Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  The United States simply did not understand its enemy, a cardinal sin among military commanders who aspired to victory. For two thousand years, the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu’s advice had proved true again and again: “Know your enemy.” The entire American political establishment had too much faith in firepower and too little an understanding of Vietnamese staying power. The other side was not about to crack and give up. Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap were willing to accept staggering losses—in the millions of people—in order to expel the United States and reunite the country. The pacification programs had been ineffective and counterproductive.

  Westmoreland chafed at the numbers of civilians, CIA agents, and ARVN troops engaged in such disjointed pacification efforts, and he wished to bring them all under the MACV umbrella. In November 1966 Ambassador Lodge created the Office of Civil Operations to coordinate pacification, but Westmoreland kept up his demands and in May 1967 President Johnson finally gave in. He established a new agency—Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS)—to control all pacification efforts. Placing CORDS under the direct control of Westmoreland and MACV militarized the pacification effort.

  As director of CORDS and deputy commander to William Westmoreland Johnson named Robert Komer. Born in Chicago in 1922, Komer was a CIA veteran with a Harvard MBA who had arrived at the National Security Council in 1961 preaching the gospel of pacification. He was self-confident, pushy, and abrasive, nicknamed the “Blowtorch.” According to one of Lodge’s aides, Komer was “a Guildenstern at the court of Lyndon I—willing to please his President at all costs.” By 1966 Komer was a special assistant to Johnson. He insisted that South Vietnam would have to win peasant loyalty before a long-term political settlement was possible. Soon there were 8,000 Americans directly engaged in pacification, and within months Komer claimed progress in winning “hearts and minds.” Still again, technology was supposed to give the answers. Komer established the Hamlet Evaluation Survey, an elaborate, computerized system for measuring the number of South Vietnamese peasants living in areas “controlled” by the Saigon government. Using eighteen political, economic, and military variables, the survey classified villages into one of five categories, depending on the extent of loyalty to Saigon. At the end of 1967 Komer confidently told Johnson that approximately 67 percent of the South Vietnamese were loyal to their government. Antiwar activists dismissed the estimate. In 1963 General Paul Harkins had also declared 67 percent of the peasants loyal to Saigon. “Politically, we failed to give due weight to the popular appeal of the Viet Cong . . . or the depth of factionalism among traditional South Vietnamese elites,” Komer would later confess. “We only grasped belatedly the significance of the steady attrition of GVN authority . . . in the countryside . . . which was directly linked to how the Viet Cong conducted the war.”

  All the pacification efforts foundered on the strategic reality of the war. For every American dollar spent on pacification, nearly one hundred were spent on military operations. For every American worker engaged in land reform, health care, and education, sixty soldiers were busy blowing the country up. Neither the United States nor South Vietnam could provide villagers security from the Vietcong. During the last seven months of 1966, the Vietcong murdered or kidnapped more than 3,000 Revolutionary Development personnel. Whatever good the pacification programs achieved was undone by the indiscriminate bombardment. Four million peasants were driven from their ancestral villages. Nothing could compensate for that.

  “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” folk artist Pete Seeger sang of such scenes as this one. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)

  Over time, Komer worried more about the political consequences of American bombing and artillery fire in South Vietnam, especially as the number of accidental civilian deaths approached one million people. When the United States first entered South Vietnam, one of its supreme objectives had been to protect peasants from the depredations of the Vietcong. But instead of safety and security, the United States brought death, destruction, and homelessness on a wide scale, and it was easy for Vietcong and North Vietnamese propagandists to convince many peasants that their miseries came from the United States, not from the communists.

  Adding to Washington’s frustration over the government of Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu was their inability to reach an accommodation with the Buddhists. Both Ky and Thieu were Roman Catholics; both were drawn to the French; both were critical of Buddhist values; both were military officers. Led by Thich Tri Quang, the most prominent Buddhist monk in the country, northern Buddhists demanded a civilian government sympathetic to Buddhist culture and Vietnamese independence. The most prominent of the Buddhist dissidents was Nguyen Chanh Thi, the “Warlord of the North,” a close associate of Thich Tri Quang. Thi had risen through ARVN ranks to become commander of I Corps in 1965. American marines in I Corps respected Thi for his courage and aggressiveness. In March 1966 Ky traveled to Hue for some military conferences, but Thi snubbed him, calling Ky “my little brother” and ridiculing him in public. Upon returning to Saigon seething with anger, Ky relieved Nguyen Chanh Thi of his command and put him under house arrest. It was just the signal the Buddhists had been waiting for. Thich Tri Quang organized widespread protest demonstrations throughout the northern regions of South Vietnam, claiming that the military government was capricious and dictatorial and calling for creation of a civilian, constitutional democracy. At the end of March, protesters seized the radio stations in Hue and Danang. Promising to “liberate Hue and Danang from the communists,” Ky led two Vietnamese marine battalions into Danang and waited for the protests to die out. When they did not do so, he attacked Danang and had to fight his way through ARVN troops still loyal to Thi. The battle, some of it house-to-house combat in Danang, lasted more than a week. In Hue demonstrators attacked the United States Consulate, and Ky had to take military control of the city early in June.

  The civil war in Danang and Hue in 1966 raised more doubts in the United States about Nguyen Cao Ky. Breaking the back of the Buddhist political movement had been expensive, especially in American public opinion. American troop levels were approaching 300,000, casualties were mounting, and now television was broadcasting images of South Vietnamese fighting South Vietnamese. Relative casualty figures were also affecting American public opinion. By the end of 1965 there were supposedly 514,000 men serving in the South Vietnamese armed forces along with 184,000 Americans. In 1966 more than 6,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam, as did nearly 12,000 South Vietnamese soldiers. But in 1967, as the pace of the war quickened, the statistics changed. American troop levels climbed to 485,000 men at the end of 1967, and ARVN forces went up to just under 800,000 soldiers. That year nearly 10,000 Americans died, compared to 12,716 South Vietnamese. In the election campaign of 1964 President Johnson had promised that “American boys shouldn’t die in a war Asian boys should be fighting,” but that is exactly what was happening.

  On March 20 and 21, 1967, Westmoreland met with President Johnson and several other administration officials at Guam to discuss the war. The previous June, Johnson had agreed to increase American ground troops to 430,000 by mid-1967, but at Guam, Westmoreland asked for more. A week later he suggested 542,000, calling it a “Minimum Essential Force.” He also let Johnson know that what he really needed was an “Optimum Force” of 678,000, which would finish off the enemy in about three years. Johnson could not give Westmoreland 678,000 troops without calling up the reserves and raising draft calls to 60,000 men a month, both of which would raise the ire of Congress and inspire more vehement antiwar protests. Westmoreland would have to make do with 542,000 men. The Vietnam War was already bigger than Korea.

  And when he got back to Saigon, Westmoreland learned that MACV intelligence had estimated that Vietcong and North Vietnamese troop strength, including paramilitary and local self-defense troops, exceeded 500,000 people. The general was visibly shaken and wondered, “What am I going to tell the press? What am I going to tell Congress? What is t
he press going to do with this? What am I going to tell the president?” Still confident of victory, Westmoreland decided on a simple solution: Don’t count the paramilitary and self-defense troops. The general did not believe they had much impact on the war anyway, but more important was that “The people in Washington were not sophisticated enough to understand and evaluate this thing and neither was the media.”

  The Buddhist crisis of 1966 and the inability of ARVN to fight at an acceptable level was meanwhile convincing American leaders that Ky had to go. He was too unpredictable, and he had failed to get ARVN into sustained combat. Ambassador Lodge recommended replacing Ky, and Westmoreland concurred. Nguyen Van Thieu decided to run for president in 1967. The decision caught Ky off guard. He viewed Thieu as a rival, and enjoyed baiting the chief of state by arriving at meetings early and parking his helicopter on the pad Thieu intended to use. The prospect that both of them might run for president gave the American leaders nightmares of a divided military, a civil war, or electoral victory by a weak civilian candidate. They persuaded Ky to accept the vice presidency.

  The Thieu-Ky ticket ran a presidential campaign of a kind to be expected of Saigonese politics. The two arrested Buddhist leaders and denied serious rivals positions on the ballot. The election was marked by voter coercion, multiple voting by ARVN troops, fraudulent vote counts, and widespread stuffing of ballot boxes. With all that, Thieu and Ky managed to secure only 35 percent of the vote and win, while a virtually unknown Buddhist peace candidate, Truong Dinh Dzu, came in second with 17 percent. Johnson praised the elections as the “birth of democracy in Southeast Asia,” but network broadcasts carried a different message: The sideshow of South Vietnamese politics had concluded another performance. Observers came to the same conclusion. Vietnamese tradition held that political authority was a mandate from heaven. Legitimate political leaders should have overwhelming support from the people, and 35 percent was hardly a heavenly mandate.

  Yet American military officials in Saigon believed the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were approaching the long-awaited point at which they could not put troops in the field fast enough to replace their dead. In the first half of 1967 the body count was up to 7,316 Vietcong and North Vietnamese a month. MACV’s attrition charts, which did not include local enemy militia, showed that the number of enemy troops had declined from 275,000 men in late 1966 to 242,000 in mid-1967. Westmoreland declared in August 1967 that “Enemy armed strength is falling, not spectacularly and not mathematically provable, but every indication suggests this. . . . There is evidence that we may have reached the crossover point.” Victor Krulak was unimpressed. He remembered a similar claim by General Paul Harkins in 1963, a decline in Vietcong from 124,000 men to 102,000. No such decline had taken place. Then at the end of 1967 Westmoreland estimated that more than 220,000 enemy troops were dead. “Wastefully, expensively, but nonetheless indisput-edly, we are winning the war,” Komer proclaimed. “We are grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass.” Krulak’s pessimism was wiser. The United States was spending $2 billion per month on the war, and although the communists had taken severe casualties, Saigon and the Americans were not killing the 250,000 troops a year necessary to slow down the enemy.

  Westmoreland and Komer also took cheer in the growing success of the Chieu Hoi, or Open Arms Program. Launched in 1963 by Robert Thompson, Chieu Hoi offered amnesty to Vietcong and attracted thousands of deserters by 1967—Komer claimed more than 40,000. At the end of American involvement in 1973, Americans would be estimating that 159,741 Vietcong had deserted. But critics called the program “R and R” for Communists.” Most genuine defectors were low-level Vietcong who had never been enthusiastic about their commitment; the others were Vietcong plants trying to infiltrate the program. Some changed sides as many as five times during the war. William E. Colby, the pacification leader and later CIA chief, estimated that in 1969 and 1970 only 17,000 of the reported 79,000 Chieu Hoi converts were sincere. But Westmoreland and Komer were true believers.

  There was other encouraging evidence, good enough at least for true believers. The Vietcong were having trouble by 1967 getting new recruits, primarily because so many millions of South Vietnamese were in refugee camps. The population of Saigon had swelled from 1.4 million in 1962 to 4 million in 1967, and it was also more difficult for the Vietcong to slip recruits out of the cities. Intelligence reports indicated that Main Force Vietcong battalions were no longer at peak strength of from 600 to 700 troops. But Hanoi was replacing the Vietcong with regular North Vietnamese troops in numbers sufficient to augment total communist strength.

  While Westmoreland’s confidence in military victory continued to inspire Johnson, Rusk, and Rostow, Lodge became one of an increasing number of defectors. He had decided that Westmoreland was applying World War II tactics to a modern guerrilla war and that he was incapable of incorporating political variables into his strategic thinking. In April 1967 Lodge retired to Boston. Lodge’s replacement was Ellsworth Bunker. Bunker, heir to the National Sugar Refining Company fortune, was a multimillionaire who had become a Democrat during the 1930s. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he filled ambassadorial posts in India, Argentina, and Italy. A New Englander with an obsessive taste for maple syrup (he had it flown fresh to Saigon) and all the reserve of his Yankee forefathers, Bunker earned the title of “Mr. Refrigerator” from the Vietnamese in Saigon. In May 1967 Bunker was prepared to give his entire support to William Westmoreland and the war effort. Lodge’s departure had deprived Johnson of his only independent point of view in Saigon.

  Sir Robert Thompson, the British expert on counterinsurgency, lost faith as well. Ever since 1961 he had warned against a military solution to the political problem in Vietnam, and when he saw Westmoreland unleash the killing machine, Thompson knew immediately that the United States was on its way to failure. “American policy in South Vietnam,” Thompson warned Lodge, “is stupid. It doubles the firepower and squares the error. Every artillery shell the United States fires into South Vietnam might kill a Vietcong but will surely alienate a Vietnamese peasant.”

  McNamara had been weakening since 1966, increasingly enduring the sickening awareness that he had been wrong, horribly wrong, and that hundreds of thousands of people were dead because of his decisions. The United States could not stop the flow of men and supplies from North Vietnam, not unless Washington was willing to unload strategic nuclear weapons on North Vietnam and Laos. In October 1966 McNamara wrote a memo warning the president that to “bomb the North sufficiently to make a radical impact on Hanoi’s political, economic and social structure would require an effort which we could make but which could not be stomached either by our own people or by world opinion.” As far as he was concerned, the United States had played with air power its last promising card and lost.

  In May 1967 McNamara asked Johnson to stop the air war over North Vietnam, put a cap on troop levels, and seek a diplomatic settlement. The “picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed,” he told the president, “is not a pretty one.” McNamara was now skeptical of the attrition strategy and Westmoreland’s talk of the crossover. “The point,” he puzzled, “is that it didn’t add up. If you took the strength figures and the body count, the defections, the infiltration and what was happening to us, the whole thing . . . didn’t add up. . . . How the hell the war went on year after year when we stopped the infiltration or shrunk it and when we had a very high body count. . . . It didn’t add up.” In June McNamara commissioned a top-secret study. With the aid of Morton Halperin, deputy assistant secretary of defense, Leslie H. Gelb of Havard set out writing what within a few years would be known as the Pentagon Papers. But at the moment McNamara was asking Gelb to get the study under way, Johnson decided to rid his administration of McNa-mara. By the end of the summer the president managed to position McNamara for the presidency of the
World Bank. In November 1967 McNamara resigned.

  Within the larger division in Washington politics, some hard-liners had strong ties to the military: Senators John C. Stennis of Mississippi, Henry Jackson of Washington, Stuart Symington of Missouri, Gale McGee of Wyoming, Russell Long of Louisiana. Long denounced all “who encourage the Communists to prolong the war. I swell with pride when I see Old Glory flying from the Capitol. . . . My prayer is that there may never be a white flag of surrender up there.” The joint chiefs threatened to resign in mass if Johnson adopted McNamara’s proposal for de-escalation. In August 1967 Stennis, who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee, convened hearings on the war. After listening to a parade of military officials, the committee concluded that “civilians had consistently overruled the unanimous recommendations of military commanders and the joint chiefs of staff.” At least one commander, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, would later hold the line on paper even after it had crumbled in the real world: “We could have flattened every war-making facility in North Vietnam. But the handwringers had center stage. . . . The most powerful country in the world did not have the willpower needed to meet the situation.”