Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  A large portion of the protesters were middle- and upper-class college students who had managed to avoid the draft, for the most part through student deferments. Those deferments were supposed only to put off conscription until students graduated, and to make the point that law specified that once a student took out a deferment his time of liability would extend from twenty-six, the conventional cut-off age, to thirty- four. But at least as long as the military had no need of a vast increase in draftees, twenty-six amounted to the practical age of exemption even for students. Beyond a young man's mid-twenties, he becomes less subject to military discipline and therefore less desirable as a soldier, regardless of his beliefs. Some students, just to make sure, went on to graduate school so that they would stay out of uniform until they reached the age of thirty-four. Youth privileged by class and money could fall back on other ways of exploiting the system. Instead of relying on the routine and often perfunctory physicals performed at army induction centers, for example, a young man with money might receive a private physical and show up an induction center with certifiable proof of disqualifying ailments. And when middle-class youth did get drafted, their education level might secure them jobs in the rear areas of the military bureaucracy. Typing skills or a few business classes could be enough to keep them out of harm's way. Undoubtedly most youth in college and graduate school remained students for the honest purpose of getting an education, but the privilege that went with enrollment in school seemed, and was, an unjust entitlement by the well-to-do. Even for several years after the Vietnam-era expansion in the number of draft calls, until it was abolished and replaced with a largely egalitarian lottery, the system continued to operate on its earlier basis. Blue-collar Americans found it insufferable that college youth, protected against conscription, used their safe status to denounce working-class youth as brutes murdering innocent Vietnamese. Many working-class Americans had painfully ambivalent feelings about the war and their country. They hated the war, loved their boys, and despised the antiwar movement.

  Visceral resentment against the students and antiwar activism in general exploded into the “hard hat riot ” of May 8, 1970, in New York City. Construction workers had learned a few days earlier that antiwar demonstrators from New York University and Hunter College were planning a rally in the financial district. About two hundred construction workers, many of them wearing the hard hats required on the job, showed up at the rally and attacked the students, chanting “All the Way USA. ” They then marched to city hall and demanded that Mayor John Lindsay raise the flag, which had been at half-staff to mourn the dead students at Kent State. The workers sang the national anthem as the flag was raised. Seeing an antiwar banner over at Pace College, they broke into a building and beat up several students. Journalists called May 8 “Bloody Friday.”

  Two weeks later, the Building and Trades Council of Greater New York sponsored a peaceful march that attracted more than 100,000 workers. They waved flags and praised the young men in the military who were putting their lives on the line. “For three hours,” Time magazine described the event, “100,000 members of New York's brawniest unions marched and shouted... in a massive display of gleeful patriotism and muscular pride. [It was] a kind of workers' Woodstock. ” Ralph Cole, a firefighter who had lost his son in Vietnam, caught the feeling of the workers: “You bet your goddam dollar I'm bitter. It's people like us who give up our sons for the country. The business people, they run the country and make money from it. The college types, the professors, they go to Washington and tell the government what to do.... But their sons, they don't end up in the swamps over there, in Vietnam. Let's face it: if you have a lot of money, or if you have the right connections, you don't end up on a firing line in the jungle. ” Cole's wife felt the same way: “I'm against this war, too—the way a mother is, whose sons are in the army, who has lost a son fighting in it. The world doesn't hear me, and it doesn't hear a single person I know. ”

  Even Americans furious at the antiwar movement could be shattered by an incident that the journalist Seymour Hersh contributed to revealing, a mass rape and murder of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers a year earlier at My Lai in Quang Ngai province. Life magazine published grisly color photographs taken at the massacre—twisted bodies, bloodied black pajamas, naked, mutilated babies. Ever since 1967, when Task Force Oregon deployed to I Corps in the area, the killing machine had done its job well. Throughout 1967 and again in 1968, 50,000 civilians were killed or wounded in Quang Ngai, the vast majority of them victims of indiscriminate artillery bombardment, B-52 strikes, fighter- bomber napalm raids, and gunship attacks. But the deaths at My Lai were different. Indiscriminate bombardment could at least be explained away as accidental; the killing at My Lai could not. It had been a rampage by war-maddened troops.

  My Lai was a rural hamlet of approximately 700 people. On the morning of March 16, 1968, Lieutenant William Calley led an infantry platoon into My Lai. With helicopter gunships circling at 1,000 feet monitoring the operation, Calley ordered his men to round up all the civilians. Tensions ran high. The troops were frustrated with their inability to distinguish civilians from the Vietcong. Calley suddenly opened fire and ordered his men to shoot as well. They plowed through the village shooting anything that moved. When it was over, nearly 500 people were dead: children, the elderly, the able-bodied. Not one of them appeared to be a Vietcong. Calley's men spent the day in an orgy of sexual violence— sodomy, rape, and rape-murder. There were a few moments that offered a sliver of moral redemption. Some soldiers refrained from the lunacy, and a three-man American helicopter team that happened upon the scene intervened to the point of preparing to fire on the marauding troops. Several decades later, the military bestowed formal honors on the three, one of whom was no longer alive.

  March 1968—Bodies of women and children lie on the road leading from the village of My Lai following the massacre of South Vietnamese civilians by American troops. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)

  High-ranking officers, among them Major General Samuel Koster, commander of the Americal Division, apparently knew of the killings but made no report and attempted no investigation. For more than a year the cover-up was successful. Then Ronald Ridenhour, a former infantryman with the Americal Division, sent a letter to Congress describing the massacre. “I do not know for certain, ” he wrote, “but I am convinced that it was something very black indeed. ” The army convened a board of inquiry and decided that war crimes had occurred. The board reduced Major General Koster in rank to brigadier general; censured his assistant, Brigadier General George Young; and charged with war crimes Colonel Oran K. Henderson, commander of the 11th Infantry Brigade, along with thirteen other officers and enlisted men.

  On March 29, 1971, a military tribunal convicted William Calley of the premeditated murder of at least twenty-two civilians. Two days later he was sentenced to life in prison at hard labor. The army dropped charges against all the other defendants. The conviction provoked an intense debate throughout the country. Many Americans were convinced that Calley was being made a scapegoat for the army. Nixon reviewed the case personally before the sentence was carried out. He had Calley released from a military stockade and placed under house arrest in an apartment. In August 1971 Nixon reduced the sentence to twenty years, and then to ten years. William Calley was paroled in March 1974. General William Peers, who had headed the army investigation of My Lai, summed up the absurdity of the event: “To think that out of all those men, only one, Lieutenant William Calley, was brought to justice. And now, he's practically a hero. It's a tragedy. ”

  The troop withdrawals, the antiwar movement, and the My Lai massacre exposed serious problems in the killing machine and further undermined public support for the war. Once Nixon announced the troop withdrawals, everyone realized that the time was near when the United States would leave and the South Vietnamese would have to fight on their own. After 1969, Westmoreland's memoirs recall, “serious morale and disciplinary problems arose. That was t
o be expected. Men began to doubt the American purpose. Why die when the United States was pulling out? ”

  The war had always been confusing. Unlike soldiers in World War II, who averaged twenty-six years of age, the GIs in Vietnam had a median age of only nineteen. They knew relatively little about life or the world. They had grown up listening to the World War II recollections of their fathers, of being welcomed by the people of Europe, the Philippines, and China, and then received as heroes at home. Fresh out of high school, troops of the Vietnam conflict went to war with John Wayne on their minds, hoping to protect freedom as the Duke had done in Flying Leathernecks, Back to Bataan, and The Sands of Iwo Jima. But it was not to be. It did not take long to see that the Vietnamese loved not the GIs but, at most, only the dollars in their pockets. The Vietnamese smiled when they hustled the GIs for money and handouts, or when they worked for the military or an American company, but looked at the soldiers with silent scorn. John Ketwig, in And a Hard Rain Fell, speaks of a bus ride from Tan Son Nhut to Long Binh in which Vietnamese lined the road, threw garbage at the troop bus, and shouted “Go home, GI ” and “Fuck you, GI. ” Enraged, one of the soldiers shouted back, “Hey, you fuckin' gooks. We're supposed to be here to save your fuckin' puny asses! ”

  Even insofar as American soldiers, at least in the early days of the widened war, believed they were there to help the South Vietnamese, they had trouble figuring out which South Vietnamese they were fighting for. It was all but impossible to distinguish Vietcong troops from simple peasants, and even the peasants wanted the Americans out. Until 1969, however, perhaps most of the young troops believed in the domino theory. They were under no illusions about preserving democracy in South Vietnam from communist assault, but they were willing to die in the jungles of Southeast Asia to protect capitalism and freedom on the other side of the world. But when Richard Nixon began withdrawing troops from South Vietnam in 1969, even the domino theory lost much of its relevancy. The United States was getting out, whether or not South Vietnam was ready to go it alone. Uncertain about the American mission in Vietnam and confused about their own role in the conflict, many combat soldiers lost faith. Survival replaced victory as the focus of their lives. They might be willing to die to protect a buddy, but there was no longer any nobility in dying for democracy. Morale plummeted.

  The tour of duty reinforced the sense of frustration. Unlike World War II, when soldiers stayed away from home for years, the Vietnam conflict required only twelve months for army troops and thirteen for marines. Every few days new, green troops arrived in the field full of news about the alienation back home. Soldiers discovered that they were in a war that did not matter. “How do you feel, ” asked Michael Herr, “when a nineteen-year-old kid tells you from the bottom of his heart that he has gotten too old for this kind of shit? ” Every six months a soldier also got an R and R leave, a week's vacation at a resort hotel in Hong Kong, Bangkok, or Honolulu. Among the troops the vacation was called “I and I"— “intoxication and intercourse. ” During those few days they were exposed to criticism about the war.

  Soldiers lost faith in their officers. The commitment of troops to South Vietnam was so enormous that a shortage of qualified officers resulted. And the ticket punching, in which career officers insisted on a combat tour in Vietnam in order to beef up their personnel file, created an average six-month assignment with an individual unit before a new officer appeared. Six months was just not enough time for an officer to secure the loyalty of his troops or acquaint himself with the tactical situation.

  One measure of the crisis in morale was the skyrocketing in the rate of desertion. The army desertion rate in 1966 had been 14.9 men per thousand. It quadrupled to 73.5 in 1971—three times higher than the worst desertion rates of the Korean War. The desertion rate for all military branches jumped from 8.43 men per thousand in 1966 to 33.9 in 1971. The AWOL rates were just as bad. In 1966 there were 57.2 AWOL incidents per thousand in the army; by 1971 that number had jumped to 176.9. Even the vaunted marines had problems. In 1967 the Marine Corps discharged 13.7 men per thousand for unfitness and misconduct; the figure in 1971 was 112.4.

  Among incidents worse than desertion, AWOL, and bad conduct were epidemics of “fragging, ” a term soldiers used to describe the assassination of overzealous officers by their own troops. It first appeared noticeably in the Mekong Delta in 1967 when several American platoons were known for pooling their money to pay an individual for killing a hated officer or NCO, usually by throwing a fragmentation grenade into a tent, which destroyed the victim along with the weapon and leaving no evidence. To warn an officer who was too ignorantly eager about the war, troops might leave a grenade pin on his pillow or throw a smoke grenade into his tent. If he persisted, one of his men would frag him. During the Vietnam War, the army has estimated, 1,011 officers and NCOs were killed or wounded at the hands of their own men. There were 96 documented cases in 1969, 209 in 1970, and 333 confirmed and another 158 suspected incidents in 1971. In 1970 and 1971 together, when American combat deaths in South Vietnam came to 5,602, the number of confirmed fraggings was 542. After the battle of Hamburger Hill in 1969, one underground GI newspaper carried an ad offering a $10,000 reward for fragging the officers who had ordered the men up the hill.

  Drug abuse soared. From the “Golden Triangle ” of Laos, Burma, and Thailand, a river of heroin, marijuana, and opium flowed into South Vietnam. A steady supply of amphetamines came from the United States and from makeshift labs in Saigon. Drugs were everywhere, like candy and ice cream on the street. Inefficient and ineffective in war, South Vietnamese government officials were experts at drug dealing. A heroin addiction requiring $150 a day on the South Side of Chicago could be maintained in Saigon for $2 a day. The Pentagon estimated at the end of 1969 that nearly two of every three American soldiers in South Vietnam were using marijuana and an astonishing one out of every three or four had tried heroin. Tens of thousands of GIs returned home with a full-blown heroin addiction. Late in 1970 CBS News brought the story to the American people by broadcasting a “smoke-in ” at a 1st Air Cavalry fire base in which GIs smoked marijuana through the barrel of a combat rifle.

  Fragging and drug abuse were so severe that Pentagon officials began to worry about the possibility of a military rebellion or collapse. Westmoreland told the joint chiefs that “an army without discipline, morale, and pride is a menace to the country that it is sworn to defend. ” Reports of field units bordering on mutiny in their refusal to carry out combat operations became increasingly frequent. McGeorge Bundy recommended to the administration that “extrication from Vietnam is now the necessary precondition for the renewal of the Army as an institution. ” The June 1971 issue of the Armed Forces Journal described “The Collapse of the Armed Forces. ” The killing machine was turning on itself. Creighton Abrams could not believe what was happening: “What the hell is going on. I've got white shirts all over the place—psychologists, drug counselors, detox specialists, rehab people, social workers, and psychiatrists. Is this a goddamned army or a mental hospital? Officers are afraid to lead their men into battle, and the men won't follow. Jesus Christ! What happened? ”

  By the beginning of 1970, at least for critics of the war, the Vietnami- zation policy was bankrupt. Kissinger and Nixon had been running the war for a year, and although troop levels were down to 475,200 at the end of 1969, another 9,415 Americans went home dead. Bipartisan opposition to the war widened in Congress. The Senate Republican whip Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania called for “a withdrawal of American combat troops as soon as is physically possible. ” In full-page advertisements placed in newspapers around the country, a group of United States senators led by George McGovern, Harold Hughes, and Mark Hatfield described Vietnamization as “an invisible program to end an undeclared war backed by a silent majority. ”

  The Paris negotiations remained stalled, Henry Cabot Lodge spending every day bickering with the North and South Vietnamese over procedural details. On February 21, 1970, Henry Kis
singer began meeting secretly with Le Duc Tho, who had succeeded Xuan Thuy as the head of the North Vietnamese delegation, but Tho remained resolute in his demand that Nixon withdraw all American troops from South Vietnam, remove Thieu and Ky from power, and permit the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, which had superseded the National Liberation Front in 1969, to participate in the government of South Vietnam. When Kissinger suggested that the communists were experiencing setback after setback in South Vietnam, Tho replied, “Before, there were over a million U.S. and puppet troops, and you failed. How can you succeed when you let the puppet troops do the fighting now? ” Thieu was just as stubborn. He would not even talk to representatives of the Provisional Revolutionary Government.

  Kissinger believed that as long as American troop withdrawals proceeded as scheduled, the enemy had no reason to compromise. The 1st Infantry Division, 26th Marine Regiment, 9th Infantry Division, 4th Infantry Division, and 25th Infantry Division were all scheduled for redeployment to the United States in 1970. American troop strength would drop to 335,000 by year's end. Kissinger wanted to slow down the reductions, renew massive bombing of North Vietnam, and consider a joint American and South Vietnamese invasion of North Vietnam, all in the hope of forcing the enemy into serious negotiations. Melvin Laird criticized the proposal, telling Nixon that “such tactics have not worked in Vietnam for the last twenty years and won't work now. Moreover, Congress will not tolerate such an expansion of the war. ”

  In January 1970 the Politburo in Hanoi had already decided to broaden the war in Indochina. It had little choice. Since early in the 1960s the Hmong army in Laos, led by Vang Pao and financed by the CIA, had steadily grown in strength and mobility. Along with as many as twenty- five battalions of troops supplied by Thailand and Royal Laotian soldiers, the Hmong had begun to threaten the Ho Chi Minh Trail by 1969. In February 1970 NVA regular troops joined with Pathet Lao guerrillas and attacked the Thai and Hmong Lao troops, driving them far to the west, away from the trail and off the Plain of Jars. That military operation secured North Vietnam's supply line to the south.