Vietnam

by Nigel Cawthorne

  As a result of the American troops' free-spending ways, the Vietnamese economy boomed. Everyone had jobs. Boys shined shoes. Women found jobs as hootch girls, cleaning barracks and, often, reporting anything of interest to the local VC. Taxi-drivers, black marketeers, bar owners, brothel keepers, pimps, shopkeepers, and waiters made small fortunes. But the influx of dollars caused inflation in the Vietnamese piastre that was soon running at 170 per cent, which meant that ordinary Vietnamese struggled with deprivation as they watched Americans living in unimaginable luxury, causing untold resentment. Many Vietnamese felt that if the US government did not spend so much on amenities for the troops there would be more to spend on the victims of war.

  The GIs were also largely ignorant of and indifferent to local customs. Despite the widespread prostitution, the Vietnamese had puritanical courtship codes for which the Americans showed no respect, and respectable Vietnamese women were shamelessly harassed. Americans' conspicuous consumption also offended the sensibilities of the fastidious Vietnamese. While bar owners and shopkeepers happily raked in the Yankee dollar, they made only the flimsiest attempt to disguise the contempt they felt for their American customers. After all, they had been educated by the French.

  This all took a terrible toll on American morale, with the people they were supposed to be defending looking down on them. As well as defending the people, the GIs were also supposed to be in Vietnam to defend democracy, but there was precious little democracy to defend. The 1966 election for the constitutional assembly was boycotted by the Buddhists and two and a half million people in Vietcong-controlled areas were prevented from voting. When the Buddhists of Hué and Da Nang called for the resignation of Premier Ky's military government, Ky denounced them as communists and used the army to smash all opposition to his government. Even though Ky was persuaded to stand aside and run for vice-president on Thieu's ticket, it was widely rumoured that the 1967 election was rigged. The GIs' own newspapers ran stories about corruption in the South Vietnamese government. The Grunt Free Press – an in-country version of the hippy underground press that was flourishing in the rest of the world – carried the story of a man who became a province chief by getting his wife to lose $45,000 at poker to the wife of the party boss. It also investigated the crooked NCO club stewards, smugglers, Indian moneychangers, mafiosi, local gangsters, drug dealers, surplus arms dealers, and crooked contractors who were milking $20 million a year out of Vietnam.

  The Grunt Free Press began in 1967 as a glossy magazine. It sold in Stars and Stripes bookstores as an in-country alternative to the military's official publication. In 1969, it went hippy. The nudes were more explicit, the humour blacker, the op-ed pieces more critical. One article noted that you could bomb North Vietnam back into the Stone Age, even nuke it, but that still would not get rid of the sniper at the end of the runway at Tan Son Nhut, who probably worked as a barber by day, cutting the hair of the US troops. Grunt Free Press had only one editorial rule, no-one was ever allowed to die in its pages – not in the stories, pictures, or cartoons. Circulation climbed to 30,000 and each issue contained a double-page centrefold poster, usually with an anti-war theme. They all contained a nude – an Asian girl: Grunt Free Press left the round-eyes to Playboy. She would be surrounded by peace symbols – the stylised cross in a circle borrowed from the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – and cryptic messages in psychedelic calligraphy.

  These posters adorned walls the length of South Vietnam. The principal artist was Tran Dinh Thuc, a South Vietnamese student who had strong peacenik leanings. When the Vietnamese authorities found he was responsible, they tried to draft him, but appreciative readers smuggled him on board a plane to Darwin.

  The editor of Grunt Free Press, Ken Sams, was chief of USAF CHECO (Contemporary Historical Evaluation of Combat Operations) in Vietnam. His editorial line reflected much of the grunts' disillusionment with the war and brought him to the attention of the authorities, especially as he liked to include items that he thought would give the enemy a laugh or two. MACV made several attempts to ban Grunt Free Press and a powerful underground syndicate tried to take it over, but Sams managed to keep it going by having it printed by a moonlighting ARVN Air Force officer with access to a USAID printing press. The magazine also popularised graffiti such as: 'This is a war of the unwilling led by the unqualified, dying for the ungrateful' and the ubiquitous 'IHTFP' [I Hate This Fucking Place]. Vietnam was full of sardonic graffiti. Some simply said: 'Fuck Communism' or 'Fuck Vietnam'. Ho Chi Minh, apparently, was born out of wedlock and was gay and every motherfucker knew 'Ho Chi Minh ain't gonna win'. There were many variations on the grunts' prayer: 'Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley'. A sign appeared in Vietnamese on a pile of four bullet-riddled VC corpses left to rot by the side of Route 13, which said: 'Vietcong meat – 300 piastres a kilo'. As the war dragged on one slogan summed up the grunts' evaluation of MACV's tactics: 'Kill them all and let God sort them out'. And peace symbols and marijuana leaves sprouted on helmets on the sides of APCs, and in other unlikely places.

  Units also had their own in-country insignia run up, incorporating the ubiquitous peace signs and marijuana leaves. They also contained their own jaundiced mottoes. The Special Forces' unofficial insignia carried the legend: 'We kill for peace'. Other units considered themselves to be mushrooms – 'kept in the dark and fed on horseshit'. And it was not uncommon to see a soldier wearing an anti-war badge, particularly those provided by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. GIs would also flick peace signs, the two-fingered V borrowed Winston Churchill's, whose 'victory' sign was a simple reversal of the traditional, offensive English V-sign said to have originated at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, where English archers showed the French that they still had their two bow fingers.

  The Grunt Free Press became popular among anti-war students in Saigon, who believed that before the Americans started bombing the North there were no North Vietnamese in the South, so when the Americans went away so would the NVA. These proto-hippies would congregate in Ken Sams' apartment to dance to the latest Beatles and Rolling Stones records that Sams' son sent from London. They started their own band called CBC – a Vietnamese code for peace. Complete with long hair, hippy beads and peace symbols, they played for an appreciative audience of grunts at a club on Plantation Road outside Tan Son Nhut air base, until a bomb went off under the bandstand while they were performing and their girl singer lost a leg. Sams kept Grunt Free Press going until 1971, when he was rotated back to 'The World'. Long after the war, he maintained that you are more likely to find the reason why the US lost the war in Vietnam in the pages of Grunt Free Press than in anything he wrote for CHECO.

  A deep disillusionment with the war had set in by 1969. The Paris peace talks were underway, Nixon had been elected on the promise of ending the war, and no one wanted to be the last GI to die in Vietnam. Despite his hawkish credentials, Nixon himself seemed to have decided that the war could not be won by military might in the paddy fields of Vietnam. Instead he called for 'days and even years of patient and prolonged diplomacy'. This gave no one any incentive to fight. Already America's war in Vietnam had lasted longer than its involvement in World War II. The validity of the war had been undermined in the minds of the men sent to fight there. The anti-war movement now had the support of every respected figure both at home in the US and internationally. The TV no longer reported victories, but night after night the evening news carried pictures of small, squalid engagements. Meanwhile, the grunts sweated it out on gruelling jungle patrols and watched their buddies being sent home in body bags.

  Each man sent to Vietnam was on a strict 365-day tour. Towards the end of the year, when a man was 'short' – counting off the days on the notches of a 'short-time stick' – he would be unwilling to risk his life out on patrol and ceased to be an effective soldier. When he was sent home, all the expertise he had built up over his year in Vietnam went wit
h him. He would then be replaced with an FNG (Fucking New Guy). FNGs were considered a liability as, out on patrol, they tended to talk too loudly, made too much noise when they moved around, failed to respond to basic commands, fired off too much ammo, packed the wrong kit, wore deodorant or used American soap which the VC could smell a mile off, flaked out after a ten-klick diddy bop in the boonies and got homesick. Veterans considered them as much use, in the phrase of the time, as 'tits on a boar hog'.

  Men consigned to Vietnam felt that they were missing out on everything that was going on in the world. The miniskirt came to America in 1966. There were new movies, new music, new fashions. A youth revolution and a sexual revolution was going on at home while they were out patrolling the jungles in a part of the world few of them knew or cared anything about, and thanks to the miracle of TV they could see what they were missing. Even the moon landings in 1969 were a cause of aggravation.

  'I remember July 20, 1969. I sat in my hootch and watched the satellite relay of the astronauts landing on the moon and saw Neil Armstrong's first step on the surface,' said one war-weary Marine. 'When I heard that fucking bullshit-nonsense phrase, “One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind”, I was so angry. I thought to myself, “Come here and step with me for a day, motherfucker”'.

  The US build up had ended in April 1968, when Johnson's new Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford rejected Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs of Staff's request for another 206,000 men to be added to the army worldwide. Clark also initiated 'Vietnamisation', though the term was coined by Nixon's Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. Once Nixon was in the White House, he was committed to making troop withdrawals to cut expenditure and phase out the draft. In June 1969, Nixon had discussions with President Thieu on the Pacific Island of Midway. Afterwards, on 8 June, he announced that 25,000 men would be withdrawn by 31 August. This policy of withdrawal was consolidated into the 'Nixon Doctrine,' proclaimed on Guam on 25 July. Another withdrawal of 35,000 men was announced on 16 September, a further 50,000 on 15 December. But at the same time, he began the secret bombing of Cambodia.

  In 1969, men began to refuse to fight. Even the elite 1st Air Cav notched up thirty-five 'wilful refusals' that year, and those were only the reported cases. More often patrols did not bother to go out, or when they did, they would pretend that they had contacted a VC patrol and call down an artillery strike on an empty piece of jungle. Between 1968 and 1970, there were 350 convictions in cases of 'combat refusal'. But after that no figures are included in official army statistics on 'Insubordination, mutiny, and other acts involving willful refusal to perform a lawful order', because there were so many of them. In 1971, there were full-scale mutinies. In September, fourteen of the 35th Engineer group barricaded themselves in a bunker and refused to come out. At Fire Support Base Mary Ann in Quang Tin province, discipline had collapsed to the point where no one would even do sentry duty. About 50 NVA infiltrated one night and knifed or shot over 100 of the 196th Infantry Brigade while they slept. Eventually whole units would refuse to go into action. When ordered out, a 1st Air Cavalry patrol 'expressed a desire not to go'. The 196th Infantry Brigade refused en masse to go out on patrols in support of the ARVN.

  Until 1968, the desertion rate among US troops in Vietnam had been lower than for previous wars, but after 1969, it soared. Some men would go underground in Saigon, while others would disappear while on R&R in Toyko and Hong Kong, and resurface in Sweden or Canada. Underground GI newspapers were full of contacts for organisations that ran escape routes, and some even ran escape routes themselves. AWOLs ran at seventy-eight per thousand in 1967, with twenty-one desertions. This increased to 112.3 per thousand AWOL and 42.4 per thousand desertion. By 1971, the figures stood at 177 per thousand AWOL and 74 per thousand desertion; by 1973 even the Marines were suffering 234 per thousand AWOL.

  Most GIs simply strove to survive their tour, whatever the dangers. In a country where nowhere was safe, paranoia became the order of the day. They came to see even friendly Vietnamese – even woman and children – as their enemy. It seemed quite legitimate to kill children as they would one day grow up to be Vietcong. The random massacre of Vietnamese civilians became commonplace. One incident, however, was to hit headlines across the world in 1969, and significantly weaken support for the war in America and further demoralise the troops.

  Anti-war activists had repeatedly accused the US of committing atrocities in Vietnam. This infuriated the hawks, who accused them of being anti-American and unpatriotic. But in this one case the facts were undeniable. The incident concerned had occurred the previous year during a routine search-and-destroy operation. Although compared with atrocities before and since, the numbers who lost their lives were small, because it was perpetrated by Americans, the name of the village where it took place has taken its place in the annals of infamy. That name is My Lai.

  MASSACRE AT MY LAI

  On the morning of 16 March 1968, three companies of American troops were sent into the My Son area near Quang Ngai, 100 km south of Da Nang. Their job was to seek out the enemy and kill them. The soldiers were from the 11th Infantry Brigade, American Division. C Company's target was the Vietcong's 48th Battalion which intelligence believed was operating out of a hamlet marked on American maps as My-Lai 4. Helicopters set Charlie Company down nearby. There was no resistance at the landing zone. This was because they were at the wrong village. Nevertheless, the company commander Captain Ernest L. Medina sent the 1st and 2nd Platoons into the village. Seeing Americans coming, some villagers ran away and were gunned down. The 2nd Platoon swept through the northern part of the village, hurling grenades into the huts and killing anyone who came out. They raped and murdered village girls, rounded up civilians and shot them. There was no resistance. After half an hour, Medina ordered the 2nd Platoon on to the hamlet of Binh Tay, where they gang-raped several more young women and rounded up some 20 women and children and shot them.

  Appalling though this was, the name most closely associated with the massacre was that of Lieutenant William L. Calley. He was in command of the 1st Platoon which swept through the south of the village, shooting anyone who tried to escape, bayoneting others, raping women, shooting livestock and destroying crops and houses. Survivors were rounded up and herded into a drainage ditch. Lieutenant Calley opened fire on the hapless villagers and ordered his men to join in. They emptied clip after clip into the tangled heap of human flesh until all the bodies lay motionless. When they stopped firing, miraculously, a two-year-old boy crawled out of the carnage, crying. He tried to climb out of the ditch and run away. Calley grabbed him, pushed him back and shot him.

  Half an hour later, the 3rd Platoon moved in to mop up. They shot wounded villagers to 'put them out of their misery', burnt houses, killed the remaining livestock, shot anyone trying to escape, and rounded up a group of women and children and sprayed them with bullets. No one is sure how many died. Estimates put the death toll at anywhere between 172 and 347 people. They were unarmed old men, women, and children. Only three of them were known members of the Vietcong. Captain Medina reported a body count of 90 dead: all enemy soldiers, no civilians. The divisional press officer announced 128 enemy killed.

  The My Lai Massacre neatly summed up everything that was going wrong in Vietnam. The war that had begun with a lie continued with lies. Patrols were reporting nonexistent contacts and officers were inflating body counts until no one in the Pentagon or in the US government had any idea what was really going on. At My Lai, there was just one American casualty, a self-inflicted wound. Thirteen Vietcong suspects, a press officer said, had been captured and three weapons taken. That only three weapons were being shared among 141 enemy soldiers should have alerted someone that something was wrong. But it was just another day in Vietnam.

  The reason that, on this occasion, things came unravelled was that two pressmen, combat photographer Ronald Haeberle and army reporter Jay Roberts, had been assigned to Calley's platoon, and had witnessed the appalling carnage. One w
oman had been hit by such ferocious, continuous fire that bone flew off chip by chip. Another woman was shot and her baby cut down with an assault rifle. Another baby was slashed with a bayonet. One GI who had just finished raping a girl put his rifle into her vagina and pulled the trigger. An old man was thrown down a well and a grenade was dropped in afterwards. A child escaping from the carnage was brought down with a single shot.

  There was another appalled witness. Warrant Officer Hugh C. Thompson, the pilot of a small observation helicopter circling the village, had begun dropping smoke flares to mark the position of wounded civilians so they could be medevaced out. He was horrified to see American foot soldiers follow the smoke and shoot the casualties.

  Gradually, the news leaked out. The men of C Company were not shy about boasting of their great victory at My Lai. Meanwhile the Vietcong distributed pamphlets denouncing it as an atrocity. The US Army half-heartedly investigated the rumours of a massacre that had eventually spread up the chain of command, but decided there was no basis for an official enquiry. However, another soldier named Ronald Ridenhour who had ambitions to be journalist heard about the massacre and took an interest. He made it his business to meet the men from C Company, especially Michael Bernhardt who had refused to participate in the killing. The other members of C Company were beginning to get uneasy about what they had done too. They were about to be rotated back to America and realised that the rest of the world did not operate in the same moral vacuum as Vietnam. They knew that there was nothing they could do without inviting murder charges, but they were happy to unburden themselves to Ridenhour.

  He compiled what they told him, but took things no further while in Vietnam, realising that if he took his evidence to the army, they would stage a summary investigation, which would result in another whitewash. On his return to America, however, he could not forget what he had been told, so he drew up a letter outlining his evidence and sent out 30 copies to prominent politicians. One of them was Congressman Morris Udall of Arizona, who pressed the Pentagon to interview Ridenhour. Six months later, and nearly 18 months after the event, Lieutenant Calley was charged with murder.