by Max Hastings
Officers and men learned to dread the words ‘body count’, yet in a war with no prospect of raising a flag in the enemy’s capital, there seemed no other plausible yardstick of success. Contrary to myth, this was not an original concept: every army in every war judges its progress partly by how many enemies it kills or captures. In Vietnam, however, this became obsessional, so that commanders belaboured subordinates who failed to deliver a sufficiency of corpses. Their attitude promoted a carelessness, if nothing worse, about which of the enumerated dead were communist fighters, how many hapless peasants.
Capt. Vince Felletter of the 101st Airborne complained that his superiors were ‘a little bit sensitive to that body-count crap’. Once, his company started digging in and found themselves in an NVA graveyard: ‘Brigade actually wanted us to dig up all [the bodies] and they reported them as a body count related to a previous contact.’ The 9th Division in the delta became especially notorious: at its headquarters, a wall chart measured ‘efficiency’ by ‘enemy eliminated per company day in the field’. Regional and Popular Forces scored 0.30 each, ARVN 0.75 and US troops 1.50. A wall graph eventually showed the 9th’s alleged body count rise from 1,998 in the second quarter of 1967 to 2,671 in the same period of 1968, 8,138 in second quarter 1969. Abrams later fulminated about ‘the worship of charts … It finally gets to the point where that’s really the whole war, fucking charts, instead of the people and the real things.’ John Vann heaped contempt on the means by which body-count numbers were secured, telling Frank Scotton of ‘a shameful 9th Division rampage’. The two provinces in which the formation operated averaged five hundred civilian casualties a month, whereas the other twelve provinces of IV Corps together accounted for only four hundred. Vann said of one of the 9th’s later commanders, Julian Ewell, that he ‘could kill his own grandmother if he could put her on his body count’. Ewell provided the principal role model for the monstrous Gen. Lemming in Josiah Bunting’s novel The Lionheads, a fictional assault on the US conduct of the war, written by a former career officer of the 9th Division.
Yet it is mistaken to view 1967–68 as a time of American tactical failure: whenever Westmoreland’s troops were able to bring the enemy to bay, they inflicted heavy casualties. Captured documents revealed a slump in the morale of many VC and NVA units. One described the communist 2nd Division’s propaganda efforts to counter ‘dread of protracted war, reluctance [to fight] … and to put an end to desertions, defections, surrenders and suicides’. Communist commanders were infuriated by reports of their men turning tail during contacts. Robert Komer, as director of pacification, wrote to the president on 28 February 1967: ‘Wastefully, expensively, but nonetheless indisputably, we are winning the war in the South. Few of our programs – civil or military – are very efficient, but we are grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass.’
After a mid-1967 battle in which the VC 514th Battalion in the delta was hit by both heliborne and riverine forces, a communist survivor complained that while they had always been indoctrinated that the ‘long-noses’ were poor fighters, instead they now saw that ‘the Americans fight fiercely … much better than the ARVN’. The Joint Chiefs wrote to McNamara on 17 October: ‘Current strategy and military actions are resulting in steady progress … The enemy is probably in significantly greater difficulty than current battle statistics and hard intelligence indicate.’ Among mountains of falsehoods that dominate the documentary landscape of the war, this assessment was not unreasonable.
In Hanoi politburo discussions, ‘differing opinions were expressed about the scale of victory that might be attained’. By the end of 1967 Dragon Court estimated that it had 232,000 fighters in South Vietnam – 190 battalions – against 204,000 men a year earlier. The increase was achieved by committing more regular NVA units, and unflinching acceptance of losses. According to Hanoi’s war history, its chiefs viewed this as a time of difficulties and frustrations: ‘Aside from the American battalions that we had destroyed in the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965, we had not since fought a single battle in which we had been able to achieve the objectives we set.’ Unless they embraced some spectacular initiative, the North Vietnamese saw themselves doomed forever to grind on with a stalemated struggle: their patience was not, as they liked to claim, inexhaustible. Hanoi’s July 1967 strategic plan called for ‘concentration of maximum effort on securing a decisive victory through a general offensive-uprising, no matter what the cost’. Here was the genesis of the 1968 Tet offensive, a stroke born partly out of false hopes – and partly also out of a sense of urgency to show their people a result.
Yet the Americans had manifold difficulties of their own. The anti-war movement was gaining traction at home faster than the US Army was advancing in South-East Asia. Thoughtful policy-makers had come to understand that it was a weakness, not a strength, that while North Vietnamese objectives stretched to the horizon, those of the US were very narrow. This restricted the means acceptable to fulfil them, above all by excluding invasion of the North. Earle Wheeler wrote on 9 August 1967: ‘Our government has repeatedly made it clear that … we are not out to destroy the Hanoi regime … nor are we out to devastate NV. We simply want NV to cease its direction and support of the Vietcong insurgency in the South and take its forces home.’
Moreover, the US never resolved the problems caused by a chaotic allied chain of command. Intelligence was a chronic weakness. When Fred Weyand once chastised Bill Colby for the CIA’s inability to predict communist moves, Colby answered, ‘You know, I’d trade all of our assets in the South to get just one asset in the North.’ Weyand commented: ‘I simply was astounded that this country of ours, with all the power that we’ve got, didn’t have that. It tells you something about the power of the communist system that it can keep us in the dark like that. Every family in the North must have had someone killed or wounded, or a person that they knew, and yet that government could maintain control over them, while we couldn’t maintain control over the streets in New York.’
Trust was low between Americans and South Vietnamese, and indeed within the forces of the Saigon regime, because communist penetration went so deep. Lt. Gen. Bruce Palmer was bemused when an ARVN divisional commander insisted on taking him outdoors, away from his own staff, before speaking seriously. Then the Vietnamese explained that his own intelligence officer was a suspected enemy agent. Palmer was one of many soldiers disgusted by the waning of political support in Washington, even as the men of a vast US army fought and died to fulfil its government’s declared wishes. The general wrote after McNamara visited in June 1967: ‘It … became perfectly clear that our civilian and military leaders were far apart.’
The American build-up ever more grievously polluted Vietnam. A journalist described a characteristic scene in Danang: ‘On the main street beside the waterfront … Alps of ammunition were joined to an Andes chain of crates and containers of tinned food, soft drinks, plastic boots, transistor radios, electricity generators, air-conditioners, heavy artillery pieces, tanks, trucks, baseball bats, candy and pulp magazines. Every company in the United States appeared to have dumped here its surplus goods, soon to become garbage.’ Barbed wire was heaped in masses beside concrete blocks; old women squatted next to crated ammunition, while children cadged cigarettes from sentries, practising scraps of English amid excesses of plenty that threatened to bury their society. Moreover, many commanders were increasingly doubtful whether the comforts lavished upon US troops, exemplified by ice-cream issues to some units in the field, boosted morale as was intended, or instead corroded the warrior spirit.
Most of the world’s media no longer believed what the military said about whether it was Monday or Tuesday. On 3 September 1967 Richard Harwood of the Washington Post, himself a Marine veteran of Iwo Jima, published a dispatch headed ‘The War Just Doesn’t Add Up’. He addressed a single example of what he perceived as official deceit. MACV, wrote Harwood, had reported as ‘much improved’ the 1966 combat performance of the South Vietnamese armoured reg
iment based in Saigon. Yet how could this assertion be squared with the fact that its 8th Squadron claimed just one enemy dead; 5th Squadron, twelve; 10th, twenty-three; 9th, 148 enemy – while all these squadrons together had lost only fourteen of their own men killed? MACV’s firehose output of numbers to show things getting better seemed believable only by those who wrote letters to Santa Claus in expectation of an authentic reply.
Yet the spirit of the protesters, of the draft-dodgers and Pete Seeger, had not yet spread to most of the Americans at the sharp end. Marine Walt Boomer enthused: ‘If ever there was a good time to fight in Vietnam, 1967 was it. There were no drugs, no race problem. Whatever might be happening back in Danang, in the field we didn’t know about it.’ Boomer, son of a North Carolina small businessman and himself a graduate of Duke University, became one of his country’s most distinguished warriors. Such an officer thought little about the wider war: he merely rejoiced in fulfilling the role he had trained for, commanding a company whose members he deeply respected as ‘courageous young men. We operated in a bubble of the Corps. I didn’t understand what was happening in the real world.’
Capt. Jim Williams, son of a Winona, Minnesota, school superintendent, agreed: ‘It was a time of real patriotism, a lot of post-World War II sentiment and parades.’ Williams spent much of 1967 commanding a reconnaissance unit near the border with Laos, amid tribesmen shepherding laden elephants to market. This was before the North Vietnamese laid siege to Khe Sanh, and the area was tranquil enough for him to attend mass in the local village church, celebrated by an American mission priest. ‘If you’re a Terry and the Pirates type,’ wrote home Texan career officer Capt. John McNamara, ‘you can get into the hinterland and intrigue and blood-brother yourself to the montagnards to your heart’s content. If you like to maneuver regiments and battalions, you can even get a chance at that. So, as a professional playground, it’s excellent.’ It was the rest of the war that troubled McNamara – how the Vietnamese people felt about it all: ‘I suppose I’m considerably less optimistic about this thing than I was last time I wrote.’
3 FIELDCRAFT
If a soldier wanted to stay safe, his best course was to remain absolutely still, preferably in a hole: every movement made him more vulnerable. Yet it was the duty of infantrymen to move. They spent much of their field time seeking out the enemy in platoon, company or battalion strength. For fifty-thousand-odd Americans fulfilling such a role at any one time, exotic Asian nature became the new normal: the brilliant green of rice paddies, darker green of palm groves, small boys leading out water buffalo, farmers plodding with the patience of centuries behind ox-drawn wooden ploughs. At dusk grunts watched the buffalo being driven back home, flanks caked with mud from their wallows, pretty much like themselves. And somewhere concealed within all this rustic charm, there was the enemy.
Walt Boomer said: ‘We were looking for a fight every day, hopefully on our terms. I soon began to realise, “This guy’s sitting back and he’s watching. Some time he’s going to see a moment when you get a bit careless, and he’s going to whack you.” He knew the terrain, and we didn’t. I remember a terrible day we had. We were advancing down a very narrow valley of mixed brush, and we got hit pretty hard: they ambushed a platoon which had three men killed; I lost one guy who had a Navy Cross. We thought: we’ve got artillery and air support – if only they stick around, we’ll get them. But they didn’t. That operation wasn’t part of anything larger, it was just me and the company going through the country and clearing – whatever that meant. How many of them did we kill? I don’t know. Headquarters was furious about the [poor] kill ratio.’
Men were sorely tried by humping a load through fierce heat in tough terrain, even before the enemy entered the story. Each carried a weapon; a steel ammo can, used to keep paper and suchlike dry; at least eight magazines and rounds to fill them; four fragmentation and two smoke grenades; four canteens, which were seldom enough – in dry places a man might think it prudent to start out with twenty pounds’ weight of water. Some burdened themselves with extra hardware, perhaps a .45 pistol. As for rations, Andy Finlayson took on five-day recce patrols one can of beans and franks, one of spaghetti and meatballs, four of fruit, three small cans of snacks. David Rogers subsisted on peanut butter and jelly on crackers, fruit, and cake. Thus it was no wonder that most foot-soldiers lost weight, a lot of weight. Walt Boomer went into Vietnam 180lb, came out at 155.
Once they started walking, the bush became ornamented with discarded munitions as sweating newcomers – ‘cherries’ – lightened their burdens. They learned that only cowboys draped their bodies in M-60 machine-gun belts, because exposed rounds became filthy rounds, prone to jam. Jim Williams afterwards found that the surest way to discover the nature of a fellow-vet’s service was to ask whether he wore underwear. If he did, he had missed the bad places: underpants bred crotch fungus, so that few men affected them. Phil Caputo said: ‘Everything rotted and corroded quickly over there: bodies, boot leather, canvas, metal, morals.’
Capt. Chuck Reindenlaugh wrote to his wife: ‘No single piece of earth is less suited to waging conventional warfare … Oozing water into which one sinks to the knees; trees and underbrush so thickly entwined that it is impossible to force a man’s body through in many places; giant trees whose upper bough structure keeps the ground in perpetual half-light.’ Poor-sighted men marched in dread of losing their spectacles in the endless brushes with branches and creepers. British officer Freddy Spencer Chapman entitled a classic memoir of the 1942 Malayan campaign The Jungle is Neutral, and the same was true in Vietnam a generation later: country boys coped best, reared to be unafraid of wilderness – triple-canopy foliage, snakes, screaming gibbons. Many Americans, however, were city-bred. It was hard for them to walk easy through thick cover, in which paths were likely booby-trapped. Where visibility was only a yard or two, each man had to keep his eyes intent on the one in front: the careless strayed and vanished. Walt Boomer’s company lost a Marine during a sweep: ‘We had to stop the whole operation and find him before the North Vietnamese did.’
Most Americans moved noisily. ‘The best way to get killed,’ wrote Andy Finlayson, ‘was simply to talk in a normal tone of voice … One usually never saw one’s enemy, but a voice was like a bullet magnet.’ A unit that sought to move fast made as much racket as an elephant herd, snapping branches and bamboo. In heavy and hostile country, a prudent point man might advance only one pace every five or six seconds, ten a minute, three hundred yards an hour. A long-range patrol, religiously dedicated to concealment, could take a day to cover a mile, with the rear man responsible for erasing tracks. Company trudges were punctuated by the hourly chant of radio-operators giving posreps – position reports – into their ‘Prick-Tens’ – PRC-10s, later replaced by PRC-25s: ‘All secure. Situation remains the same.’ Nearly all US units radioed too much, failing to grasp the diligence of communist monitoring.
Though an officer navigated by map and Lensmatic compass, an enlisted man was designated to count the paces they advanced. The leader – point – did not ‘break trail’, he simply advanced with infinite watchfulness, leaving those behind to wield machetes. Every unit had its small quota of eager warriors. In Judde Kinne’s platoon there was staff-sergeant Hayward Riley, famously good at handling men, and Corporal Thompson Flute, a Native American from Oklahoma not to be trusted near a drink back at base, but magnificent in the field. Walt Boomer always picked for point ‘the most skilled hunter, with a sixth sense’. Reg Edwards became less afraid of going first when he learned from experience that point usually survived the shock of contact – those immediately behind were more likely to get whacked. Space – at least five yards between men – was critical, especially in heavily booby-trapped areas: bunching meant multiplying mutilations and deaths. Action seldom started in the middle of a column, which made that a popular place to be. ‘Drag’ demanded as much bushcraft as point – he was rear man, tasked to catch enemy sneaking up from behind.
Tim O’Brien, among the most vivid chroniclers of the infantryman’s experience, wrote: ‘If you weren’t humping, you were waiting. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring … You’d be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you’d feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet … You’d try to relax. You’d uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you’d think, that wasn’t so bad. And right then you’d hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you’d be squealing pig squeals.’
Some fights started with an air assault onto a ‘hot’ LZ, a landing zone occupied by an enemy who shot back even before infantrymen sprang heavily down from the choppers. Phil Caputo wrote that such an operation ‘creates emotional pressures far more intense than a conventional ground assault. It is the enclosed space, the noise, the speed, and, above all, the sense of total helplessness. There is a certain excitement to it the first time, but after that, it is one of the more unpleasant experiences offered by modern war.’ It was nailbiting to ride the first bird in, but the second was often the enemy’s target of choice. Fred Childs was perched on the edge of a Huey hovering a few feet above an LZ when two men on the opposite side jumped down, causing the helo to lurch sideways and Childs to fall out and hit his head. Concussed, he recalled nothing about the battle that followed.
One day up near Chu Lai, a notably stoical black soldier named Davis took a bullet as he hit the ground, but kept shooting back. When another wounded man, Taylor, merely lay sobbing, Davis mocked him mercilessly, goading him to use his weapon: ‘You cryin’ cause you gettin’ ready to die. You dying, and you know you dying. You might as well come on and take some of these gooks with us.’ Taylor said sulkily, ‘I’m not gonna die,’ which caused Davis to prod him again: ‘Why you sittin’ there crying if you not gon’ die? You cryin’ cause you a big faggot.’ Then both Davis and Taylor kept shooting until a dust-off came. Twenty-nine-year-old company commander Vince Felletter once lost six men who jumped from a stricken Huey, only to have the wreck flip on top of them, rotors flailing, which imposed on survivors the ghastly task of sorting body parts. Next night battalion flew a hot turkey meal out to them – ‘Feeling sorry for us, I guess.’ This gesture went awry: the entire company succumbed to food poisoning, and at dawn fourteen men were medevacked with temperatures over 103. Felletter said: ‘That was the worst time in my command.’