Vietnam

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Other types of punji traps sprang up, impaling the luckless grunt. Wooden or metal spikes would often be smeared with human excrement to give anyone not killed directly blood poisoning. Trails also concealed mines and grenades rigged to tripwires. These were often hidden under water in places where patrols had to wade through swamps. The VC also littered areas with 'toe-poppers,' upright bullets half-buried with the primer resting on a nail or firing pin. When a GI stood on one it would blow his foot off. Some 10,000 US servicemen lost at least one limb in Vietnam – more than in World War II and Korea put together. Grenades were attached to bamboo arches over the trails so that their shrapnel caused messy head and face wounds. The idea was to sap the morale of the grunts. It also had an added political bonus. An eighteen-year-old GI who had just seen a buddy mutilated by a booby trap was more likely to commit atrocities. Even experienced jungle fighters used local peasants as human booby-trap detectors, causing the Vietnamese people to hate and mistrust the Americans.

  The entrances to tunnel complexes were usually surrounded by mines – GIs tended to avoid places where their buddies had been killed or wounded. The entrance shafts were often booby-trapped with a slit at about the level of the eyes of anyone hanging by his fingertips from the lip before dropping down. A spear would be thrust through the slit. Items GIs liked to take as souvenirs were booby-trapped. Even coconuts were filled with explosives. Nowhere in Vietnam was safe. It was even rumoured that prostitutes in Saigon would booby trap their sexual parts with broken glass. Among the Australians there was talk of a young squaddie whose penis was sliced in two by a razor blade mounted on a cork inside a prostitute's vagina – though no one ever met the man or woman concerned. But bad things did happen. One young GI was bought a prostitute by his buddies for his birthday so that he could lose his virginity. After she had relieved him of it, she left a bomb under his bed which blew his arms and legs off. Marine fliers were not allowed downtown in Da Nang in 1965 after a booby-trapped cigarette lighter bought from the street vendor blew a Marine's head off. In another case, a toddler was booby-trapped with explosives so when a kindly GI picked it up, the two of them were blown to smithereens. The GIs got their own back, salting enemy ammunition dumps with doctored rifle bullets and mortar rounds that would blow up in the weapon. The idea was to wound the enemy, not kill him. The VC and NVA had limited medical facilities and an injured man put a lot of strain on their resources. It also bred in the enemy soldiers a mistrust of their own weapons.

  Even without the booby traps, life for the grunts in the jungles was bad enough. It was full of blood-sucking insects and leeches that had to be burnt off with a cigarette. There are also 133 species of snake in the jungles of Vietnam – 131 of them poisonous. Some had venom that killed within hours. The damp rotted everything. Monsoon rains turned jungle tracks to mudslides, chilled GIs who had acclimatised to the stifling heat, gave them trench foot, rotted their kit, and turned C-rations into a greasy, cold soup. And twenty-four hours a day they had to be ready for ambush by an unseen enemy.

  Conditions for the VC were even worse. Vietnamese peasants were used to life in the paddy fields and were no more at home in the jungle than Americans were, and they were less well prepared. Wearing sandals made them very vulnerable to snake bites. Thousands would have been saved if they had solid army boots. Antivenin tablets were issued, one to be swallowed; a second to be chewed and placed on the bite. However, the Vietcong had no defence against mosquitoes. More Vietcong died of malaria than of any other cause. Even those who survived were permanently weakened. With few medical supplies, Vietcong soldiers did their best with traditional remedies, but any wound almost inevitably resulted in a painful and lingering death.

  Vietcong troops were constantly hungry. Twice a day they ate a small ball of cold rice made palatable with a few small chillies and occasionally a little dried meat, fish or salt. One chicken would feed up to thirty men. Most suffered from vitamin deficiencies. Bomb craters filled with water were stocked with fish and ducks. Otherwise they would eat monkey, rat, dog, and even tiger and elephant, which is, apparently, tough and tasteless. Some ate moths attracted by the flame of their lamps. The Vietcong would also scavenge C rations discarded by the ARVN and their American allies, until the GIs started booby-trapping them. Vietcong soldiers were in constant danger of discovery. Where a cooking fire was lit, an elaborate chimney had to be constructed to carry the smoke away into the earth. They also lived in constant fear of artillery and air raids. If they stopped for more than half a day, they would dig in.

  In base areas, they lived below ground in tunnels. This was no picnic. The air was bad and what food they had rotted quickly. The tunnels were full of mosquitoes, ants, spiders, and parasites called chiggers that burrowed under the skin causing intensive irritation. Often dead bodies were dragged below ground to foil the Americans' body counts. But their rotting flesh filled the tunnels with a sickening stench. The wounded operated on without anaesthetic in the underground hospitals often begged to be taken above ground to die. Nevertheless an underground lifestyle flourished. There were morale-boosting lectures and other entertainments. Weddings were held and babies born.

  Initially, the Americans knew nothing about the tunnels. Indeed, the US Army's biggest base in South Vietnam was built right on top of a Vietcong tunnel system at Chu Chi. When the 25th Infantry Division arrived in 1966, an enterprising VC called Huynh Van Co and two comrades hid underground for a week while the GIs settled in. Then they began to emerge at night to steal food, sabotage equipment, and set off explosives: the newly arrived 25th thought they were being mortared from outside the perimeter. After seriously undermining the 25th's morale, Huynh Van Co and his comrades withdrew undetected and their tunnels were never discovered.

  After Operation Crimp, the American forces tried destroying the tunnel systems with explosives or pumping burning acetylene gas down them. This was ineffective due to the hardness of the tunnel walls and the doors and seals the VC had installed. Dogs were sent down, but they were easily killed by the Vietcong or their booby traps. There was no alternative but to send men down. Special teams of volunteers called 'tunnel rats' were formed under a southerner named Captain Herbert Thornton, the Chemical Officer of the 1st Infantry Division. He narrowly escaped death when crawling behind a rookie tunnel rat who detonated a booby trap. The explosion in such a confined space deafened Thornton in one ear, though the rookie's body protected him from much of the blast.

  While a high-tech war raged above ground, the tunnel rats took on the enemy on their own territory underground with nothing more than a flashlight, a handgun, and a knife. Facing all manner of booby traps along with armed men hidden in the dark recesses of their own tunnel systems, the tunnel rats earned enormous respect from their above-ground colleagues. Smaller men, often Hispanics, were used, often accompanied by 'Kit Carson Scouts': Vietcong who had defected to the Americans. They were used to negotiate with cornered VC and persuade them to surrender. Valuable intelligence was gained this way. Careful searches were made as the Vietcong's battle plans, along with other vital documents, were stored underground. The tunnel rats developed their own procedures. They never fired more than three shots without reloading, otherwise the enemy would know you were out of ammunition. They also whistled 'Dixie' when they emerged, as a mud-covered figure clambering out of a tunnel shaft might be mistaken for a VC. The tunnel rats had their own code of honour too. No dead tunnel rat was ever left underground and rats would often disobey direct orders to return underground and kill whoever had killed one of theirs. And they were not without a sense of irony: their unofficial motto was cod Latin for 'not worth a rat's ass'.

  The year 1966 saw the big build up in Vietnam, with 385,500 men in country by the end of the year. However, only 14 per cent of US servicemen deployed were front-line troops. The rest were concerned with administration, construction, and logistics, much of it dedicated to providing the men with everything from colour TVs to Napoleon brandy. By 1968, there were f
orty ice-cream plants in Vietnam and over 760,000 tons of supplies were being delivered every month. With American goods on sale in the PXs, American movies and stage shows, American music on the radio station Armed Forces Vietnam, American TV and chilled American beer, it was possible for rear-echelon troops who never left the base to imagine they were still back home. This, General Westmoreland remarked, was 'one of the more remarkable accomplishments of American troops in Vietnam'.

  President Johnson wanted to go further in the Americanisation of Vietnam. A liberal Democrat, Johnson had already begun his 'Great Society' reforms at home, an enormous programme of social welfare legislation that included his 'war against poverty', federal support for education, medical care for the aged through an expanded social security programme, and an extension of African-American civil rights which were still being restricted by state voter registration laws in the South. In February 1966, Johnson met Premier Ky in Hawaii and offered to extend his 'Great Society' to Vietnam, saying, 'We are determined to win not only military victory over hunger, disease, and despair'.

  But Ky was no liberal Democrat and he was losing support at home. When the mayor of Da Nang rebelled against the Saigon government, Ky sent in troops, and America was forced to look the other way while its ally Ky, a military dictator, butchered elected representatives who were exercising the right of free speech.

  If that was not irony enough, the cost of the Vietnam War, both in monetary and political terms, killed Johnson's Great Society. After he left office, Johnson told his biographer Doris Kearns:

  I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. If I left the woman I really loved – the Great Society – in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser, and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.

  With South Vietnam virtually in a state of civil war, Johnson realised that his ally could not be relied upon and the prosecution of the war would have to be done by the Americans. All he could do was escalate the war. But even though B-52 strategic bombers dropped hundreds of tons of bombs on the Ho Chi Minh trail, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara estimated that 4,500 men a month were being infiltrated into South Vietnam. B-52s bombed Hanoi and North Vietnam's principal port Haiphong, destroying up to 90 per cent of North Vietnam's oil reserves. But this only served to harden the Communist world's support for Hanoi, while turning allies, such as Britain and France, against US involvement. Civilian casualties mounted. After a visit to South Vietnam, US Representative Clement Zablocki claimed that five civilians died for every one Vietcong killed. The war also began to spill over into neighboring Laos and Cambodia. Westmoreland asked for more men. By the end of 1966, there were 400,000 US troops in Vietnam, but the Vietcong still seemed to be able to attack American bases, seemingly at will.

  The American response grew more extreme. Armour was deployed, particularly the M113 Armored Personnel Carrier. These heavily armed 'battlefield taxis' which carried eleven troops, plus the driver, into battle at up to 40 miles an hour achieved some success in a series of battles along the Minh Thanh road in June and July 1966, when the 1st Infantry Division opened Route 13 from Loc Ninh to Saigon and blocked the VC's attempt to withdraw into Cambodia. On 9 July, ACAV's (Armored Cavalry Assault Vehicles) broke through the enemy's flanks and decimated elements of the 9th Vietcong Division, killing over 240 VC.

  However, the M113 were vulnerable to anti-tank mines and the men would pack the floor with sand bags, flak jackets, empty ammunition boxes and even C-ration tins full of sand for protection. The VC and NVA were also armed with 57mm and 75mm recoilless rifles and RPG-2 rocket propelled grenades, which turned the inside of the M113 into a blizzard of lacerating metal fragments. Grunts often found it safer to ride on the roof. The tactic devised by the 1st Squadron of the 4th Cavalry Regiment to avoid enemy fire was the 'herringbone defence'. The ACAVs would move forward in a criss-cross pattern, ending with guns pointing in all directions and giving overlapping fields of fire. Then they would unleash a 'mad minute', sixty seconds of fire from the M113's 0.5-inch machine-gun and two M60 general purpose machine-guns or M163 20mm Gatling guns whose armourpiercing, ball and tracer was designed to flatten everything in sight.

  Despite, the 1st Air Cav's victory in the Ia Drang valley, fighting continued in the Central Highlands. Huge operations were mounted by US, ROK and ARVN troops, now under close US supervision, but no matter how many victories they won and no matter how high the body count – 2,389 enemy casualties claimed in Operation Masher/White Wing in Binh Dinh province alone – the moment the troops moved on the area was reoccupied by the Vietcong and the NVA who were turning up in the South in increasing numbers.

  US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara is briefed by General Westmoreland in Vietnam, 10 October 1966.

  4

  THE GROWING COMMITMENT

  IN THE HIGHLANDS, the Green Berets still worked with Khmer, Mnong, Montagnard and other tribesmen who were ethnically different from the Vietnamese and persecuted by both Communist and anti-Communist Vietnamese alike. They were organised into Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGs). The cidgees often brought their families into Special Forces camps for such protection as these afforded them. But these remote camps strung along the border with Cambodia and Laos came under increasing pressure from the Communist forces. Again the US forces adopted a sledgehammer approach to defending their forward bases in the shape of 'Puff the Magic Dragon'. These were AC-47s – armed C-47 Dakota transport planes – named for the song by the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, to the singers' great annoyance. They carried three six-barrelled Gatling guns, each capable of delivering 6,000 rounds a minute, along the port side. The Magic Dragon would drop a flare to illuminate the target, then circle, sometimes in pairs, raining down bullets on the enemy and forcing even the toughest NVA formations to withdraw. 'Spooky', the 4th Air Commando Squadron who flew them, sometimes also worked with PSYWAR C-47s of the 5th Air Commando Squadron. These 'Bullshit Bombers' carried huge speakers that blasted the jungles with appeals from the South Vietnamese government urging the VC to defect. This was not ineffective: by 1967, 75,000 guerrillas had come over to the government side on the promise of money, better food and conditions, and a chance to see their family and friends.

  Even so, the US forces were amazed at how much punishment VC units could take without cracking, the more so as many were drafted at gunpoint. This did not necessarily make them any worse fighters than other conscript armies. After all, most of the Americans and Australians fighting in Vietnam were draftees. But the Vietcong had unique methods of dealing with the problems handling the hardships of their plight and homesickness among recruits, many of whom had not been outside their village before. Each recruit joined a three-man cell, which included at least one veteran. They would stick together through thick and thin as long as they survived, so they formed the strongest of ties. In turn, these three-man cells were attached to three-cell squads, which made up three-squad platoons. Few were Communists or had any knowledge of Marxism. Nothing was done to remedy this. Propaganda lectures concentrated on Vietnam's historic struggle to oust foreign invaders – first the Chinese, then the Japanese, then the French. The war against the South Vietnamese government and the US was portrayed as a continuation of the French anti-colonial war with the US in the role of a neocolonial power. Occasionally, when morale was low or a unit was doing particularly badly, a political officer would organise a session of self-criticism. But these attempts to shame men into greater effort were far more humane than the hard physical punishments other armies use. The factor most on the side of the Vietcong
was that they were peasant farmers, used to backbreaking toil, deprivation, and hardship. Few saw their families again. For most a terrible death awaited. They were gassed like vermin in their tunnels, buried alive by artillery strikes, incinerated by napalm, or blown into unidentifiable hamburger by bombs. But what the Vietcong and NVA feared most was the B-52 strikes. They called them the 'whispering death' because the first they knew of the presence of the bombers high above the jungle canopy and the clouds was the whistling of their bomb. Aerial bombardments could go on for days or weeks at a time. Even the most battle-hardened veterans lost control of their bodily functions, soiling their pants and shaking uncontrollably. Some went mad and no one who survived could ever be cured of the abject terror a B-52 strike inspired. A B-52 mission could drop up to 54,000 pounds of bombs on a single target.

  By 1966, B-52s began to strike against the Ho Chi Minh trail. The North Vietnamese had instituted a series of control points every three miles, where trucks could be hidden from US reconnaissance planes. As the Ho Chi Minh trail ran for most of its length outside Vietnam and US rules of engagement required that American planes only attack vehicles actually moving down the trail, bringing them in low and making them easy targets for the Communists' anti-aircraft defences. High-level carpet bombing was thought to be the answer. Tran Thi Truyen, a sixteen-year-old nurse who served in a field hospital in southern Laos, recalled how intense American bombing denuded the jungle and there was no place to hide. During her month-long march down the trail, she carried a rifle, a sixty-pound knapsack, and a shovel. When American planes came overhead, her group would disperse and dig foxholes. After the bombing had stopped, she said she could not focus her eyes and her head ached for hours. Wounded Vietnamese soldiers were brought up the trail for her to treat in her underground hospital. Most were so badly wounded, nothing could be done for them. Eventually Tran contracted malaria and was sent back to the North.