by Max Hastings
The first South Vietnamese withdrawals from Laos had taken place on 3 March, and a progressive retreat continued through the month, in ever-worsening chaos. Less than half Saigon’s tanks and little more than one-third of its APCs survived: the rest broke down, ran out of fuel or were destroyed by communist fire. The Americans lost over a hundred helicopters, with a further 544 damaged. One of their briefers said with notable understatement: ‘The air mobility concept received a severe test during this operation.’ As the evacuation was ever more hard-pressed by the NVA, panic overtook many of Thieu’s soldiers, so that the abiding image of Lam Son 719 derived from photographs of fugitives mobbing helicopters, some flying out clinging to the skids. By the time the operation reached a ragged, threadbare conclusion, the South Vietnamese had fought in Laos for forty-two days and lost almost half the forces committed, some eight thousand men, including many taken prisoner.
MACV estimated that thirteen thousand NVA had been killed, but this seemed a considerable exaggeration. Post-war North Vietnam admitted a loss in the battle of 2,163 killed and 6,176 wounded, believable numbers amounting to 13 per cent of its committed strength. The communist narrative attributed half their casualties to artillery and mortars; more than one-third to air attack, including a surprisingly low 2 per cent to the napalm which so impressed US and Vietnamese troops; the balance to small arms. Their history states that almost half of all losses were incurred behind the front, which probably meant from American rather than Vietnamese fire. They acknowledged heavy materiel losses: 670 AA guns, six hundred trucks, one in five of their mortars, eighty-eight tanks.
CIA officer Merle Pribbenow had become friendly with two Vietnamese Airborne privates who visited his apartment whenever they were in Saigon. After Lam Son, one of them arrived unannounced and visibly stricken, having lost his friend and most of their unit in Laos. Pribbenow thought: if this was how a soldier of an elite formation now looked and felt, ‘the rest of the ARVN must be in a hell of a fix’. Bob Destatte, veteran Vietnamese-speaking PoW interrogator, said savagely: ‘If there were any criminals in Lam Son 719, they were not ordinary soldiers, who fought their hearts out, but instead the people who put them in there.’ Col. Nguyen Duy Hinh wrote sadly: ‘ARVN forces had to leave behind in Laos a substantial number of their dead and wounded. This came as a horrendous trauma for those unlucky families who, in their traditional devotion to the cult of the dead and their attachment to the living, were condemned to live in perpetual sorrow and doubt. It was a violation of beliefs and familial piety that Vietnamese would never forget or forgive.’ The CIA’s Frank Snepp said: ‘Lam Son 719 told us everything we needed to know about where Vietnamization had really got to – and it told Hanoi the same things.’
The debacle precipitated fury in the White House, though Nixon was obliged to assume a brave face, saying in a 7 April TV broadcast: ‘The South Vietnamese demonstrated that without American advisers they could fight effectively against the very best troops North Vietnam could put into the field.’ In reality, however, the operation’s outcome was the reverse of that which was intended: it weakened, rather than strengthened, the American hand in the Paris negotiations. While the requirements of domestic politics meant that troop withdrawals must continue unchecked, the credibility of the Thieu regime, and of its army as a fighting force, had received a shattering blow.
The administration chose to lay blame partly upon the Vietnamese – focus of Kissinger’s anger – but chiefly upon the US military. Alexander Haig said: ‘President Nixon and those of us in the White House involved in the planning were appalled by the Defense Department’s handling of the operation.’ In his rage, Nixon’s initial instinct was to sack Abrams and replace him with the nearest officer to hand. He told Haig: ‘Get on the first available plane and fly to Saigon. You’re taking command.’ Haig claimed later that he persuaded the president to hold off and take some deep breaths for twenty-four hours before making such a decision. Thereafter, of course, Nixon relented. Kissinger disputes Haig’s account, but it is believable. The national security adviser said that he would never believe another word Abrams spoke.
The approaching presidential campaign loomed ever larger in White House calculations. On 19 March 1971 Kissinger said: ‘We can’t have [South Vietnam] knocked over – brutally – to put it brutally – before the election.’ Nixon: ‘That’s right.’ Kissinger asserted that if the president was seen to give up on Vietnam before Americans voted, he would be denied re-election; he urged against doing the ‘popular thing’ by bringing all troops home that year. Nixon, Kissinger and Haldeman never appear to have discussed whether keeping the war going past 1972’s US polling day would do anything meaningful for the people of Vietnam. The White House was now resigned to sacrificing them. The challenge was to hold out for an appropriate moment to do so.
The issue of almost six hundred US prisoners in communist hands increasingly dominated domestic debate: Americans bought fifty million stickers and 135 million postage stamps expressing support for the PoWs. The administration pleaded constantly with Congress to provide funding for a residual war effort, which alone could add clout to the US negotiating position in Paris. Yet after a Hill briefing before the president broadcast to the nation on 7 April, a senator demanded to be told why, if half a million soldiers had previously failed to persuade Hanoi to exchange prisoners, keeping fifty thousand Americans in Vietnam should now help anybody. Next day Nixon told Kissinger, ‘Of course I couldn’t say to him, “Look, when we get down to fifty thousand, then we’ll make a straight-out trade – fifty thousand for the prisoners of war” – and they’ll do it in a minute, ’cause they want to get our ass out of there.’ ‘That’s right,’ said Kissinger. Nixon laughed: ‘You know? Jesus!’
John Paul Vann, newly appointed pacification chief and senior American in the Central Highlands, with civilian status equivalent to a two-star general, said after Lam Son: ‘The war is gradually shifting to the northern two corps [areas], and moving towards a more conventional confrontation between North and South Vietnam.’ This was an accurate assessment. On 7 April, air reconnaissance showed truck traffic on the Ho Ch Minh Trail in Laos restored to its pre-Lam Son 719 density.
Between killings, there were also spasmodic lunges into comedy: Abrams was briefed on the deployment at Camranh Bay of five US Navy bottle-nosed dolphins, trained to attack swimming saboteurs. ‘The enemy,’ said the briefer, ‘has been led to believe that the dolphin is trained to attack a male swimmer’s privates. Our latest information is that the enemy plan to counteract this by employing female swimmers in the future.’ The general was informed that one dolphin had already deserted. Meanwhile, the collapse of morale at a special forces camp at Bu Prang proved to be caused by tensions between montagnards and Cambodians serving there. The montagnards worshipped a python which lived in nearby jungle, to which they periodically offered sacrifices until one day the Cambodians killed and ate it. American advisers brokered an uneasy truce, whereby it was agreed that harmony could be restored by the sacrifice of a white water buffalo. SF officers scoured the region until a suitable animal was found, purchased, and conveyed to the camp beneath a C-7 transport helicopter. Unfortunately the sling became entangled in the animal’s testicles, so that during the flight it strangled itself, arriving dead and thus unfit for sacrifice. After further elaborate parleys the montagnards agreed that two hundred chickens would represent acceptable substitutes, which were duly flown to Bu Prang, sacrificed and eaten.
One day not long after the Laos debacle, Abrams attended a commemoration ceremony at the Vietnamese national cemetery outside Saigon. His helicopter failed to return before the proceedings concluded, and thus he was obliged to linger after dignitaries, troops, bands departed. Eventually, only the general himself and his personal escort were left, chafing impatiently. Then he saw approaching the cemetery on foot an ARVN sergeant, together with his wife and children: ‘she was pregnant. And they had three little kids. He was carrying one of them … Well, it was a
long walk. And then there was a little boy. I guess he was probably nine. He was carrying a big bag, plastic bag, a handbag. And it had a big wad of those joss sticks sticking up the top of it, and I suppose a little lunch or something in there. They were on their way to … I imagine, some relative.’ Abrams, like many warriors, was prone to spasms of intense sentimentality. One such now overtook him: ‘All this stuff about “The Asians … don’t value life” and all that – I think it’s a real myth. I think they feel about these things a lot like our people do.’
23
Collateral Damage
1 MARY ANN
In the course of 1971, many US Army and Marine Corps units atrophied, amid tensions created by disaffection, race, drugs and a competition to avoid becoming the last American to die in a cause widely believed to be discredited. An illusion spread that men were entitled to resign from the struggle if they felt that way. In March, fifty-three Marines near Khe Sanh refused combat, yet faced no disciplinary action; soldiers at FSB Pace rejected orders to patrol. Word travelled of such gestures, infecting further units. An extreme manifestation was the disaster that unfolded at Firebase Mary Ann on the night of 27–28 March 1971, in which thirty of its residents – few could justly be described as defenders – were killed and a further eighty-two wounded. Mary Ann, named for its first commanding officer’s sister, was the usual shanty town of steel containers and sandbags, encircled by wire and adorned with a forest of aerials, atop a barren ridge in the midst of Quang Tin province, thirty miles from the Laotian border. It was garrisoned by C Company of the 1/46th Infantry, part of the 23rd Americal Division, whose reputation had been brought low by its role in the 1968 My Lai massacre, for which Lt. William Calley had recently been sentenced. C Company’s men did not take their role very seriously, because within weeks Mary Ann was scheduled for transfer to the South Vietnamese, who already manned artillery on the position.
Pfc Ed Voros said: ‘The war didn’t make any sense any more. We all thought it was bullshit … We were just there, and it basically came down to staying alive and keeping your buddies alive.’ Pfc James Creaven agreed: ‘We weren’t stupid. We knew we were pulling out, and we knew the ARVN weren’t willing to fight their own war. Why risk your life for people who didn’t even appreciate your being there? The only ones who wanted to be there were career officers. Anybody who was gung-ho and wanted to kill gooks was incredibly suspect.’ Out on ambush, Creaven and his kin were content to let the enemy come and go unscathed: ‘These people never did a damn thing to me.’
Discipline in the 1/46th was somewhat, though not immensely, worse than in many other units. There were repeated refusals of combat, including one by an entire company. Lt. Brian Magrath, an adviser with a nearby Vietnamese unit, heard radio exchanges involving Mary Ann’s garrison ‘in which patrols refused to move into certain areas that seemed particularly dangerous’. One of the battalion’s men had died, and three others almost followed, after prising the back off a Claymore and eating its C-4 plastic explosive, having heard a rumour that this would give them a high. Capt. Paul Spilberg wrote home about one element of the 1/46th: ‘This company really is a mess … The troops sit around reading newspapers, playing cards … most of the time they don’t even carry their weapons.’ The writer was recognised as a keen, driving professional, but one of his platoon leaders said: ‘Spilberg used to get on us lieutenants for being good guys with the troops, but if I had gone in with the attitude that I was the lieutenant and you’re going to do what I said, I may have gotten fragged.’
Senior officers would say – indeed, did say after the looming debacle – that what happened at Mary Ann represented a failure of leadership. Yet Lt. Col. Bill Doyle, the short, stocky thirty-nine-year-old Irish-American who commanded the battalion, was brave to the point of recklessness. He repeatedly fired his personal weapon at the enemy, because he believed in leading by example. A sign stood outside his operations centre: ‘F[OR]T. COURAGE. KILL PROFESSIONALLY’, topped by a water buffalo’s skull and horns. He was said to fight hard and party hard, causing critics to brand him ‘full of piss and wind’.
Doyle’s officers and NCOs were a mixed bunch, some competent, others much less so. During a February firefight a C Company lieutenant adjusted artillery onto his own platoon, killing a man. A fundamental dilemma faced all commanders: how much dared they ask of their soldiers without facing likely fraggings, and at worst collective combat refusal – mutiny, though the army recoiled from using that word? There were daily negotiations, humiliating for good officers, about what operations their troops were, or were not, willing to undertake. The 1/46th’s D Company once declined to make a sweep unless provided with scout dogs, Cobra gunships and a circling medevac Huey. Only after being harangued by Lt. Col. Doyle did the men grudgingly move out.
A month after that incident, on the moonless night of 27 March the battalion commander was slumbering in Mary Ann’s operations centre, Captain Spilberg likewise in another hooch. Defence was in the hands of C Company commander Capt. Richard Knight, a bespectacled twenty-four-year-old who had dropped out of college to join the army. The son of a Florida restaurant-owner, Knight was an enthusiastic officer on his second tour, after being badly wounded in 1968. Yet he lacked either inclination or personal authority to persuade his men, guarding a perimeter five hundred yards in length by two hundred in width, to man all their twenty-two bunkers. Or to reset trip-flares and Claymores. Or to renew wire entanglements. Or to remain awake. Or to abstain from alcohol and marijuana. The assortment of officers, radio-operators, mortar teams, gunners, riflemen, cooks and odd bodies on the firebase comprised in all 231 Americans and twenty-one ARVN personnel.
One man in four was supposed to be pulling guard. However, an almost crazed complacency caused most of the designated perimeter-watchers on Mary Ann, which had never suffered an attack, to be sleeping, playing cards, drunk or stoned – copious alcohol consumption is undisputed, though argument persists about the prevalence of drugs. Knight left supervision to his platoon leaders and NCOs, who appear to have been inert. At 0200 a 23-inch jeep-mounted searchlight swept the cleared ground beyond the FSB’s wire, as its crew was accustomed to do every night. Seeing nothing amiss, after twenty minutes they switched off, shut down the generator, retired to their hooches.
One day around this time, at another firebase an ex-NVA sapper who had ‘rallied’ gave a demonstration to US officers amongst the acres of wire protecting a firebase perimeter. Creighton Abrams said: ‘This apparently was a very shocking experience. They saw that little character get out there and come through that damn thing like it wasn’t even there, and not a sound.’ This is what happened on a grand scale at Mary Ann at 0240 on 28 March: some fifty sappers, wearing only green shorts, their exposed bodies blackened with grease and charcoal, launched a meticulously-planned attack. They came from the south-west, slithering forward to cut four large gaps first, in outer double concertina-wire, then in the two inner barriers, which were ill-maintained. They lay for some time just in front of the bunkers, awaiting a mortar barrage that was the signal to attack. The first the Americans knew of these terrifying apparitions was a storm of satchel charges, grenades, CS-gas canisters and AK-47 fire in the darkness, which precipitated panic and paralysis. Capt. Knight was ignominiously killed inside his bunker, along with his communications sergeant. The NVA charged through the firebase, shooting and bombing with cold efficiency, lobbing explosives into each hooch in turn, while two demolition teams raced for the artillery positions on the crest.
The attackers were drawn from the NVA’s 409th Sapper battalion, and their assault followed two months’ surveillance of Mary Ann – they named the position Xa Doc, after the nearest village. They conducted night probes of its perimeter, to prepare paths through the wire. Briefings were conducted on a terrain model, and each squad leader studied his objectives from an observation post. On the afternoon of the assault, the sudden appearance of helicopters and an L-19 spotter plane, together with reports of a US s
pecial forces patrol nearby, led the sappers to fear that their operation was blown. Even when this alarm proved groundless, after nightfall the sudden blaze of Mary Ann’s searchlight prompted some heart-stopping minutes, during which eight communist ‘spearhead groups’ lay motionless amongst the wire entanglements. Some, no doubt, reflected on their empty stomachs: the sappers had been on short rations for days, and launched their attack after a supper of manioc roots.
The garrison responded to the orgy of explosions by huddling mute in its bunkers, either from fear or because some men believed that they faced only a mortar barrage. Contrary to brigade standing orders, Lt. Col. Doyle had posted no guards outside his ops centre. He was thus confounded by the detonation of a tossed-in satchel charge, which hurled him to the floor and inflicted a slight leg wound. Capt. Spilberg appeared clutching a pistol and choking as he said, ‘Sir, they’re using CS!’ The colonel gasped, ‘No fucking shit!’ The North Vietnamese packed the captured gas in some of their mortar bombs, as well as in satchel charges, intensifying confusion as Americans groped for masks.
Sappers ran hither and thither, knowing exactly what they were doing, as the garrison did not. Men fled from the communications facility when it became filled with yellow smoke. Almost all wireless links went down, though an operator on a residual artillery frequency demanded illuminants. He did not, however, report Mary Ann under ground attack, so that higher headquarters remained bemused. One charge detonated a crate of white phosphorus grenades, which set fire to the operations bunker. Doyle remained conscious but concussed, or perhaps merely in shock. During the ensuing thirty minutes most of Mary Ann’s men lay in hiding, praying to escape the enemy’s attentions. Few got to their rifles, so that they were either unarmed or, at best, clutching pistols. Sappers loosed bursts of AK-47 fire wherever they glimpsed Americans. Some defenders heard the enemy chattering to each other, watched them lob Coke-can grenades before slamming bunker doors to contain the blasts.