Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Be that as it may, Australia’s Justice Philip Evatt spent two years in the 1980s examining evidence about the effects of Orange on his countrymen who served in Vietnam, and produced a report of nine volumes and 2,760 pages which found the chemical ‘not guilty’. One of the scientific advisers to the Royal Commission said with typical Australian bluntness: ‘Most of the problems that worried the veterans after the Vietnam War weren’t due to Agent Orange: they were just due to it being a bloody awful war.’ Evatt suggested that tobacco, alcohol and post-traumatic stress were the most convincing and widespread causes of veterans’ difficulties. A historian is not obliged to pass a verdict on Agent Orange in the face of rival masses of contradictory evidence. The defoliant was indisputably a loathsome instrument; yet that does not make it necessary to accept the more extreme claims made about its effects on human beings exposed to it.

  Almost every week of 1966 witnessed an action such as that which took place one September morning, sixty miles north of Saigon. At 0900 the 2/18th Infantry advanced north up Route 13 between Loc Ninh and the Michelin rubber plantation, where the Vietcong were known to be strongly emplaced. The Americans were riding APCs, supported by tanks. C Company commander twenty-seven-year-old Ted Fichtl said: ‘We knew we were going out as bait … But the confidence in our ability to trigger it and get through was very high … We knew the rest of the battalion, brigade and division was locked and loaded, just waiting for that to occur, and by God it did.’ They met a storm of fire from ambushes on both sides of the road, small arms, mortars, recoilless rifles: ‘It was extremely violent; very, very accurate and effective … We lost a lot of tracks and took a lot of casualties right away.’ Fichtl’s dismounted C Company was supported by flamethrowers and heavy machine-guns, but found itself in deeper trouble than commanders had anticipated. The struggle went on hour after hour: undamaged American vehicles pulled back out of the killing zone.

  The battalion commander reached Fichtl on foot, and ordered him to disengage and move to support A Company, which was in desperate straits. The captain felt emotionally exhausted. He protested that he had lost half his own men already: somebody else should do the job. ‘The colonel said, “That’s not the issue. The issue is that A Company needs to be reinforced. Move out.”’ Fichtl said: ‘The colonel got us to do it by sheer force of leadership.’ The action continued for five hours, across a front of eight hundred yards, with guerrillas and Americans sometimes exchanging fire within twenty yards of each other: Fichtl’s executive officer and a platoon commander were among the dead. C Company’s spirits rose when they saw the rest of the battalion being airlanded three miles beyond the enemy: ‘It was great to see helos going in … Instantly you could tell that [the VC’s] attention was divided between what was going on directly in front of them and what may have been going on behind.’

  The Americans were obliged to evacuate casualties on trucks, because medevac helicopters – ‘dust-offs’, as they were always known – could not land through the intense fire. When at last the battle ended and the enemy withdrew, around 1400, Fichtl found his company reduced to sixty-six effectives, and there was a delay of weeks before all the losses were made good by replacements. He never forgot the shock he received when he heard a divisional staff officer report over the radio an enemy body count three times that which he had been given by the participants. 1966 witnessed a hundred battles such as that which the 2/18th fought. In the overwhelming majority, while the communists lost more men than the Americans, they seldom acknowledged a defeat. This was the year in which Westmoreland discovered that the ‘Charlies’ were seldom, if ever, quitters. And merely by staying in the ring, they were being seen to frustrate the will of the most powerful nation on earth.

  13

  Graft and Peppermint Oil

  1 STEALING

  Corruption was endemic throughout South Vietnam. US narcotics agencies despaired of curbing the traffic in heroin, cocaine and marijuana, because the regime’s leaders and clients were engaged up to their necks. In both army and civil life, promotion on merit was almost unachievable. Some officers languished for decades as lieutenants because they lacked influence or cash. Higher commands were allocated not by assessing generals’ competence, but instead in accordance with their political allegiances. The coming of Americans in bulk boosted graft and fraud. The Commercial Import Program – US economic aid – peaked in 1966 at $400 million. Some money was used prudently – for instance, to provide thousands of sewing-machines for clothing manufacture. Much, however, was merely diverted into the pockets of businessmen, and explicitly of regime supporters, who imported luxury goods which ended up in the street markets of Saigon. Duong Van Mai wrote: ‘The newly affluent class included many who stole without qualm from the Americans.’ Old people grumbled that while in the past Vietnam’s hierarchy of merit placed scholars first, peasants second, artisans third and merchants last, now bar girls seemed to rule in a society in which maids, cyclo- and taxi-drivers ranked ahead of honest toilers. ‘For us “Western culture” meant bars, brothels, black markets and bewildering machines – most of them destructive,’ recalled peasant Phung Thi Le Ly.

  A post-war USAID report concluded: ‘Corruption … was a critical factor in the deterioration of national morale which led ultimately to defeat.’ A Southern general wrote gloomily about one of President Thieu’s reshuffles of ministers and commanders: ‘These changes did not improve leadership or advance the national cause. They were made in the same old pattern of power intrigue, based not on talent, experience or merit, but instead on personal loyalty and clannish relations.’ Gen. Vien deplored the typical case of a man who had been a good regimental officer, but when appointed province chief of Binh Dinh, sold public posts and favours for cash and allowed his wife to run a gambling joint.

  The official exchange rate for the Vietnamese piaster was set artificially high, so import licences ensured fat profits. Black-market currency dealings enriched thousands of people, many of them ethnic Chinese, with access to dollars or US Army scrip. Everything from cement and freezers to vehicles, weapons and ammunition was available at a price; forgery networks flourished. Such scourges are by-products of all conflicts, but the protraction of this one caused them to become institutionalised. According to prime minister Nguyen Cao Ky, projecting himself as a crusader against corruption, the police officer responsible for enforcing vice law in Cholon paid $US130,000 to secure his post, and showed a profit on the investment after two years. Meanwhile the military governor of Saigon deployed soldiers to protect Cholon’s big casino in return for a slice of its take.

  According to the US Army judge-advocate-general, black marketeering and currency violations ‘[surpassed] the capacity of the law enforcement agencies’. The case of three Marine deserters was typical: while hiding out in Danang they forged orders for their own transit to Saigon, where they joined a ring of forty-seven army deserters engaged in a huge money-order racket. On the proceeds they rented Saigon apartments, remitted cash home and bribed military police to stay away. The ring was eventually broken and those involved jailed, but there were many more uniformed gangsters where they came from. The most baffling aspect of the criminality was not that the Vietnamese were unable to check it, but the degree to which elements of the US government became complicit. A civilian contractor, Cornelius Hawkridge, was so outraged by what he witnessed in Saigon that he tracked illegal activities and formally reported them to American authorities – who ignored his claims. Hawkridge’s lonely little crusade became the subject of a 1971 book, A Very Private War, which attracted less attention than it deserved. Civilian contractors, including some of the largest US corporations, were deeply engaged in crime. Investigators reported that the currency black market was dominated by a syndicate in Madras: a Senate sub-committee estimated the traffic’s annual value at a quarter of a billion dollars.

  Sen. Karl Mundt of South Dakota rightly observed that the trade could only be viable with the complicity of US banks which handled the l
aunderers’ profits, prominently including Irving Trust and Manufacturers Hanover. Frank Furci, son of a Florida mobster, served briefly in the US Army in Vietnam, then after his discharge returned with a friend to run rackets in partnership with serving NCOs, whose profits were posted to the International Credit Bank of Geneva. Another important illegal money exchange was the Hong Kong branch of Deak & Co., founded in 1939 by Hungarian immigrant Nicholas Deak, who spent the war years in the OSS. In 1964 Time magazine called him ‘the James Bond of the world of money’. Crooks who funnelled cash through Deak knew they were protected from attention by law enforcement agencies, because the firm was used by US corporations as a conduit for bribery of foreign governments. It was revealed by the Washington Post in 1976 that Deak also handled huge black-market transactions for the CIA’s Saigon station, doubling the spending power of its budget.

  However deplorable the conduct of powerful Vietnamese, they could not have robbed their own people without the active or passive complicity of thousands of Americans, some of them relatively exalted. In 1972 the US Army’s most senior NCO, Sergeant-Major William Woolridge, was convicted for his part in a massive fraud involving military clubs and PXs, in which scores of supply sergeants were involved. Young CORDS officer Hal Meinheit was asked to sign off receipts for purchased material which the briefest inquiries showed were phoney. He was disgusted to discover that the money went into the pocket of a colleague: ‘I had expected Vietnamese corruption but had not expected a well-paid American adviser to twist the system.’

  2 RULING

  It is mistaken to regard corruption as a mere by-blow of the war. It was a plague bacillus that infected the entire US effort. A society in which vice was seen to prosper, and virtue received no reward, was sorely wounded even before the enemy opened fire. Who could be surprised by the respect accorded to Vietcong province chiefs, dressed in peasant black calico and sandals cut from old tyres, in contrast to their Saigon-appointed counterparts who rode in Mercedes and decked their wives in jewels? American apologists shrugged at corruption, observing that every Asian government acted this way. Yet not all were engaged in a death-grapple with communist insurgents.

  As South Vietnam’s 1965–66 prime minister, Nguyen Cao Ky found that ‘Everything I touched was potentially worth money! A duty assignment closer to home for a major, or far away for someone’s romantic rival. A licence to import some goods, to build a factory or close one, to start a business. A construction contract. An easy job for a relative. An exemption from the draft or from service in a combat unit. A lenient sentence for a convicted criminal.’ Ky damned his own reputation in the eyes of the Saigon press corps, and of a global audience beyond, by repeatedly praising the ruler of the Third Reich, as in a 1966 interview with a German correspondent to whom he said: ‘I admire Hitler because he pulled your country together when it was in a terrible state in the early thirties. Our situation here in Vietnam is so desperate that we need four or five Hitlers.’ The Hanoi politburo displayed a mirror enthusiasm for Stalin and Mao Zedong, the twentieth century’s other supreme mass murderers, but in the 1960s neither inspired remotely as much revulsion among Western liberals as did Hitler.

  The prime minister was further damaged by his handling of the case of a thirty-five-year-old Chinese-Vietnamese merchant named Ta Vinh. The first step in Ky’s campaign against corruption was Vinh’s conviction for embezzlement, hoarding, speculation and attempted bribery. An exemplary death sentence was carried out at dawn on 14 March 1966 in Saigon’s Central Market by a firing squad of ten paratroopers, before a large crowd that included Vinh’s wailing wife and seven of his eight children. The riflemen botched the job: an officer’s pistol had to finish off the condemned businessman. No one doubted his guilt, but it seemed monstrously unjust to kill Vinh for pursuing practices for which thousands of other rich Vietnamese went unpunished. The communists murdered people even more barbarically, but had the prudence not to invite along the world’s TV cameras. The brutal clumsiness of Ky’s intervention caused his standing abroad, never high, to sink further.

  In February President Johnson met both Ky and Thieu in Honolulu, where he warned them sternly of the need to address issues which roused popular sentiment. For instance, an estimated two million South Vietnamese had become displaced. Johnson told his guests that the refugee issue was ‘just as hot as a pistol in my country. You don’t want me to raise a white flag and surrender, so we have to do something about that.’ He added that if they read the New York Times and transcripts of the latest Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings they would understand the pressure facing the White House to produce evidence of things getting better in Saigon. Max Taylor had just told the committee, chaired by Fulbright, that the US aspired to achieve sufficient battlefield success to oblige the enemy to accept an independent non-communist Vietnam. Dean Rusk said: ‘Toughness is absolutely essential for peace.’ The great George Kennan, however, won wider plaudits than either witness when he told the committee that there was ‘more respect to be won in the opinion of the world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions’.

  Few Vietnamese, and certainly not Ky, had much grasp of how America worked. The prime minister scarcely read the US press, and wrote later: ‘If Americans, who came to my country by the million, never came to understand Vietnam, then my people … also failed to understand America … I had not learned to appreciate the power of American media in shaping public opinion … I thought that America was President Johnson and his ambassadors, that when we spoke to congressmen, cabinet secretaries and top generals, we were talking to America. We were 100 per cent wrong.’ He regretted not having expended more attention on winning over the US public, though given his own personality and the nature of his government, it is hard to see how this might have been achieved.

  The insularity and naïveté of Saigon’s generals now precipitated a new crisis. Even as the Americans lavished unprecedented resources upon winning the war, their Vietnamese clients started playing a road-race game of their own, all over the highway. The experience of sitting at a Honolulu conference table opposite the president of the United States persuaded Ky that he should start exerting his own authority. His first gambit was to sack I Corps’ commander Gen. Nguyen Chanh Thi, who ruled the northern provinces as a personal fiefdom, focused on Hue.

  The ancient capital beside the Perfume River was the last important Southern city still distinctively Vietnamese in character: serene and peaceful, scarcely touched by Americanisation. Hue’s women were alleged to be the country’s best cooks. Students sat reading on the Ngo Mon gate and beside the lotus ponds. Enigmatic graffiti were scrawled on the walls of the citadel: ‘Liberté, qu’est-ce que c’est?’ ‘Amour?’ In the old colonial club with its half-empty swimming pool, dust lay thickly on the piano, and on old copies of Le Monde and France Soir. The city also boasted a formidable, indeed dominant Buddhist presence. Thi persuaded the bonzes that his interests and theirs were aligned. On 12 March demonstrations against the general’s sacking erupted, which soon embraced students, spread to Danang and Saigon, then escalated into workers’ strikes. A leaflet issued by the Buddhist Struggle Group proclaimed: ‘We are oppressed by two forces – the communists and the Americans. We must regain our right of self-determination.’

  For all Ky’s pretensions to rule, he was merely the most visible of a committee of warlords. In the face of the northern turbulence, he panicked. A despairing ambassador Lodge wrote to Lyndon Johnson: ‘Most of the things [Ky] says come about a week too late. Also, one always wonders whenever a Vietnamese says something intelligent and true, whether he is in any way able to do anything about it.’ Yet the prime minister persuaded the Americans that the Buddhists were promoting communist interests; that the north was close to secession. II Corps’ chief of staff had earlier told MACV that ‘the army was being systematically subverted by its Buddhist chaplains, who had told units to prepare to lay down their arms because the war was being fought for the good of the US’. L
odge lent Ky planes to airlift two battalions of Vietnamese Marines to Danang, a gesture that intensified anti-Americanism. Then Ky weakened, promising elections within three to five months, following which he himself would resign.

  These assurances briefly pacified the Buddhists – which re-emboldened the prime minister to ship another thousand troops to Danang without telling either President Thieu or the Americans, and to retract his pledge to quit. Ky summoned thirteen leading monks to a meeting at which he told them they were mistaken if they supposed that he would allow himself to be toppled as readily as had been Diem: ‘Before I let you kill me, it will be my pleasure to shoot each of you personally.’ Demonstrations resumed, almost entirely distracting American attention from operations against the communists, who were bewildered spectators of the civil strife.

  The US government took for granted its own right to ordain the governance of South Vietnam. On 14 May Averell Harriman recorded a conversation with McNamara: ‘I asked him why we shouldn’t get the [Saigon] military committee to put someone else in as prime minister.’ McNamara responded that such action had best be postponed until the Vietnamese had held assembly elections in September. That day Ky’s troops landed in Danang, and fourteen dissidents perished in all-day fighting. Then the prime minister dispatched his ruthless police boss Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, who restored government control of the northern cities, killing hundreds of Thi’s supporters, some of whom were dragged from sanctuary in Buddhist temples. Eight more monks and nuns conducted public self-immolations, with a new refinement: companions poured peppermint oil on the fires, to mask from the squeamish the odour of roasting flesh.