The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Whether the young men were phantoms or not, he ceased to think of them. Another method of escape, suicide, replaced them in his musings, and despite the jailer’s precautions (no mirror, no belt or tie or shoelaces), he had devised a way to do it. For in his cell, too, was a ceiling bulb that burned constantly; also, unlike Hickock, he had in his cell a broom, and by pressing the broom brush against the bulb he could unscrew it. One night, he dreamed that he had unscrewed the bulb, broken it, and, with the broken glass, cut his wrists and ankles. “I felt all breath and light leaving me,” he said, in a subsequent description of his sensations. “The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird.” Throughout his life—as a child, poor and meanly treated; as a foot-loose youth; as an imprisoned man—the yellow bird, huge and parrot-faced, had soared across his dreams, an avenging angel who savaged his enemies or, as now, rescued him in moments of mortal danger. “It lifted me,” he said. “I could have been light as a mouse. We went up, up. I could see the square below, men running, yelling, the sheriff shooting at us, everybody sore as hell because I was free, I was flying, I was better than any of them.”

  Jonathan Schell

  JULY 15, 1967

  UP TO A few months ago, Ben Suc was a prosperous village of some thirty-five hundred people. It had a recorded history going back to the late eighteenth century, when the Nguyen Dynasty, which ruled the southern part of Vietnam, fortified it and used it as a base in its campaign to subjugate the natives of the middle region of the country. In recent years, most of the inhabitants of Ben Suc, which lay inside a small loop of the slowly meandering Saigon River, in Binh Duong Province, about thirty miles from the city of Saigon, were engaged in tilling the exceptionally fertile paddies bordering the river and in tending the extensive orchards of mangoes, jackfruit, and an unusual strain of large grapefruit that is a famous product of the Saigon River region. The village also supported a small group of merchants, most of them of Chinese descent, who ran shops in the marketplace, including a pharmacy that sold a few modern medicines to supplement traditional folk cures of herbs and roots; a bicycle shop that also sold second-hand motor scooters; a hairdresser’s; and a few small restaurants, which sold mainly noodles. These merchants were far wealthier than the other villagers; some of them even owned second-hand cars for their businesses. The village had no electricity and little machinery of any kind. Most families kept pigs, chickens, ducks, one or two cows for milk, and a team of water buffaloes for labor, and harvested enough rice and vegetables to sell some in the market every year. Since Ben Suc was a rich village, the market was held daily, and it attracted farmers from neighboring villages as well as the Ben Suc farmers….

  Troops of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (usually written “ARVN” and pronounced “Arvin” by the Americans) maintained an outpost in Ben Suc from 1955 until late 1964, when it was routed in an attack by the National Liberation Front (or N.L.F., or Vietcong, or V.C.), which kidnapped and later executed the government-appointed village chief and set up a full governing apparatus of its own. The Front demanded—and got—not just the passive support of the Ben Suc villagers but their active participation both in the governing of their own village and in the war effort. In the first months, the Front called several village-wide meetings. These began with impassioned speeches by leaders of the Front, who usually opened with a report of victories over the Americans and the “puppet troops” of the government, emphasizing in particular the downing of helicopters or planes and the disabling of tanks. Two months after the “liberation” of the village, the Front repelled an attack by ARVN troops, who abandoned three American M-113 armored personnel-carriers on a road leading into the village when they fled. The disabled hulks of these carriers served the speakers at the village meetings as tangible proof of their claimed superiority over the Americans, despite all the formidable and sophisticated weaponry of the intruders. Occasionally, a badly burned victim of an American napalm attack or an ex-prisoner of the government who had been tortured by ARVN troops was brought to Ben Sue to offer testimony and show his wounds to the villagers, giving the speakers an opportunity to condemn American and South Vietnamese–government atrocities. They painted a monstrous picture of the giant Americans, accusing them not only of bombing villages but also of practicing cannibalism and slitting the bellies of pregnant women. The speeches usually came to a close with a stirring call for support in the struggle and for what was sometimes called “the full cooperation and solidarity among the people to beat the American aggressors and the puppet troops.” The speeches were often followed by singing and dancing, particularly on important National Liberation Front holidays, such as the founding day of the Front, December 20th, and Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, May 19th….

  People from many villages around Ben Sue who had been left homeless after ground battles, bombing, and shelling migrated to the comparative safety of other villages, to live with relatives or just fend for themselves. When the small village of Mi Hung, across the river from Ben Suc, was heavily bombed, at least a hundred of its people moved into Ben Suc. During 1966, a scattering of refugees from other bombed villages had also found their way there. Then, in the second week of the month of January, 1967—when the population of Ben Suc was further swollen by relatives and friends from neighboring villages who had come to help with the harvest, which was exceptionally abundant that season, despite the war—the Americans launched in Binh Duong Province what they called Operation Cedar Falls. It was the largest operation of the war up to that time.

  · · ·

  For the Americans, the entire Saigon River area around Ben Suc, including particularly a notorious forty-square-mile stretch of jungle known as the Iron Triangle, had been a source of nagging setbacks. Small operations there were defeated; large operations conducted there turned up nothing. The big guns shelled and bombed around the clock but produced no tangible results. The enemy “body count” was very low, and the count of “pacified” villages stood at zero. In fact, a number of villages that had been converted into “strategic hamlets” in Operation Sunrise, launched three years earlier, had run their government protectors out of town and reverted to Front control. Late in 1966, the American high command designed the Cedar Falls operation as a drastic method of reducing the stubborn resistance throughout the Iron Triangle area. Named after the home town, in Iowa, of a 1st Division lieutenant who had been posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, Operation Cedar Falls involved thirty thousand men, including logistical support, and it was planned and executed entirely by the Americans, without the advance knowledge of a single Vietnamese in the province. The decision that no Vietnamese was a good enough security risk was based on previous experiences, in which the enemy had learned about operations ahead of time and had laid traps for the attackers or simply disappeared. It also reflected the Army’s growing tendency to mistrust all Vietnamese, regardless of their politics. On several American bases, entrance is forbidden to all Vietnamese, including ARVN soldiers, after a certain hour in the evening. During Cedar Falls, security was particularly tight….

  The attack on Ben Suc was planned for January 8th—the day before the thrust into the Triangle. I joined a group of six newsmen outside a field tent on the newly constructed base at the village of Lai Khé, to hear Major Allen C. Dixon, of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, outline the plan and purpose of this part of the operation. “We have two targets, actually,” he explained, pointing to a map propped on a pile of sandbags. “There’s the Iron Triangle, and then there’s the village of Ben Suc. This village is a political center, as far as the V.C. is concerned, and it’s been solid V.C. since the French pulled out in ’56. We haven’t even been able to get a census taken in there to find out who’s there.” Most of the American officers who led the operation were not aware that ARVN had had an outpost in Ben Suc for the nine years preceding 1964. They saw the village as “solid V.C. as long as we can remember.” Major Dixon continued, “Now, we can’t tell you whether A, B, and C are
at their desks or not, but we know that there’s important infrastructure there—what we’re really after here is the infrastructure of the V.C. We’ve run several operations in this area before with ARVN, but it’s always been hit and run—you go in there, leave the same day, and the V.C. is back that night. Now, we realize that you can’t go in and then just abandon the people to the V.C. This time we’re really going to do a thorough job of it: we’re going to clean out the place completely. The people are all going to be resettled in a temporary camp near Phu Cuong, the provincial capital down the river, and then we’re going to move everything out—livestock, furniture, and all of their possessions. The purpose here is to deprive the V.C. of this area for good. The people are going to Phu Cuong by barge and by truck, and when they get there the provincial government takes over—it has its own Revolutionary Development people to handle that, and U.S. AID is going to help.”

  A reporter asked what would happen to the evacuated village.

  “Well, we don’t have a certain decision or information on that at this date, but the village may be levelled,” Major Dixon answered, and went on to say, “The attack is going to go tomorrow morning and it’s going to be a complete surprise. Five hundred men of the 1st Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade are going to be lifted right into the village itself in sixty choppers, with Zero Hour at zero eight hundred hours. From some really excellent intelligence from that area, we have learned that the perimeter of the village is heavily mined, and that’s why we’ll be going into the village itself. Sixty choppers is as large a number as we’ve ever used in an attack of this nature. Simultaneous with the attack, choppers with speakers on them are going to start circling over the village, telling the villagers to assemble in the center of the town or they will be considered V.C.s. It’s going to be hard to get the pilots on those choppers to go in low to make those announcements audible, but everything depends on that. Also, we’re going to drop leaflets to the villagers.” (Later, I picked up one of these leaflets. On one side, the flags of the Republic of Vietnam, the United States, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, and Australia were represented in color; on the other side was a drawing of a smiling ARVN soldier with his arm around a smiling soldier of the National Liberation Front. The text, written in English, Vietnamese, and Korean, read, “Safe conduct pass to be honored by all Vietnamese Government Agencies and Allied Forces.” I learned that the Chieu Hoi, or Open Arms, program would be in operation during the attack. In an attempt to encourage defections from the Front, the government was opening its arms to all hoi chanh, or returnees who turned themselves in. Hence the unusually friendly tone of the leaflets.)

  About the encirclement of the village, Major Dixon said, “There are going to be three landing zones for the choppers. Then the men will take up positions to prevent people from escaping from the village. Five minutes after the landing, we’re going to bring artillery fire and air strikes into the whole area in the woods to the north of the village to prevent people from escaping by that route. At zero eight thirty hours, we’re going to lift in men from the 2nd Brigade below the woods to the south to block off that route. After the landing is completed, some of our gunships are going to patrol the area at treetop level to help keep the people inside there from getting out. After the area is secure, we’re lifting a crew of ARVN soldiers into the center of the village to help us with the work there. We want to get the Vietnamese dealing with their own people as much as we can here. Now, we’re hoping that opposition is going to be light, that we’re going to be able to get this thing over in one lightning blow, but if they’ve got intelligence on this, the way they did on some of our other operations, they could have something ready for us and this could be a hot landing. It could be pretty hairy.”

  For several reasons, the plan itself was an object of keen professional satisfaction to the men who devised and executed it. In a sense, it reversed the search-and-destroy method. This time, they would destroy first and search later—at their leisure, in the interrogation rooms. After all the small skirmishes and ambushes, after months of lobbing tons of bombs and shells on vague targets in Free Strike Zones, the size, complexity, and careful coordination of the Cedar Falls operation satisfied the military men’s taste for careful large-scale planning. Every troop movement was precisely timed, and there would be full use of air support and artillery, in a design that would unfold over a wide terrain and, no matter what the opposition might be, would almost certainly produce the tangible result of evacuating several thousand hostile civilians, thereby depriving the V.C. of hundreds of “structures,” even if the “infrastructure” was not present. This time, unless the entire village sneaked off into the forest, the objective of the operation could not wholly elude the troops, as it had in previous campaigns. Thus, a measure of success was assured from the start. In concluding his briefing to the newsmen, Major Dixon remarked, “I think this really ought to be quite fascinating. There’s this new element of surprise, of going right into the enemy village with our choppers and then bringing in our tremendous firepower. Anyway, it ought to be something to see.”

  That evening, I was sent by helicopter to a newly constructed base ten miles north of Ben Suc, at Dau Tieng, where Colonel James A. Grimsley, commanding officer of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, was winding up his briefing of his officers on the next morning’s attack on Ben Suc. The officers were assembled in a tent, in which a single light bulb hung from the ceiling. “The purpose of this operation is to move in there absolutely as fast as we can get control of the situation,” Colonel Grimsley said. “I want to emphasize that you’re going to have only about ten seconds to empty each chopper, because another chopper will be coming right in after it. A last word to men landing below the southwest woods: Your job is to keep anyone from escaping down that way. Now, of course, if it’s just a bunch of women and children wandering down through the woods, who obviously don’t know what they’re doing, don’t fire, but otherwise you’ll have to take them under fire. The choppers will be taking off at zero seven twenty-three hours tomorrow morning. Are there any questions?” There were no questions, and the officers filed out of the tent into the darkness.

  · · ·

  The men of the 1st Division’s 2nd Brigade spent the day before the battle quietly, engaging in few pep talks or discussions among themselves about the dangers ahead. Each man seemed to want to be alone with his thoughts. They spent the night before the attack in individual tents on the dusty ground of a French rubber plantation, now the Americans’ new base at Dau Tieng. The airstrip was complete, but not many buildings were up yet, and construction materials lay in piles alongside freshly bulldozed roads. The men were brought in by helicopter in the afternoon from their own base and were led to their sleeping area among the rubber trees. Most of the transporting of American troops in Vietnam is done by helicopter or plane. So the men, hopping from American base to American base, view rural Vietnam only from the air until they see it through gunsights on a patrol or a search-and-destroy mission.

  Darkness fell at about six-thirty. Thanks to a cloudy sky over the high canopy of rubber leaves, the area was soon in perfect blackness. A few men talked quietly in small groups for an hour or so. Others turned to their radios for company, listening to rock-’n’-roll and country-and-Western music broadcast by the American armed-services radio station in Saigon. The great majority simply went to sleep. Sleep that night, however, was difficult. Artillery fire from the big guns on the base began at around eleven o’clock and continued until about three o’clock, at a rate of four or five rounds every ten minutes. Later in the night, along with the sharp crack and whine of outgoing artillery the men heard the smothered thumping of bombing, including the rapid series of deep explosions that indicates a B-52 raid. Yet if the outgoing artillery fire had not been unusually near—so near that it sent little shocks of air against the walls of the tents—the sleepers would probably not have been disturbed very much. Because artillery fire is a routine occurrence at night o
n almost every American base in Vietnam, and because everyone knows that it is all American or Allied, it arouses no alarm, and no curiosity. Furthermore, because most of it is harassment and interdiction fire, lobbed into Free Strike Zones, it does not ordinarily indicate a clash with the enemy. It does make some men edgy when they first arrive, but soon it becomes no more than a half-noticed dull crashing in the distance. Only the distinctive sound of mortar fire—a popping that sounds like a champagne cork leaving a bottle—can make conversations suddenly halt in readiness for a dash into a ditch or bunker. Throughout that night of January 7th, the roaring of one of the diesel generators at the base served as a reminder to the men that they were sleeping on a little island of safety, encircled by coils of barbed wire and minefields, in a hostile countryside.