The Americans stationed in Vinh Binh operated under no illusions about the strength of the Viet Cong. Travel was absolutely forbidden at night. Every road offered the possibility, if not the probability, of death through mines or ambush. Hacker recalled that the enemy would regularly mortar the Chieu Hoi compound, killing mostly women and children, as a means to discourage defection. A favorite tactic was to blow up a bus, killing thirty or forty people. Americans and their Vietnamese counterparts would rush to the scene only to be ambushed. “The carnage of a mine going off under a vehicle the size of one of our yellow American school buses was just unbelievable,” Hacker said. “Arms and legs and heads were scattered everywhere. They counted on the horror to paralyze us and throw us off guard.”59
Hacker remembered Colby periodically visiting Vinh Binh. “He was the right guy at the right time . . . very cool. I could not imagine Colby sweating.” Vann was omnipresent. One either loved or hated Vann, Hacker recalled. He loved him. “If you worked for CORDS and believed in counterinsurgency/pacification, Vann was your hero,” said Hacker. He showed no weakness or ambivalence, but led by example. Both Vann and Colby knew that the war was going to be a protracted struggle, Hacker said, and they believed that only pacification could win it. Colby was the brains, Vann the brawn and the inspiration. Even more striking than these two Americans were the Vietnamese peasants themselves, Hacker remembered: “Nine hundred years of Chinese domination, one hundred years of French, and now the Americans were pounding the hell out of them.” And yet, whenever the Chieu Hoi teams stopped to ask directions, the locals would invariably invite them for a meal. They were swarmed by smiling children. “They had this innate decency about them,” Hacker said.60
After Abrams, Komer, and Colby arrived on the scene, and John Vann was transferred to the delta, the US military began to recede into the background there. Rural Development teams were paired effectively with CORDS staff and the ablest village leaders. In the wake of Tet, the liberation committees began to step up their pressure on the rural population, demanding more money and more recruits and sowing terror when they were not forthcoming. Slowly, trust began to shift. Bruce Kinsey, who headed the pacification effort in Long An Province, recalled that villagers became increasingly willing to finger Viet Cong tax collectors and members of the Banh-anh-ninh. Kinsey became aware that, over time, local leaders in the delta had worked out accommodations with the Viet Cong. The two sides agreed unofficially on a division of territory: you take everything between here and the river, for example, and we will control everything between here and the marketplace. Kinsey discovered the existence of these clandestine arrangements during one of his first forays into the countryside. He asked for and received a tour, but when his party approached a particular footbridge, the chief halted and forbade Kinsey to go any further. Over time, he and his colleagues began to push the boundaries to expand their work into communist-controlled territory. Vann’s idea, Kinsey recalled, “was that the VC do not wear seven league boots and that they are just as scared as we are and a lot of this war is psychological.” Thus the constant jeep rides through contested territory night and day. Kinsey recalled that the morning after a local official was beheaded in a remote, contested village, Vann declared, “Those people need to know who their friends are.” Vann loaded Kinsey and two of his compatriots into his jeep and, armed to the teeth, they made their way to the village to pay their respects to the dead leader’s family.61
Despite the depredations of the Viet Cong, ongoing government corruption, and other problems, there was progress in Long An. As chief civilian officer for CORDS in the province, Kinsey had an abundance of resources at his disposal: a Construction Battalion (Seabee) team, a battalion of Army Corps of Engineers, road-building equipment, a contingent of nurses and medics, a civil affairs platoon, and a steady flow of unrestricted funds. By the time he left in 1970, things were happening that had not been seen in years: mail delivered, small electrical grids, Kubota tractors in the rice paddies, and roads open day and night. “That did not happen all over the country,” he said, “but it happened over most of the Mekong Delta, and that’s where 65 percent of the people lived.”62
Virtually all CORDS personnel involved in reconstruction, development, and local self-empowerment wanted American main force units to be kept as far away from their areas of operation as possible. The battalion- and division-level sweeps and free-fire zones were, to say the least, counterproductive of what Colby’s outfit was trying to accomplish. But there was a special evil, “Operation Speedy Express,” that unfolded from December 1968 through May 1969.
Speedy Express was the code name for a massive American search-and-destroy offensive against Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in the Mekong Delta; in charge was Lieutenant General Julian Ewell, commander of the Ninth Infantry Division. Ewell, later dubbed by one journalist “The Butcher of the Delta,” was obsessed with body count, and he was determined that Speedy Express set a record for number of enemy killed; to this end, he applied relentless pressure on his brigade and battalion commanders. Lieutenant Colonel William Taylor recalled a visit from Ewell. “What the fuck are you people doing down here; sitting on your ass? The rest of the brigades are coming up with a fine body count and you people aren’t producing. . . . If you can’t get out there and beat ’em out of the bushes, then I’ll relieve you and get somebody down here who will.”63
Ewell was not above faking numbers, but he much preferred dead bodies. It was his Ninth Division that pioneered nighttime hunter-killer operations. Cobra gunships would fly over “enemy” terrain, spotlighting anything that moved and raining down fire from their miniguns. Vann, who at the time was DEPCORDS for the delta region, began to hear reports of hundreds of dead and wounded civilians. The division claimed 10,899 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers killed but could produce only 788 weapons. Vann forwarded the information to Colby, who asked him to investigate. The practices and procedures the Ninth was using were unprofessional, Vann subsequently reported. The First Air Cavalry did not count an enemy dead until one of its number had “put a foot on ’em.” Eventually, Vann confronted Ewell. How could he account for the disparity between body count and captured weapons? The enemy was crafty, Ewell responded. Frequently, his men got to the Viet Cong only after they had conducted an operation and hidden their weapons. During a trip to Washington, Vann briefed Westmoreland, then army chief of staff, on what Ewell was doing. Vann’s senior advisers in the provinces and districts were up in arms. They were trying to pacify villagers while Ewell was killing them. Westmoreland feigned surprise, Vann recalled. In truth, the person responsible for Julian Ewell was Creighton Abrams. Ewell was one of his top commanders; Abrams had to know about the excesses committed by the Ninth Infantry. In 1972, the army inspector general would estimate that between 5,000 and 7,000 civilians were killed by Speedy Express.64
Colby saw the armed components of CORDS as a police force, not as a military contingent. Ewell and Speedy Express might not have been typical, but they were a byproduct of the military mentality. The CORDS effort, Colby later wrote to a military historian, “was an ad hoc instrument to provide a non-military and primarily political function.” What he envisioned was a police model based on the British constabulary, aiming to protect and serve, not the American model, which was primarily military—“us vs. them, Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral.” The United States had had a brief experience with the constabulary model in the Philippines at the turn of the century, Colby observed, but had apparently forgotten it. The object should be to control and convert enemy guerrillas; killing them should be a last resort. The goal was to engage the population, not impose upon it.65
CORDS men in the field were not merely instruments of Colby’s intellect, however; they were individuals through which he could once again live his Lawrence of Arabia, Baden-Powell, Robert Rogers dream. Kinsey and Hacker—these were Colby’s people. CORDS was his ideal; its concept and practice were his seven pillars of wisdom all in one. It was t
he dream of Vann, Scotton, and Bumgardner, and, before his defection, Ellsberg, too. Colby’s real contribution, as Bruce Kinsey observed, was to make it all work.66 Prior to 1968, the US effort in Vietnam had been a jungle of competing bureaucracies and clashing personalities. Wielding the authority provided by Abrams and Bunker, Colby somehow got everyone working together, something Komer could never do. Instead of acting like rivals, the State Department, USAID, MACV, and even to some extent the CIA began functioning as a team. The notion that America could produce an organization that blended military and civilian authority would previously have been considered impossible. Indeed, it was antithetical to the writings of the Founding Fathers, who were sharply aware that military power had been an impediment to liberty and self-determination as often as it had been its protector. Only Colby, with his peculiar combination of will, ego, and humility rooted in perceived service to a higher cause, could have presided over an operation like CORDS. The idea that it was possible to fight tyranny and preserve a civil, democratic society went to the root of the man’s beliefs. It was a bold and perhaps unrealistic assumption, but it underlay much of America’s Cold War effort in the developing world.
14
BIRDS OF PEACE AND BIRDS OF WAR
While Colby’s CORDS programs were making progress in South Vietnam, new actors appeared on the American political stage; indeed, a new play was about to unfold. The bloodletting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968 had ended with the nomination of Hubert H. Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president. Though he had been “loyal as a beagle,” as LBJ put it, Humphrey had begun to have doubts about the conflict in Vietnam. After the convention rejected an antiwar plank in its platform, however, Humphrey could not avoid association with the increasingly unpopular war. The Republicans, meantime, had nominated Richard M. Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president, a politician with impeccable anticommunist—some said red-baiting—credentials. During the campaign, he announced that he had a “secret plan” for ending the war in Vietnam.
Democratic Party leaders pleaded with the Johnson White House for a dramatic peace initiative to boost Humphrey, who lagged well behind Nixon in the early polls. Over the next few weeks, Harriman, in Paris, carefully negotiated an “understanding” with the North Vietnamese. The United States would halt its bombing unilaterally, but in return Washington would expect cessation of communist rocket and mortar attacks in South Vietnam and a limit on the infiltration of men and supplies. Hanoi agreed, and the two sides declared that meaningful peace talks would begin four days after the bombing halted.
The problem was that President Thieu refused to go along. Ky and other South Vietnamese hardliners, including virtually the entire Catholic community, warned him against an American sellout. Henry Kissinger—a Harvard government professor who had served in the Johnson administration as an unofficial envoy, but now smelled a Republican victory—informed Nixon that Johnson was planning an election-eve end to the bombing. Using Anna Chennault, the widow of Lieutenant General Claire Chennault and a prominent member of the conservative China Lobby, as an intermediary, the Nixon camp urged Thieu to hold out; he was certain to get better treatment from a Republican administration, Madame Chennault assured him. Thereupon, Thieu informed the Americans that Hanoi would have to agree to negotiate directly with the government of Vietnam; he proclaimed that his administration was not “a car that can be hitched to a locomotive.” He knew that North Vietnam would never extend to the south the de facto recognition such negotiations would entail.
Thieu’s opposition notwithstanding, Johnson announced a bombing halt on November 1, four days before the general election in the United States. Polls showed Humphrey and Nixon in a dead heat. But without South Vietnamese participation, the US delegation to the Paris Peace Talks felt that it could not proceed with negotiations. Nixon won by a hair, and two weeks later, Thieu agreed to send representatives to Paris. By that time, however, the Johnson administration had run out of time.
Prior to taking office in January 1969, Nixon, along with Kissinger, who would become Nixon’s national security adviser, vigorously defended the American commitment in Vietnam. Indeed, during the campaign, the Republican candidate had criticized the Johnson administration for not putting more military pressure on North Vietnam. The presence of American troops in Southeast Asia, he declared, was necessary to contain Communist China. Kissinger admitted privately that the strategic assumptions that had led to escalation might have been flawed, but he believed that America’s prestige was now on the line, and it must persevere. In truth, Vietnam was but a pawn in the larger game that the two men had in mind. They envisioned a US-led new world order that would be based on great-power negotiation and accommodation of strategic and economic interests. At the heart of this plan were openings to Communist China and the Soviet Union. For these things to occur, there would have to be peace in Vietnam. But it would have to be “peace with honor,” as Nixon put it, that is, there would have to be no hint of defeat.
The president and his national security adviser decided to gamble. They would intensify the bombing campaign against North Vietnam and communist positions in the south, and authorize a joint MACV-ARVN incursion to wipe out the communist sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos. At the same time, to undercut the antiwar movement at home, the administration would order a gradual US stand-down in South Vietnam. Perhaps North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front would feel pressured enough to negotiate with the Thieu regime, and the United States could quietly repair to the sidelines. “We were clearly on our way out of Vietnam by negotiation if possible, by unilateral withdrawal if necessary,” Kissinger declared in his memoirs.1
The White House was playing a dangerous game, however. What if none of the parties involved—Hanoi, the NLF, Saigon—cooperated? The CIA warned the White House that the ARVN could not hold out against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army without US help. Even after plans for modernization of the South Vietnamese military were completed in 1972, government forces were “simply . . . not capable of attaining the level of self-sufficiency and overwhelming force superiority that would be required to counter combined Viet Cong insurgency and North Vietnamese Army main force offensives,” said Abrams.2
In March 1969, Nixon dispatched Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to Saigon to notify Abrams that a gradual drawdown of American combat forces was at hand. MACV, backed by the CIA, expressed strong reservations. Laird subsequently reported that in his opinion, the US military mission was being too pessimistic. Once freed from the stifling presence of the huge American expeditionary force, the ARVN would be able to hold its own against all comers. The secretary of defense, a former power in the House of Representatives and still a force in the Republican Party, would become a relentless advocate for military withdrawal.
The following month, Vice President Ky came to Washington to prowl the corridors of power. During one meeting, Laird made it clear that the role of the United States henceforward would be to enable the South Vietnamese to choose their own form of government, whatever that might be. How did the South Vietnamese government like the term “Vietnamization”? Just fine, Ky replied gloomily. On June 8, Presidents Nixon and Thieu met at Midway Island, where Nixon announced that 25,000 US combat troops (out of a total of 542,000) would be out of Vietnam by August. On November 3, in a major address to the American people, he outlined his plan for turning the war over to the South Vietnamese. After seeming to appease opponents of the conflict, he lashed out at them in the same speech. Antiwar protesters were irrational and irresponsible. He openly appealed for the support of “the great silent majority” and then concluded with a melodramatic warning: “North Vietnam cannot humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”3 Lest the communists think that he was throwing in the towel, Nixon ordered the air force and the navy to conduct top-secret saturation bombing raids against communist sanctuaries in Cambodia.
Meanwhile, in Hanoi, representatives of the NLF and other front or
ganizations announced the formation of a Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) for South Vietnam. This would be the capstone for the village and hamlet liberation committees and give form and structure to the communists’ subsequent claims to be the legitimate government of South Vietnam. At the same time, the Central Committee of the Lao Dong, the Communist Party of Vietnam, instructed communist operatives in the south to focus once again on political organization and small-scale guerrilla warfare. In effect, Colby, Abrams, and Bunker had been put on notice by Washington and indirectly by Hanoi. The other war had become the only war, and they had a very limited amount of time to win it.4
Colby and Abrams decided that the quickest and most effective way to secure victory was to break the back of the Viet Cong. “That infrastructure is just vital,” Abrams proclaimed to his staff, “absolutely critical to the success of either the VC military or . . . political [effort].You wipe that part out and goddamn it, if he’s got 50 divisions it’s not going to do him any good.” Colby could not have agreed more. The CORDS chief now believed that Phoenix, the war against the Viet Cong Infrastructure, must receive top priority. “You’d have a village election, and the VC would come in and chop off the village chief’s head in front of his family and the villagers and then shoot his family. You are not going to have much community development in that environment.” Colby continued to insist that the communist cadres were imposing their will on the rural population rather than winning their support through appeals to nationalist sentiment and promises of social and economic justice. The enemy had “a wonderful cadre machine, absolutely magnificent cadre machine,” Colby observed at a MACV commanders’ meeting, “but it hasn’t turned into mass political support.” The CORDS chief was probably correct, but his observation was largely irrelevant. Vietnamization was in full swing, but for the villager it was all about not burning bridges with the winning side. One did not have to show political support for the communists, merely to stay out of the way, turning a blind eye when they beheaded the district chief.5
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