Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Several attackers snatched watches from the wrists of prostrate Americans, either dead or pretending to be. One bent down to address a wounded man in English – ‘Are you okay, GI? Are you dead, GI?’ – before administering a contemptuous kick. The soldier held his breath and lay motionless while his wallet and watch were lifted. Lt. Jerry Sams had commanded his platoon for a month without hearing a shot fired. Now, as he struggled to pull on his boots a grenade explosion permanently blinded him in one eye and inflicted multiple fragment wounds. He lay nursing his agony in a conex: ‘I could hear ’em killing my people!’ At one end of the position stood an ARVN howitzer battery which never fired. Engulfed by clouds of CS gas in the old mess hall, cooks screamed in panic, intensified by a shower of grenades.

  Only a few men fought back. It was claimed that Lt. Barry McGee, a West Pointer disliked by his men who had been a Golden Gloves boxer, killed a sapper with his bare hands before himself being shot. Tony Jorgensen used a pistol to shoot an attacker who was kicking him, but was then wounded by the man’s grenade, and lay splattered with mingled American and Vietnamese blood. Two supply men, Louis Meads and William Meek, were stunned by a grenade explosion, but poked their heads out of the debris far enough to see two attackers muttering to each other, whom they shot. Meek said: ‘I felt so good because I knew the sonofabitch wasn’t going to get me.’ The NVA account of the action describes a hand-to-hand grapple between their own little Private Trung and a large American who tried to throttle him, which ended with the attacker detonating a grenade which killed his assailant. Another sapper allegedly brained a defender with a section of bangalore torpedo tubing.

  Capt. Spilberg described Lt. Col. Doyle and two others wrestling with the useless radios amid the fires in the command bunker. A hysterical officer casualty, Ed McKay, shouted, ‘We’re all going to die!’ The colonel slapped him across the face and bellowed, ‘Shut the fuck up, lieutenant!’ The heat in the bunker became intolerable: its occupants managed to scramble unnoticed through the darkness towards a nearby aid station, which was deserted.

  Higher headquarters still had no idea what was taking place on Mary Ann. Illuminants revealed little, because the firebase was shrouded in smoke from burning hooches and ordnance. When Spilberg suggested to Doyle that they should make a move, the traumatised colonel dissented, telling the captain, ‘Paul, this is where we’re going to die.’ Yet there was now silence around their own refuge on the south side of the FSB. The officers could hear continued firing only at the north end, where the enemy were busy destroying two 155mm guns and shooting gunners as they stumbled out of a bunkhouse. An artilleryman later gave evidence to the army inquiry about his comrades: ‘They were so shook up and scared they just ran in all different directions.’ Two medics almost tripped over a supply sergeant lying with both legs blown off.

  The North Vietnamese broke off their attack at 0325, forty-five minutes after it began, when the first American gunship, a Night Hawk Huey equipped with infra-red, appeared above Mary Ann – its spotlights and tracer caught some attackers retiring through the wire. Soon afterwards, a dust-off landed. Sgt. John Calhoun, one of the first casualties to be evacuated, had been hit in five places. He said: ‘Being from the country we used to butcher hogs. You get a smell when you gut a hog – and I could smell it on the chopper from intestinal wounds. It was a sickening smell, and people were moaning and groaning and pleading.’

  Back on the firebase, order was slowly restored. Lt. Col. Doyle hobbled among the casualties with his own leg bandaged, making wan little jests about men’s ‘million-dollar wounds’. Fires still blazed, and the darkness was periodically punctured by flashes from ordnance explosions. Rotor-wash fanned flames as the shocked brigade commander disembarked from a helo. A medevac pilot asked if body bags were needed. A soldier replied: ‘As many as you can get.’ Some American dead were burned to charcoal. Five severely mangled communist corpses were burned in the trash dump, which subsequently prompted a threat of war-crimes charges against officers responsible.

  The attackers retired triumphant, but faced further privations: lacking rice, for the next four days they lived on jungle plants. They admitted the loss of fourteen of their own men, and carried away twenty-one wounded – which shows that at least a small minority of Americans resisted effectively. Following Doyle’s evacuation, a new CO was appointed to Mary Ann, who set about imposing belated discipline. On Lt. Col. Clyde Tate’s second day, when he found whiskey in the operations room, he smashed the bottle. Survivors, nursing trauma and bitterness, convinced themselves they were victims of an ‘inside job’ – that the ARVN on the firebase, whose quarters were not attacked, had provided information and maybe access for the sappers. This was a fantasy, but reflected the pervasive lack of trust between Americans and ‘their’ Vietnamese.

  The 23rd Division inspector-general’s report told a dismal story: men assigned to guard duties were asleep; most had sought refuge rather than engage the enemy. He was brutal in asserting that many casualties were ‘victims of their own failure to do what they were told to do’. He also acknowledged the courage and professionalism of the attackers. Among US troops, he said, ‘there is … an understandable reluctance to acknowledge that in any given circumstance the VC/NVA might just do a better job than we do … most VC/NVA soldiers appear to … believe in the rightness of their cause … The same could not be said of the average American soldier in Vietnam in the spring of 1971.’ Divisional commander Maj. Gen. James Baldwin chose not to relieve Doyle of command of the 1/46th, but Abrams in Saigon overruled him. Baldwin was himself also sacked, together with the brigade commander.

  MACV’s report, delivered in July, found the dead Capt. Knight guilty of ‘dereliction of duty’, and branded several other key personnel ‘ineffective’; Doyle was fortunate to escape court-martial. As facts about Mary Ann trickled out, the press had a field day. In the wake of the Calley trial, however, the US Army had no appetite for flaunting yet more dirty linen. Westmoreland wrote from Washington: ‘The Secretary [of the Army] and I want to do our best to reduce the number of self-inflicted wounds which the Army is receiving.’ Doyle was allowed to keep his uniform and rank, albeit in non-operational postings. Both he and Baldwin, their lives blighted, died relatively young. Apologists for the two men later claimed that they were scapegoated. This is true insofar as the tragedy reflected an institutional malaise: it had become hard for commanders at any level to impose their authority, to extract from their men even minimal standards of soldierly conduct.

  No other single episode demonstrated so graphically the folly of attempting unilaterally to abandon the war while within reach of the enemy. It almost defies belief that officers acquiesced in the indolence and even decadence that prevailed on Mary Ann. Many people afterwards took pity on the garrison, because its losses had been so grievous. Yet almost every man, from Lt. Col. Doyle downwards, contributed towards his own nemesis.

  Whatever was still being done by South Vietnamese forces, by US air power and some army units, the bulk of America’s ground forces were no longer remotely as motivated and disciplined, and thus as effective, as their communist foes. Lt. Brian Walrath, an American adviser working near Mary Ann, wrote later: ‘I doubt that the troops [manning the FSB] were much different than most … at that stage.’ There was another such episode on 21 May, when a firebase was struck by eleven 122mm rockets which killed thirty-three Americans and wounded another twenty-one, chiefly because they had all been in a mess hall when the attack began, then fled to a single bunker which received a direct hit.

  Abrams was furious, because the unit had received warning of an imminent attack. He said: ‘You shouldn’t fool with this stuff [intelligence alerts]. What you’re doing is fooling with men’s lives.’ The same happened again at LZ English, where men were playing volleyball and assembling for a movie when the enemy struck. Abrams shouted in frustration, ‘It was failure – a failure of command. They had the intelligence … I don’t know what the hell they’re think
ing of.’ They were thinking of going home: a month after the attack on Mary Ann, the Americans quit the hill for ever. On Christmas Day 1971, Bob Hope was booed at his annual show for the grunts still serving in Vietnam.

  2 THE ‘GOAT’

  America’s senior soldiers recognised that whatever further ground fighting took place, their own combat formations would no longer play a significant role. Fred Weyand said in May 1971: ‘Our air is going to be the glue that holds all this together … If it weren’t for that air, which is driving this guy [the enemy] right up the wall, we’d be in very bad shape, and yet these people back in Washington keep wanting to whack at that, too.’ He meant that there was constant political pressure – expressed in congressional funding cuts – to reduce the US air as well as ground presence in Vietnam. As American troops went home, air power became the principal weapon at the disposal of Nixon and Kissinger. Between March 1969 and May 1970, the president had personally mandated 4,308 B-52 sorties against targets in Cambodia, which were undisclosed even to USAF chief Gen. John Ryan. Before flying missions over Cambodia and Laos, navigators were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement: since Hanoi denied its own troops’ presence in those countries, its leaders could scarcely make propaganda capital out of the illegal American campaigns there. Strategic Air Command kept two sets of after-action reports: one for very limited circulation, identifying real targets; the other recording fictional attacks inside South Vietnam.

  Another such deceit, however, is less well-known, and casts extraordinary light on the manner in which American war-making was conducted in those days. From 1969 onwards, Nixon pressed his air commanders to hit the North Vietnamese as hard as they could, wherever they could. He had formed a low opinion of the military, often complaining about their alleged timidity. For domestic reasons, however, the administration was unwilling to seek escalatory adjustments of the Rules of Engagement – RoE – that must attract the unwelcome attention of Congress and the media.

  In the latter months of 1971 the president personally authorised repeated strikes against armour and vehicle concentrations north of the DMZ. These were perfectly rational measures against an enemy who was massing forces for a spring offensive, yet they breached the established RoE. In November Adm. Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Lt. Gen. Jack Lavelle, commanding Seventh Air Force in Saigon, to dispatch reconnaissance flights against Dong Hoi airbase in North Vietnam, because the communists would be sure to fire on them, thus justifying bombing. Here was an issue that would become central to the so-called Lavelle Scandal. RoE prevailing since 1968 permitted US aircraft to attack gun and missile positions in the North only if these had first fired on them, and on radar installations only if these were already vectoring MiG-21 fighters onto American aircraft. Rationally absurd though such restrictions might be, they assumed the status of holy writ at a time when many members of Congress were bent upon using every ounce of their powers to shut down the war.

  The RoE allowed a certain licence in interpretation – for instance, authorising attacks on radar stations known to have locked onto American planes, before their linked missile launchers could fire. But in December 1971 the communists began to fire SAMs instantaneously with radar lock-on, which denied pilots aural warnings. Confusion increased in the minds of airmen and commanders about how far they might go in launching unprovoked attacks on enemy launchers that might shoot down aircraft. The mood music from the White House was never in doubt: Nixon wanted the communists hurt. He repeatedly complained that the air force was not doing enough, partly because radar bombing through overcast was often ineffectual. In December 1971, Gen. Ryan visited Udorn base in Thailand and told crews that he was bitterly disappointed by their ‘dismal performance’. But when defense secretary Melvin Laird visited Saigon and Lt. Gen. Lavelle requested additional RoE latitude, Laird turned him down. Instead, said the defense secretary, Seventh’s chief should ‘make maximum use of the authority we had and he would support us in Washington’. Yet a month later Laird, who was not in the White House loop, said contradictorily that radar installations should be attacked only if they were controlling MiGs that were already ‘airborne and hostile’.

  On 2 February 1972, Adm. Moorer told Nixon that he had directed Creighton Abrams – in his capacity as Lavelle’s superior – ‘to increase his airfield reconnaissance and to make certain these reconnaissance aircraft are heavily supported with bombing aircraft, and if these aircraft are fired on, which they always are, he was to then attack the airfield, and so we have been doing a series of operations of this type, sir’. The president said: ‘I just want to be sure that [the RoEs] are being interpreted very, very broadly.’ On the following day he briefed Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, who was visiting Washington, that he must tell Abrams, ‘He can hit SAM sites, period? But he is not to build up publicity … And, if it does get out … he says it’s a “protective reaction strike”.’

  Yet such operations now precipitated a huge row. In January, Lavelle, a World War II fighter ace, had indeed ordered some ‘protective reaction’ strikes. When crews which attacked said afterwards that the enemy had not responded, they were warned against admitting this in their computerised OPREP-4 after-action reports. The following month, an intelligence specialist at Udorn airbase named Sgt. Lonnie Franks wrote to anti-war senator Harold Hughes, saying that aircrew were making false post-mission reports to justify bombing. Thereafter, the story played out in public. Gen. Ryan, with whom Lavelle had longstanding differences, dispatched air force inspector-general Louis Wilson to Saigon to investigate these charges. He reported back, on the most questionable evidence, that Seventh’s commander had ordered missions which clearly violated the agreed RoE. Lavelle was promptly recalled to Washington and retired from the USAF on ‘health grounds’ with the rank of major-general, forfeiting two stars.

  At this stage, President Nixon knew nothing. But he held a personal meeting with Lt. Gen. John Vogt, newly-appointed replacement commander of Seventh Air Force, with Kissinger in attendance, at which he told Vogt he wanted much more aggression from the air force. The airman later described Nixon at this encounter as ‘wild-eyed’. Then came front-page media leaks about Lavelle’s dismissal. Editorial writers excoriated the general for having carried out a ‘private air war’, in defiance of his superiors, for which he had engaged pilots and subordinate commanders in ‘a widespread conspiracy’. At a meeting with Kissinger and secretary of state Rogers on 14 June, for the first time Nixon focused on the disgraced general: ‘What the hell is that all about?’ he demanded. ‘Who is Lavelle? Is he being made a goat? If he is … it’s not good.’ Kissinger and Rogers explained Sgt. Franks’s letter, and what had followed. At another meeting later that day, Kissinger said: ‘What happened with Lavelle was he had reason to believe that we wanted him to take aggressive steps.’ Nixon responded: ‘That’s right, that’s right.’ Kissinger: ‘And then suddenly Laird came down on him like a ton of bricks.’ Nixon: ‘I don’t want a man persecuted for doing what he thought was right.’ Kissinger grumbled about the military: ‘They all turn on each other like rats,’ to which Nixon assented. He then said: ‘Can we do anything to stop this damn thing?’ Now, ruthless politics took over. Kissinger said: ‘I think this will go away. I think we should just say ah … We took corrective steps.’ Nixon heaved one more ritual sigh over the grave of Lavelle’s career: ‘It’s just a hell of a damn shame. And it’s a bad rap for him, Henry.’ That was the end of the airman.

  Kissinger was not wrong about the rats ‘turning on each other’: Moorer testified to a Senate committee in September 1972 that he had never urged protective-reaction air strikes against the North – which was a falsehood. Abrams told the same hearings: ‘[Lavelle] acted against the Rules, and I think Rules are a little different than policy.’ Abrams’ equivocations emphasised what a tangle of deceits the war had become. Lavelle’s dismissal, for executing the oft-expressed wishes of his commander-in-chief, reflected deplorably upon his superiors Moorer and Ryan,
who indeed made him a ‘goat’, to use Nixon’s word. The RoE under which the USAF was required to operate were ridiculous and hypocritical. There was only one rational choice: for the Americans either to conduct an air war against the North, or not to do so. But in the increasingly deranged world of Washington policy-making, neither reason nor honesty was available.

  3 ‘LET’S GO HOME’

  Creighton Abrams had become a shadow of his former self, a victim of ulcers, pneumonia, high blood pressure and excessive alcohol consumption: on those grounds alone, and heedless of the forfeiture of White House confidence, it is remarkable that he remained in his job. One of the most vivid exchanges between Nixon and Kissinger took place on the morning of 29 May 1971, just before the national security adviser embarked on a new round of secret negotiations. He outlined his plans to make a deal in time for the next presidential election: ‘So we get through ’72. I’m being perfectly cynical about this, Mr President.’