Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  ‘Goddammit, doesn’t he understand this is an emergency?!’

  ‘He says “I don’t take orders from Americans.”’

  Vann bellowed into the handset, ‘Ba! If you don’t get your vehicles across the canal I shall tell General Le Van Ty to sling you in jail!’

  The Vietnamese belatedly ordered forward his company, which spent the ensuing two hours struggling to cross dykes and canals: the little captain forever afterwards argued that neither Vann nor Scanlon recognised the difficulties of overcoming the water obstacles. When the M-113s’ .50-calibre machine-gunners finally engaged, several were shot off the exposed steel hulls by Vietcong whose positions were so skilfully camouflaged in the banana and coconut groves that few attackers glimpsed an enemy all day. When one carrier attempted to use its flamethrower, the crew proved to have mixed the fuel wrongly, so that the jet drooped to a trickle. Around 1430 the armoured crabs began to pull back; a further two helicopters were forced down by enemy fire.

  Vann’s L-19 made repeated deck-level passes as he strove in vain to identify Vietcong positions, and to energise the stalled ground movements. At 1805 a mass parachute drop from seven USAF C-123s yielded a crowning disaster: the troops landed half a mile off their intended DZ, within easy range of Vietcong in Tan Thoi, whose fire ploughed into them, killing nineteen paras and wounding thirty-three, including two Americans. When darkness fell, the communists still held almost all the ground they had occupied at first light, and experienced no difficulty in slipping away to the sanctuary of the nearby Plain of Reeds.

  The guerrillas did not have the day’s fight all their own way, losing eighteen men killed and thirty-five wounded, most to artillery and air strikes. On Saigon’s side, however, three Americans had been killed and five wounded, along with sixty-three Vietnamese dead and 109 wounded. Back in May’s Landing, New Jersey, a seven-year-old boy cried out in excitement as he watched a TV clip of a helicopter door-gunner in action, ‘Look, there’s my daddy!’ Just six hours later, a telegram arrived to report the death of his father, crew chief William Deal, in a Huey outside Bac.

  The media experience of next day, 3 January, however, exercised a greater influence on the history of the war than did the battle itself. Paul Harkins, MACV’s supremo, descended on IV Corps headquarters to cheerlead a renewed assault on Ap Bac. He told David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, ‘We’ve got [the Vietcong] in a trap, and we’re going to spring it in half an hour.’ Unfortunately, the journalists knew that the enemy were long gone, and thus that the South Vietnamese ‘assault’ was a pantomime. Harkins’ remark suggested that the general was either a fool or a wilful deceiver – probably the former, because he never looked further into any situation than he wished to see.

  A few miles away, matters got worse. Neil Sheehan and Nick Turner of Reuters reached the previous day’s battlefield to find the Southern soldiers unwilling to handle their own and the Americans’ dead: the disgusted journalists themselves loaded the corpses aboard helicopters. Then, as they talked to US brigadier-general Robert York, an Alabaman World War II veteran, artillery support for the new ‘assault’ started to thump in around them, blasting up geysers of mud. York said to Sheehan, ‘Jesus Christ, run for your life, boy.’ They bolted across the rice paddy before throwing themselves to the ground, Sheehan convinced that he was about to die. When the shelling stopped they rose covered with filth. York remained almost pristine, however, having adopted a press-up posture in the dirt. He shrugged, ‘I didn’t want to get my cigarettes wet.’ Sheehan said ruefully, ‘Never mess with a man who’s so calm under fire.’ Fifty rounds had landed in the vicinity, killing four ARVN soldiers and wounding twelve. The enraged infantry battalion commander drew his pistol and shot in the head the young lieutenant acting as forward observer for the artillery.

  The defeat at Bac was less militarily significant than – for instance – a 1960 action at Tua Hai in Tay Ninh province, in which the communists also beat a much larger government force. The difference was that at Tua Hai there had been no foreign witnesses, while now the sharpest correspondents in Vietnam were in the bleachers. Sheehan wrote later, ‘We knew this was the biggest story we had ever encountered.’ The dispatches of himself and Halberstam quoted anonymously an American adviser who condemned the Southern showing on 2 January as ‘a miserable damn performance’, at a moment when Harkins was still insisting that Bac was a victory. Few people, including the general, doubted that the dismissive words came from John Vann, and he demanded the colonel’s head.

  MACV finally decided that it would be more prudent to allow this galvanic but famously indiscreet officer to complete his tour in March as scheduled. Vann’s influence on the war would thereafter wax and wane until its dramatic termination almost a decade later, but in 1963 he played a critical role in providing authoritative briefings to Sheehan, Halberstam and others about the bungling and pusillanimity that characterised Southern operations, and the deceits practised to conceal these. The colonel warned Maj. Gen. Bruce Palmer that Harkins was allowing himself to be duped by Saigon’s officers, who routinely assaulted objectives they knew to be untenanted by the enemy. It was nonetheless the Harkins version that Maxwell Taylor and Robert McNamara chose to believe. Frances Fitzgerald later wrote in her influential history Fire in the Lake: ‘The United States had … made the Saigon government into a military machine whose sole raison d’être was to fight the Communists. The only difficulty was that the machine did not work.’ The ARVN was not an army ‘but a collection of individuals who happened to be carrying weapons’. This was an overstatement, but contained a core of truth.

  The Ap Bac affair prompted extensive media comment. Arthur Krock wrote in his syndicated column on 9 January: ‘No amount of US military assistance can preserve independence for a people who are unwilling to die for it.’ Richard Hughes, a Hong Kong-based Australian veteran who wrote for the London Sunday Times, said that he saw clear parallels with US follies in China after World War II. The best the Americans were promising, he said, was a ten-year war to preserve a ‘reactionary, isolated, unpopular’ regime. The only way out, he suggested, was for the Saigon government to admit communists to a coalition.

  Within Vietnam, word spread swiftly about the fiasco. A Vietnamese officer wrote that Ap Bac ‘greatly hurt ARVN morale’. Ly Tong Ba, who rose to become a general, later denounced Neil Sheehan, ‘who only wrote articles filled with malicious arguments and inaccuracies’. He also argued that his own adviser on the ground at Bac, Jim Scanlon, was as ‘terrified’ of Vann as of the Vietcong, which prompted him also to paint a false picture of events. The press coverage was seized upon by MACV officers, and by others who deplored ‘negative’ reporting, as highlighting the difficulties of fighting a war covered by a media which recognised no obligation to favour ‘our side’ – meaning the US and its South Vietnamese client – as had been the patriotic duty of every correspondent in World War II, when the press was additionally constrained by censorship.

  It remains as difficult now as it was then to see virtue in Gen. Harkins’ attempts to deny the real state of affairs. The maxim obtains for all those who hold positions of authority, in war as in peace: lie to others if you must, but never to yourselves. MACV’s chief could make a case for talking nonsense to Halberstam and Arnett, but he was peddling the same fairy tales in top-secret cables to Washington. Nonetheless, a valid criticism persists of the media’s coverage throughout the war: the critics got bang to rights the shortcomings of the Diem regime and its successors, but gave nothing like the same attention to the blunders and horrors perpetrated by the communists. Halberstam, Sheehan and the rest conscientiously and sometimes brilliantly fulfilled their duty, to tell what they saw and heard; Saigon’s apologists, exemplified by Time magazine, destroyed their own credibility by denying unpalatable realities. The South was only half the rightful story, however. Much of the media showed itself ignorant of or blind to the tyranny prevailing in the North, which was inflicting worse hardships on its own people.

/>   An Australian surgeon who served as a civilian volunteer down at Vung Tau wrote later: ‘It seems fair to say what is usually left unsaid, that if the economic aid to South Vietnam had not been prevented by the activities of the Vietcong, the people of the country which today is war-torn and unhappy would have been well-fed, in better health and better-educated.’ Frances Fitzgerald concluded her powerful 1972 account of America in Indochina with an expression of yearning for North Vietnamese victory, for a moment when ‘“individualism” and its attendant corruption give way to the discipline of the revolutionary community’. American officials, she wrote, might attribute this to the triumph of brainwashing by ‘hard-core Communists’. Not so, she asserted: ‘It will simply mean that the moment has arrived for the narrow flame of revolution to cleanse the lake of Vietnamese society.’ Here was a view of the war that seems as delusional at one end of the political spectrum as was that of Gen. Harkins and his kind at the other.

  2 THE BUDDHISTS REVOLT

  Throughout the spring of 1963, the credibility of the Diem government drained away as surely as Vietcong morale and strength rose, impelled by a surge of excitement after the victory at Ap Bac. In the 261st Battalion, its history records, ‘there was much singing’. COSVN broadcast a new slogan: ‘Emulate Bac!’ The battle provided an important boost to the ‘forward’ faction in Hanoi, which argued ever more insistently that the season for caution had passed; that in the South, the prize lay ripe for taking. Michael Burleigh has written of US policy-making: ‘Seldom has an imperial power put its prestige behind a more suicidal group of puppets than the Ngo Dinh clan.’ Even as the security situation deteriorated, in May the Saigon regime adopted an initiative that set its wagon careering downhill towards the final wreck. Vietnam’s Buddhist priesthood had always resented the favouritism shown by the Ngos towards their fellow-Catholics. On 8 May 1963, when worshippers assembled in Hue for the 2,527th birthday of the Buddha, a Catholic army officer sought to enforce an old decree banning them from displaying their flag. Several thousand Buddhists gathered outside the local radio station to hear a broadcast by prominent bonze Thich Tri Quang. The station director suddenly cancelled the transmission, saying that it had not been approved by the censors. He also telephoned the army, which dispatched to the scene a troop of armoured cars. When the Buddhists ignored an order to disperse, the soldiers opened fire. A woman and eight children died in the ensuing melee.

  This gratuitous, murderous folly prompted weeks of anti-government demonstrations in many cities, Buddhists being joined by thousands of students. It was subsequently claimed that the protests were communist-orchestrated. Plainly they suited the NLF and Hanoi: cadres may have encouraged the bonzes. Beyond doubt, however, what took place represented a surge of spontaneous anger against the regime, which refused to apologise for the deaths in Hue, or to punish those responsible. Diem sat on his hands, ignoring warnings from Washington, while his brother Nhu embarked on a programme of repression.

  Frank Scotton said: ‘Most of the bonzes were victims of their own wishful thinking about the possibility of representative government, but the Buddhist crisis was not just about politics. For Diem to have made a grand gesture of reconciliation, he would have had to go up against his own younger brother, and he couldn’t bring himself to do that.’ Reporter Marguerite Higgins described Quang, foremost among the rebellious monks. Far from being a passive, meditative figure, she said, ‘deep, burning eyes started out from a gigantic forehead. He had an air of massive intelligence, total self-possession and brooding suspicion.’ A Southern officer wrote: ‘The [Buddhist] crisis was like a great fire, uncontrollable and raging quickly. It had a strong negative effect on the morale of officers and enlisted men … I knew that it was impossible to maintain Diem’s government. My only hope was that power would fall into the hands of a new, competent and loyal leadership.’

  When Duong Van Mai returned to Saigon from Washington that autumn, she found that her family, and especially her mother, had become bitterly hostile to the government because of its assault on the faith to which an overwhelming majority of Vietnamese professed adherence. On 10 June David Halberstam wrote: ‘The conflict between the South Vietnamese Government and Buddhist priests is sorely troubling American officials here … [who] are deeply embarrassed … and frustrated in the face of persistent questioning by individual Vietnamese, who ask: “Why does your Government allow this to go on?”’ Americans were perceived as literally calling the shots.

  Next day, Western media organisations were alerted to attend a protest in Saigon. Few took heed, however, because its nature was unspecified. On the morning of the 11th, at a busy intersection, an elderly Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc disembarked from a car in orange robes, adopted the lotus position on the street, then sat motionless surrounded by a large crowd while another bonze poured petrol over him. Duc himself struck a match and flicked it at the pyre, then allowed flames to consume and shrivel him. Throughout the process another bonze proclaimed through a megaphone: ‘A Buddhist priest burns himself to death! A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr!’ At this and other such ghastly human sacrifices it was noticed that signs, placards and denunciations were in English: the intended audience was not Vietnamese.

  The only Western journalist who had troubled to turn up, Malcolm Browne of AP, wrote later: ‘I could have prevented that immolation by rushing at him and kicking the gasoline away … As a human being I wanted to. As a reporter I couldn’t … I would have propelled myself directly into Vietnamese politics. My role as a reporter would have been destroyed along with my credibility.’ Yet Browne assuredly altered the face of South Vietnamese politics by photographing the scene, just as the Buddhists had intended when they alerted him. His devastating images were ‘pigeoned’ to Manila, then wired around the world. Madame Nhu fuelled outrage with her televised depiction of the event as a ‘barbecue’. She shrugged: ‘Let them burn, and we shall clap our hands.’ Browne said that he never forgot the overpowering scent of joss sticks mingling with that of burning flesh. The perpetrators, well satisfied with the attention secured by their grisly gesture, displayed Duc’s heart in a glass case.

  Americans responded with stunned incomprehension. Lt. Gordon Sullivan, an adviser with a Ranger group who chanced to be in Saigon, said, ‘The whole thing changed. This was something new. We didn’t know people did stuff like that.’ The Washington Post editorialised on 20 June 1963: ‘Of course the communists will exploit Buddhist grievances. And why not? It is Mr Diem’s regime itself that is gratuitously serving communist purposes by policies that are morally repugnant and politically suicidal.’ US ambassador ‘Fritz’ Nolting still maintained that this was the least bad Saigon government the US would get, and the CIA’s Colby agreed. In Washington, however, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy and the State Department’s Roger Hilsman took a bleaker view. So did Henry Cabot Lodge, who arrived in Saigon at mid-August to replace Nolting, whose ‘appeasement’ of Diem was deemed discredited.

  The new envoy was sixty-one, a Republican grandee from Massachusetts with long experience of diplomacy and the Senate, who had run as vice-presidential candidate on Nixon’s ticket in 1960. Arthur Schlesinger wrote: ‘The president has a habit of designating “liberals” to do “conservative” things, and vice versa.’ Lodge’s appointment was a classic example of this: he was a big figure, bound to seek to play a big role, more proconsular than ambassadorial. If he subsequently misplayed or overplayed his hand, blame rightfully lay with those who appointed him.

  On 21 August, after Diem imposed martial law in response to the continuing storm of protests, Nhu’s forces assaulted Saigon’s principal Buddhist sanctuary, the Xa Loi temple. They arrested four hundred monks and nuns, including Vietnam’s eighty-nine-year-old patriarch. Henry Luce’s Time suppressed condemnatory dispatches from its own correspondents; Bill Colby shared his friend Nhu’s contempt for the Buddhists, as did Harkins. Yet despite the imposition of rigorous press censorship and a stream of mendacious gove
rnment statements, most Americans, including ambassador Lodge, recognised that the president’s brother was rampaging out of control.

  The nationwide security situation continued to deteriorate. The NLF, impatient to see the back of the regime, intensified its campaign of terror, while Southern army morale grew shakier by the day. Because David Halberstam’s grim reports were so widely read, MACV and Washington worked ever harder to rubbish them. Secretary of state Dean Rusk personally contradicted an August 1963 dispatch that described the communists gaining ground in the Mekong delta. Harkins itemised details that he asserted were untrue. In September the general cabled Maxwell Taylor at the White House: ‘From most of the reports and articles I read, one would say Vietnam and our programs here are falling apart at the seams. Well, I just thoroughly disagree.’

  Yet the record shows the young turks, Halberstam and Sheehan prominent among them, were far more correct in their assessments, both military and political, than was MACV. There were more and more such episodes as one in September, when in broad daylight the Vietcong overran a government post in the delta almost without loss, because the provincial VC had infiltrated two of its men into the garrison. They killed six defenders, seized six prisoners and thirty-five rifles, blew up bunkers and watchtowers before withdrawing. That autumn, according to Frank Scotton, ‘it was apparent that many cultured city-dwellers’ – attentistes, as those folk were known who waited upon events rather than precipitating them – ‘anticipated a change of government’. Diem’s time was almost up. It remained only to be seen whether the communists, the Buddhists or his own generals pulled the plug. And what Washington decided to do about it all.