Cold War Hot: Alternate Decisions of the Cold War

by Tsouras, Peter

  Lodge’s revised political settlement within South Vietnam, reinforced by worldwide diplomatic support, served to establish the essential pre-conditions for pacification. This was the main interest of Sir Robert Thompson, who now got down to picking key provincial leaders, ARVN military staff and US advisers to begin setting up “expanding oil stains”8 of government control in the countryside. He rejected Diem’s concept of setting up thousands of new strategic hamlets all over the country all at once, just as he also rejected the idea of starting off with the worst trouble-spots, such as Long An and Dinh Tuong provinces in the Mekong Delta. Instead, he decided to set up his first safe areas in provinces where the government already exercised a greater, albeit still disputed, control. He selected five initial target provinces—two in the Delta, two on the coast of central South Vietnam, and one in the north around Da Nang. His long term plan was to expand from there in a gradual and measured way until he could eventually nibble effectively into the truly intransigent hard core VC centers.

  With new professional American manpower and massive funds for civilian aid now assured for the immediate future, it was possible to give a great boost to the South Vietnamese police and civilian aid agencies. The plight of the many refugees and political prisoners created by Diem was noticeably ameliorated, and it was observed that the lightened national mood of optimism that had followed the fall of Diem seemed to be holding up well into the new year. The early political gains were not rapidly dashed, as many had feared, and so the road was opened for the Thompson–McNamara plan to be put into effect in the full spirit that it had demanded. It was not shelved or side-lined into one of the many bureaucratic backwaters that had previously plagued this particular theater of operations.

  Da Nang, South Vietnam: March 1965

  The coastal town of Da Nang was regarded with special affection by the 9th US Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which had made an exceptionally fine job of pacifying all the neighboring hamlets in the course of the previous 12 months. There had been no noisy beach landing as at Iwo Jima; no vast invasion of armored vehicles and heavy guns; but simply the quiet infiltration of a battalion-sized base from which almost microscopically small units were sent out into each hamlet, supported by a major effort of police, intelligence and civic reconstruction teams, not to mention a great deal of logistic resources to ensure health, prosperity and education. Because expertise rather than merely manpower was being concentrated upon a relatively small number of target communities, a high rate of success was assured. The false accounting by which a hamlet was routinely reported as “fully under government control,” quite regardless of its true status, became a shameful thing of the past—as did the wanton creation of refugees. Whenever isolated outlying settlements were closed down and their inhabitants brought into the larger hamlet, there would always be excellent housing and other facilities ready for them. Among those facilities the best of all, from the peasants’ point of view, were large free grants of land. The proportion of land on which rent had to be paid fell from 86 percent to 22 percent, and of that only 4 percent was owned by landowners who lived outside a ten-mile radius of the land itself.

  As far as security was concerned, each village was fortified, and the villagers were organized and armed to provide their own night garrisons, under Marine direction. If the worst came to the worst an emergency reaction and counter-attack platoon might be sent out from the central Marine base, but essentially the posture was defensive and local. The real offensive against the VC lay in the creation of contented and loyal communities in which intelligent police work could accurately pinpoint the worst enemy activists, but in which the ordinary peasant’s natural ambivalence was well understood and accommodated. There was no provocative talk along the lines that “those who are not with us are against us.” There was no vainglorious rhetoric about “search and destroy” missions; no futile sweeps through the countryside on the off chance of encountering an occasional guerrilla; no wasteful speculative barrages against unidentified targets, and no air strikes against small groups of personnel who might possibly be hostile.

  It was recognized that the more powerful the ordnance used, the greater was the risk of mistakes and “collateral damage.” The tired old PR line that collateral damage was “unfortunate but sometimes unavoidable” was now perceived as the shocking affront to humanity that it had always been. Instead, any unintentional damage to civilians or their property was seen as a major setback to the central task of winning the hearts and minds of the peasantry. It was taken very seriously and generous compensation, reconstruction or other appropriate after care was guaranteed. Those responsible for mistakes were arraigned and punished while—perhaps most important of all—a full and honest report of the incident was issued to the press. The culture of security forces lying in the interests of short term cover-ups was rejected in favor of a long term determination to tell the unvarnished truth. If any other policy had been followed, it was predicted that the support and belief of the American public would not have survived beyond, say, the presidential elections of 1968.

  Up to the spring of 1965 Lyndon Johnson had experienced little public criticism over his Vietnam policy. It was recognized that he had acted decisively in January 1964, after which there had been no great moments of crisis, few memorable headlines, and no dissent outside a number of universities on the left of the debate, and presidential candidate Senator Barry Goldwater on the right. Goldwater was easily discredited as too hawkish, so that LBJ was duly confirmed in the presidency in November 1964, and empowered to devote himself to his program of domestic reforms.

  Vietnam had been relegated to the status of a relatively minor and containable sideshow, little more perceptible to the general public than the many other small covert wars currently being fought and won by US advisers in Latin America. Nor was the public troubled by any sudden or massive increases in troop deployments, or expansions of the draft. Almost all the personnel sent to Vietnam were volunteers and professionals, supported by an expanded obligation on reservists, National Guardsmen and civilian specialists. As a result, no particular fear of death in a paddyfield was felt by non-volunteering civilians of draftable age, regardless of whether they were college students who could obtain deferment or ghetto blacks who could not. If a young man was drafted, he would join the active army in exotic but peaceful foreign places such as Korea or West Germany, or more likely in less exotic home garrisons somewhere to the south of the Mason–Dixon Line. In sum, the social pressures within USA were not particularly exacerbated by any mass requirement for manpower in Indochina, and the popular music industry had to seek its inspirations elsewhere.9

  The government nevertheless had to wrestle with the major difficulty that the war would be a very long one. It had to be repeated to the public, over and over again, that victory was not yet in sight and that a long hard struggle, with an ever-mounting toll of casualties, was unavoidable before it would be. For example the pacification of the Da Nang area was completed to an acceptable standard only 12 months after it had begun, and only after that was it possible to expand the “oil stain” into neighboring sectors of Quang Nam province. At that rate it was estimated that the whole process, country-wide, might take something like 12 years, or three presidential terms—presumably two of LBJ following through his chosen policy of January 1964, and then a third of someone unknown, and of an unknown party. It was the uncertainty of that third presidential term that most bothered the planners, but there was nothing much they could do about it in 1965. They simply had to keep faith that the only key to success in Vietnam lay in consistently applying the correct principles of counter-insurgency, and not in any brash short term fix.

  The other major difficulty that had to be confronted was the possibility of escalating North Vietnamese intervention. In 1964 this was not running at a high level, and a welcome breathing space was granted during the “campaigning season” of the northeast monsoon from November 1964 to March 1965. This was a great help not only for t
he start of the pacification program, but also for the ARVN build-up of conventional forces on the frontiers. Then during the southwest monsoon from May to October 1965 the climate made troop movements difficult, although there were reports of NVA activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia, and in the central highlands. At this juncture the question for the North Vietnamese government was whether or not it should significantly reinforce that area for the next campaigning season.

  On one side of the argument was a group of impatient commanders who argued for an immediate assault with regular troops against the ARVN, which was still perceived as inefficient and vulnerable. They believed they could cut South Vietnam in half by a bold thrust from the Ia Drang valley in Pleiku province to the coast in Binh Dinh province. Against this view General Vo Nguyen Giap, the triumphant victor at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, pointed out the uncertain hazards of a premature escalation into a more conventional phase of warfare. He argued that in the absence of a massive US deployment, the village war in the South was still being won very handsomely by guerrilla methods alone. Indeed, the commitment of NVA regulars on a large scale might well provoke a US response in kind, which would make the whole task very much more difficult. For him it was better to exploit what he saw as America’s weak response in a quiet rather than a noisy manner.

  At the end of much debate the veteran Giap had his way, and there was only a two-battalion attack in the Ia Drang that October, against the Montagnard special forces camp at Plei Me. It defended itself very well and the ARVN was able to relieve it with an armored column from Pleiku. The robustness of the ARVN response was itself something of a surprise to the northern troops, although it was immediately negated by a very successful VC ambush on November 11 against an ARVN infantry regiment at Ap Bau Bang on Highway 13 north of Saigon. The Hanoi planners could still draw the conclusion that the ARVN was weak and the VC strong, but they had not yet noticed the long term shift in the balance that was slowly taking place on the ground.

  The Iron Triangle, January 1967

  By the time the Thompson–McNamara plan had been running for three full years the situation had already changed quite significantly. The village war was progressing more or less according to plan, despite some notable setbacks. Equally the “Vietnamization” of the mainforce war was going forward very well, with an emphasis on armor, artillery and basic fighter ground-attack aircraft. Everyone was delighted with the new M16 rifle, which gave the soldier an equivalent weapon to the communist AK-47, and removed the South Vietnamese suspicion that they were being offered only a second rate inventory. By contrast the helicopter was confined to only an auxiliary role, since it was recognized as too vulnerable, and its armament too light, for serious combat. If it were used to deposit infantry in the jungle, moreover, that infantry would be deprived of its heavy weapons and would be all but immobile on foot. It would have no tactical advantage over the enemy, and would in all probability have to retreat out of any firefight to find a secure landing zone for resupply and casualty evacuation. Instead of becoming the main instrument of warfare, therefore, the helicopter was used selectively for armed reconnaissance, resupply and a variety of liaison and medical tasks. Despite the futuristic claims of its highly-funded lobbying groups, it could not truly replace the tank and the APC as the best means of providing battlefield firepower and mobility.10

  The first real test of the new ARVN mainforce capability came during the campaigning season of 1966–67, when the North Vietnamese finally decided to release a major regular army attack across the frontier. Obviously they had at last come to realize just how far the underlying balance of power in the South was shifting against them, and so they decided to build up a major force in the “Iron Triangle” area just south of Ben Suc and Ben Cat villages, some 25 miles north of central Saigon, to launch what they hoped would be a mortal blow to the capital. Good intelligence alerted the ARVN forces to the threat, and a series of fierce battles began on January 8, 1967, which would come to be known as the Sin Loi campaign. It continued through March, and at the end of it all neither side could credibly claim to have won the victory.11 Admittedly the ARVN troops were not fighting as effectively as the Americans might have done in their place, but on the other hand they did not take the risks of all-out offensive combat against deeply-entrenched fortified zones. They had some dismal failures, but then again they also had some solid successes. This campaign represented the real start of the mainforce war, and by and large the South Vietnamese troops did not disgrace themselves in the way some cynics had been predicting.

  One major intelligence coup was the unexpected discovery by the British SAS that the communists in the Iron Triangle traced their line of communication not northwards up the long overland Ho Chi Minh Trail to Hanoi, but westwards to the Cambodian coast at Sihanoukville, where Soviet bloc and Chinese shipping was able to send supplies up a much shorter route into the heart of South Vietnam.12 A major operation, codenamed Toan Thang, was planned against this “Sihanouk Trail” in May. It involved a clear infringement of Cambodia’s neutrality, but President Johnson prepared the way by showing the world detailed photographs of just how the North Vietnamese had already abused Cambodian hospitality by their own military presence. Because there had been no clandestine bombing or other operations in Cambodia, and no widespread protest movement against the Vietnam war itself, this frank diplomatic initiative was internationally accepted in the same spirit as Kennedy’s had been when he displayed photographs of Soviet missile bases in Cuba. The ARVN Toan Thang operation itself was certainly very successful, and large stocks of food and ammunition were uncovered in the jungle not far from the border north of Saigon. The port of Sihanoukville was mined to prevent the importation of more, but without harming the Cambodian population.

  Meanwhile, in the village war, the felicitous mix of military and civilian professionals, both South Vietnamese and allied, was bearing sturdy fruit. In Phuoc Tuy province, for example, the Australians had brought in teachers and nurses to supplement the section-level military teams in every hamlet which, together with the vital land reform programs, seemed to have the effect of negating the attraction of the VC to many of its potential recruits.

  To be sure there was still a continuing toll of friendly casualties caused by sniping, mining and the occasional full-blown company assault. On one occasion in August 1966 the whole hamlet of Xa Long Tan was overrun, with 22 dead among the security forces and civilian aid workers. That defeat caused some powerful negative headlines worldwide, but at the end of it all the general opinion was that if serious counter-insurgency at hamlet level had not been undertaken, the scale of the battles and casualties might well have been at least ten times greater. The grim total of non-Vietnamese freeworld personnel killed between January 1964 and January 1968 added up to the horrific figure of 2,896, including six journalists and 148 medical personnel. However that added up to an average of only 724 per year or 2 per day, which was well below the level experienced in any other major war the world had known, and considerably lower than the 18,000 dead in four years (making 4,500 per year, or 12 per day) that some experts estimated as the minimum toll to be expected if the Americans had escalated the mainforce war, and if less well-controlled circumstances had obtained in the village war.

  As the number of pacified villages grew, so the demands on Western manpower also grew. New tasks were constantly being found for them, ranging from an accelerated program of training for the ARVN, to the creation of a new deep water port at Cam Ranh Bay, as well as a number of jet-capable airstrips. Logistics personnel were needed to handle the massive quantities of supplies that came rolling in, especially building materials, agricultural machinery, motor vehicles, medicines and consumer goods of all sorts for the new hamlets. The overall contingent of non-Vietnamese personnel in-country gradually increased from 80,000 to more than 120,000, although the high rate of volunteering for second and third tours meant that by the end of 1968 the grand total of those who had served in Vietnam was s
till as low as 250,000. As one tenth of one percent of the overall US population, this was such a small proportion of the whole that their experiences scarcely scarred a generation.

  The US Embassy, Saigon: January 31, 1968

  When Ambassador Lodge looked out of his office window, he was troubled by reports of a new NVA offensive at Khe Sanh and the A Shau valley, north of Hue, as well as in Pleiku and Darlac provinces in the central highlands. The ARVN was suffering heavy losses, and the enemy had even sprung a tactical surprise at Lang Vei by using a few light tanks.13 The whole country was on edge with a fear of the unknown. Nevertheless the ambassador had been reassured that there were adequate ARVN reinforcements at hand, behind which as many as 400 USAF combat aircraft were already on their way across the Pacific from California to meet the crisis. The battle line would hold and the village war would continue to be won. “Land to the tiller” had turned out to be a wonderful trump card which had massively eroded support for the VC, even if there were still mutterings of bitterness among the fat cat landlords who had been dispossessed—and richly compensated. He sighed and turned away from his window—but as he did so he noticed movement out of the corner of his eye, so he turned back quickly to look again.

  Two men dressed in black were scrambling over the garden wall of the embassy, and a police siren could be heard from the street outside. There was a crackle of gunfire. The ambassador rushed to alert the Marine guard, fearing that a VC commando unit was mounting an attack. There was a moment of confusion, but it rapidly passed. Apparently two street urchins on a motorbike had snatched a watch from a tourist, but had quickly been pursued by a police patrol car. They had selected the embassy wall as their line of flight by pure chance, and had been lucky to escape unscathed as a policeman emptied his revolver at their disappearing profiles. The embassy Marines immediately arrested them and handed them straight back to the frustrated patrolman on the sidewalk outside, and in future a much enhanced security watch was put in place in the building.