by Max Hastings
Kissinger briefly harboured illusions that Ho Chi Minh’s death on 2 September would shake North Vietnamese confidence, stability and morale. Yet, while the begetter of his country was passionately mourned, he had long ceased to guide its destinies. The old man’s greatness seems indisputable, measured by his influence upon great events. A part of this derived from a grace, charm and dignity which persuaded much of the world of his benignity. In truth, however, as with all successful revolutionaries, Ho’s ruthlessness was absolute, his capacity for compassion moot, given the systemic cruelties, privations and denial of personal freedom over which he had presided since 1954.
Le Duan’s grip on power was assured. Following the shambles of Tet, he no longer expected to achieve absolute military victory before the Americans quit Vietnam. But he was confident that his people’s will was stronger than theirs, all the more so after the vast 15 October nationwide US demonstrations in the name of the Vietnam Moratorium, of which a highlight was a hundred-thousand-strong rally on Boston Common. The only crumb of comfort for Nixon’s men talking in Paris was that the North Vietnamese ceased to inflict wilful torture – though they sustained relentless privation – on the American prisoners held in Hanoi. A minimal standard of well-being was thereafter deemed expedient: the PoWs’ fate would obviously be a key issue in negotiations. By a directive of 10 June the NLF renamed itself the PRG – Provisional Revolutionary Government – personified by a cluster of ministers-in-waiting deep in the jungle on the Cambodian border. Cadres were told that even after the US had signed a treaty, ‘the war will be continued’. In short, and as ever, only communist victory would suffice.
Abrams said: ‘[The enemy] is … pouring more resources in, and we’re pulling resources out … With just that basic fact he’s bound to do better, and we’re bound to do worse.’ Lt. Landen Thorne, now flying as an artillery observer in an L-19 spotter plane, suddenly found his guns’ ammunition allocation cut. He thought: ‘In a war you’re supposed to win, you get everything you need.’ Quite so.
* To the author, in 1985.
22
Losing by Instalments
1 THE FISHHOOK AND THE PARROT’S BEAK
Back in March 1969, Creighton Abrams and his intelligence chief held one of many conversations about the possibility, and unlikelihood, of being permitted to attack the communists’ Cambodian sanctuaries. Brig. Phil Davidson ruminated: ‘Boy, if the doves have savaged old Johnson – and they did, they drove him from office – think what they would do with Nixon if he went into Laos and Cambodia!’ A year on, however, Henry Kissinger desperately needed to strengthen his hand in the Paris secret negotiations. He said: ‘We have to be tough.’ On 29 April 1970 allied forces, which peaked at 19,300 Americans and twenty-nine thousand Vietnamese, launched a series of thrusts into border areas of Cambodia known from their map shapes as the Parrot’s Beak and the Fishhook. Abrams admitted that there was scant enthusiasm for the operation among his own men: ‘It has taken some doing to get the American troops in an offensive mood.’ Meanwhile a new bomber offensive was launched against North Vietnam.
The Cambodian incursions were precipitated by an 18 March army coup in Phnom Penh led by Gen. Lon Nol, who seized power with a junta of fellow-officers while Prince Norodom Sihanouk was on his way to Beijing – ironically, in hopes of getting the Chinese to induce the North Vietnamese to curb operations in eastern Cambodia, which they treated as their own fiefdom. Indeed, Hanoi’s conduct was as devoid of moral justification as that of Washington: both sides were indifferent to the interests of the Cambodian people, whom Vietnamese despised. There is still no evidence of direct American complicity in the coup, and Sihanouk’s erratic, eccentric rule over his erratic, eccentric little country had for years been precarious. A Westerner described the prince denouncing in a radio broadcast some alleged Vietnamese slanderer, screaming abuse in a piercing falsetto, sounding ‘less like a head of state making a diplomatic détente than a schoolgirl hockey player accusing another of “sticks”’.
Lon Nol and his fellow-plotters were driven by a genuine disgust and exasperation at the North Vietnamese occupation and the US bombings it had provoked, mingled with more mundane concerns: the Sihanouk family was thought to be appropriating too many of the spoils of power, the generals receiving too few. If Washington had made it explicitly plain to the usurpers that it would not back them, it is unlikely they would have dared to overthrow the prince. In the event, however, senior VC cadre Tran Bach Dang chanced to reach Phnom Penh from COSVN in the immediate aftermath of the coup, and was shocked to discover that he and his kind, who for years had come and gone at will, were suddenly hunted men. Possessed of only a T-shirt and shorts, he sought sanctuary in the Cuban embassy, from whence he was whisked to Hanoi via Shanghai, arriving in time to enjoy a macabre privilege: he watched Soviet technicians thaw the frozen corpse of Ho Chi Minh for embalming.
Cambodia’s new rulers appealed to the Americans for aid. Washington responded with sufficient arms and cash to sustain Lon Nol’s regime for the next five years, but not nearly enough to crush the indigenous communist Khmer Rouge, which almost overnight became a serious military force. Cambodia’s ramshackle army, which had just twenty surgeons, was cruelly mauled. By autumn the Khmer Rouge threatened Phnom Penh, where refugees from American bombing and communist terror eventually swelled the population by two million destitute people. After a 24–25 April conference held on the Vietnam–Laos border, the Pathet Lao, the Khmer Rouge and North Vietnam proclaimed a common struggle. Sihanouk, for all his limitations, commanded immense prestige among his own people. When this was placed at the disposal of the communists following his overthrow, the prince became a serviceable tool.
The US and North Vietnam shared responsibility for the tragedy that engulfed Cambodia in the decades that followed, a struggle merciless even by the standard sustained in Indochina since 1945. Journalist Jon Swain described an encounter with two wounded North Vietnamese soldiers, captured by the Cambodian army near Kompong Cham: ‘Their coarse olive-green uniforms were caked in a mixture of mud and blood. They were terribly mutilated, in agony, whimpering like animals in a trap. Suddenly aware of a foreign presence, they stirred, opened their eyes, and looked at me in the dim light [with] intense hatred.’ Swain asked a Cambodian major if he could take the men to hospital. Instead, the soldier prodded their wounds with a cane and said, ‘Let them die. We did not invite them to come to our country.’ One was an NVA officer named Lt. Dao An Tuat. Swain leafed through his notebook, noted the faded photograph of Ho Chi Minh, and a scribbling by the owner in his own language:
To live is to give oneself to the fatherland,
It is to give oneself to the earth, the mountains and the rivers,
It is to clench one’s teeth in the face of the enemy,
To live is to sustain one’s courage in times of sorrow,
It is to laugh in times of anger …
We must drink deeply of the blood of the foe.
Tuat, who duly expired in the stinking hut, was plainly a committed cadre; the Cambodians burned the petrol-soaked bodies of him and his comrade before tossing the remains into the Mekong. If the fortunes of war had decreed differently, those North Vietnamese would probably – and the unspeakably brutal Khmer Rouge would certainly – have done likewise to inconvenient PoWs.
As for the US-ARVN incursions, though some American soldiers exulted about implementing an initiative they had advocated for years, polls showed that 60 per cent of their countrymen opposed it, as did secretary of state William Rogers. Substantial munitions and ration dumps were seized: a MACV briefer told Abrams on 12 May that the invaders had thus far captured ‘6,500 man-years of rice’. Yet the general was himself uneasy: ‘the weapons I saw out there are a lot of junk … What you’re building up is a big fraud, and that’s what they’ll tag you with … It’s really very sickening to sit around here and contemplate the fact that we’ve been talking about a basketful of fog.’ As so often, advance intelligence was p
oor – to preserve secrecy, the South Vietnamese had been cut out of the planning loop. Although the NVA suffered significant casualties, the bulk of enemy forces withdrew westwards, declining to lock horns with the invaders.
Doug Ramsey, a prisoner of the communists, observed later that the US incursion seemed to represent ‘either a blind leap away into cloud-cuckoo land or a cynical, opportunistic attempt not to win the war in Vietnam, but simply to help delay its loss … at unconscionable cost to Cambodia’. He believed that intervention might have been a rational gambit four or five years earlier, but not in 1970: ‘We were sacrificing the long-term vital interests of a tiny, distant country, previously anxious to avoid involvement in the Indochina conflict, to the peripheral and ephemeral interests of one or two generations of our own policy-makers … We had bestowed on ourselves exceptional prerogatives that we would never have permitted others to assume.’
The administration asserted at the outset that the Cambodian operation was limited in both time and space – that the invaders would penetrate not more than eighteen miles beyond the border, nor stay past June. Nixon said in a national TV address: ‘Tonight American and South Vietnamese units will attack the headquarters for the entire Communist military operation in South Vietnam.’ Yet COSVN comprised a group of footloose people, rather than a building complex such as the president appeared to envisage: leading members of the PRG merely abandoned one set of huts in favour of another, beyond the Americans’ self-imposed limits. Phil Davidson said gloomily to Abrams on 19 May, ‘I think it’s clear to everybody that COSVN displaced before we went across the border.’ This was so: almost two months earlier, the communist leadership anticipated such a thrust and moved deeper into Cambodia. Cadres bolted along prearranged escape routes, covered by the NVA 7th Division. Their flight was harassed by American aircraft, and beset by torrential rain. A PRG minister wrote: ‘Our exertions were imbued not merely with the desperation of men fleeing the clutches of a merciless foe, but with fears for the very existence of our struggle.’ Another PRG leader, Dr Duong Quynh Hoa, was seven months pregnant: she gave birth under the stress of the flight, to the accompaniment of artillery and small-arms fire. The baby was safely delivered, but died of malaria a few months later. The leadership reached the Cambodian town of Kratie without casualties, though Truong Nhu Tang acknowledged that ‘The whole affair gave us a bad fright, not to mention a spell of acute physical hardship.’
Tang described Nixon’s Cambodian adventure as ‘an enduring gift to Vietnam’s revolution … [because] it helped to separate the US leadership from its domestic base and instilled in many Americans an enduring scepticism about their government’s moral compass’. The operation formed an element in Kissinger’s ‘coercive diplomacy’, yet inflicted nothing like sufficient strategic pain on the enemy to compensate for the political damage Nixon suffered at home: amid a dramatic intensification of anti-war protests, on 4 May 1970 at Ohio’s Kent State University, National Guardsmen killed four unarmed students, two of them mere passers-by, and wounded nine others. Two more students were killed by police and twelve wounded at Mississippi’s Jackson State College.
Following the latest round of Indochina turmoil, a MACV briefer catalogued the interrelated but separate conflicts in the region: civil war in northern Laos; the NVA’s struggle to sustain its logistics links in southern Laos and Cambodia; the Cambodian civil war; the COSVN border theatre in South Vietnam; the battle in the delta; the central and northern war zones. Deep in the South, Vietcong doctor Dang Thuy Tram wrote: ‘The mad dog Nixon has foolishly enlarged the fighting … Oh! Why are there such terrible, cruel people who want to water their own golden trees with our blood? … Oh, my country! … Has any on earth suffered as much? Have any people fought as courageously, persistently, and tirelessly as ourselves? … I am still a soldier in this struggle. I keep smiling … even when gunships bring down rockets on my head … I remember Lenin’s words, “Revolutionaries have the warmest hearts.” This is me.’ On the morning of 22 June, a patrol of the US 4/21st Infantry heard voices and the sound of a radio playing Vietnamese music. Other members of the same unit, alerted, later encountered nearby four people advancing towards them along a jungle trail. This was a free-fire zone, where all human movement was deemed hostile: two communists escaped the ensuing M-16 bursts, but two fell. One of them, dressed in black pyjamas and Ho Chi Minh sandals, was twenty-seven-year-old Tram. Found among her scanty possessions were a Sony radio, a medical notebook, bottles of Novocain, bandages, a photograph of her beloved NVA captain and poems written by him, together with her diary.
The American incursions, together with Operation Menu – the secret B-52 bombings – caused the NVA serious logistical difficulties. They were not, however, the game-changers sought by Nixon and Kissinger: the latter fulminated about the USAF’s inability to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Congress had initially treated the Nixon White House with considerable deference, and acquiesced in the president’s determination not to be seen to quit. ‘A great nation,’ he declared sonorously, ‘cannot renege on its pledges.’ He reasserted the familiar US government position, that abandonment of the South Vietnamese would raise worldwide doubts among both the nation’s friends and foes. Melvin Laird rehearsed the administration’s goals: to make a success of Vietnamisation, minimise US casualties, continue troop withdrawals, and stimulate meaningful negotiations.
In the course of that year, however, and influenced by the equivocal outcome of the Cambodian lunge, more and more Americans began to crave escape from Indochina on almost any terms, or even none. Democratic senators Mark Hatfield of Oregon and George McGovern of South Dakota led a charge against further funding for the war. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker returned from a home visit to tell Abrams in Saigon on 23 May: ‘The disturbing thing, I thought, was some of the people who have been pretty strong supporters’ – he cited the example of Dean Acheson – ‘now say, “Well if this is going to tear the country apart it isn’t worth it.”’ Against such a background, what is surprising is not that American troops became ever more reluctant to hazard their lives, but that some remained willing to do so.
Nixon and Kissinger might have gained crumbs of comfort had they known more about the difficulties of the other side. Given the size of the US intelligence apparatus, it is extraordinary how little Washington ever understood about North Vietnam, and especially the Hanoi politburo. The CIA depended for humint almost exclusively upon the British SIS station in their Hanoi consulate-general, then run by the formidable Daphne Park, who flew down to Saigon every two months to brief ‘the cousins’. The British were unable to run agents, send coded cables or own a wireless transmitter. They nonetheless talked freely to East European diplomats, the Soviet ambassador notable among them – Park was a fluent Russian- and French-speaker. When the Americans asked SIS to service a dead letter drop, they met a flat refusal: the consulate’s personnel were too closely watched. They had little access to top North Vietnamese, though a member of the politburo once arrived unannounced, and talked on their balcony for six hours.
One day at Bangkok airport, a British academic met Park returning from a short leave: he described her sitting on a mound of shopping bags, ‘as unmistakably English as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple’. He asked if she was taking back supplies for SIS. ‘Oh no,’ she responded cheerfully, ‘this stuff is all for the East European mission people who won’t eat Vietnamese food.’ Park described in her October 1970 valedictory dispatch how she and her sole colleague walked miles through Hanoi by day and night, pursued by children shrieking ‘Lien Xo!’ – ‘Russian!’ – who left them black and blue with mischievous pinches. The British spies gazed on Vietnamese ‘gathered around the family brazier on the pavement, eating their rice, or already asleep. In the hottest months young and old, like battered bundles, sleep on the steps of the Ministry of Trade, on the pavement, in doorways, anywhere out of the stifling courtyards and the houses where they live, a family to each room. The rats run over them as they sleep
, fight over scraps of garbage, and sometimes drown in the water which gathers in the open concrete shelter-holes … There are rats even in the cinema.’
Julian Harston, another SIS officer, described how they would try to estimate the size of the latest army call-up by counting used inoculation syringes in rubbish bins outside the military hospital. When the consulate’s local staff dared to accept small gifts, such was their poverty that they chose bicycle repair kits, razor blades, aspirin – even empty bottles. All this constituted thin stuff from which to form an intelligence picture, though interestingly, in late 1970 Daphne Park was among those who thought the regime in trouble.
The Chinese withdrawal of personnel – though not shipments of materiel – injured the prestige of Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, Mao’s keenest adherents. At January’s 18th Plenum of the Central Committee, a resolution was passed asserting that the country ‘must respond to enemy attacks not only with armed resistance and political activity, but also with diplomacy’. This opaque observation did not represent a rupture at the top – no fully-feathered doves dared take wing in Hanoi – but made plain that many North Vietnamese craved peace. Tensions grew between the politburo and Southern communists. Such PRG ministers as Truong Nhu Tang and Nguyen Van Kiet found themselves derided by Hanoi ‘proletarians’ for their bourgeois backgrounds. An injured Tang wrote: ‘Many of us were from well-to-do families and had been used to the good life before we enlisted. Our motives varied, but we regarded ourselves as people who had already sacrificed a great deal for the nation, and remained ready to sacrifice all.’ Tang claimed never to have considered himself a communist, but recognised that ‘as far back as 1920, the only ally Vietnamese nationalism had known was the Comintern. Ho Chi Minh accepted its support with the fervour of a drowning man.’ Nonetheless, Tang was increasingly uncomfortable with the ideological rigour of Le Duan and his comrades, writing: ‘they had sacrificed conscience and pragmatism for the certitudes of their political religion. Amid their steely arrogance, there was no latitude for compromise.’