Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  Robert McNamara was ready to try another technological tool. The only sure way of stopping infiltration across the Demilitarized Zone from North Vietnam was to station huge numbers of troops just south of the seventeenth parallel. Instead, McNamara proposed construction of an electronic barrier. Critics dubbed it “McNamara’s Wall.” The Third Marine Division agreed to construct the barrier—a twenty-five-mile bulldozed strip of jungle complete with acoustic sensors, land mines, infrared intrusion detectors, booby traps, and electronic wires along the northern border of South Vietnam to detect NVA infiltration. The marines constructed a bulldozed strip of land 660 yards wide and 8.2 miles long from Con Thien to the sea, but the project was weighed down by its own overambitious technology, besides lacking sufficient support from the military. The whole idea struck the North Vietnamese as silly. “What is the use of barbed wire fences and electronic barriers,” said General Tran Do, “when we can penetrate even Tan Son Nhut air base outside Saigon?”

  It was that kind of war. For most American combat soldiers, the Vietnam experience combined surrealistic incongruity, boredom, suffering, and danger.

  At the beginning of the buildup in 1965 and early 1966, most troops arrived in South Vietnam by ship after long voyages from the United States. Their journey to war was not unlike that of their fathers, who had gone to Europe and the Pacific in large, crowded troop transports. By the end of 1966, however, most of the major military units had deployed to Vietnam, and replacement troops arrived by commercial jet. With more than one million American soldiers arriving or leaving the country each year, the military did not possess enough planes or ships to carry the load, so they contracted the job out to commercial airlines. Soldiers went to war in air-conditioned jets, drinking cocktails and beer along the way and ogling the short-skirted stewardesses. Recalling his own trip to South Vietnam via Braniff Airlines, Rob Riggan writes in Free Fire Zone: “We might have been over Gary, Indiana. . . . Stewardesses with polished legs and miniskirts took our pillows away from us. As we trooped out the door, they said: ‘Good luck! See you in 365 days.’”

  At the sixth-month point in a soldier’s tour of duty, he was back on the jetliner, drinking highballs and staring at the stewardesses, now known as beautiful “round eyes from the world.” The planes took the troops on “R and R”—Rest and Recreation—since the military provided a paid vacation for its men, jetting them to Honolulu, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok, Manila, Singapore, Taipei, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, and Australia, putting them up in luxury hotels and letting them do whatever they wanted. Many of the men spent the week with their wives, who were flown in, while others dissipated the time with booze and prostitutes. But at the end of the week, they left the air-conditioned hotels, climbed aboard the commercial jets, and returned to the combat zone, hoping to stay alive for six more months and to return to the world of round-eyed stewardesses.

  Most of the jets landed at large American bases such as Bien Hoa and Danang. When the troops deplaned, pungent odors of burning excrement assaulted their noses. Base outhouses covered 55-gallon drums that collected the wastes. When the barrels filled, rear-echelon soldiers poured in kerosene and set them on fire, filling the air with a distinctive smell most troops would never forget. To the memory of one soldier, Vietnam smelled like “sweat, shit, jet fuel, and fish sauce all mixed together.” In the thick humidity, the odors seemed to hang permanently in the air.

  After several days of orientation at the big bases, the soldiers in combat groups made their way—via jeeps, trucks, or helicopters—out to their military units. More than 60 percent of the land that greeted them consisted of heavily forested mountains, hills, slopes, plateaus, and valleys, stretching from the seventeenth parallel south to within fifty miles of Saigon. Sparsely populated, the uplands provided perfect cover and staging areas for North Vietnamese regulars. The remainder of South Vietnam contained heavily populated lowlands where Vietcong guerrillas enjoyed the protection of local villages.

  From base camps, combat soldiers went after enemy troops in search-and-destroy operations. They might be “inserted” into an area by helicopter and then patrol from two or three days to a month at a time. Troops often hacked their way through thick uplands vegetation, tall elephant grass, or flooded rice paddies, loaded down by 80-pound packs, heavy, armor-lined flak jacket vests, rifles, mortars, ammunition, and canteens. Infantrymen called the patrols “humping the boonies.” During the monsoon season, rain fell constantly, and soldiers had to put up with perpetually wet feet and sometimes “immersion foot”—swollen, blistered, and decaying flesh. If they marched through standing water, leaches burrowed into the skin of their legs and groin. The humidity and the heat, ninety degrees and up, sapped their strength, and many troops were unable to carry enough water to keep themselves from becoming dehydrated. In heavy, canopied jungles, the air resembled a sauna. During Operation Virginia Ridge near the Demilitarized Zone in May 1969, Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment lost 65 of its 147 men during the first three days of the operation, even though there was no contact with enemy troops. It was heat exhaustion that forced the evacuation of nearly half the company.

  Land mines posed the greatest threat to patrolling American combat troops. The Vietcong placed land mines everywhere. Knowing that accidental peasant casualties would diminish Vietcong influence among the people, they taught villagers how to identify mine locations. Villagers often helped the Vietcong manufacture the land mines out of unexploded American ordnance and artillery shell casings. That so few peasants, and so many GIs, stepped on the mines convinced American soldiers that the villagers were supporting the Vietcong. Land mines caused as many as one-third of all American casualties during the war.

  Despite all this effort, American soldiers had trouble locating communist troops. The tactical initiative remained with the enemy. North Vietnam’s strategy was based on choosing when and where to fight. If American military pressure became too intense, the communists simply melted back into the jungles or into sanctuaries in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam. Official MACV studies indicated that only one percent of all army and Marine Corps search-and-destroy sweeps into the countryside ever resulted in contact with the enemy, and that in 85 percent of all firefights the first shot was fired by enemy troops. “One of our greatest military frustrations in Vietnam,” in the retrospective judgment of Robert Komer, an American pacification expert and a deputy to Westmoreland, “was . . . pinning down an elusive enemy. . . . Hanoi was able to control the rate of its own losses by hit-and-run tactics, evasion and use of sanctuaries, which led to military stalemate.” Many of Westmoreland’s larger operations did not find the enemy in concentrated numbers. His strategy, as the journalist Malcolm Brown described it, was “like a sledgehammer on a floating cork. Somehow the cork refused to stay down.”

  Worried that enemy forces were preparing to attack the major cities, Westmoreland launched Operation Attleboro in mid-September 1966. Troops probed the “Iron Triangle,” or War Zone D, a sixty-square-mile area of rice paddies, dense jungle, rubber plantations, and underground tunnels twenty miles northwest of Saigon. Since late in the 1940s the Iron Triangle had been a communist stronghold. American troops encountered the Vietcong Ninth Division and the NVA 101st Regiment. When the battle was over in mid-November, Westmoreland claimed 1,106 enemy casualties, but he had not trapped and destroyed the communists. In January 1967 the 1st and 25th Infantry Divisions, the 173d Airborne Brigade, the 11th Armored Cavalry, and several ARVN units— a total of more than 35,000 troops—moved into the Iron Triangle again. They spent several weeks removing civilians before going after the Vietcong. Designating the campaign Operation Cedar Falls, they laid waste to the whole region, including the village of Ben Suc, which gained notoriety in the American press after being completely leveled. When the dust settled, another 720 Vietcong were dead and most of their tunnels, elaborately constructed over the previous twenty years, were destroyed. But given the size of the operation, the body count d
isappointed Westmoreland. More frustrating was its aftermath. Even as American troops were leaving the Iron Triangle, they saw Vietcong with AK-47 rifles walking back into the area.

  Westmoreland followed up Operation Cedar Falls with Operation Junction City, an assault on War Zone C in Tay Ninh Province near the Cambodian border. More than 45,000 American and ARVN troops attacked in late February 1967. The operation lasted nearly three months before the Vietcong 9th Division escaped across the border. By that time the division had suffered more than 2,700 casualties. But even that number seemed paltry compared to the investment. The American attack had been unable to trap Vietcong main units. Still, the deputy MACV commander, William DePuy, claimed Junction City to be “a blow from which the VC in this area may never recover.”

  The communists chose to fight only when they had the advantage— a regiment against a battalion or a battalion against a company. Long before the battle, they rehearsed in scale-model exercises, hid supplies of rice, ammunition, and medicine, and camouflaged bunkers and tunnels. They moved to the battle site in small groups and then assembled for action. They preselected several withdrawal routes; the goal was always to engage the Americans and then break away before the artillery and aerial bombardment began. Soon after the battle started, they began a withdrawal that would not stop until after twelve hours of hard marching in the jungle. More often than not the Americans would be unable to find them.

  To deal with that frustration, American policymakers let their faith in technology reach absurd levels. Westmoreland expanded Operation Ranch Hand. C-123 transport planes carrying several chemical agents, particularly dioxin-laced Agent Orange, sprayed suspected enemy strongholds with the herbicides. Eventually, Operation Ranch Hand dumped 19 million gallons of chemical poison on nearly 6 million acres, more than 20 percent of the entire land area of South Vietnam. Westmoreland also wanted to find some way of separating peasants from communist troops. The creation of “free fire zones” was the answer. Labeled “specified strike zones” after 1965, “free fire zones” were described by the Pentagon as “known enemy strongholds virtually uninhabited by non-combatants. They are areas which have been cleared by responsible local Vietnamese authority for firing on specific military targets.” The free fire zones were an attempt to design the war along conventional military lines, with enemy forces and friendly forces occupying separate areas. The conveniently labeled “enemy areas” were then subjected to the full application of American firepower. And once more, the military called on technology to solve its problems. Isolation of enemy forces was accomplished not by combat and territorial acquisition but by computer definition. Traditional Vietcong strongholds were defined as being free of noncombatants. Anyone living there was the enemy. In places not identified as Vietcong strongholds, American and ARVN troops relocated civilians. Loudspeakers, aerial leaflet drops, and infantry unit sweeps warned inhabitants to evacuate before the killing machine arrived. Once inhabitants had been warned and evacuation attempts made, MACV declared the region a free fire zone and opened up. By 1967 the free fire zone map at Westmoreland’s headquarters was so filled with designated areas outlined in red that the whole country seemed a strike zone.

  When American troops went on search-and-destroy missions, they often destroyed villages suspected of harboring enemy troops. Early in August 1965, for example, marines pursued Vietcong troops into the village of Cam Ne in I Corps. Unable to find the guerrillas, the frustrated marines, using Zippo lighters, burned 150 village huts in their futile search. Morley Safer of CBS News filmed the entire event, and Walter Cronkite broadcast it on the evening news. “Zippo squads” were common during the war. Civilians who lost their homes were relocated to refugee camps.

  Occasionally, the hunt for enemy troops assumed surrealistic proportions. During Operation Cedar Falls, the villagers of Ben Suc got a taste of the killing machine. A known Vietcong refuge, Ben Suc was doomed. American troops evacuated 6,100 people—no doubt Vietcong as well as civilians—and relocated them to a refugee camp at Phu Loi. A huge sign greeted them: “Welcome to the reception center for refugees fleeing communism.” Engineers from the First Infantry Division brought in heavy equipment, including huge plows, and leveled the village. They destroyed every hut, every building, every piece of vegetation. They left behind twenty acres of dust and 6,100 bitter peasants. In February 1968 Vietcong troops overran Ben Tre, the capital city of Kien Hoa Province, and dug in against an awesome display of American firepower. After massive air strikes and naval bombardments, American and ARVN troops recaptured Ben Tre, but by that time the town did not exist anymore. More than 600 civilians were dead, 1,500 seriously wounded, and 4,000 homeless. The journalist Peter Arnett asked an American major about such indiscriminate use of explosives. The answer was the most famous quotation of the war: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

  The collective impact of such enormous firepower was catastrophic. Arc Light campaigns—B-52 raids inside South Vietnam—brought a level of destruction similar to what tactical nuclear weapons could accomplish. Six B-52s flying in formation at 30,000 feet could drop a bomb load that would pulverize almost everything within an area of about 1.5 square miles. Often Vietnamese peasants and enemy troops did not even know the B-52s were coming. They called B-52 strikes “whispering death.” The combined effect of naval shelling, B-52 Arc Light raids, 300 daily fighter-bomber sorties, helicopter gunships, howitzers, and mortars averaged out to a daily detonation of 3.5 million pounds of explosives in South Vietnam. General William DePuy summed the strategy perfectly in the spring of 1966: “The solution in Vietnam is more bombs, more shells, more napalm . . . until the other side cracks and gives up.”

  U.S. Air Force F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bombers drop bombs on North Vietnam. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)

  But civilian peasants, not the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, cracked first. Americans failed to understand that the village was the soul of Vietnamese culture, the key to the often-sought and often-labeled “hearts and minds” of the people. The village was where they were born, where the bones of their ancestors were buried, where mud and water produced the rice that fed their children. Peasants expected to spend all their lives in their villages. American forces destroyed the peasants’ way of life. By the end of 1966 more than two million South Vietnamese had lost their homes in accidental bombardments or been moved out of free fire zones before soldiers intentionally destroyed their homes. The number of homeless reached three million in 1967 and almost four million in 1968.

  And that was not the worst of it. Between 1965 and 1972 more than one million civilians died in South Vietnam and another one million were wounded, most from the “friendly fire” of American forces. One-third of the South Vietnamese population, and nearly 50 percent of the rural population, either lost their homes or were killed or wounded by American firepower. South Vietnamese civilian casualties reached almost two-thirds the number of Vietcong and North Vietnamese killed. In Quang Ngai Province of I Corps in 1967, the artillery and aerial bombardment was so intense that by year’s end more than 300 of the province’s 450 villages had been completely obliterated and the number of peasants killed or wounded from indiscriminate shelling was averaging 1,000 people a week. When the journalist Neil Sheehan asked Westmoreland whether the civilian casualties bothered him, the general replied, “Yes, Neil, it is a problem, but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?”

  In more subtle ways the American presence disrupted the social fabric of traditional Vietnamese society. The destructiveness of the war drove millions of South Vietnamese into the cities, but so did the billions of dollars being pumped into the country. The entire urban Vietnamese economy revolved around providing services to Americans. By 1967 most Vietnamese workers were either Vietcong, ARVN soldiers, or service workers for Americans. So Vietnamese employees of the United States government would have something to spend their money on, Americans brought in a cornucopia of consumer goods—transi
stor radios, television sets, motor scooters, and watches. Indigenous Vietnamese industries shriveled up and died; inflation skyrocketed; and corruption was rampant.

  Given this level of destruction and social disruption, the idea of winning the “hearts and minds” of these peasants through pacification was absurd. Pacification became a bureaucratic backwater of the war, a hodgepodge of programs to which the United States paid lip service only. The most prominent civilian pacification program was the Agency for International Development’s $500 million-a-year effort to build schools, health clinics, and agricultural stations. At the same time the CIA had its own pacification program—political action teams of trained South Vietnamese cadres whose mission was to find and eliminate the Vietcong infrastructure. Army Special Forces conducted pacification programs among Montagnard peoples. And in response to American pressure, South Vietnam launched its own pacification effort. The New Life Hamlet Program, successor to the defunct Strategic Hamlet Program, was just as unsuccessful, for it too forcibly relocated peasants and ARVN troops brutally carried out the relocations. In 1966 the New Life Hamlet Program gave way to the Ap Doi Moi Program, which translated as “Really New Life Hamlets.” Like its predecessors, it was riddled with official corruption and angered peasants who did not want to leave their ancestral homelands.