Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  The vivid and sometimes moving memoirs of Vietcong who participated in Tet conspicuously omit the widespread atrocities committed in areas that they occupied. Cadre Nguyen Van Lem is alleged to have captured an ARVN officer and his family, then personally cut the throats of Lt. Col. Nguyen Tuan, his wife, six children and eighty-year-old mother. Shortly afterwards, on 1 February, Lem fell into the hands of ARVN Rangers. When he was brought before Saigon’s police chief, Brig. Nguyen Ngoc Loan simply drew a Smith & Wesson and shot him in the head. Nonetheless, Eddie Adams’ photograph of Loan shooting the prisoner, which won the AP man a Pulitzer Prize, inflicted devastating damage on the American and South Vietnamese cause, an outcome regretted by the photographer: ‘I thought absolutely nothing of it. He shot him, so what? … And I just happened to be there this time.’ Adams lamented that he was unable to get a picture ‘of that Viet Cong blowing away the [Tuan] family’. American historian Ed Moise is convinced that the entire story of Lem murdering the Tuan family is a post-war invention. The truth will never be known, but Vice-President Ky wrote bitterly: ‘In the click of a shutter, our struggle for independence and self-determination was transformed into an image of a seemingly senseless and brutal execution.’

  MACV urged the media to consider countless atrocities committed by the other side, but could offer no remotely comparable visual images. It was the same story later in the battle, when newspapers published AP photos of a Vietnamese Marine shooting a PoW. A US adviser was quoted as saying, ‘We usually kill the seriously wounded Viet Cong for two reasons. One is that the hospitals are so full of our own soldiers and civilians that there is no room for the enemy. The second is that when you’ve seen five-year-old girls with their eyes blindfolded, their arms tied behind their backs, and bullets in their brains, you look for revenge. I saw two little girls that dead yesterday. One hour ago I shot a Viet Cong.’

  At MACV, Brig. John Chaisson faced the ordeal of briefing reporters – ‘that group of buzzards’. Army information lagged hours behind events, so that on the morning of 1 February Westmoreland’s staff announced that in Hue a VC company had merely attacked a bridge and loading ramp before being driven off. That evening’s US Army press release reported only two mortar rounds landing in an ammunition dump at Phu Bai, nine miles to the south, whereas by that time much of Hue city was in communist hands. Scrabbling for good news, spokesmen highlighted the voluntary return from leave of many Vietnamese soldiers, together with the fact that few civilians were rallying to communist appeals. Chaisson himself told reporters on 3 February that clearing Hue was ‘just a matter of time’, a process that should be completed ‘in the next day or so’. In reality, the city’s battle had three weeks to run.

  The Christian Science Monitor that day asserted that the US faced the possibility of military defeat. The Wall Street Journal editorialised that something was ‘awfully wrong. The South Vietnamese government, with all the vast aid of the US, has revealed its inability to provide security for large masses of people in countryside and city.’ The satirical columnist Art Buchwald wrote: ‘Little Big Horn, Dakota, June 27, 1876: “General George Armstrong Custer said today in an exclusive interview with this correspondent that the battle of Little Big Horn had just turned the corner and he could now see the light at the end of the tunnel.”’

  Some Vietnamese senior officers behaved well, but others succumbed to funk. Westmoreland told the Pentagon that IV Corps’ commander had sought refuge in his mansion behind a screen of tanks, while another senior officer had taken to wearing civilian clothing beneath his uniform. Lt. Gen. Creighton Abrams complained to the ARVN chief of staff that in Hue three battalions of Vietnamese Marines had moved forward less than half a city block in three days: ‘In this time of great need … if the Marines cannot [rise to the occasion] … they have forfeited their right to be a part of your armed forces.’ David Brannigan of NBC claimed that South Vietnamese troops were doing more looting than fighting. Fred Weyand said later: ‘Some of them did remarkably well – as well as we would have done – and some were just terrible … In too many cases, when they felt in danger of being overwhelmed, they fell apart.’

  By the fifth day of fighting in Saigon, 4 February, the VC’s regional commander proposed a general withdrawal, a call immediately rejected by the Party secretary. Senior cadres later lambasted some leaders’ supposed lack of determination, though such criticism was surely designed to deflect attention from their own responsibility for launching the offensive on the basis of multiple false assumptions. That same 4 February, after formally celebrating the thirty-eighth anniversary of the founding of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Dang shifted his command post. He and his staff rode bicycles to a ferry, then withdrew across the Saigon River. As American shelling intensified and their casualties mounted, on 5 February they quit. COSVN ordered units withdrawing from the city’s centre to keep fighting on its fringes, but a battalion commander blurted despairingly, ‘The suburbs are a meat-grinder: if we hold on there we shall lose a lot of men.’ Sluggish trickles of survivors set forth on a long, dejected march back towards the sanctuary of the Plain of Reeds.

  John Chaisson wrote home on 6 February: ‘Gen. Westmoreland is bearing up pretty well, but he is taking a drubbing in the press.’ MACV’s chieftain retained his fixation with the north-west. On 8 February he cabled the Pentagon: ‘Although I feel we can hold Khe Sanh, it is conceivable that we will not be so fortunate. If we lose it, it will be essential that we retake it and that is why I have put the 1st Cav Div in the area … It is only prudent to plan for the worst contingency.’ As late as the 10th he messaged Adm. Sharp that he was still convinced that North Vietnam ‘intends to make Khe Sanh another Dienbienphu’.

  The media followed the general’s lead. In February and March the base on Route 9 accounted for 38 per cent of all Vietnam AP stories from outside the capital, and one-fifth of all war photos published in the New York Times and Washington Post. TV stations broadcast repeated shots of casualties and damage inside the Marine perimeter – half of CBS’s nightly war coverage featured the siege – but could show nothing of the far heavier carnage among the NVA. On 16 February CBS reporter Murray Fromson asserted bleakly: ‘Here the North Vietnamese decide who lives and who dies … and sooner or later they will make the move that will seal the fate of Khe Sanh.’ Although scores of aircraft took off and landed unscathed, TV majored on three C-123s and one C-130 wrecked on the airstrip. CBS’s Walter Cronkite, visiting Vietnam, is alleged to have said that few people doubted that the communists could take Khe Sanh if they really wanted it.

  Amid this high tide of crisis, CIA analysts upgraded their estimates of total communist strength in the South from 515,000 to 580,000, though the real number was probably nearer three hundred thousand. Fears at MACV lapped up to the White House – how else to explain Johnson’s remark to Earle Wheeler on 3 February that while he had no wish to drop an atomic bomb at Khe Sanh, the enemy might force that decision upon him? Westmoreland assured the president that this would not be necessary – one of very few direct telephone exchanges between the two men took place during Tet. But then the general himself said that if the NVA now unleashed a full-scale invasion of the South, the US should be willing to use whatever was needed to stop them, including chemical or nuclear weapons.

  On 5 February an aide of William Fulbright received an anonymous call suggesting that the senator should ask why one of America’s foremost experts on tactical nuclear weapons, Professor Richard Garwin, had recently visited South Vietnam. This tip-off prompted intense and alarmed speculation: on 8 February Eugene McCarthy, now the anti-Johnson Democratic aspirant in the 1968 presidential election, asserted that the military had requested access to tactical nuclear weapons. The White House and the Pentagon immediately denounced McCarthy’s remarks as unfair speculation, which indeed it was. Yet at a news conference Earle Wheeler refused to rule out the possibility of using nuclear weapons if Khe Sanh was in danger of being overrun; meanwhile Johnson briefly considered
invading the North.

  The persistence of such fevered discussion was reflected in a 17 February New York Times story about the president headed ‘Johnson Denies Atom Use in Vietnam is Considered’. Such talk appalled America’s allies. British prime minister Harold Wilson said on CBS’s Face the Nation that the use of nuclear weapons would be ‘lunacy … sheer lunacy’. In truth, nobody got close to unleashing such a nightmare; most of the generals’ obtuse remarks reflected a desire to keep Hanoi guessing, rather than real intent. On 12 February Adm. Sharp sought to foreclose the issue by ordering Westmoreland to abandon nuclear contingency planning. The damage to international confidence was done, however, and proved irrevocable.

  The communists deployed sixty thousand men on the northern-sector battlefields. Early on 7 February a battalion of the 304th Division, ineffectually supported by armour, launched an assault on a US special forces camp at Lang Vei, five miles west across the mountains from Khe Sanh. The first NVA PT-76 tank was quickly hit and left burning, but infantry breached the perimeter. The army pressed the Marines at Khe Sanh to dispatch a relief column, a proposal wisely rejected: the NVA was deployed to punish just such a move, and it was a reflection of the panic in high places that soldiers proposed it. At Lang Vei the attackers hit some defenders’ bunkers with B40 rockets, poured petrol into one that continued to hold out before setting it ablaze, then raised their flag at the cost of 30 per cent casualties. Helicopters evacuated American survivors before the impossibly exposed camp was abandoned.

  Though the communists crowed about their success, their losses throughout the region were appalling. Disease took a steady toll even before B-52s intruded: one man in five suffered from malaria, more when the rainy season came. In one failed assault a regiment lost a quarter of its strength, then another lost one man in five attacking Hill 832. The NVA’s 9th Regiment suffered typical tribulations: on the evening of 6 February, its men bivouacked along a stream a mile from Route 9. Next morning as the troops resumed their march, aircraft suddenly appeared overhead: six B-52s, unrolling a blanket of devastation. Half the regiment found itself directly beneath thunderous columns of bombs.

  As men scurried among the dead and strove to succour the wounded, a second and then a third wave of bombers attacked. When the last B-52s faded into the distance, wrecked bodies lay everywhere among stripped trees and blood-red water. The regiment had suffered almost three hundred casualties, 15 per cent of its strength, before firing a shot on the battlefield. One company commander had a nervous collapse. The divisional history acknowledges a slump in morale. Back on the Ho Chi Minh Trail almost two hundred tons of ammunition, transported south by herculean labour, were also destroyed by air strikes.

  After the first weeks of Khe Sanh’s siege, the green hills around the base were reduced by bombardment to red wastes, shrouded in dust and smoke. Each air strike was followed by a frenzy of communist digging to rescue buried men. One bomb exploded beside a command bunker, killing five new arrivals, fresh out of high school. The two sides’ snipers waged protracted duels, but most of the communist effort was devoted to pushing trenches ever closer to the American perimeter. The urgency of their excavations was driven by knowledge that only through closely grappling the defenders might they gain respite from air attacks. By March, some NVA companies were reduced to thirty men. The Americans who held those positions never forgot the experience. Corporal Orville Fulkerson noted curiously that a tangle of intermingled American and NVA corpses on Hill 881 ‘jolted like jelly’ as they were hit again and again by the small-arms fire of one side or the other. Jeff Anthony, among the defenders of Hill 861, never believed that the North Vietnamese could capture Khe Sanh, because they were hammered in every attack on his own company’s positions. Again and again in the darkness the Marines glimpsed shadowy figures at sixty yards, then forty, then thirty – closer than ever before in the Vietnam experience of most Americans. Yet guided by overhead illuminants, the defenders mowed down the NVA, emptying magazine after magazine, belt after belt, ‘though we took a lot of casualties from their mortars’. After one clash on the morning of 25 February, the NVA tried an old psychological warfare ruse from Dienbienphu, inviting the Americans to remove their own dead under a white flag. The Marines ignored this attempt to secure a priceless propaganda image.

  Communist commanders deployed an entertainment troupe to alleviate the boredom, as well as the exhaustion and terror, besetting the besiegers. A playwright named Chu Nghi created a work entitled At the Ta Con Perimeter Wire, which was duly performed. Its morale-boosting effect was somewhat diminished when the author was himself killed in an air attack, which also wounded an actor and actress. Hanoi histories cite fantastic statistics for casualties inflicted on the Americans, including an alleged body count of 3,055 in place of the real five hundred, and claims of 279 US aircraft destroyed. One squad reported killing forty enemies for each of its own men lost: ‘the tall, heavy, slow Americans died in large numbers’. Khe Sanh is described as ‘a glorious victory’. No communist soldier privately believed such nonsense, however. The 304th Division’s history admits that its units suffered ‘considerable attrition during this ferocious trial of strength’, which caused ‘problems … in the thinking and ideology of the division’s cadres and enlisted men’. Desertions and self-inflicted wounds soared. Disciplinary action was taken against an extraordinary 399 men, including 186 Party members and eighty-five cadres, for offences that included ‘lack of offensive spirit’.

  The NVA assert that 45 per cent of all its own losses were caused by air strikes, a similar percentage by artillery, less than 10 per cent by small arms. By the time the Tet battles ended, the communists in the northern sector faced a sick list of twelve thousand and admitted six thousand killed and another fifteen thousand wounded in action. The siege of Khe Sanh petered out through the spring. Perceived objectively, it was a major defeat for the NVA, which lost at least ten men for every American they killed. But Westmoreland and the media between them snatched a psychological defeat: MACV was deemed to have fallen victim to a brilliant communist deception – which, in considerable degree, it had.

  In Hue, by the night of 4–5 February the attackers had suffered well over a thousand killed and four thousand wounded, and faced shortages of ammunition and food. Yet when NVA commanders sought permission to withdraw, it was refused. They were told that air drops would soon take place, for which they should prepare marker fires; that on 18 February, a new wave of nationwide attacks would be launched; that reinforcements were at hand. A cadre later expressed his bitterness about these lies, the betrayal of men’s trust by the wilful propagation of false hopes. Few senior communists dared openly to acknowledge bad news. In the words of the NVA’s Col. Nguyen An, ‘Everyone was afraid to speak for fear of being accused of cowardice or some ideological fault.’

  Vice-President Ky was told that the Americans hesitated to bombard Hue’s temples and palace, in which the communists were now concentrated. He responded with his accustomed ruthlessness: ‘These things were made by men. They can be rebuilt by men. Hit them!’ Shells and air strikes pounded the citadel whenever persistent poor weather permitted. Yet the city’s recapture proceeded with agonising slowness, securing only a few hundred yards of rubble a day. Marines became contemptuous of their South Vietnamese allies. An American who clambered onto the hull of an ARVN tank to fire its turret machine-gun battered in vain on the hatch for ammunition: the crew had locked themselves down.

  From a foxhole north of Hue, Lt. Andy Westin wrote to his wife Mimi: ‘My darling, for the first time since I came here, last night, I cried. I wasn’t the only one. From the CO on down, our men were crying … Our entire battalion got caught in a gook trap … It was a slaughter! All the brass thought the gooks had moved out, so we just went waltzing into this woodline … I’ve never seen anything like it and I hope I never do again.’ As losses mounted, Americans grew increasingly careless about the plight of civilians in the path of their shells, bombs, bullets. Sorely con
scious of their own bleak prospects, they became cruel in their contempt for property: there was much wanton destruction. It cost four days of dogged fighting, blasting out the enemy with fire from tanks, flamethrowers and 106mm recoilless rifles, to secure a mile-strong strip of the southern city between the MACV compound and the Phu Can canal. Meanwhile across the river, ARVN efforts to retake the citadel still made painfully slow progress.

  On 11 February, Myron Harrington’s Marine battalion was dispatched up Route I to Hue: ‘Nobody knew what was happening.’ He was given a perfunctory briefing on street-fighting tactics, ‘about which I didn’t have a clue’. On the 13th, the battalion’s Alpha Company suffered heavily, attempting to advance into the citadel. Next day, Harrington’s bewildered Delta moved upriver in landing craft and junks, taking incoming fire. That evening Harrington was told casually, ‘By the way, tomorrow you’re going to have to take the Dong Ba gate,’ which ‘put the fear of God into me’.

  He passed a sleepless night, partly from anxiety and partly because of the relentless din of artillery. The morning of 15 February found him leading a hundred men scrambling southwards up a ditch inside the citadel wall, grateful for heaps of rubble that gave them cover: ‘It was suddenly very quiet, like those apparently silent Japanese Pacific beaches in World War II.’ Then the communists opened up, quickly wounding Harrington’s runner. ‘The fire was so intense it was like being on the 300-yard range at Quantico. I couldn’t hear myself think. One platoon commander was lying on a balcony, wounded by an RPG, with his radio knocked out. I sent several runners to his position, who were all hit.’ Harrington told Sgt. Maury Whitmar to take a squad up onto the wall. ‘He gave me an incredulous look – then did it.’