Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  3 AN EMPTY VICTORY

  In South Vietnam, from June through the autumn US aircraft battered the Northern forces into retreat, enabling Saigon’s troops slowly to recover some lost territory. Communist losses rose to levels that no less ruthless national leader than Le Duan would have countenanced. The commander of the 308th Division sent a personal signal to Giap, urging that the offensive should be abandoned. He complained that political officers branded as a coward anyone who urged withdrawal, ‘yet this is what I recommend. As we are now placed, we would struggle to engage a single enemy platoon.’ Outside Quang Tri in June, with infinite labour communist engineers moved forty-two pontoon sections to a ford – only to watch them destroyed by an air strike in which their protective flak unit was wiped out. An artillery brigade was likewise wrecked before even reaching the battlefield. Renewed infantry assaults went ahead anyway, but in the words of Gen. Phi Long: ‘at the end of a week’s fighting our resources were exhausted. Every battalion was reduced to thirty or forty men.’ Several senior officers were superseded after collapsing with exhaustion of various hues. The North Vietnamese had been taught the brutal lesson that, whatever the limitations of air power against guerrillas and jungle supply lines, it impacted with devastating force on conventional forces, and especially on armour caught in motion. Neglect of logistics, against the advice of Giap, whose role in the campaign appears to have been administrative and honorific rather than operational, caused many gratuitous difficulties.

  On 11 July a South Vietnamese heliborne assault marked the first step in a long struggle to recover Quang Tri. As the communists grudgingly fell back, the veteran Col. An was dispatched to join their battle to retain the city. Arriving in torrential rain to find most infantry companies reduced to 20 per cent of strength, survivors in poor health and low spirits, he wrote: ‘The enemy was hammering and overwhelming us.’ An too favoured breaking off operations, as did another senior officer who said: ‘It’s clear that the enemy has gained the initiative … I know the other cadres in the division agree, but no one dares to say so out loud.’

  An wrote: ‘Perhaps because the phrase “the Revolution only attacks” had been so deeply etched into our mindset, anyone who suggested adopting a defensive posture was likely to be accused of “negativist ideological thoughts” … The rainy season caused countless difficulties. Trenches were forever filled with water and mud. Even when we bailed out bunkers, within a few hours they flooded again … No matter how hard transport personnel worked, supplies were insufficient. Our soldiers … were hungry, cold, filthy and sick.’

  Pham Hung of the 308th Division celebrated his eighteenth birthday on 26 August, in Quang Tri under ARVN shellfire. He decided to hold a little celebration, for which he would catch some fish from a nearby pond, using a familiar soldiers’ technique: during a lull he leapt out of his foxhole, ran to a nearby pond and emptied his AK-47 into its occupants. Collecting the floating corpses, he dashed back towards cover just too slowly to escape a deluge of American bombs. An explosion hurled him stunned to the ground, where he lay reflecting dreamily: ‘I am dying, and not honourably. Instead of being a hero, I am clutching a handful of dead fish. I have never made love to a girl.’

  He was very unhappy, but after a time understood that he was not dying, though considerably bloody. He tried to cry out for help, but could hear no sound. The company medic had been killed, but he succeeded in attracting the attention of the man’s replacement, a veterinary student, who bandaged wounds in his arm and head. Two men were detailed to carry him to the aid station, but confronted by a new air strike, they dropped him abruptly and painfully in the open, before dashing for cover. When the bombing stopped and they returned he said: ‘Let me crawl. It’s less painful than being dropped.’ On reaching the aid station, his companions congratulated him on his good fortune: he was alive, and would go home; they must suffer on.

  Hung thought their remarks odd, especially when he was so bloody. A week after being hit he joined a column of walking wounded for a long, slow, painful progress back up the Trail: ‘We looked a terrible sight, a defeated army. We sang songs as we went, but they were very sad songs. At that time we felt the war must go on for ever, and that we could not possibly win. We kept meeting drafts of new recruits going the other way, and we felt even sorrier for them. We said to each other: “If those kids knew what they were heading for, they would turn around and run home.”’

  Yet once they were back in the North, it was amazing how spirits rose among those battered men. Approaching the Kien Giang River, someone shouted, ‘Just the other side is where Giap was born!’ Hung said: ‘We thought, “So long as Giap is still with us, we can win.” It was as if a dry tree had been watered. Suddenly I, too, felt that we could prevail; that I must go and fight again.’ In the event, his wounds were too severe, but he stayed in uniform for two more years, to spare his younger brother from being drafted as a substitute. When he was finally discharged in May 1974, he felt bitter at the lack of recognition for what he had endured: he left the army with hearing and mental disabilities that persisted for years, he was made to pay cash for several items of lost equipment, and obliged to walk nine miles to catch a bus home.

  In the South by autumn 1972, a Northern artillery regiment commander admitted: ‘Our men just could not take it any more.’ Bao Ninh said that morale slumped: ‘The losses had been worse than in 1968.’ Back home in Hanoi, teacher Do Thi Thu sobbed when she learned that three former pupils from her own class had died at Quang Tri. Following the turn of the tide, Southern morale briefly soared. At the Saigon home of Airborne colonel Ly Van Quang, all night he and fellow-officers downed ruou de – rice alcohol – and exchanged experiences. They roared with laughter as they discussed the follies of communist tank commanders at An Loc. In the words of a family witness, ‘They were so proud: it was the first time the ARVN had done something really important on their own.’ Senior communist cadre Truong Nhu Tang acknowledged that the South Vietnamese and their American sponsors had once more prevailed, ‘just as they did during Tet, in Cambodia, and in so many of the pitched battles in which they confronted Vietcong and North Vietnamese main forces. Our losses had been prodigious.’ Nonetheless, ‘The paradox was that despite this, the spring offensive was a decisive triumph for us … the US and South Vietnam had already lost the war – and so also, if only we had known it, had the Vietcong.’ Tang meant that the Northerners would ultimately impose a new oppression upon all Southerners, heedless of their past allegiances.

  Kissinger warned President Thieu that he needed to recapture as much ground as possible before a peace treaty was signed, because whatever the communists then held, they would keep. Although South Vietnamese Marines claimed a significant prestige victory by reoccupying the citadel of Quang Tri on 16 September, after desperate fighting and five thousand casualties, thereafter they were too exhausted to advance further and retake the lost firebases along Route 9 and the area south of the DMZ. Dong Ha, once a key American base, became for the war’s last three years the port through which the communists shipped supplies up the Cua Viet River from the sea. Half the territory of South Vietnam’s four northern provinces – one-tenth of the entire country – remained permanently under communist domination, as did the western borderlands adjoining Laos and Cambodia.

  Even while Thieu’s soldiers were fighting their desperate battles, during the first six months of 1972, 135,000 Americans went home, leaving behind just forty-nine thousand. A South Vietnamese officer described the eerie experience of driving through abandoned barracks and camps at Phu Bai, Dong Tam, Qui Nhon, seeing nearby shanty towns that had once provided bars, nightclubs, whorehouses deserted and crumbling. In the Mekong delta, where earlier in the war the NVA never ventured, Hanoi now deployed eight thousand regular troops. An American adviser in My Tho recorded bleakly: ‘We’ve got North Vietnamese soldiers up to our ears.’ Another adviser, in the delta town of Vinh Kim, reported that five hundred communists had just pillaged the US compound: �
�They’re standing and fighting. We call in B-52s and they’re still there. These people are not backing down. This really is a different ballgame from what we’re used to in these parts.’ Amid a haemorrhage of Southern troops to fight the big battles further north, the government withdrew from local posts, leaving the communists to take over whole districts. Moreover the communists showed notably more sensitivity than Saigon’s troops in managing their relations with local people, who were soon offering them food. The resurgent Vietcong embarked upon a new wave of assassinations of those who assisted the Saigon regime.

  The outcome of the great battles of 1972 was a tactical victory for the South, won at a cost of eleven thousand men killed, perhaps fifty thousand casualties in all. Most of the three hundred Americans who fell that year perished during the spring offensive. The Northerners’ casualties probably exceeded a hundred thousand. They lost over half their committed armoured force – at least 250 tanks – and most of their heavy artillery. Some twenty-five thousand civilians were killed, ‘collateral damage’ impressive even by the standards of Vietnam. The Chinese bitterly criticised Hanoi for overreaching itself. ‘Our military men said they had lost Quang Tri because of Le Duan’s order to take Hue,’ said a senior cadre.

  On the American side, a few professional optimists such as Creighton Abrams hailed a victory secured by the Southerners, saying: ‘With all the screw-ups that have occurred, and with all the bad performances that have occurred … we wouldn’t be where we are … if some number … hadn’t decided to stand and fight,’ adding later, ‘By God, the South Vietnamese can hack it!’ Few others agreed. The CIA’s Merle Pribbenow, then in Saigon, said, ‘It was clear that without massive US air support, the country would have fallen.’ Most of his informed compatriots agreed with that judgement, yet many members of Congress constantly agitated to tighten the screws on funding for air operations.

  The North Vietnamese politburo was well satisfied with the outcome of its campaign. Saigon’s armed forces had made their last serious stand: thereafter, morally exhausted, most proved capable only of flirting with war. Major David Johnson was one among many US advisers who emerged despairing from his 1972 experiences: ‘I tried to do a job, but my heart wasn’t in it.’ As ever more departing Americans shuffled towards embarkation at airbases, much of the country they left behind resembled a junkyard of broken or worn-out consumer goods and military equipment. All the dollars, all the war, had failed to confer upon the rulers of South Vietnam and their supporters three vital elements: dignity, self-respect and sufficient human sympathy to achieve an accord with their own people. Absent these things, battlefield success counted for little.

  25

  Big Ugly Fat Fellers

  1 ‘IT WILL ABSOLUTELY, TOTALLY, WIPE OUT McGOVERN’

  Henry Kissinger achieved superstar status for his role in negotiating the settlement that promised to extricate his country from its quagmire. In October 1972, both the American people and the national security adviser convinced themselves that his brilliant diplomacy had brought the Paris talks close to an outcome. In truth, however, the US eventually settled on the only terms North Vietnam cared about, whereby its own troops remained in the South, while the Americans went home. Almost all the other provisions of the final Accords were such as neither side supposed would be observed. The only change in the communist position, the face-saver that opened the way for Washington to accede, was that Hanoi abandoned its earlier insistence on President Nguyen Van Thieu’s removal as leader of South Vietnam.

  Two factors were in play here: during the summer the Northerners recognised that Nixon was assured of re-election. Not only could they not hope to negotiate with a different and more sympathetic US government, but once polling was over, the White House might play rougher. Moreover, Hanoi made the pragmatic calculation that getting rid of the Americans was the only objective that mattered: once the ‘imperialists’ quit Indochina, destruction of their Saigon clients should neither prove difficult, nor take intolerably long. This perception was shared by the government of South Vietnam.

  The exchanges at the White House between Nixon and Kissinger about Vietnam are chronicled in an incontrovertible detail unprecedented in history, because tape-recorded. The two men cherished few illusions about what they were doing, though bent upon ensuring that the American people did. Kissinger professed to regard Hanoi’s shift about Thieu as a diplomatic victory, because it opened the way for a ‘decent interval’. He told Nixon on 3 August: ‘If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy, if it looks like it’s the result of South Vietnamese incompetence. If we now sell out in such a way that, say, within a three- to four-month period, we have pushed President Thieu over the brink’, he thought that even the Chinese would be dismayed by American clumsiness and cynicism. Everything in the later negotiations was about timing outcomes to make things look right.

  In Paris on 26–27 September, Le Duc Tho and Kissinger found themselves close to agreement on a paper formula for a three-party ‘election commission’ or ‘Commission of National Reconciliation’ for South Vietnam – touching distance from the North’s demand for a three-party coalition government. Kissinger explained this to Nixon on 29 September: ‘You see, Mr President, this is all baloney, because the practical consequence of our proposal, as of their proposal, is a ceasefire. There’ll never be elections.’ Nixon asked, ‘So then what happens? They – they just resume the war later, huh? But we’ll be gone.’ Kissinger said, ‘Yeah.’

  During the days that followed, Nixon displayed flashes of anger towards the North – implicitly, perhaps, spasms of guilt about the abandonment of the South that his emissary was crafting. He talked about an intensive new bombing campaign: ‘I have determined that I am not going to sit here and preside over 55,000 American dead for a defeat.’ Yet on the morning of 6 October, Kissinger confronted his master with a stark choice: he himself was about to fly to Paris, where Le Duc Tho would table a menu of proposals headed by a ceasefire-in-place, with the other vacuous provisions previously discussed. Would the president authorise his emissary to receive these favourably? In the long, tough conversation that followed, Nixon wavered. He was fearful that South Vietnam’s president, less than a month before US election day, would publicly expose the deal as a sell-out. Kissinger acknowledged to Nixon: ‘Thieu is right, that our terms will eventually destroy him.’ The two men discussed the possibility of arranging a coup in Saigon, to change South Vietnam’s government. Finally rejecting this option, they agreed that it must be Thieu who presided over his country’s almost assured descent to oblivion.

  Kissinger smoothed the president’s unease by saying that he would get the communists to promise withdrawal from Laos and Cambodia, abandoning the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Nixon said, ‘I’d get the commitment. I wouldn’t worry about it. They’re never going to withdraw.’ Kissinger agreed: ‘No, but I’ll get it in writing.’ He offered his employer valedictory comfort by recalling the example of de Gaulle, who took France out of Algeria in 1962, and whom ‘everyone thinks a great man’. He said that Hanoi had expressed its desire for respective foreign ministers to sign the prospective settlement, adding, ‘I don’t want to sign the goddamn thing. You should sign it.’ Nixon demurred: ‘I don’t think we should dignify it by my signature.’ Then the president of the United States authorised Kissinger to receive Le Duc Tho’s proposals.

  At 4 p.m. on 8 October 1972, in the familiar villa at Gif-sur-Yvette on the outskirts of Paris, Le Duc Tho opened a green folder and set out the North’s conditions. His draft conformed to expectations, and passed Kissinger’s low, low threshold: release of PoWs and a ceasefire-in-place for North and South Vietnamese forces in exchange for total American withdrawal. Hanoi insisted upon the principle of matching replacements of weapons – if the Americans were to continue arming the ARVN, the North would do likewise for its own forces in the South, while professing ‘strict respect’ for the sovereignty of Laos and Cambodia.
It proposed that the US should pay North Vietnam reparations for the war damage it had inflicted.

  Kissinger emerged from the session exultant, and was exasperated when the State Department’s John Negroponte predicted fury in Saigon. Kissinger shouted at him: ‘You don’t understand. I want to meet their terms … I want to end this war before the elections.’ On 12 October he returned to Washington bursting with excitement: the communists were ready to sign, and there was still almost a month before polling day. He told Nixon: ‘The deal we’ve got, Mr President, is so far better than anything we dreamt of. I mean, it will absolutely, totally, wipe out McGovern.’

  It was Nixon’s good fortune that his 1972 Democratic opponent, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, was one of the least impressive presidential candidates of modern times. Had the Republican nominee instead been obliged to fight Sen. Edward Kennedy, fatally tarnished by the Chappaquiddick scandal, he would probably still have won, but his Vietnam policy would have faced much more piercing scrutiny. Kennedy denounced Vietnamisation as a charade, preceding the unveiling of a deal to be struck with the communists on the eve of the election. He was correct: private debate within the administration focused only upon the duration of a politically acceptable pause before the communists took over Saigon. Kissinger thought eighteen months should be enough: he had told Nixon in August, ‘If we settle it, say, this October, by January ’74 no one will give a damn.’