Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Posterity will continue to debate whether the praiseworthy achievement of Ho Chi Minh and his followers in expelling French colonialism from Indochina justified the economic and social tragedy which they subsequently inflicted on the Vietnamese people, first in the North and later nationwide. Many Southerners who espoused the communist cause until 1975 ceased to do so after experiencing the implementation of Hanoi’s ideology.

  Could the US involvement have had a different outcome? Many Americans – the likes of Frank Scotton, Doug Ramsey, Sid Berry – went to Vietnam inspired by the highest ideals of service. Scotton recalls a remark of his old colleague John Paul Vann: ‘John said that we had assisted the Vietnamese to rise high in the sky in a heavier-than-air machine, and must help them come down as gently as possibly, rather than crash.’ Scotton asked him what the difference would be. Vann replied: ‘There are more survivors that way.’ The two men once landed a tiny LOH chopper at a Regional Forces outpost that had been overrun during the night. They somehow crammed a badly wounded soldier into the cockpit, then headed fast for Pleiku. The man bled all over Scotton’s lap, before dying in the air. When they landed Vann stood banging his fist furiously on the plexiglas, saying again and again, ‘Just another twenty minutes! Just another twenty minutes and he would have made it!’ Scotton thought: ‘This is a guy whom John has never met in his life: yet he cares terribly about him, because he is on our side.’

  The anecdote is moving, yet the American commitment was fatally flawed by its foundation not upon the interests of the Vietnamese people, but instead on the perceived requirements of US domestic and foreign policy, containment of China foremost among them. The decisions for escalation by successive administrations command the bewilderment of posterity, because key players recognised the inadequacy of the Saigon regime upon which they depended to provide an indigenous façade for an American edifice. In 1965 the Joint Chiefs warned McNamara about the ‘lack of a viable politico/economic structure … of stability in the central government, the low state of morale of the leadership, and the poorly-trained civil service … The solutions, primarily political, to these problems are critical to the eventual termination of the insurgency.’ America’s leaders nonetheless deluded themselves that all these complex challenges could be met by an overwhelming application of military power, as if by using a flamethrower to weed a flower border.

  Since this was the core US Vietnam policy failure, it seems inappropriate to lay extravagant blame upon the generals, unimpressive though some of them were. In 1964 William Westmoreland rejoiced in having secured the most important field command conferred upon any American soldier since the Korean armistice. By the time he went home four years later, he had been transformed into the fall guy for a national humiliation. David Elliott says justly: ‘There never was a clever way to fight the war.’ Gen. James Gavin was among those who warned from the outset: ‘If a village is fought over five or six times, a great many civilians will die. The whole pattern of life will be altered … As the war continues to drag on, we ourselves destroy the objective for which we fight.’

  Even before considering the kinetic consequences, American decision-makers failed to recognise the economic and cultural impact of a huge foreign army upon an Asian peasant society. A Vietnamese secretary at USAID earned more than an ARVN colonel. Bulldozers and conexes, antennae and armoured vehicles, watchtowers, sandbags and concertina wire ravaged the environment even before guns began to fire, helicopters to swirl overhead, huge soldiers to purchase the sexual attentions of tiny women. This was not a curse unique to Vietnam, but hangs over all Western military interventions in far-flung places, however well-intentioned.

  The communists enjoyed the critical propaganda advantage that they were almost invisible to most of the people, most of the time. They set a light footprint on the land, contrasted with that of the Americans, whose steps might be compared – and were, by cultured Vietnamese – with those of some sci-fi movie giant, lumbering across the landscape, expunging tranquillity, smashing fragile structures in its path. In the twenty-first century, Western military commanders still fail to understand the folly of sending their soldiers to wage ‘wars among the people’ wearing sunglasses, helmets and body armour that give them the appearance of robots empowered to kill, impossible to love or even to recognise as fellow-human beings.

  In both North and South, wherever the communists’ writ ran they propagated terror and confiscated personal freedom. For all the adulation heaped by the Western Left upon Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan, they presided over a fundamentally inhumane totalitarian regime. Yet its mandate seemed more credible than that of its foes. In most societies, including the modern US, rural dwellers feel an instinctive mistrust of metropolitan elites. This was especially acute in South Vietnam, where Saigon was seen as the embodiment of a French colonial rather than an indigenous culture. While few people had much interest in Marxist-Leninist theory, many were impressed by the promise of land reform that would cast off the yoke of landlords and money-lenders, promote government by and for Vietnamese, expel foreigners. Southerner Chau Phat said: ‘The communists could ceaselessly remind us how humiliating it was to be occupied.’ His father, a former Northerner, said from an early stage of the war, ‘There’s no hope. We’re going to lose.’ His son said: ‘He could see into the minds of the people: he understood that the other side had the monopoly of patriotism.’

  The PRG’s Truong Nhu Tang spoke contemptuously of the ease with which the communists manipulated Western media, saying, ‘We were not so much looking for supporters, but rather for opponents of the American and Saigon regimes … Not only were the South Vietnamese and American publics lied to by the communists. Even those of us who lived in the jungle and made sacrifices and fought … were made victims.’

  The North Vietnamese depended upon Soviet and Chinese cash and weapons, but the people of the South never encountered these foreign armourers, seeing instead only their communist fellow-countrymen, conspicuous for lack of material possessions, alongside the ostentatious spoils amassed by the servants of Saigon. It was plain to the humblest peasant that the men who ruled the South, whether in fatigues or tuxedos, could not rise in the morning without asking their ‘long-nose’ paymasters which side of the bed to get out. Few Americans understood how grievously the conspicuousness of their own dominance crippled the war effort. Communist victory was attributable less to the military prowess of the NVA and Vietcong than to the fact that they were Vietnamese. Hanoi told many lies about many things, but it spoke truth when it asserted that the leaders of the Saigon regime were puppets.

  It is sometimes said that there are no parallels between Vietnam and the West’s twenty-first-century struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet an obvious one is that the US and its allies experience chronic difficulties in translating battlefield successes into sustainable polities. That fine American officer Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster once described* his experiences and achievements commanding an armoured cavalry regiment in 2004–05 Iraq. He concluded sadly: ‘The problem was that there was nothing to join up to.’ Neil Sheehan says: ‘In South Vietnam, too, there never was anything to join up to.’ In the absence of credible local governance, winning firefights was, and always will be, meaningless. In Vietnam, the communists were the only belligerents who conducted an integrated political and military struggle.

  Yet if the war could not have been won on the battlefield, the US might have contrived to inflict less damage, through the excesses of its armed forces, upon its own stature as a standard-bearer for civilised values. It is a common illusion that beneath fatigues young Westerners fighting abroad remain decent hometown boys. Some do, others do not. Soldiers are trained to become killers. The circumstances of combat oblige them to live a semi-animal existence that coarsens sensibilities. Many warriors come to hold cheap the lives of bystanders, people whom they do not know, especially when their own casualties are high. In Vietnam, grunts were often baffled by Rules of Engagement designed to limit civilian losses. One p
rotested to Michael Herr, ‘That’s what a fucked-up war it’s getting to be … I mean if we can’t shoot these people, what are we doing here?’

  It is hard to fine-tune the conduct of young men in possession of lethal weapons who are – like most soldiers most of the time – hot or cold, filthy, hungry, suffering constipation or diarrhoea, thirsty, lonely, weary, ignorant, holding their nerves and rifles on hair-triggers because only thus can they themselves hope to survive. Soviet and Nazi precedent suggests that merciless occupiers can suppress resistance by force. In Vietnam, the US Army contrived to be sufficiently intrusive and racially contemptuous – also intermittently murderous – to earn the hostility of the population; yet inadequately savage to deter many peasants from supporting the communists. Americans burned villages enough to incur the world’s censure, yet too few to prevent local people from sheltering guerrillas.

  Almost as dismaying was the willingness of their fellow-countrymen to shrug off My Lai and similar horrors: a 1969 Time poll showed 69 per cent of Americans endorsing the proposition ‘Things like that happen in time of war.’ A just measure of any society is not whether its soldiers spasmodically commit atrocities, but whether these are judged institutionally acceptable, as they were in Hitler’s army and those of its World War II Russian and Japanese counterparts, none of which seem appropriate exemplars for a modern Western democracy. Excesses by US forces in Vietnam, while not universal, were sufficiently commonplace to show that many uniformed Americans considered Vietnamese inferior beings, their lives worth less than those of ‘roundeyes’. In August 1967 Operation Benton, which almost nobody has heard of, was a brigade-strength search-and-destroy directed against an NVA regiment. During its course some ten thousand Vietnamese in Quang Tin province south of Danang lost their homes. In an area six miles by thirteen, 282 tons of bombs and 116 tons of napalm were dropped; a thousand rockets, 132,820 20mm rounds, 119,350 7.62mm cartridges and 8,488 shells were fired. An enemy body count of 397 was announced, 640 civilians were evacuated to refugee camps. Such a fortnight’s work may be deemed representative. Moreover, it was a terrible symbolic mistake to allow Vietnamese to shine the humblest pfc’s boots and clean his hooch.

  American commanders committed considerable energy to civic action programmes. As professional warriors, however, they were conditioned to regard battle as their principal business. Most felt in their marrow that if their troops were not fighting, they were not earning their pay. Furthermore, career officers were properly ambitious to burnish their reputations and credentials for promotion. It was unlikely they could achieve this by reporting a tally of schools opened and villages visited by Medcap teams: nobody got a Medal of Honor for distributing candy in orphanages. The gold standard had to be numbers of enemy engaged and destroyed. Every nation needs soldiers to defend its interests, but at its peril does it concede them free rein in the midst of civil societies. Army doctor Russ Zajtchuk came to hate Medcap visits: ‘When you have a village that was bombed and people burned, and you go in later with a few vitamins and soap, I never felt very comfortable about it. In fact I felt a hypocrite.’

  In the conflict’s later stages, guerrilla warfare gave way to a conventional clash of arms in which it is possible that US forces might have defeated the communists had not the will of the American people already been broken. Even had firepower prevailed, however, it is hard to envisage to what good end. The Saigon regime commanded negligible popular support: there was still ‘nothing to join up to’. Arguably, the people of Vietnam had to experience the communist model, as they did at dreadful cost after 1975, before they could reject it.

  The war cost the US $150 billion, much less than Iraq two generations later. Yet the true price was paid not in mere money, nor even in the fifty-eight thousand lost American lives – as a proportion of population, a smaller forfeit than the nation paid in Korea – but instead in the trauma that it inflicted. Neil Sheehan observes that previous historical experience had shown Americans that foreign wars were a good thing: ‘You won; you were welcomed home. Then Vietnam came along. A lot of people got killed for nothing. All the other war memorials honor victories. The Vietnam Memorial commemorates sadness and waste.’ The US Army and Marine Corps took fifteen years to recover from their descent into mutinous near-rabbles, to become again outstanding fighting forces.

  The American people’s belief in both their own moral rectitude and their military invincibility, created by the outcome of World War II and matched by an economic success so awesome that it seemed only logical to believe that it reflected the will of a Higher Being, suffered devastating injury. Gen. Walt Boomer says: ‘The Vietnam war did more to change this country than anything in our recent history. It created a suspicion and mistrust we’ve never been able to redeem.’

  Even though the anti-war movement’s younger zealots flaunted their naïveté by proclaiming the virtues of Ho, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, its supporters correctly identified Vietnam as a catastrophe. When Daniel Ellsberg was asked how he could justify his devastating revelation of the seven-thousand-page secrets of the Pentagon Papers, he responded to his questioner: ‘I wonder if it has occurred to you to ask any of the other officials [involved in directing the war] how they justify to themselves not doing what I did? What made them feel they had a right to keep silent about the lies that had been told … the crimes that had been committed, the illegalities, the deception of the American public?’ Ellsberg made a fair, indeed concussive point. Walt Boomer, who went on to command the Marine Expeditionary Force in the 1991 First Gulf War, said that the great lesson he himself carried home from Vietnam was: ‘Tell the truth.’

  A former USAF navigator wrote about his Vietnam experience: ‘Though I’m proud to have served as a B-52 crew member, I’ve spent the last forty-plus years trying to forget that damned war … a useless waste of time, money and human capital. And at the end … our political leaders tuck their tails and run, abandoning the very people to whom we made so many promises.’ Frank Scotton discerns inside the US today two rival narratives: ‘When many American veterans gather, they tell each other how badly the South Vietnamese screwed up. And when South Vietnamese exiles get together, they talk about how the Americans did.’ He himself after the war ‘felt that the most important part of my life was over. I was never again willing to put my life on the line for a cause.’ In southern California he finally made obeisance to Kim Vui, a longtime lover whom he had abandoned in Dalat in 1966, and they were married in November 2015: ‘She says I owe her fifty years.’ Doug Ramsey eventually moved into his parents’ old house in Boulder City, Nevada: ‘It seemed a good place to recover whatever sense of normality I can, though nowadays I realise I should have stayed around Washington, where the care is much better.’ Almost wholly disabled, obliged to rely upon inadequate Medicare and workers’ compensation, he said: ‘I share with Vietnamese veterans the belief that we have been screwed by our respective governments.’ Ramsey died in February 2018.

  Former air force officer Nghien Khiem says that he still seeks to avoid any contact with Northerners: ‘We are the same people, but some of my family, friends, men whom I commanded, died at their hands.’ Today he is no longer an angry man, but cannot forget. Nor can NVA soldier Pham Thanh Hung, who suffered terrible wounds at Quang Tri in 1972: ‘Sometimes I still have nightmares about being under an air strike – and worse ones about being called back to the army to fight in a new war. I, and some of my generation, feel somehow cheated by what happened to us.’

  Major Don Hudson, who commanded an infantry company in 1970, said of the disillusionment of US veterans: ‘They thought they were going home with their uniforms on and their little medals and everybody would be really happy to see them. They found out that was not true.’ David Rogers is among those who still looks back with profound emotion: ‘The experience was huge. I don’t have a lot of big thoughts – so much is personal. I tried to write a book, but didn’t have the skill to carry it off. I had a lot of trouble coming home and going to church.
I couldn’t confess. I felt dirty. I’d been part of killing.’ Some contemporaries recoiled from him merely because of his association with the struggle: ‘One girl who had gone to Canada with her boyfriend was very judgmental.’ The only memory that still matters to Rogers, like millions of his former comrades, is that of his own platoon: ‘to be able to say that as a corpsman I was there for them’.

  Around one-third of ‘his people’ were killed or wounded. Living close to Washington, DC, he sometimes visits its memorial Wall at five, six in the morning. ‘I won’t go when there are others around. To me it’s a big headstone. I’m glad I have it. I have about ten names – Tony from Chicago, Jerry Johnson from Minnesota, Sam and some more. Moments come back. Seeing a treeline behind the salt ponds up at Martha’s Vineyard I thought: that’s like Vietnam: the prettiest sights I saw there were choppers over treelines. Reading writers like Neil Sheehan I get so angry with the people who ran America. They knew what was happening. We didn’t. I did the pace count and that was it.’ Sgt. Maj. Jimmie Spencer says: ‘People are re-evaluating. At least now we can separate the war from the warriors. They were blamed for something they didn’t start. Never again will we allow one group of veterans to turn their backs on another.’

  At this distance of time, it may also be possible to extend forgiveness to some of the ‘Big People’ who made disastrous decisions that damned their historic reputations, yet which they later repented. Late one 1967 afternoon in Robert McNamara’s huge Pentagon office, he was discussing ammunition requisitions with staffer William Brehm. ‘Let’s see. That would be two thousand rounds for every enemy infiltrator. That oughta be enough.’ Then Brehm noticed that the defense secretary’s body was shaking; he was staring up at his predecessor James Forrestal’s portrait on the wall, with tears streaming down his cheeks. He knew that Forrestal, like himself, had been destroyed by the experience of the office.