Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Then B-52s came, summoned by John Duffy. Hai wrote: ‘Suddenly the earth shook and flames boiled into the sky … it was hard to breathe. I stood bracing myself against the wall of the communication trench with hands covering my ears and mouth open to counter the concussions, but I still felt like the blood was about to burst from my chest … Dirt, rocks, branches rattled off my helmet. Next day there were no enemy ground attacks, and only spasmodic artillery rounds.’ Yet flak remained heavy enough to hold off medevac choppers – one that tried to land was hit and limped away, bleeding smoke. ‘Brother Five’ conferred with his officers, who begged him to abandon the position. Early-morning mists and the darkness that descended at 1600 severely inhibited air support, even when planes were available. Hai said, ‘If we just sit here waiting to be clobbered, we’re dead.’ The CO replied, ‘I’ve already told headquarters that, but no one will listen. I’m as sick as you are of the words “Hold on to the last man!”’

  Morale sank, not assisted by the moans and cries of wounded men, for whom medical supplies were almost exhausted. In the early hours of 12 April, Hai renewed his pleas to ‘Brother Five’ to change his smock. The colonel wearily agreed: ‘You guys read all those damn astrology books and come up with all kinds of stupid ideas. I’m going back to my bunker to write a letter – call me if anything happens.’ He delivered a parting injunction to collect weapons and ammunition from the dead, since they would receive no more resupply. Then enemy shelling and rocketing began again, thudding into the hilltop. John Duffy said later: ‘The NVA FO above Charlie was good. He took out three of four command bunkers in ten minutes.’ The colonel’s suffered a direct hit, and his staff dragged out his body – still clad in its British airborne smock.

  By late afternoon, shells had killed or badly wounded thirty men, and another hundred were slightly injured. The position was shrouded in smoke and dust when the artillery abruptly stopped and the Southerners saw line upon line of enemy infantry rise and advance on Charlie, their pressed-paper helmets and khaki tunics adorned with leafy camouflage. Artillery and air-dropped napalm ploughed swathes in their ranks – in all, during the two-week battle Duffy directed 188 strikes by Cobras and fixed-wing aircraft – but two planes were hit and one came down. At last communist survivors withdrew, leaving behind a stench of burnt flesh.

  Yet with ammunition dwindling and garrison numbers much reduced, the Vietnamese commander and Duffy decided that the position was no longer defensible. Renewed B-52 strikes bought time for the survivors to withdraw at nightfall on 14 April, stumbling downhill in thin files totalling 167 men weakened by exhaustion, wounds and hunger – rations had run out two days earlier. Next morning they were awaiting helicopter evacuation when heavy firing broke out: the enemy was pressing their rear. Two Cobras swooped, shooting and rocketing, driving away the communists even as a Huey lifted out one group of Airborne. Three further loads escaped safely, until only a handful of Vietnamese were left with Duffy. Two more Cobras struck, pushing back the communists yet again. Then another Huey dipped to earth. The exhausted men piled gratefully aboard, even as enemy fire ripped into the fragile hull, wounding the co-pilot. As they rose into the sky with Duffy still on the strut, Hai was hit twice in the leg by AK-47 fire, and toppled off the side. The adviser caught the little captain by his web gear and yanked him back inboard. The Huey clattered towards safety as Duffy tended the crew chief, hit in the chest; the American died a few minutes later, one day before he was to leave Vietnam.

  Just thirty-seven of the 471 men who garrisoned Charlie escaped by air. FSBs Delta and Metro fell along with Charlie, and on 24 April Tan Canh was lost. Duffy, a special forces officer, later received a Distinguished Service Cross. So much has been written about tensions in the relationship between American soldiers and Vietnamese that the saga of the 11th Airborne, and the fine part played by their adviser, deserve notice. The defence of FSB Charlie remains a proud memory of Southern veterans, to set off against such disgraces as Camp Carroll’s surrender.

  Meanwhile, north of Quang Tri there were fierce encounters between rival tank forces. When M-48s knocked out the first of a column of communist T-54s, exultant South Vietnamese infantrymen leapt to their feet and clapped their hands shouting: ‘That was just like the movies! It’s over!’ It was not, of course. An officer wrote: ‘One corner of the horizon was filled with flames, smoke, the acrid stench of burning flesh mingled with that of cordite.’ The Ai Tu ammunition dump caught fire, and communist artillery began to pound Quang Tri city. Abrams said: ‘What Giap’s got on here is what in basketball they call a full court press. He’s committed every goddamn thing he owns!’

  And Hanoi had done this against the explicit wishes of the Russians. On 20 April in Moscow, even as the battle raged in Indochina, Kissinger met Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, whom he found eager to fix a summit meeting with Nixon. A prevailing theme of that year was that, while the Soviets continued vociferously to denounce American conduct in Vietnam, and to make large weapons deliveries to the North, privately they made plain their indifference: like the Chinese, their foremost priority was détente – deals on such issues as strategic-arms limitation. Just as the US government sustained its support for Saigon for overwhelmingly domestic political reasons, so China and the Soviet Union did likewise for Hanoi, to assuage sentiment within their own ideological constituencies.

  John Vann had sworn that FSB Delta and the town of Tan Canh could be held against the two attacking Northern divisions, and for a time he made good his word. Following the loss of Delta, however, the Southern 22nd Division holding Tan Canh collapsed ignominiously. Defenders were shocked to see their tanks being destroyed by Sagger missiles, one of which hit the command bunker. Vann played a prominent role in evacuating surviving US advisers, who found themselves shooting advancing communists at almost point-blank range, even as they sprang aboard helos. As well as acts of courage, there were also deeds of shame: while American dust-off pilots would famously risk all to evacuate casualties, some of their VNAF counterparts sold seats on Hueys to unwounded fugitives. Many Regional and Popular Forces militiamen fled in disarray. Gen. Dzu suffered a nervous collapse, and disgusted Vann by seeking to persuade President Thieu to abandon the entire Central Highlands.

  The region, and especially the provincial capital of Kontum, a town of twenty-five thousand people on Route 14, were saved because the communists paused to regroup for three priceless weeks after taking Tan Canh, enabling the South Vietnamese to reinforce, and the Americans to deploy two gunships fitted with TOW anti-armour missiles, which proved invaluable against T-54s. Some Saigon generals had odd notions about how to encourage subordinates. A corps commander urged the man appointed to defend Kontum: ‘Ba, do your best and don’t run away!’ Colonel Ly Tong Ba was the Vietnamese officer who almost a decade earlier had incurred John Vann’s scorn at Ap Bac. Now, however, the two men forged a remarkably successful battlefield partnership.

  Among the communist troops fighting in the north at Quang Tri was seventeen-year-old gunner Pham Than Hung, experiencing his first battle. From the moment that a bullet glanced off his helmet, Hung felt convinced that he was properly destined to become a poet rather than a hero: ‘I was terrified, the sweat pouring down my back.’ He was an unusual man in that army, who dared to think for himself. Hung’s father had conducted a long struggle to keep his son away from the war, and might have succeeded but for the North’s manpower crisis. At the end of the teenager’s first year at Hanoi University, students were suddenly informed that, although they were not being drafted, they must ‘volunteer’ for military service. The night before their medical exam Hung and a friend sat for hours on the roof of their dormitory, fantasising about how they might escape the hated prospect by drinking coffee laced with tobacco, which somebody said would send their blood pressure soaring. This proposition was never tested, partly because neither knew where to get tobacco in a hurry; moreover, they fell asleep as they talked, and awoke to find the sun high and the medical board in s
ession. A few weeks later their entire year assembled in the university’s grand hall, to be addressed by its president. In the midst of his speech, the platform on which he stood collapsed. Much of his audience dissolved into tears, convinced this was a terrible omen: ‘We really thought it meant we were all going to die.’

  The students represented North Vietnam’s intellectual elite. Such was their naïveté about the nature of the experience that awaited them that some reported for induction clutching guitars and books – English novels were fashionable, though like Shakespeare these caused identified readers to become ideologically suspect. The girls of their year told them to make sure they all came home as colonels. The boys cracked nervous little jokes at each other: ‘Either the grass will be green or your chest red,’ meaning that they would win either graves or heroes’ quotas of medals.

  In Quang Tri province, Hung’s unit was bivouacked in territory newly occupied by the Northerners: several nights in succession men were shot, though no enemy unit was within miles. The killer was found to be a seventy-year-old local woman who sought vengeance for the deaths of two Southern soldier sons. She was promptly executed, causing Hung discomfort. True, he thought, she was helping the other side, but was she not, in her own way, a sort of national heroine? This was a dangerous rumination for a soldier of Hanoi’s army, yet not his only one. He and comrades in a 37mm AA battery were disgusted by officers who ‘just wanted to make themselves heroes’. They received a citation for having allegedly shot down six American aircraft, but the gunner said, ‘It was all just propaganda. I don’t remember us shooting down anything.’

  On 21 April a devastating air strike hit the battery, killing one-third of the gunners, wounding another third, destroying their guns. Men asked bitterly: ‘Why did the officers have to poke a stick into a hornets’ nest by opening fire?’ In the wake of the disaster, morale plunged. Some survivors reported sick. A squad leader shot himself in the leg: as Hung helped him to an aid station, the man pleaded for the teenager’s corroboration in convincing doctors that he had fallen victim to an enemy bullet, but he was arrested and charged anyway. Amid the wreck of his unit, Hung was disgusted to find the packs of his dead comrades being ransacked by passing soldiers; their owners had no more need of them, said the pillagers, ‘and we do’. Transferred to a 130mm battery, Hung found that most of its men were ex-deserters who had accepted this alternative to jail. Then they too suffered a devastating air attack which killed scores of soldiers, and temporarily buried Hung in a slit trench. He was ordered to take around a bucket and collect loose body parts: ‘I was so terrified that I decided that not only was I unfit to be a hero, I did not think I could become a poet either.’

  The moral of Hung’s story is not that his comrades were villains or cowards, but rather that they represented the same blend of humanity as fills the ranks of all armies. Bao Ninh said: ‘No one in their right mind wanted to be there … But we had a duty.’ Their leadership, discipline and training were, on the whole, superior to those of the ARVN. But the Northern army’s higher direction in the 1972 campaign was little more impressive than it had been during the 1968 Tet offensive; it was merely marginally better than that of South Vietnam.

  Two north-western firebases, Bastogne and Checkmate, succumbed to the communists only after staging protracted defences, but in the last days of April the ‘Dong Ha line’ bent – then broke. Though the attackers were savaged by air strikes, these were much less effective than further south, because in Quang Tri province the Americans had surrendered responsibility for forward air control to the Vietnamese. Moreover, below the DMZ the communists had their strongest missile defences: an estimated thousand SAM-2s were fired at American and VNAF aircraft during the campaign.

  As Northern columns streamed south across the Cam Lo bridge, it became plain that Quang Tri was no longer defensible. The last Vietnamese and their American advisers pulled out on 1 May, and next day the communists occupied the city. Amazing scenes took place as some Vietnamese fled half-naked, having torn off their military garb. I Corps commander Lam was belatedly sacked, to be replaced by Lt. Gen. Ngo Quang Truong, whom Abrams called ‘the most professionally qualified officer ARVN has got’. The hapless divisional commander in Quang Tri was nominated official scapegoat for the disaster, and with considerable injustice was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for ‘desertion in the face of the enemy’.

  On May Day in Paris, Kissinger again met Le Duc Tho. The communist subjected the national security adviser to a propaganda monologue. It had become plain that the best the US could hope to extract from a peace deal was a ceasefire-in-place, though Kissinger continued to demand the withdrawal of Northern forces engaged in the ongoing offensive. Communist field commanders were disgusted when Le Duc Tho established a direct radio link from Paris to the Southern battlefield, bypassing Dragon Court, himself sometimes issuing orders – always demanding further attacks. ‘Incredible!’ said one officer later. ‘The staff did not agree with this way of doing things, but we had no idea to whom we could protest.’ In the later stages of the 1972 offensive, communist attacks were launched not in expectation of gaining ground, but instead to win headlines around the world, to move American public opinion, and to sustain pressure on Kissinger in Paris. In pursuing those political objectives, Le Duc Tho was notably successful.

  On the afternoon of 2 May, below the My Chanh River south of Quang Tri, South Vietnamese and their advisers contemplated the wreckage of an infantry division, four Ranger groups, an armoured brigade, two cavalry squadrons and a Marine brigade, together with RF, PF and support troops. Few officers or men had distinguished themselves, but survivors cherished the story of Dinh Thi Thach, wife of a sergeant-major: after her village near Quang Tri was overrun, for weeks at risk of her life she sheltered a dozen Southern fugitives in her cellar, and later guided them safely to their own lines.

  The retreat became ever more chaotic. A tank officer wrote: ‘God, how can one describe the tragedy that befell [us] on reaching Highway 1. The men had no order, the road in front was blocked by the enemy, whose forces were also crowding our rear and pouring fire onto our heads.’ Some despairing drivers slammed their feet down on accelerators, drowning their M-48s in the waters of the Thach Han River. Others dropped illuminant grenades down hatches and watched their tanks burn before joining the flood of fugitives wading streams and trudging across waterlogged fields towards Hue city.

  In Saigon, Abrams fumed at South Vietnamese complaints that they lacked arms and equipment: ‘The ARVN haven’t lost their tanks because the enemy tanks knocked them out. The ARVN lost their tanks because goddamn it, they abandoned them. And, shit, if they had the Josef Stalin 3 [tank] it wouldn’t have been any better.’ He likewise harangued President Thieu and Vien, Saigon’s chief of staff: ‘Equipment is not what you need. You need men that will fight. And you need officers that will fight, and will lead the men … You’ve got all the equipment you need … You lost most of your artillery because it was abandoned.’ Much of the Western media predicted that the latest battlefield disasters would bring down the curtain on South Vietnam.

  The last three hundred military patients in Quang Tri hospital were loaded aboard a road convoy which became stranded on Route 1 south amongst a throng of refugees and wrecked vehicles. Communist artillery fire pounded the ambulances into scrap. Dr Pham Viet Tu, an Airborne medic, wrote of the fate of civilians: ‘There were hundreds of cars, trucks, bikes, motorbikes riddled with communist bullets and shell fragments, some burned to ashes. Human skeletons lay scattered on the roadbed … The image that sent a surge of pity thrusting through my heart was that of the skeleton of a child about two years old inside a large aluminium wash basin. A tiny pair of rubber sandals lay beside its mother’s remains.’

  Abrams and the South Vietnamese were astonished that the communists did not race south after taking Quang Tri to seize Hue, which lay open for the taking. A Saigon officer wrote: ‘Hue seemed a lawless city; the few police and MPs could not
control a mass of refugees and soldiers. There were robberies, lootings, car hijackings. Beside the main roads, many straggling children from toddlers to early teens cried and watched the people flow by. I saw a boy about twelve years old holding his brother of around three leaning on a roadside tree. The older one clutched a piece of letter-sized paper on which he had scribbled: “We are children of Mr Xuan of Quang Tri. Can’t find our parents. Please help us.”’

  Hundreds of brief messages were scrawled on walls with chalk or charcoal, or scribbled in pencil on paper stuck to tree trunks with a lump of rice: ‘To Pfc Nguyen Van Ba, 1/57th Btn. The children and I are moving to Auntie’s home in Da Nang,’ or ‘Corporal Bay 3/2 Inf to wife: I’m alive and fighting. Buddha blesses you and our kids.’ One read: ‘Wife Hoa to husband Sgt. Truong RF-Quang Tri. VC mortar killed our baby girl yesterday. The boy is safe with me. Don’t worry and don’t go AWOL.’ Mrs Bong, the Hue housewife who had endured terrifying experiences during the 1968 Tet offensive, now wrote to a friend: ‘My only surviving son has left home. I am alone with my daughter and my little grandchild. It is so lonely. If my dear son is killed, I don’t know what I should do. We think now this terrible war will never end … My poor children.’

  Major Nguyen Cong Luan met a young captain taking his battalion forward into action, who seemed dispirited. When the man complained that the Americans now fulfilled less than half his air-support requests, Luan suggested that the decisive factor in influencing American responses would be that the Southern army displayed its own will to fight. Of its 1972 material losses of two hundred tanks, 275 APCs, 634 trucks and three hundred guns, half were abandoned or destroyed in the north. It was fortunate for the Saigon regime that the communist advances in the north and the Central Highlands lost momentum after taking Quang Tri and Tan Canh. The invaders had suffered huge casualties, mostly to air strikes, and lacked the logistics support to push on. In the course of May the Southerners formed a defensive line, and stemmed the faltering enemy advance. Later in the summer a long, slow counter-offensive began to regain Quang Tri.