So negotiation was blocked out; the decisions were made, and the troops were on their way. Not just American troops, it turned out, but North Vietnamese troops as well. Though top officials of the American government would later claim that they had bombed and sent American combat troops because the North Vietnamese were escalating, this was patently untrue. By early 1965, a regiment of the North Vietnamese army had been identified as being in the South, and another was believed on its way, but no North Vietnamese had entered battle—that would come long afterward, after the Americans had bombed the North and sent in their combat troops. But with the arrival of American combat troops in the summer of 1965, Hanoi moved to match the American escalation. First-line units of the North Vietnamese army, one of the great infantries of the world, began to move down the trails, ready to neutralize the American build-up. They would not fight in the guerrilla style which had marked hostilities in the past, and they would not fight in the populous regions of the Delta. Rather, they would wait in the highlands, fight in rugged terrain favorable to them, and meet American main-force units there. More often than not, they chose both the time and place of battle. Thus as American forces would provide a shield to the ARVN, the NVA regular forces would provide a comparable shield for the Vietcong; the American force was being neutralized even as it arrived.
In mid-November 1965, regiments of the North Vietnamese army stumbled into units of the elite First Cav (the new heliborne division). The result was a bloody and ferocious battle in difficult terrain, which came to be known as the battle of the Ia Drang Valley. It was the first real testing of American men and arms in Vietnam. Official American estimates were that 1,200 of the enemy had been killed, against 200 American losses. To General Westmoreland and his deputy, General William Depuy, it was viewed as a considerable American victory; it proved the effectiveness and the validity of the new airmobile concept: that we could strike at the enemy in his base-camp areas, that we could overcome normal logistical limitations with our new technology; a range and a mobility that had been denied to the French was now available to us. So a strategy of attrition was possible. It was a battle which encouraged the American military in their preconceptions and their instincts, that the aggressive use of American force and strike power against the enemy in his distant base camps could eventually destroy his forces and his will. It was a point at which General Depuy, then extremely influential on Westmoreland’s staff, was still talking about the threshold of pain. It was something he believed in, that the enemy had a threshold, and that if we hit him hard enough he would cry out; at this very point, in fact, the North Vietnamese were testing out our threshold of pain. They would find that ours was a good deal lower than theirs, that we could not accept heavy casualties as they could. Thus Ia Drang was in a way a kind of closing of the door as far as strategy was concerned. We were convinced that we had dealt the other side a grievous blow and we were now ready to deal him more.
But there were others who took a somewhat different view of the battle. John Vann, the Army colonel who had resigned in protest of the Harkins policies, and who was now back in Vietnam as a lowly civilian official, conducted his own private investigation of the battle, and based on his considerable knowledge of enemy tactics, decided that the battle represented something very different from what Westmoreland and Depuy thought. Vann came to the conclusion that the North Vietnamese had deliberately been taking unusually high casualties in order to see where the Americans were vulnerable; in the process they had come up with the answer. The way to offset U.S. might (which was clearly technological and not based on individual bravery or superiority soldier against soldier) was to close with the Americans as tightly as possible, within thirty meters. This neutralized the American air and artillery power. Over a period of time they were able to match American losses on a ratio which was acceptable to them; after all, they were willing to accept far higher casualties in this war.
However different the interpretations of events, the battle of Ia Drang had proven beyond doubt one other factor. It had shown graphically that Hanoi would resist the American escalation with an escalation of its own. In the past, despite the prophecies of the intelligence community, the likelihood that North Vietnamese troops would come into the South had been played down. But by the early fall it was clear that Hanoi was taking its regular units, breaking them down into small sizes, and infiltrating them quickly into the South. In July 1965, when the Americans had decided to send a total of between 175,000 and 200,000 combat troops to Vietnam by the end of the year (with an additional 100,000 ticketed for 1966), the estimate had been that there were still no more than two NVA regiments in the South; by November there were six confirmed North Vietnamese regiments, two more probable and one possible in the South. The bombing, as a weapon of interdiction, had failed. As for affecting Hanoi’s will, the bombing and the arrival of American troops had affected it, but not the way the American principals had anticipated; Hanoi was now determined to send men down even more quickly than the Americans could bring theirs in. If the full implications of this were lost on Westmoreland, he nonetheless sensed the immediate one, that the manpower advantage he hoped to have in 1966 was already lost. On November 23 he reported to his superiors:
The VC/PAVN build-up rate is predicated to be double that of U.S. Phase II forces [these were essentially his 1966 forces]. Whereas we will add an average of 7 maneuver battalions per quarter, the enemy will add 15. This development has already reduced the November battalion-equivalent ratio from an anticipated 3.2 to 1, to 2.8 to 1, and it will be further reduced to 2.5 to 1 by the end of the year. If the trend continues, the December 1966 battalion-equivalent ratio, even with the addition of Phase II (300,000 men) will be 2.1 to 1.
In the past all the estimates and predictions that the other side would meet force with force had deliberately been filtered out or diluted; at best the enemy’s response was said to be unpredictable, and if anything, the use of American force would bring not counterforce, but negotiations. Now that illusion was gone; the real world was tougher than the world of doctored war games and high-level meetings. At the time that Westmoreland made his assessment, McNamara was in Paris for a NATO meeting; he immediately flew to Saigon, met with Westmoreland, and negotiated troop levels with the commander. At the end of November, when McNamara returned to Washington, he recommended to the President that projected force levels be increased to the point where the American build-up would reach 400,000 by the end of 1965, and possibly 600,000 by the end of 1967. It was clearly not going to be a short, limited war any more.
This counterescalation did not bother Westmoreland. He was not euphoric but he was confident: American force would do it. It would not be easy, but if we set our mind to it, then it could be done. We would have to pay the price. (His views throughout were quite similar to Rusk’s.) He thought he had a totality of Washington’s backing and he prepared for a long war. His MACV planners in very late 1965 and early 1966 were absolutely confident that the troop commitment would go to either 640,000 or 648,000 and there was, in addition, a contingency plan by which it could go as high as 750,000, a figure that MACV called the balloon and considered very much in the ballpark. MACV was confident; there had been tentative agreement, it thought, from Defense, and the President had never said no to any request. Westmoreland was indeed the favored child. In Saigon, Frank McCulloch, the bureau chief of Time, was repeatedly filing that MACV felt that it would get a minimum of 640,000; in Washington, his colleagues working for the same magazine and covering Defense, not privy to the kind of informal atmosphere which existed in Saigon, working through weaker sources, kept knocking the figure down, saying nothing like that was in the works. It was in the works, all right, but it was not a figure which Washington wished to give out; only four or five men knew of it in Washington and they weren’t talking. Similarly, four or five men knew of it in Saigon and a few of them were talking. Saigon, Lyndon Johnson would always find to his annoyance, was always leakier than Washington.
There were, of course, some indications that the war was changing, that it was sliding from a small combat-troop war to a big one. In late November in Saigon, after a meeting of the mission council, Barry Zorthian, the embassy public affairs officer, told a few select reporters that the strategy had gone from holding the country and preventing the other side from winning, to winning ourselves. Victory. Westmoreland, he said, had a schedule which went as high as 750,000 men. “The name of the game has changed,” Zorthian said. “Now we’re going to win.” One of the reporters he spoke to was Stanley Karnow of the Washington Post, who had an uneasy feeling that they had changed policies and objectives in midstream, that this was akin to crossing the 38th parallel in Korea, and that it might have consequences. Of course, there was a certain inevitability to it; a man like Lyndon Johnson would not invest that much for a tie game; Johnson always liked to talk in poker terms and analogies; the more you put into the pot, the more you had to take out as a winner.
If McNamara had learned some of the bitter truth during the November visit, he managed to conceal it admirably. During the trip he had gone to Danang to inspect what the Marines were doing there. While at Danang he had been given a very thorough briefing by a Marine colonel on the situation. The Marines were doing very well in pacification, it seemed. Wherever they appeared and fought, the Vietcong immediately moved back. There was, however, a problem. Once the Marines seemed to have pacified an area, they moved on, and there was a tendency of the Vietcong to come back, and do just as well as before. The result was a danger of spreading the American troops too thin.
That night when McNamara was back in Saigon, he asked Sander Vanocur of NBC, who had hitched a ride with him, what he thought of the day. Vanocur replied that he was very depressed. McNamara, surprised, asked why, and Vanocur answered that we were going to be spread too thin, that it seemed to him a bottomless pit. “Every pit has its bottom, Mr. Vanocur,” said the Secretary.
For those who had expected the other side to oblige by folding quickly, the contrary evidence was now in. For McNamara, who had already been primed by McNaughton for some time on the dangers of counterescalation, the new implications were quite obvious. Since he knew there was no easy way out, he had become a frustrated and divided man. As a weapon of interdiction the bombing had failed, and as a weapon to push Hanoi to the table it had failed; yet he had no other answers and had to recommend a steadily ascending rate of bombing—the rate of sorties went up from 2,500 a month to 10,000 a month in the next year, all of it futile. So by the end of 1965 he was already trapped. While he was negotiating with Westmoreland for more and more troops, though he sensed the hopelessness of the troop escalation, he was at the same time becoming a leading advocate of negotiations within the government. But even now he could not speak openly about what he really felt, how dark he thought it might all be; he could not lose credibility and say that he had miscalculated, that all his forecasts were wrong. That would cost him his credibility, and his effectiveness; he would be known as a dove and he would soon be out. So when he pushed for negotiations at the tail end of 1965, he sold it in a particularly disingenuous way—we could have a bombing pause and try to negotiate, and then, after we had shown that the other side was unwilling to be conciliatory, we would have far greater national support. Worse, because he was committed to force and to the war, he could only offer Hanoi what amounted to surrender. So he was pushing negotiations, but they were doomed negotiations on hopeless terms, and yet in the very effort to bring about negotiations, he was diminishing his credibility with the President.
Some of the particular dilemma of his and the American position, however, had already been seen by his trusted deputy John McNaughton. McNaughton had long feared that the North Vietnamese would respond the way they had, and along with George Ball, he was probably the least surprised member of the upper level of the government. In addition he was picking up other sounds, which bothered him, and this was the changing rationale of the military. At a dinner party in January 1966 he told Henry Brandon that in August 1965 General Wheeler had said that the American aim was victory, and therefore we were putting more men into Vietnam. Now, McNaughton said, Wheeler was using a different rationale—he was saying that unless more men were sent, then American casualties would rise. Thus McNaughton realized that the Americans were in a special kind of trap. In mid-January 1966 he wrote a memo for McNamara:
. . . The dilemma. We are in a dilemma. It is that the situation may be “polar.” That is, it may be that while going for victory we have the strength for compromise, but if we go for compromise, we have the strength only for defeat—this because a revealed lowering of sights from victory to compromise (a) will unhinge the GVN and (b) will give the DRV the “smell of blood.” . . .
McNaughton was clearly influencing McNamara, as were events. When McNamara first came back from meeting with Westy he had rather positively recommended the boost to 400,000 Americans. But two months later, in late January 1966, discussing the same subject, he was more cautious, and seemingly more pessimistic. He wrote:
. . . Our intelligence estimate is that the present Communist policy is to continue to prosecute the war vigorously in the South. They continue to believe that the war will be a long one, that time is their ally, and that their own staying power is superior to ours. They recognize that the U.S. reinforcements of 1965 signify a determination to avoid defeat, and that more U.S. troops can be expected. Even though the Communists will continue to suffer heavily from GVN and U.S. ground and air action, we expect them, upon learning of any U.S. intentions to augment its forces, to boost their own commitment and to test U.S. capabilities and will to persevere at a higher level of conflict and casualties . . .
If the U.S. were willing to commit enough forces—perhaps 600,000 men or more—we could ultimately prevent the DRV/VC from sustaining the conflict at a significant level. When this point was reached, however, the question of Chinese intervention would become critical. . . .
It follows, therefore, that the odds are about even that, even with the recommended deployments, we will be faced in early 1967 with a military standoff at a much higher level, with pacification hardly under way, and with requirements for the deployment of still more U.S. forces.
So McNamara was boxed in, seeing the darkness, recommending more troops as a means of bringing negotiations which were, given the U.S. attitude, hopeless. The real point of it all was that the civilians in Washington, those men who above all else felt they controlled events, had, by the end of 1965, completely lost control. They no longer determined policies, and they did not even know it. One set of reins belonged to Hanoi, the other set to Westmoreland. The future increments were now being determined in Hanoi by the Politburo there, and in Saigon by Westmoreland and his staff. If Westmoreland had enough troops, then Hanoi would send more; if Hanoi sent more, then Westmoreland would want more. The cycle was out of their hands; nor had they set any real limits on Westmoreland as far as his use of troops in-country
was concerned (that is, inside South Vietnam as opposed to attacking neighboring sanctuaries). He was the General, he would use them as he saw fit. His projections were for a long war, larger and larger units fighting, a higher and higher rate of combat, the enemy eventually becoming exhausted. But the Commander in Chief of the enemy forces did not have to run for re-election in 1968.
The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library) Page 95