by Max Hastings
Ramsey thought a lot about philosophy and quantum mechanics: ‘Since I could not control the environment in my own corner of the world, it seemed sensible to think about the universe instead. It was mental masturbation.’ There were few humorous moments in those long years: when laughter came, it was about stupid immediacies, such as the sight of a chicken that fell in the latrine, then fluttered out and shook its feathers all over a cadre whom nobody liked. Once when a prisoner was absent, seriously ill, the others were fed monkey meat. An American picked up a primate paw on his plate and examined it theatrically: he said he wanted to be sure he was not eating his cellmate. From time to time disease killed a prisoner, always a blow to morale. Cook, whom Ramsey described as ‘the most impressive PoW I ever encountered – I needed him both to keep me in line and to cheer me by example’ – died of malaria in 1967. Ramsey describes kidney malfunction as the cause of adviser Major John Schumann’s death, though the soldier is still officially listed as missing.
It was fortunate for Ramsey’s sanity that he did not know until long afterwards that he could have been spared the last eighteen months of his ordeal, had Washington willed it. In December 1970 Nguyen Tai became one of the most senior cadres ever to fall into Saigon’s hands: for six years he had been directing espionage and terrorist operations in the Southern capital. In October 1971 the PRG offered a swap: Tai and another top communist for Doug Ramsey. Neither Thieu’s men nor the CIA would approve such a deal. Tai, especially, they said, was too important: he remained confined until the fall of Saigon. Ramsey’s fate awaited an outcome of the Paris talks.
2 ‘PEACE’
Early in 1973, as an Essex-class carrier left San Francisco for what proved its final deployment in the Tonkin Gulf, aircrew and sailors gazed in gloomy wonder at traffic snarl-ups on each side of the deserted Golden Gate. The bridge had been closed by police, lest anti-war protesters drop rocks or even explosives onto the ship – to such depths had the war brought domestic ferment. Yet now, at last, Americans were approaching a point of departure, even if Vietnam’s own hapless people were denied access to the same gate. In 2013, Henry Kissinger itemised changes in the October 1972 draft Paris agreement which were secured, he said, by the Christmas bombings: an unrestricted right for the US to continue providing munitions and equipment to South Vietnam; communist withdrawal from Laos and Cambodia; a strengthening of the internal control machinery (‘All of which is bullshit, to tell the truth,’ Kissinger had privately told Nixon on 12 October 1972, ‘… but it will read good for the soft-hearts, for the soft-heads’); minor technical amendments.
The first point had been settled four months since. The other stipulations were either trivial, or never likely to be observed by the communists. Kissinger also emphasises that, supposedly as a consequence of the bombings, in January 1973 his interlocutor Le Duc Tho moved swiftly to agree what became known to history as the Paris Accords. Yet the previous October, the North Vietnamese had been furious that the Americans failed to sign what was in every significant respect the same deal. The State Department’s John Negroponte said bitterly: ‘We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions.’
The decisive January change of heart took place not in Hanoi, but in Saigon. Under pressure from two prominent hawks, Senators Barry Goldwater and John Stennis, President Thieu reluctantly acquiesced. On 23 January a deal was announced from the Oval Office: President Nixon told the American people that, following a general ceasefire, their PoWs would be coming home within sixty days. He called for scrupulous adherence to the Paris terms. ‘The United States,’ he said, ‘will continue to recognise the government of the Republic of Vietnam as the sole legitimate government of South Vietnam. We shall continue to aid South Vietnam within the terms of the agreement and we shall support efforts by the people of South Vietnam to settle their problems peacefully.’
He was studiedly vague about the consequences of violations: ‘We shall do everything the agreement requires of us and we shall expect the other parties to do everything it requires of them.’ Most Americans believed that Nixon’s toughness, reflected in the Christmas bombing campaign, had secured the peace that eluded successive administrations for so long. The president’s personal approval rating soared to 68 per cent. On 27 January, secretary of state William Rogers signed the Paris treaty: the last twenty-seven thousand US troops and advisers began to come home, a process completed by 29 March. Twenty-one thousand Americans had died in Vietnam since Nixon assumed the presidency, supposedly armed with a plan for peace. Communist prisoners being repatriated tore off the clothes issued to them by the Saigon government, hurling them from the trucks that bore them northward through the DMZ, in a symbolic gesture matching that of homebound North Korean PoWs after the 1953 armistice. In Hanoi, there was a giant firework display.
Kissinger told his master that he was terrified the North Vietnamese would launch a major offensive to complete unification as early as that autumn, precipitating a nightmare dilemma for the administration about how to respond. Nixon said to Haldeman later that day, 14 March: ‘Well, Henry’s exactly right. We’ve got to do everything we can to see that [the Paris agreement] sticks for a while, but as far as a couple of years from now, nobody’s going to give a goddamn what happens in Vietnam.’ Then the president started to fret about the mid-term elections, little knowing that he himself would be driven out of the White House by Watergate in August 1974, before these took place.
Under the terms of the Accords, South Vietnam released 26,508 communist PoWs, while the North freed 4,608 ARVN soldiers, 588 Americans and nine citizens of other nations. The return of the US PoWs, almost all flown out of Hanoi, prompted wildly emotional scenes back home, made more intense when their sufferings in captivity were revealed. Much had changed since they went away. Fighter pilot Col. Fred Cherry, absent for almost eight years, found that his wife had had a baby by another man, and two of his sons had dropped out of high school; Mrs Cherry had squandered the family savings. The deeply religious Capt. Norm McDaniel suffered culture shock: he was dismayed by the explicitness of sex in movies, the openness of homosexuality, fancy coloured pants and wide belts for men, store prices that seemed fabulously high. ‘I came back with a 1966 time frame. We knew very little about riots and assassinations. I had a lot of trouble with memory. I learned to pick and choose what to focus on.’
McDaniel secured a comfort blanket of familiarity by remaining on active duty with the air force. Moreover, he had sufficient generosity of spirit to feel pity for the North Vietnamese whom he left behind: ‘I came back to something better. They just had more of the same.’ He was thirty-five years old, but vitamin deficiencies had caused his bone structure to become that of a sixty-year-old. He said: ‘America treated us PoWs much better than it did ordinary war vets. A lot of grunts needed closure – and didn’t get it.’ Some former prisoners made full physical and psychological recoveries, and went on to build successful careers beyond the armed forces, foremost among them Sen. John McCain. Others never threw off the pain and the memories.
Before the release of Doug Ramsey and other Americans held in the South, their camp commandant addressed them. After their release, he said, a period of bitterness was inevitable, and in some measure deserved. Though the circumstances of war had rendered some of their privations in captivity inescapable, others had resulted from shortcomings in VC behaviour. He nonetheless hoped that, as mature individuals, the Americans would come to see that they were fortunate to have been allowed to live, when it would have been more convenient to shoot them. He hoped that the prisoners would persuade their fellow-countrymen not to repeat elsewhere the Vietnam intervention. Having themselves lived the lives of have-nots, they might better understand the plight of those obliged to exist without even the hope of having. The immediate response of most of his American listeners was cynical, indeed contemptuous: none was about to go home and become a ‘freedom-fighter’. Ramsey later concluded, however, that what the communist said contained elements o
f truth, ‘and even of profound wisdom’.
They were released, twenty-seven men in all, on 12 February 1973 at Loc Ninh, where their personal possessions were handed back. Jim Rollins was given a cheap Seiko watch, which a cadre told him was a replacement for his own gold Rolex, lost ‘due to wartime exigencies’. This caused Rollins to explode, ‘Bullshit! I saw that Rolex on the wrist of your cousin only a couple of weeks ago!’ A communist colonel at the handover to their fellow-countrymen, who included Ramsey’s old comrade Frank Scotton, asked to examine the cockpit of the Americans’ big helicopter. He said he hoped that his own son might one day study in the US, which seemed to his adversaries a revealing glimpse of North Vietnamese consciousness of the limitations of their own society. The prisoners were appalled when they learned, at the last moment before liberation, that one of their guards’ children had been killed and another had lost an arm in the Christmas bombing of Haiphong. This man nonetheless shook their hands, wished them well, and gave them his tobacco ration. Ramsey said that here was the most impressive gesture the man could have made for his own cause: ‘Most Americans, under such circumstances, would have had to be restrained from grabbing an AK-47 and carrying out a My Lai-style massacre of the PoW contingent.’
To this day, some hawks believe that if Nixon had remained in the White House, he would have committed air power to save the Saigon regime when the North launched its final offensive. Yet in February and March 1973, the president made it plain – on one occasion to a returned PoW – that he viewed renewed military action as a political impossibility. On 29 June, House minority leader Gerald Ford stunned Congress by announcing that the president would sign a Bill prohibiting all US combat activity in, above or off the coast of the four components of Indochina – this, just two days after he had vetoed legislation to ban US bombing of Cambodia. The Bill was duly passed into law – by 278 votes to 124 in the House, 64–26 in the Senate – after Ford spoke on the telephone to Nixon at San Clemente, to ensure that he correctly understood the commander-in-chief’s intention. Though Nixon would later thrust blame upon Congress for permitting South Vietnam’s collapse, the record shows that he voluntarily surrendered his own discretion. There can be little doubt of the motive: if, or more realistically when, the long-expected North Vietnamese final offensive took place, Nixon wanted no part of a dilemma about whether to launch a new intervention.
Though there are no tapes of his conversations at San Clemente, on 29 March in Washington he told Kissinger: ‘On Cambodia, we’ve got to bomb the goddamn place until the Congress takes away the power. [Then?] we can blame them for the whole thing going to pot.’ In June he abdicated responsibility for Indochina. With or without Watergate, this was a wise decision. The United States and its people had been riven asunder by the war: the Paris Accords signalled the beginnings of a closure. On 4 August, Nixon signed into law the Bill that he himself had initiated, barring further US combat activity. In a gesture worthy of Pilate, he then wrote to congressional leaders, warning that if as a consequence the communists overran Indochina, blame would belong on Capitol Hill.
More than two years earlier, on 18 February 1971, Kissinger had told Nixon that he proposed to say to Le Duc Tho: ‘Look, we’re willing to give you a fixed deadline of total withdrawal next year for the release of all prisoners and a ceasefire.’ To the president, he added: ‘What we can then tell the South Vietnamese – they’ve got a year without war to build up.’ During the subsequent half-century Kissinger has often asserted that he achieved a decent settlement, which was wrecked by Watergate, communist perfidy and congressional pusillanimity. Yet the record, as established by such scholars as Jeffrey Kimball and Ken Hughes from the evidence of the White House tapes, shows that both Kissinger and Nixon always recognised South Vietnam as doomed. Watergate changed nothing. Once again, the charge against the two men is not that they failed to preserve the Saigon regime, a nigh-impossible task, but that they sought to persuade the American people at the time, and posterity since, that they ever supposed they could.
Six months after Nixon resigned, Kissinger characterised him to Arthur Schlesinger: ‘He was both more evil and better than people supposed.’ The secretary of state – as Kissinger had become in December 1973 – described his boss as astonishingly lazy, noting that he often failed to read important papers. ‘His work habits,’ said Nixon’s principal instrument, ‘were very much like Hitler’s as described by Speer … Everything was weird in that slightly homosexual, embattled atmosphere of the White House … You could not believe a word he said.’ This was vintage Kissinger: so far distancing himself that it eventually came to seem that through those White House years he had been merely an interested astronomer, viewing the by-then-disgraced president’s doings through a lunar telescope.
Kissinger deserved the gratitude of the American people for extricating them from their long nightmare, clad in a threadbare shift of dignity. He merited none from the Vietnamese people, however: his reputation will be forever tainted by the share in the Nobel Peace Prize which vanity caused him to accept, and which Le Duc Tho prudently declined. Most exiles to this day hate Kissinger for their perceived betrayal. South Vietnamese historian Nguyen Ky Phong is unusual in the temperance of his verdict: ‘His job was simply to do whatever it took to get the Americans out of Vietnam, and that is what he did.’
3 WAR OF THE FLAGS
When a North Vietnamese military delegation landed at Tan Son Nhut at the end of January 1973 to establish a liaison office, there was a stand-off on the tarmac because the newcomers refused to comply with immigration procedures, which would have implied recognition of South Vietnam’s legitimacy. Some American spectators relished the spectacle of their former enemies literally sweating it out, but eventually formalities were waived. Lt. Nghien Khiem, who commanded the VNAF security detail that day, said of the communists: ‘They walked and talked like men who knew they were on top.’ Some of his own company demanded: ‘Lieutenant, how come they are all generals?’ The ubiquitous gold stars on Northern uniforms of all ranks bewildered the Southerners.
Throughout the communist camp, there was exultation. According to an NVA squad leader, ‘morale was sky-high because we were absolutely certain we stood on the brink of victory’. His unit celebrated wildly, ‘because we thought this meant we would all live to go home’. With the end of bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the logistics of Hanoi’s soldiers – especially rations – were transformed for the better. The veteran Col. An wrote: ‘It was as if someone had turned the “off” switch on a radio-cassette player: all the noise suddenly stopped.’ Communist soldiers revelled in being able to sleep through the night, eat in the open, gaze at the heavens without searching them for hostile aircraft. Theatre troupes were dispatched from the North to entertain soldiers, some of their performances watched at a safe distance by their Southern once-and-future foes. Bao Ninh’s unit began to receive small comforts including books, ‘though these were all unreadable propaganda’.
There was some fraternisation. Tri, a former Hanoi University student, found himself gossiping with a young Saigonese whose studies had also been interrupted. They agreed that a soldier must do his part, whichever side he was on, and that blame – if there was to be blame – must lie with the big people at the top. A mushroom growth of rival propaganda billboards sprouted across the country, such as one planted in reeds at the boundary of a Vietcong area: ‘Soldiers, let us put aside vengeance. Now we need reconstruction and friendship.’ Mai Elliott said: ‘There was a brief spasm of optimism. It was not that people doubted that the communists would win eventually, but they thought it might take a long time.’
The Saigon CIA’s Merle Pribbenow was astonished to find some State Department colleagues convinced that the South could survive. Langley’s chief of Vietnam operations flew into town and sought the views of junior staff: ‘Virtually all of us agreed that Hanoi would not give up,’ said Pribbenow. ‘There would be another massive offensive. Yet the official Agency view was that
this was manageable; that the North had been hurt very badly in the 1972 fighting and now needed US economic aid.’
The optimists were thus far right, that in the first weeks after the Paris Accords voices were raised in Hanoi, including that of Giap, to urge that the terms should be respected. The old general believed a period of stabilisation, and the Americans’ promised cash, would be precious prizes for his exhausted country. As always, however, Le Duan rejected even a temporary accommodation. This iron man, so proud of subordinating human frailties to the revolution, told an expanded meeting of the Hanoi politburo on 27 March 1973 that their objective must be to reinforce in the field, while ensuring that odium for breaching the ceasefire fell upon the other side.
Hanoi’s pivotal decision was that the war should continue. Though Soviet and Chinese aid was cut back, the NVA held ample stocks of weapons, now no longer vulnerable to attrition by air strikes. In the course of 1973, twenty-seven thousand tons of arms and ammunition, forty thousand tons of rice, six thousand tons of fuel were shipped south – four times the volume dispatched in the previous year. A hundred thousand fresh troops moved down the Trail, boosting communist strength below the Demilitarized Zone to 400,000 men. Kissinger urged military action to stem this traffic, but even before the congressional veto Nixon, buffeted by the rising breakers of Watergate, had no appetite for renewed bombing.
Nor was it only the North Vietnamese who set about flouting the Paris terms. For understandable reasons, President Nguyen Van Thieu found it intolerable that large tracts of his country should remain in communist hands. Some historians write as if the Paris Accords represented a sustainable settlement, had their provisions been observed. Yet few rational people could suppose that a nation now represented on the map by a patchwork of communities – interspersed with communist enclaves as determined by the ceasefire-in-place and soon delineated on the ground by ten thousand rival flags – was economically and politically viable. Moreover Thieu, now aged fifty, found himself in a bewildering predicament. He had forged a career out of compliance with American wishes, yet henceforward the keenest desire of many of Nixon’s fellow-countrymen was that he should disappear into a hole. Clark Clifford, Lyndon Johnson’s former defense secretary, publicly described the Vietnamese president as an obstacle to peace, saying that if he quit, a ‘truly neutral and representative government could be formed in Saigon which would negotiate in good faith with the other side’.