by Max Hastings
The My Lai massacre has come to symbolise all that was worst about the US armed forces’ conduct of the war. The ‘patriot lobby’ back home was not wrong in asserting that Calley was a scapegoat. The lieutenant stretched the truth when he asserted that his actions were ‘just following orders’, but he could legitimately have asserted that the killing reflected a culture of casual murder, a racial contempt for Vietnamese, which infected many US units – and their commanders. Justice would have been well-served by imposing exemplary custodial sentences on several senior officers named by the Peers inquiry, Koster foremost among them.
Meanwhile, it seems no more justifiable to blame Abrams than his MACV predecessors for failure to win the war, because his options were so meagre. He was mandated to achieve battlefield success with forces that soon began to shrink. He did what soldiers are supposed to do – kill the enemy – but had no power to fix the apparently immutable, intractable reality, that South Vietnam’s government had no relationship with its own people. Given a thousand-mile western border to hold, and beyond it multiple communist sanctuaries, like Westmoreland he deplored Washington’s refusal to permit him to thrust into Laos and Cambodia. The NVA-run Hak Ly trucking company in Cambodia, in which the Phnom Penh government held a profitable stake, was shifting fourteen thousand tons of supplies a year from the port of Sihanoukville to North Vietnamese bases in the east of the country.
Abrams fumed: ‘It’s criminal to let these enemy units fatten up over there … getting a free ride.’ Yet when he suggested to Lt. Gen. Andrew Goodpaster that some B-52 Arc Light strikes might ‘accidentally’ drift over the border, his deputy responded firmly that a Washington policy decision would be required. Abrams was further infuriated by a CIA study that suggested military action against the sanctuaries would achieve little. Greg Daddis observes that the MACV command change represented more a shift in rhetoric than a change of strategy. Under Abrams, the 101st Airborne’s operations, and the May 1969 assaults on Hill 937 in the A Shau Valley – what became known as Hamburger Hill, barely a mile from the Laotian border – were indistinguishable from many battles fought on Westmoreland’s watch.
Another such episode achieved notoriety as Matterhorn, the theme of Karl Marlantes’ fictionalised fragment of autobiography. Diplomat’s son Lt. Landen Thorne, a fellow-platoon commander with Marlantes in C Company of the 1/4th Marines, was one of relatively few upper-crust Americans who accepted Vietnam service without demur: his grandfather had been a career Marine, his father a radar officer on the wartime carrier Hornet, and Thorne wanted to discover whether he could match up to them. In the last months before the twenty-five-year-old New Yorker graduated from Yale, his classmates agonised about whether to go to the war, and most decided against: ‘I got progressively more worried as I got to learn more. I was getting “Hey, did you hear about Charlie? He just got killed.” But a number of people seriously distorted their lives to avoid service, and for some it became a lasting guilt trip.’ In San Francisco for embarkation, Thorne was kept company on the ride to the bus station from the city’s smartest rendezvous, the Top of the Mark, by his sister Julia. She then set off for finishing school in Europe, and became a fervent anti-war protester.
At Danang, Thorne and his fellow-new arrivals were greeted by a crowd of tour-expired vets who said bleakly, ‘Welcome to the greenest mud on earth. You’ll be sorry.’ He waited two days for a CH-46 to FSB Argonne – which melded with events at LZ Mack to become Marlantes’ fictional Matterhorn – where he found the company gazing at the NVA on a hill just two clicks away on the Laotian border. The Americans were attacked the first night: ‘You could hear the doomp, doomp, doomp as their mortars fired, probing our positions.’ Thorne discovered that he had joined an unhappy unit: ‘The CO tried to seek performance beyond what was reasonable. If young Marines are with you, they can do fantastic things. But poor leadership can make things much more difficult.’ Thereafter they spent weeks clearing a nearby hilltop code-named Neville, where Thorne was sent to serve as FO for three 105mm guns. He was on the position, defended by just two platoons, when in the early-morning darkness of 25 February two hundred NVA, smart in green fatigues and sandals, launched a surprise attack through the jungle that ran right up to their wire. ‘We got overrun three times, ran out of Claymores, couldn’t get air resupply, mortared by 60mms and 82mms.’ Listening posts were told: ‘Lie chilly’ – stay silent and hope the enemy does not notice you. Fires broke out, fed by loose powderbags around the gunpits, one of which fell briefly into enemy hands.
The NVA sappers were evicted after a three-hour battle sometimes fought with entrenching tools as well as rifles and grenades, but twelve Marines and two navy corpsmen lay dead, and many survivors had sustained hearing damage from repeated close-quarter explosions. The enemy continued the harassment of Neville’s shrunken perimeter for days, during which helicopters could not land and parachuted ammunition drifted beyond reach. Thorne found himself too scared to eat: ‘There was so much adrenalin running. You’ve been emotionally destabilised, because you’ve accepted death. When you live, you’re a different person afterwards. The second night the big problem was fire discipline, because everyone was jumpy. There was a tendency to squeeze off a rifle or pop a Claymore. I had artillery in as soon as we heard movement.’ On the third day, having suffered painful constipation, he felt the urge for a bowel movement and had just squatted on an ammunition box when the hated Doong! Doong! started again. Incoming. ‘But at that moment I was prepared to die to take a crap.’
The attacks tapered off. The weather was still too bad for helos, but they tried to fix the gaps in their wire. A company sent to support them was obliged to walk all the way, which took a week. Then Sea Knights belatedly arrived. Corpsmen cleaned the maggots off the American dead and threw enemy corpses over the hill: ‘The NVA went off to give Karl and C Company their difficult days.’ Thorne was summoned to Dong Ha to become an aerial observer. His first thought was ‘How can I leave you guys?’ His second was ‘How could they be so fucked up at headquarters as to have put us out here?’ The 1/4th’s subsequent misfortunes, vividly described by Marlantes, reflected the reckless yet familiar willingness of some commanders to expose relatively small forces in predicaments that conceded advantage to the enemy. Fighting in the area persisted into April: the 1/4th’s colonel, one of the architects of their woes, was among its victims, killed by a mortar bomb. Though as usual the NVA’s losses significantly exceeded those of the Americans, it was the latter who emerged feeling like losers.
The apparent contradiction is that the communists later acknowledged 1969 as their own worst year of the war, measured in losses and morale. In the mountains of Quang Ngai province in June, even the fervently committed young revolutionary Dr Dang Thuy Tram confessed that she and her comrades were exhausted, their spirits sagging, many men too weary even to eat: ‘Day and night we are deafened by the explosions of bombs, the noise of jets, gunships and UH-IAs circling above. The forest is gouged and scarred by bombs, the remaining trees stained yellow by toxic chemicals. We’re affected, too. All cadres are desperately tired.’
NVA soldier Bao Ninh wrote of the ‘Jungle of Screaming Souls’, an area where a battalion had been almost wiped out: ‘The sobbing whispers were heard deep in the jungle at night, the howls carried on the wind … One could hear birds crying like human beings. They never flew, they only cried among the branches. And nowhere else in these Central Highlands could one find bamboo shoots of such a horrible colour … As for the fireflies, they were huge. Here, when it is dark, trees and plants moan in awful harmony. When the ghostly music begins it unhinges the soul and the entire wood looks the same no matter where you are standing. Not a place for the timid. Living here one could go mad or be frightened to death.’ Here, these communist soldiers established a secret Buddhist altar, and prayed before it for their dead comrades.
Yet their weariness was matched by no allied sense of achievement. Intelligence chief Brigadier Phil Davidson spoke bitter
ly of the US as the battlefield ‘where the enemy won his greatest victory of 1968’. On 15 March he reported to Abrams a reduction in truck traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The general wagged a half-satirical finger: ‘Let’s be careful that we don’t sound some hopeful note in this.’ Davidson: ‘Oh, no, sir. I’m never hopeful, sir.’ He fulminated: ‘We’ve got to defend our bases and the cities and populated areas. Let’s say that the enemy had to defend what he’s got – bases, areas and populace. We’d win the war in a month! We’d kick his tail right out into the ocean!’
COSVN’s Directive 55, promulgated in April, mandated a more pragmatic communist approach, warning that commanders should not stake their entire forces on any given operation ‘but instead preserve combat potential for sustained future action’. Directives 81 and 88, issued soon afterwards, identified the NLF’s objectives as being ‘to compel the enemy to accept negotiations with us, to withdraw troops, to … accept a coalition government’. Communist forces displayed sufficient energy and aggression to sustain a steady flow of American and ARVN casualties, but whereas in October 1965 the NVA had represented just a quarter of combat strength in the South, now they contributed 70 per cent and counting.
In Saigon, the media had irredeemably lost faith. Peter Braestrup, who served four years as Washington Post bureau chief, wrote in his sceptical analysis of the correspondents’ performance, especially in 1968, that most were ‘adventurers, and to some extent, voyeurs. At their best they were also shrewd observers and interrogators, and perceptive tellers of tales,’ but they focused on such conspicuous dramas as Khe Sanh, Saigon, Hue, at the expense of broader analysis, and ‘committed major sins of omission … Most analyses were the hasty reactions of the half-informed.’ After saturation coverage of Tet, said Braestrup, global media interest in Vietnam declined steeply. Though it became increasingly clear that Hanoi had suffered a major defeat, this re-evaluation gained little attention. ‘At Tet, the press shouted that the patient was dying, then weeks later began to whisper that he somehow seemed to be recovering – whispers apparently not heard amid the clamorous domestic reaction to the initial shouts.’
Yet while Braestrup was narrowly correct, no military achievement overcame the problem that, while many South Vietnamese hated the communists, their own government remained unloved. The inhumanity of Le Duan invites posterity’s repugnance, yet Hanoi sustained a more effective war machine, with incomparably fewer material resources, than did Saigon. North Vietnam’s leaders, recognising that the American people had lost patience, were prepared to endure further years of pain in anticipation of an ultimate victory that now seemed assured. Indeed, they had inflicted so much grief on their own people that they could afford to settle for nothing less. Meanwhile on the other side, by the time Frank Snepp joined Saigon’s CIA station in the summer of 1969, ‘We were not fixed on winning or losing, but on setting up an end game.’
There was a further critical point. Whatever tactical successes Abrams’ forces achieved, the US Army was crumbling from within – a slow, inexorable, deadly process that attained a nadir in 1973. It was driven by three related and mutually reinforcing elements: drug abuse; racial strife, powerfully influenced by the US domestic Black Power movement; and a decline of discipline and will to fight. A US general said later:* ‘We went into Korea with a rotten army, and came out with a fine one; we went into Vietnam with a great army, and finished with a terrible one.’
When Capt. Linwood Burney took over an Airborne company late in 1968, he felt obliged to initiate routine drug searches. The military police made eleven thousand drug arrests in the following year, yet the proportion of grunt pot-smokers continued to rise, to almost 60 per cent in 1971. Many were using the super-strong variety known to bar girls as ‘Buddha grass’: a pack of joints cost a dollar. In 1969 only 2 per cent of personnel had experience of heroin, yet within two years this soared to 22 per cent – an awesome statistic – with seven hundred recorded addicts. The drug was imported from neighbouring Laos by Royal Air Laos and Air Vietnam, then trucked around the country by ARVN. At least a few of those Americans who volunteered for second or third Vietnam tours did so to retain access to narcotics. Sixteen 1969 MACV overdose deaths were followed by thirty-five in the first eighteen days of 1970. Abrams acknowledged that he did not dare to ‘kick ass’ – adopt a hard-line policy towards users – though he strove to punish traders.
Company commander Major Don Hudson retained a passionate belief in his soldiers, and attributed most problems to the shortcomings of officers: ‘We had some fine young men over there and the leadership, as I perceived it, is the ones that ruined [some, by] not caring for them.’ He described problems with pay, promotions, sometimes going a month without mail: ‘It was criminal. [The] drug problem haunted me … Any resupplies going out, I found capsules of heroin wrapped in plastic bags stuffed down in water cans.’ Hudson deplored institutional indulgence of drugs, reflected by a case in which he caught a soldier with five hundred caps of pure heroin, yet charges were dropped ‘for lack of evidence’: ‘I would say I had about five key ringleaders that were really on the criminal side.’ He found that an ambush squad had sat in the bush for three days high on marijuana, ‘led by a sorry team leader … The bad actors had started taking over the organization. Once I weeded out the hardcore drug users, the guys that were making money by supplying’, matters improved.
The dealers responded first by threatening Hudson, then by attempting to lay counter-charges that he had been drunk on duty. He still refused to back off: ‘The way I look at that, if they are going to frag you, they’re going to do that. They’re not going to tell you. Soldiers like a winner, and you can be as hard as you want and if you’re not getting casualties and you’re taking care of them the right way … don’t worry about if the soldier likes you.’ In the later years of the war, many American officers continued to display courage in the face of the enemy, but relatively few matched Major Hudson’s guts in controlling their own men. Pte. Richard Ford’s all-black reconnaissance team had a private joke that they were Knights of the Round Table. One night a soldier named Taylor, smoking a joint, began to insist that a lone tree he could see was the Statue of Liberty: ‘Sir Ford. Sir Ford. Ain’t that the bitch? The world moves, right? Well, we getting closer to New York, ’cause I can see the bitch.’ The others had to tranquillise him. Substance abuse was overwhelmingly an enlisted men’s issue, but some officers and NCOs were equally damaged by drink: a significant minority became alcoholics.
As for discipline, Capt. David Johnson took over an infantry company in October 1968 and was appalled to find men refusing to go into the field, conduct unknown during his previous tour. Following an operation soldiers ‘just flaked out’, declining to clean weapons and equipment. His platoon sergeants were incapable of directing mortar or artillery fire, and he lacked confidence in what the company would, or would not, do under fire: ‘Many of us were questioning whether we should be there. Soldiers were constantly asking themselves: “Can I hang on? Can I last the tour out?” I’m talking about my own feelings as well as that of the men … People would do weird things, crazy things. I had a soldier [who] ate some C-4 plastic explosive and he died … fell in six feet of water and drowned. The fact that we were hitting a lot of booby traps without a lot of enemy results … was a big morale factor. I had twenty casualties in sixty days, seventeen by booby traps, and that included myself.’
Elsewhere two pilots killed each other practising quickdraw with handguns. The air force assumed this to be a unique moment of madness until a few months later it happened again, though this time only one pilot died. The general reporting the incident mused in bewilderment, ‘Now, why would people do that?’ On 20 July 1969, a pretty little twenty-year-old Australian singer, Catherine Anne Warnes, suddenly fell dead on stage while performing in a USO show at a Marine base. She was the victim of a single shot fired from behind a screen with a silenced .22 automatic. A twenty-eight-year-old sergeant, James Killen, was convicted of kill
ing the girl in a moment of crazed drunkenness, with suggestions that the intended victim was his company commander. Killen served less than two years before being acquitted by a retrial.
On 5 February 1970 two grenades were tossed into Andy’s Pub, an enlisted men’s facility, while a three-girl Australian group named the Chiffons were singing. One exploded, killing a corporal and injuring sixty-two others. It emerged that earlier the same day more than twenty black Marines had met on the camp basketball court to vent alleged grievances. A lance-corporal promised: ‘We’re going to do some beasts [whites] tonight.’ Blacks were warned not to attend the Chiffons’ show. At the subsequent trial, prosecuting counsel said: ‘This was a deliberate, carefully thought-out attempt to kill a hell of a lot of people … strictly because of racial problems.’ The two prime suspects were nonetheless acquitted, which caused a third trial to be aborted. Nobody was ever convicted for the Andy’s Pub grenading.
In all wars, unpopular officers have been killed by their own men – usually shot in action under cover of exchanges of fire. In Vietnam, however, a new brand of cold-blooded attacks, often with fragmentation grenades, acquired the appellation ‘fragging’. The history of the Marine Corps legal branch records that such acts had ‘never been so widespread, so callously carried out’. Its narrative identified over a hundred such incidents, while the army between 1969 and 1971 recorded more than six hundred fraggings, resulting in eighty-two deaths and 651 injuries. A psychiatrist who studied twenty-eight cases found that most of those responsible were support personnel, and that 87.2 per cent had either been drunk or high on drugs. Few afterwards displayed contrition.