by Max Hastings
Propaganda policy enforced the exclusion from North Vietnam’s state broadcasts and publications of all tidings not relevant to the national struggle. Thus, radio announcer ‘Hanoi Hannah’ made no mention of the 1967 Middle East war, nor later of the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia or the 1969 American moon landing. Prisoner Doug Ramsey recoiled in disgust from a communist ‘True War Heroes’ comic which extolled the virtues of a female suicide-bomber. He hated Radio Hanoi’s incessant war songs, ‘frightening in their obvious sympathy with and preference for violence, their narrowness of view, shrillness, tendency to find only hero-figures and villains in Washington and Vietnam alike’. He became weary of the marching song of the NLF:
Liberate the South!
We are staunchly resolved to march
To kill the American imperialists,
Smash and scatter their lackeys who sell our country.
Yet Bao Ninh’s fine autobiographical novel The Sorrow of War helps to dispel the notion that communist soldiers were brainwashed automatons. Ninh – real name Hoang Au Phuong – was born in 1952, and spent four years in the South as an NVA infantryman. His harrowing narrative shows men driven by much the same forces as their American foes: camaraderie, a yearning for survival, dismay at the relentless loss of friends, obsession with a girl left behind. In one passage the writer’s alter ego, the young officer Kien, resists with dismay a young comrade’s attempted intimacy: ‘He hated any confidences … Hell, if everyone in the regiment came to him with personal problems after those horrendous firefights, he’d feel like throwing himself over a waterfall.’
Kien supports the Northern struggle, but curls his lip in cynicism at the reality that its chief burden is borne by country boys permitted no voice in the decisions about their own lives and deaths. He himself, a highly-educated young man, privileged by the standards of his society, loved those ‘friendly, simple peasant fighters whose extraordinary qualities had created an almost invincible fighting force’. Pot-smoking grunts had company on the other side: Kien and his men experimented with drying and smoking the flowers and roots of Rosa canina, which blossomed white in the rainy season, ‘its perfume filling the air, especially at night … fuelling erotic, obsessional dreams. When we awoke the perfume had evaporated, but we were left with a feeling of smouldering passion, both painful and ecstatic.’
When they smoked shredded flowers and roots mixed with tobacco, ‘after just a few puffs they felt themselves lifted, quietly floating like a wisp of smoke itself floating on the wind … They could decide what they’d like to dream about, or even blend the dreams, like preparing a wonderful cocktail. With rosa one smoked to forget the daily hell of the soldier’s life, hunger and suffering. Also to forget death. And totally, but totally, to forget tomorrow.’ Ninh’s novel mocks the weary round of indoctrination: ‘Politics continuous. Politics in the morning, politics in the afternoon, politics again in the evening. “We won, the enemy lost. The enemy will surely lose. The North had a … bumper harvest. The people will rise up and welcome you. Those who don’t just lack awareness.”’
Americans could take for granted their daily rations, as their enemies could not. North Vietnamese officers observed to each other that ‘Rice is the field-marshal of our army.’ One of them, Pham Phu Bang, described obsessional conversations about food with his close friend Thanh Giang. Month after month, and eventually year after year, they also shared jokes – ‘yes, there were jokes’ – and recitals of each man’s alleged past love life. When at last Bang was terribly wounded in an air strike near Tay Ninh, it was Giang who dragged him to the rear, cut off his blood-soaked clothing, dressed him in a suit from his own pack. Bang found out only later that these were his friend’s intended wedding clothes, which he had cherished pristine. Thanh Giang later became a successful writer, dubbed ‘the Ernest Hemingway of Vietnam’.
Col. Nguyen An was an enthusiastic hunter who shot deer when he found them, and occasionally his men met bigger game. ‘Once as we marched,’ he wrote, ‘word was suddenly passed back from the head of the column: “We’ve got elephant meat. Hurry up!”’ Every man quickened his pace. When An and his group reached the spot where the elephant had been killed, they discovered that soldiers had detonated a small explosive charge to expose its rump, because the beast’s hide was impervious to knife thrusts. ‘One man was crawling out of its belly carrying big slabs of meat, men were pushing and shoving each other as they ripped flesh from the curved ribs, others were struggling to cut steaks from the rump. The most delicious parts – the trunk and four feet – had already been taken away. In just a few hours, all that was left was hide and bones.’ That happy place lingered in their memories, written onto NVA maps as ‘Elephant Field’.
Yet even hungry Northerners declined to eat everything: Bao Ninh’s narrator Kien tells of how his comrade ‘Lofty’ Thinh one day shot a big orangutan, and summoned his squad to drag it triumphantly back to their hut: ‘But, oh God, when it was skinned the animal looked like a fat woman with ulcerous skin, the eyes, half-white half-grey, still rolling. The entire squad was horrified and ran away screaming, leaving all their kit behind.’ Instead of eating the beast, they eventually buried it beneath a headstone.
Nor was hunger the NVA’s worst privation. Natural hazards created by snakes, centipedes and other poisonous creatures did not exclusively afflict foreigners, as Americans sometimes supposed. As for the weather, Vietnamese have a mournful little song of which one line runs: ‘The rain dripping off the banana leaves, drop by drop, tells us autumn has come.’ It was amazing that either side’s fighters could find repose in the jungle during the wet season, their clothing forever soaked through, waterfalls cascading down their faces. ‘But,’ in Bang’s words, ‘when you had marched eighteen miles that day, and probably eighteen more the day before, you fell asleep the moment you halted, rain or no rain.’
They fell prey to diseases for which their medical officers had few remedies. One day in 1967 a Northern private surrendered to Saigon soldiers. He was suffering from acute malaria, for which he had been treated at a camp in Cambodia by a doctor who chanced to be a relative. This man told him he should ‘go chieu hoi’ – defect – if he wished to survive: continued jungle life would kill him. He was admitted to a US Army field hospital, needing massive blood transfusions: these were funded by contributions from twenty generous Americans out of their own pockets. Restored to health, he joined a government armed propaganda company, exclaiming to a friend, ‘Long live Thieu, Ky, and the American imperialists!’ He said that the only communist he still regarded with enthusiasm was the doctor who had advised him to go chieu hoi.
Chronic sickness – malaria and diseases brought on by vitamin deficiencies – afflicted even senior cadres at COSVN. Truong Nhu Tang spent two months of each of his six years in the jungle flat on his back, fighting fever: ‘Almost all jungle-dwellers were marked by a jaundiced and sickly pallor.’ Hanoi’s minister of health travelled south to explore ways of combating malaria, and himself died of it. A host of VC and NVA suffered from the debilitating misery of haemorrhoids.
If American grunts felt far from home, the North’s soldiers endured almost absolute remoteness: they knew virtually nothing of what was happening in the world beyond their immediate experience. Traversing the Ho Chi Minh Trail was never less than hazardous, even now that trucks covered some stretches. The NVA’s Col. An, recalled to Hanoi, offered a vignette: ‘Every night, hundreds of trucks and vehicles stretched out in a long line. Once, as we drove, the whole column stopped suddenly and every vehicle turned off its lights. Enemy aircraft roared overhead, and we could see flares in the sky some distance in front. We sat there waiting for hours. I looked anxiously at my watch and saw that it was 0400 – dawn coming soon. I walked to the head of the column to see what was happening. The night was strangely quiet. It seemed that there was nothing alive in the area and all I could hear was the buzzing of night insects. I pounded on the doors of the cabs of several trucks and asked loudly, “A
nybody home?” but got no answer. I listened carefully for a moment and heard the sound of snoring. Our car pulled out and drove on past the head of the convoy.’ Shortly afterwards An was badly injured when a bridge collapsed under his vehicle, so that he eventually reached Hanoi swathed in bandages. A jovial fellow-colonel said, ‘After all these years in the Central Highlands, you finally get a chance to go home to your wife and those lips you had planned to use to kiss her are swollen up like balloons. What the hell are you going to do now?’
At regular intervals an army mailman set forth down the Trail carrying perhaps sixty pounds’ weight of letters. It became a small miracle when any fraction of these survived bombs and weather to reach the army. ‘Quite often rain had made letters unreadable,’ said one soldier, adding that they cherished them anyway. ‘In good times, we might receive mail twice a year, but less often if things were going badly. When a letter reached a man, it was never his private property: the whole squad gathered, to hear it read aloud.’
American and South Vietnamese operations forced NVA and VC units to shift camp often, and fast. Young Dr Dang Thuy Tram described her grief when obliged to quit her mountain fastness. Intensely romantic, she had grown to love the primitive little hospital: ‘Perhaps nothing is sadder than the spectacle of an evacuation – the houses abandoned, stripped of furniture, devoid of life. This afternoon as I return to the clinic from the forest the enemy is not far away – I look at the lovely houses, and my heart fills with hatred … So much sweat has been expended on the laying of each stone and sheaf of straw. If we have to leave this place, when can we enjoy such treatment facilities again?’
Early next day a long column of fighters, porters and medical staff set forth, carrying the sick and wounded on stretchers, together with as many medical supplies as they could hump: ‘We trudge up the hill, sweat pouring down our faces, not daring to pause to rest. We are so exhausted I have to cajole some men to return and bring out the last three stretchers. Kiem, a wounded soldier with a broken leg, is on the last litter … I call one of the students, Ly – a little girl – to help me carry him. He is big – too heavy for the two of us to lift. We … can only drag him a short distance.’ She found two guerrillas to carry Kiem to a hiding place. Next day, she looked back across the mountains and sobbed as she saw thick smoke rising from the ruins of her hospital.
Throughout the war, the US and Saigon regime devoted immense and vain effort to destroying the NLF’s headquarters, customarily located in some cluster of huts just inside or outside Cambodia. After Truong Nhu Tang’s release from imprisonment he described a two-week march through the Mekong delta to reach COSVN, then sited on the Mimot rubber plantation, straddling the border in the so-called Fishhook area: ‘The first sign of it was a wooden barrier across the trail and a control point manned by about ten guards, from which other soldiers were summoned on bicycles to lead new arrivals to a guest hut, one among several hidden beneath the jungle canopy.’ The headquarters building, they found, likewise resembled a simple peasant hut: ‘Up close you could see the system of tunnels and bunkers that jutted off from it. COSVN was, and always had been, people rather than a place … a leadership group that implemented the directives of the North Vietnamese Politburo and co-ordinated the operations of the Party and the NLF.’
Urban Party luminaries such as himself found it hard to adapt to living ‘like hunted animals’. His only possessions were two pairs of black pyjamas, underpants, a mosquito net, and a few square yards of plastic, interchangeable as bivouac roof or raincoat. VC fighters had the same, adding only ‘elephant’s guts’ – the long tubes of rolled cotton filled with rice that they carried slung over their shoulders as they marched. Constantly hungry, they grew vegetables and killed wild animals to supplement their meagre diet. When they stayed in one place long enough, they also raised chickens and pigs, destined for cooking in ‘Hoang Cam stoves’, named for a guerrilla commander who devised a horizontal chimney that diffused smoke. At one time or another the NLF leaders ate elephant, tiger, wild dog, monkey, none of which the softly-reared Tang digested with much pleasure. Unlike Col. An, he described elephant disdainfully as ‘a rubbery substance, tough as old shoes’. He thought better of big jungle moths, which they captured fluttering around their lanterns and barbecued over a flame with their wings cut off.
Tang was among many communists – and likewise hapless Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao peasants – for whom a dominant war memory was that of enduring B-52 Arc Light strikes. COSVN and main force NVA units usually received warning of their imminence from the Soviet intelligence trawlers off Guam and Okinawa that monitored American take-offs; North Vietnamese radar picked up formations approaching from Thailand. Thus senior cadres and their staff could grab some rice and a few possessions before fleeing the likely target area on foot or bicycle. Sometimes, however, the bombers and the torment of explosives caught them anyway. Tang wrote: ‘The concussive whump-whump-whump came closer and closer, moving in a direct line towards our positions. Then, as the cataclysm walked onto us, everyone hugged the earth – some screaming quietly, others struggling to suppress surges of violent trembling. Around us the ground heaved spasmodically, and we were engulfed.’ Few prayed to Lenin or ‘Uncle Ho’, most instead to Buddha.
‘From a thousand yards away the sonic roar of the explosion tore eardrums, leaving many victims permanently deaf, while the shock waves knocked some senseless. A bomb within five hundred yards collapsed the walls of an unreinforced bunker, burying alive those cowering within … The first few times I experienced a B-52 attack, I felt that I had been caught up in the Apocalypse: terror was absolute. One lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible orders to get out of the bunker.’ There was once a strike while a Soviet delegation was visiting COSVN: their Russian guests were afterwards embarrassed that they had visibly soiled their trousers. Tang wrote: ‘The visitors could have forgone their shame; their hosts were well-accustomed to the same experience.’
Tang and his colleagues sometimes returned to COSVN after an Arc Light strike to find nothing left: ‘It was as if an enormous scythe had swept through the jungle, shearing like grass the giant teaks and go-trees, shredding them into billions of scattered splinters. The hut complex was annihilated; food, clothes, supplies, documents, everything. In some awesome way they had ceased to exist … the bomb craters were gigantic – thirty feet across and nearly as deep. In the rainy season they filled with water, then did service as duck or fish ponds.’
Yet the veteran cadre observed that once he and his comrades grew accustomed to the bombers, shock and terror were replaced by ‘an abject fatalism. The B-52s somehow put life into perspective. Many of those who survived an attack found that afterwards they viewed everything from a more serene and philosophical perspective. This lesson lingered, and on more than one future occasion helped me to compose myself for death.’
3 SAIGON SOLDIERS
After the war ended, an American general wrote that the great enigma was why ‘the enemy apparently fought so much better than the South Vietnamese’. Doug Ramsey said: ‘If you compared the average ARVN officer with his VC counterpart – so much more motivated – you knew the South had little chance.’ The Vietcong asserted mockingly that the only beneficiaries of the Saigon regime were monks, whores, Americans and generals. Yet some South Vietnamese passionately believed in the cause, fought hard, liked Americans. Pilot Tran Hoi said: ‘I was awed by their generosity, and especially that of the US Air Force. Whatever we needed they gave us, even down to toys for our children.’
Hoi flew air-cover and ground-attack sorties in a prop-driven Douglas A-1 Skyraider armed with a medley of 2.75-inch rockets and 250lb bombs, in addition to four 20mm cannon. On sunny days the cockpit and its metal fittings were painfully hot when he climbed aboard and ran up his engine before take-off. A delicious coolness prevailed in the air, however: Hoi loved the mere fact of flying, sometimes contour-chasing for miles, as low as fifty feet. He claimed to be untroub
led by his daily business of strafing, because he was confident that he served the right side. One day, ordered to attack a cluster of huts, he called base to say that he saw no enemy below, only a man walking his dog. The radio crackled back that intelligence was sure the communists had just moved in. The controller urged, ‘Go for it!’ Hoi dropped his napalm without a qualm: ‘I knew how cunning the communists were.’
Another day he and his wingman were ordered to attack a big junk moving up the Mekong estuary. They quickly identified the target, which was flying a Saigon flag. Ignore that, said the controller – just a ruse. Hoi rolled, dived and unleashed a pair of rockets that exploded in the boat’s hull. Immediately, black-clad figures emerged and began to leap over the side. Hoi dived again, firing cannon at the survivors struggling and splashing in the brown water. His wingman, however, made only a dry pass, without touching the gun-button. It was his first combat mission, and he exclaimed emotionally, ‘I can’t shoot! It’s too cruel!’ Hoi rebuked him over the radio as they turned for home, ‘This is our job. We’re not doing it for fun. Unless you change your mind, you’d better ask for reassignment.’ His young companion never again flinched.