ia Drang to boost his troop requests up to 375,000 men, with the option of asking for 200,000 more. Robert McNamara was visibly shaken by the deaths of 240 Americans in one battle. He told Johnson that“U
.S. killed-in-action can be expected to reach 1,000 a month and the odds are even that we will be faced in early 1967 with a 'no decision' at an even higher level.” That would soon pose a colossal political problem. The war was becoming the central theme of the Johnson administration, eclipsing the Great Society domestic programs. Anticipating a hostile political reaction at home and abroad to more troop requests, McNamara suggested that“We must lay a foundation in the minds of the American public and world opinion for such an enlarged phase of the war and … we should give NVN [North Vietnam] a face-saving chance to stop the aggression.” Johnson accepted McNamara's proposal for another pause in Rolling Thunder. On Christmas Eve 1965 the bombing stopped. But Ho Chi Minh still insisted on the unconditional withdrawal of all American troops and participation of the National Liberation Front in the South Vietnamese government. On January 31, 1966, Johnson resumed the raids.
While Johnson offered peace, the battle of the Ia Drang Valley boosted Westmoreland's morale. The deaths of 240 Americans did not startle him; he viewed those deaths in the context of a military victory. The boys had died nobly, giving the enemy a real thrashing. The foe had lost nearly half a division; attrition was working.“The death of even one man is lamentable,” Westmoreland said of the Ia Drang Valley,“and those were serious losses, yet I could take comfort in the fact that in the Highlands … the American fighting man … performed without the setbacks that had sometimes marked first performances in other wars.” Throughout the last half of 1965 and most of 1966 Westmoreland built the infrastructure he desired. To the jet air bases at Tan Son Nhut, Bien Hoa, and Danang he added four along with six new deep-water ports, four central supply and maintenance depots, twenty-six permanent base camps, seventy-five new tactical airstrips, and twenty-six hospitals—more than 16 million square feet of construction. He built 2,500 miles of paved roads and installed the Southeast Asia Automatic Telephone System, complete with 220 communications centers and 14,000 circuits. To supply electricity needs, he brought in 1,300 commercial generators and dozens of World War II tankers converted to floating generator barges.
For the permanent base camps Westmoreland made wooden barracks of high quality built on concrete slabs and equipped with hot showers. High-ranking officers enjoyed air-conditioned quarters in mobile trailers. Foremost Dairy and Meadowgold Dairies built fresh milk and ice cream plants at Qui Nhon and Cam Ranh Bay, and to supply troops in remote locations with fresh ice cream, Westmoreland built forty army ice cream plants. To make sure that the soldiers got three meals a day of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy products, he built thousands of cold storage lockers throughout South Vietnam. To amuse the troops, he built the famous PXs—air-conditioned movie theaters, bowling alleys, and service clubs full of beer, Cokes, hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries, malts, sundaes, candy, and ice. No army in the history of the world had more of the amenities of home.
Of the women sent to South Vietnam as the war grew, about 11,000 were nurses. To deal with cases of sick and wounded soldiers, the Pentagon began to deploy army medical detachments in the spring of 1965. The 3rd Field Hospital went to Tan Son Nhut in April 1965, and the 58th Medical Battalion reached Long Binh in May. The 9th Field Hospital was stationed in Nha Trang in July, and it was followed by the 85th Evacuation Hospital in August, the 43rd Medical Group and the 523d Field Hospital in September, and the 1st Medical Battalion, 2nd Surgical Hospital, 51st Field Hospital, and 93rd Evacuation Hospital in November. Eventually, the army assigned forty-seven medical units to South Vietnam. Navy nurses worked on the USS Repose and the USS Sanctuary, hospital ships that sailed between the Demilitarized Zone and Danang off the coast of Vietnam in the South China Sea. Air force nurses worked on medevac aircraft evacuating the wounded to Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and the United States. There were no Marine Corps nurses.
July 14, 1965—U.S. Army nurses Capt. Gladys E. Sepulveda, left, of Ponce, Puerto Rico, and 2nd Lt. Lois Ferrari, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, rest on sandbags at Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)
Nursing may have been the most emotionally hazardous duty of the entire war. During the course of a tour of duty, day after day for an entire year, nurses were exposed constantly to sick and wounded young men. They frequently encountered men and boys younger than they who were suffering from massive wounds. The combination of helicopters and field hospitals allowed some soldiers to survive wounds that in any previous war would have been fatal. Sarah McGoran, an army nurse, saw wounds“so big you could put both your arms into them.” Napalm and white phosphorous bombs created a new definition of burns—“fourth degree.” In Kathryn Marshall's In the Combat Zone, published in 1987, a navy nurse speaks of burn victims who had been“essentially denuded. We used to talk about fourth-degree burns—you know, burns are labeled first, second, and third degree, but we had people who were burnt all the way through.” Some wounds were so horrific that medical terminology did not exist to describe them.“Horriblectomies were when they'd had so much taken out or removed. Horridzoma meant the initial grotesque injury but also the repercussions of the injury.” Rachel Smith had to numb herself“to the screams of teenaged boys whose bodies had been blown to bits, moaning for their mothers, begging for relief, praying for death. Pretty soon it just became another day's work for me. Otherwise, I would've gone nuts.” Later in the war, the nurses treated soldier-addicts, young men using opium, amphetamines, cocaine, and heroin to block out the war.“Nobody told me,” an army nurse recalled,“I was going to be taking care of so many strung-out motherfuckers. I mean, this was supposed to be a war.”
Another 1,300 military women performed nonmedical jobs in Vietnam. Most were assigned to the Women's Army Corps, in which they worked as secretaries at MACV. Others were in the Army Signal Corps. Other military women were air traffic controllers, intelligence officers, decoders, or cartographers. For the most part, they were assigned to Saigon and the major bases in South Vietnam. Tens of thousands of civilian women had jobs in South Vietnam during the war. The American Red Cross sent women to Vietnam, as did such other service groups and relief organizations as the American Friends Service Committee, the Mennonite Central Committee, the Agency for International Development, Army Special Services, the USO, Supplemental Recreational Activities Overseas, Catholic Relief Services, and the Christian Missionary Alliance. Civilian women worked with the CIA's Air America and World Airways. Women came to South Vietnam with the international construction firms that had secured billions of dollars in government contracts. Among those construction firms were Brown and Root, Bechtel, and Martin Marietta.
In all, more than 50,000 American women served in Indochina in military and civilian capacities. Eight of them made the ultimate sacrifice. Seven military women died of accidents and disease; Lieutenant Sharon M. Lanz of the Army Nurse Corps died on June 8, 1969, when North Vietnamese rockets hit Chu Lai.
The widening of the ground war and bombing campaigns made infiltration of supplies from North Vietnam more difficult but did not stop it. By the early summer of 1966, 8,000 North Vietnamese Army troops a month were coming into South Vietnam. The communist troop contingent in South Vietnam reached 435,000 people: 46,300 North Vietnamese regulars, 114,000 Main Force Vietcong, 112,000 guerrillas, and more than 160,000 local militia. They did not need ice cream and bowling alleys, so the logistical requirements were simple. By 1966 they needed eight tons of supplies a day. They lived off the land and the peasants.
The supplies the communists could not get from South Vietnamese peasants came from the Soviet Union and China. During the early 1960s, when Nikita Khrushchev preached peaceful coexistence with the West, North Vietnam had gravitated toward the Chinese. But Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, and the new regime, headed by Leonid Brezhnev, was more interested in assisting North Vietnam. The Soviet Union and China were competing for leadership of the communist world, and neither could ignore the tiny ally against which the United States was conducting a major war. Moscow saw the American decision t
o escalate the war as an opportunity to diminish Chinese influence in Southeast Asia and augment its own. China supplied Hanoi with rice, trucks, AK-47 rifles, and 50,000 laborers; the USSR had sophisticated military technology—fighter aircraft, tanks, and surface-to-air missiles. North Vietnam exploited the Sino-Soviet split, and between 1965 and 1968 received more than $2 billion in assistance from the two powers.
The war's intensification undermined Johnson's political position and threatened his Great Society. At the end of 1965 there were 184,300 American troops in South Vietnam, with another 200,000 scheduled to arrive. Since 1959, 636 United States soldiers had died while another 6,400 were wounded, most of them in the previous two months.
The White House press corps added to Johnson's troubles. The journalists questioned everything. Throughout the 1964 election campaign Johnson had promised to avoid a land war in Asia, but the discrepancies between his promises in 1964 and his actions in 1965 were not the main reason for the growing hostility. Politicians rarely live up to election rhetoric. It was the lies that alienated reporters. Desperate to keep the war from gutting his Great Society, Johnson was trying to mislead the press. He had lied in the summer of 1964 about the incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin; in April 1965 he lied in denying that NSAM 328 had authorized offensive operations on the ground; and he lied repeatedly about the number of troops he was approving for combat in South Vietnam. On May 23, 1965, David Wise of the New York Herald Tribune coined the term“credibility gap,” and a few days later Murray Marder of the Washington Post amplified it.
Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995 Page 21