by James Webb
The situation inside Vietnam was the most complicated. First, for a variety of reasons the French reversed their withdrawal from their long-term colony after World War II, making it easier for insurgents to rally the strongly nationalistic Vietnamese to their side. Second, the charismatic, Soviet-trained Ho Chi Minh had quickly consolidated his anti-French power base just after the war by assassinating the leadership of competing political groups that were anti-French but also anticommunist. Third, once the Korean War armistice was signed in 1953, the Chinese shifted large amounts of sophisticated weaponry to Ho Chi Minh’s army. The Viet Minh’s sudden acquisition of larger-caliber weapons and field artillery such as the 105-millimeter howitzer abruptly changed the nature of the war and contributed heavily to the French humiliation at Dien Bien Phu. And fourth, further war became inevitable when United States–led backers of the incipient South Vietnamese democracy called off a 1956 election that had been agreed upon after Vietnam was divided in 1954.
In 1958 the communists unleashed a terrorist campaign in the South, followed later by both guerrilla and conventional warfare. Within two years, Northern-trained terrorists were assassinating an average of eleven government officials every day. President John Kennedy referred to this campaign in 1961 when he decided to increase the number of American soldiers operating inside South Vietnam. “We have talked about and read stories of 7,000 to 15,000 guerrillas operating in Viet Nam, killing 2,000 civil officers a year and 2,000 police officers a year, 4,000 total,” said Kennedy. “How we fight that kind of problem, which is going to be with us all through this decade, seems to me to be one of the great problems now before the United States.”4
The United States entered the war reluctantly, halfheartedly, and with a confused and ineffective strategy. But its leadership felt morally and politically compelled to do so, and even such major newspapers as the Washington Post initially supported the effort. The U.S. recognized South Vietnam as a separate political entity from North Vietnam, just as it saw West Germany as being separate from communist-controlled East Germany, and just as it continues to distinguish South Korea from communist-controlled North Korea. And South Vietnam was being invaded by the North just as certainly (although with more sophistication) as North Korea had invaded South Korea.
There has been little historical recognition of how brutal the war was for those who fought it on the ground. Dropped onto the enemy’s terrain twelve thousand miles away from home, America’s citizen-soldiers performed with a tenacity and quality that may never be truly understood. Those who believe the war was fought incompetently on a tactical level should consider that the Vietnamese communists admit to losing 1.4 million soldiers, compared to South Vietnamese losses of 245,000 and American losses of 58,000. And those who believe that it was a “dirty little war” where bombs did all the work might contemplate that it was the most costly war the U.S. Marine Corps has ever fought. Five times as many Marines died in Vietnam as in World War I, three times as many as in Korea, and there were more total casualties (killed and wounded) for the Marines in Vietnam than in all of World War II.
That the war was pursued with honorable intentions does not mean that those who conceived and implemented our strategy deserve any prizes. My own father, who had defined for me the notion of loyalty, became disgusted with Defense Secretary McNamara’s so-called “whiz kids” after being assigned to the Pentagon in 1965.
When I was commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1968, he was working on a highly classified program he could not discuss openly, but which I later learned was a satellite linkup from Vietnam to Washington, giving civilian leaders full daily oversight of the war. Watching firsthand the Johnson administration’s dissembling to the Congress and disrespect of military leaders, he urged me more than once to go into the navy, find myself a nice ship where I could, as he so often put it, “sit in the wardroom and eat ice cream,” and not risk myself as a Marine on an ever-deteriorating battlefield. Once I did receive my orders for combat, my father put in his papers to retire from the air force, telling me he “couldn’t bear to watch it” while still wearing a military uniform. Sitting at the kitchen table in his government-issue quarters at Andrews Air Force Base, fighting back the temptation to break the law and share classified information with me, he was ferociously intense, this man who had found his life’s calling by flying bombers and cargo planes and perfecting the art of shooting intercontinental ballistic missiles. And he was telling me, as a father and a military professional, that this strategically botched war was not worth my life.
Finally he found the words that communicated his unease without violating his oath of office. “Do you realize Lyndon Johnson is going to know you’re wounded before your division commander does? And do you know what that says about the ability of the American military to fight a long-term war?”
He was wrong. Lyndon Johnson never knew I was wounded, because by then Richard Nixon was running the show.
My professional career in writing and government is entirely accidental. At the age of twenty-two my dream was to become a general officer in the Marine Corps. Had I not been wounded, I would never have gone to law school. And had I not gone to law school, I would never have fully comprehended the disdain that many of the advantaged in my generation felt for those who had fought in Vietnam, or the ingrained condescension of the nation’s elites toward my culture. And had I never been exposed to this unthinking arrogance, I would not have begun the journey of discovery that, over three decades, finally led to this book. And so, in an odd way, it can be said that I owe all of this to Ho Chi Minh, and to Richard Nixon’s post-Tet campaign offensive of 1969.
I was fully prepared for what awaited me in Vietnam. At the Naval Academy, I became one of six finalists for the position of brigade commander despite having less than stellar grades, and was one of 18 in my class of 841 to receive a special commendation for leadership upon graduation. At the grueling Marine Corps Officers’ Basic School in Quantico, I had graduated first in my class of 243, scoring 99.3 in leadership and also winning the Military Skills Award for the highest average in the areas of physical fitness, marksmanship, land navigation, and military instruction. Few things in life have come as naturally to me as combat, however difficult those days proved to be. And conversely, few things have surprised me so completely as the other world I entered a few years later when I arrived at the Georgetown University Law Center.
1969 was an odd year to be in Vietnam. Second only to 1968 in terms of American casualties, it was the year made famous by Hamburger Hill as well as the gut-wrenching Life magazine cover story showing the pictures of 242 Americans who had been killed in one average week of fighting. Back home it was the year of Woodstock and of numerous antiwar rallies that culminated in the Moratorium march on Washington. The My Lai massacre hit the papers and was seized upon by the antiwar movement as the emblematic moment of the war. Lyndon Johnson left Washington in utter humiliation. Richard Nixon entered the scene, destined for an even worse fate.5
I spent my tour in the An Hoa basin southwest of Da Nang, where the 5th Marine Regiment was in its third year of continuous combat operations. As a rifle platoon and company commander, I served under a succession of three regimental commanders who had cut their teeth in World War II, and four different battalion commanders, three of whom had seen combat in Korea. The company commanders were typically captains on their second combat tour in Vietnam or young first lieutenants like myself, who were given companies after many months of “bush time” as platoon commanders in the basin’s tough and unforgiving environs.
The basin was one of the most heavily contested areas in Vietnam, its torn, cratered earth offering every sort of wartime possibility. In the canopied mountains just to the west, not far from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the North Vietnamese Army operated an infantry division from an area called Base Area 112. In the valleys of the basin, main-force Viet Cong battalions whose ranks were 80 percent North Vietnamese Army regulars moved against the Americans every day. L
ocal Viet Cong units sniped and harassed. Ridgelines and paddy dikes were laced with sophisticated booby traps of every size, from hand grenades to 250-pound bombs. The villages, where many battles took place, sat in the rice paddies and tree lines like individual fortresses, crisscrossed with trenches and spider holes, their homes sporting bunkers capable of surviving direct hits from large-caliber artillery shells. The Viet Cong infrastructure was intricate and permeating. Except for the old and the very young, villagers who did not side with the communists had either been killed or driven out to the government-controlled enclaves near Da Nang.
In the rifle companies we spent endless months patrolling ridgelines and villages and mountains, far away from any notion of tents, barbed wire, hot food, or electricity. Luxuries were limited to what would fit inside one’s pack, which after a few “humps” usually boiled down to letter-writing material, towel, soap, toothbrush, poncho liner, and a small transistor radio. We moved through the boiling heat with sixty pounds of weapons and gear, causing a typical Marine to drop 20 percent of his body weight while in the bush. When we stopped, we dug chest-deep fighting holes and slit trenches for toilets. We slept on the ground under makeshift poncho hootches, and when it rained we usually took our hootches down because wet ponchos shined under illumination flares, making great targets. Sleep itself was fitful, never more than an hour or two at a stretch for months at a time as we mixed daytime patrolling with nighttime ambushes, listening posts, foxhole duty, and radio watches. Ringworm, hookworm, malaria, and dysentery were common as was trench foot when the monsoons came. Respite was rotating back to the mud-filled regimental combat base at An Hoa for four or five days, where rocket and mortar attacks were frequent and our troops manned defensive bunkers at night.
We had been told while in training that Marine officers in the rifle companies had an 85 percent probability of being killed or wounded, and the experience of “Dying Delta,” as our company was known, bore that out. Of the officers in the bush when I arrived, our company commander was wounded, the weapons platoon commander was wounded, the first platoon commander was killed, the second platoon commander was wounded twice, and I, commanding the third platoon, was wounded twice. The enlisted troops in the rifle platoons fared no better. Two of my original three squad leaders were killed, the third shot in the stomach. My platoon sergeant was severely wounded, as was my platoon guide. By the time I left my platoon I had gone through six radio operators, five of them casualties.
These figures were hardly unique; in fact, they were typical. Many other units—for instance, those that fought the hill battles around Khe Sanh, or those with the famed Walking Dead of the 9th Marine Regiment, or that were in the battle for Hue City or at Dai Do—had it far worse.
When I remember those days and the very young men who spent them with me, I am continually amazed, for these were mostly recent civilians barely out of high school, called up from the cities and the farms to do their year in Hell and then return. Visions haunt me every day, not of the nightmares of war but of the steady consistency with which my Marines faced their responsibilities, and of how uncomplaining most of them were in the face of constant danger. The salty, battle-hardened twenty-year-olds teaching green nineteen-year-olds the intricate lessons of that hostile battlefield. The unerring skill of the young squad leaders as we moved through unfamiliar villages and weed-choked trails in the black of night. The quick certainty with which they moved when coming under enemy fire. Their sudden tenderness when a fellow Marine was wounded and needed help. Their willingness to risk their lives to save other Marines in peril.
In July 1969, I was hit by two grenades while clearing a series of bunkers along a streambed in a place of frequent combat called the Arizona Valley. The first grenade peppered me lightly on the face and shoulders. The second detonated behind me just after I shot the man who threw it and a second soldier who was pointing an AK-47 at me from inside the same bunker. I was hit in the head, back, arm, and leg, and the grenade’s concussion lifted me into the air and threw me down a hill into the stream. I still carry shrapnel at the base of my skull and in one kidney from the blast. But the square, quarter-sized piece that scored the inside of my left knee joint and lodged against the bone of my lower leg would eventually change the direction of my life.
I did not pay much attention to my wounds. I had seen dead Marines, multiple-limb amputees, high-arm amputees, severed spinal cords, bladders ripped open by shrapnel, sucking chest wounds, even one Marine who had been shot between the eyes and out the jaw only to come back to our company after three months in a Japanese hospital. Like so many others during this woefully misunderstood war, I rejoined my unit as soon as possible. I belonged in the bush. Returning to my company before the leg wound had completely healed, it soon became infected. I ignored the infection and the joint itself eventually became septic, complicated by a small, razor-sharp piece of shrapnel that migrated into the joint’s open spaces and chewed on the cartilage whenever I walked or ran. I would not learn the full extent of this damage until I completed my tour and returned to the United States.
There followed two years of surgeries and physical therapy as I tried to rehabilitate my leg and remain in the Marine Corps. In 1971, I was put on limited duty and assigned to a desk job on the secretary of the navy’s staff. Following a surgery in early 1972, the joint unexpectedly swelled and drained heavily through the stitches, an indication of continuing infection in the bone, and I was finally referred to a medical board. The operating surgeon wrote that, because of the infection, the articular cartilage “was so markedly destroyed that one could easily indent it with a hemostat” and commented that “It is remarkable to note the amount of weight he has succeeded in lifting when one considers the condition of his knee pathologically, indicative of the motivational factors that have sustained him as a Marine officer.” He then concluded that “This man is highly motivated and wishes to excel in what areas he can perform in the Marine Corps; however he has diligently exercised for three years with no improvement; indeed, with worsening.”
I had recently become one of 16 first lieutenants out of a group of more than 2,700 to be promoted a year early to captain. I loved commanding infantry troops. I had never given any thought as to what I might do if I became a civilian. And now I was one.
2
The Invisible People
THE MARINE CORPS, which took 103,000 killed or wounded out of some 400,000 sent to Vietnam, represented one extreme of that volatile era. The better academic institutions such as the Georgetown Law Center, which I entered in August 1972, represented the other. Moreover, the divide between these two extremes was nearly total. In the Marine Corps, virtually everyone I knew had pulled at least one tour in Vietnam. While at Georgetown Law, among a student body of eighteen hundred people who were largely the same age, I can recall meeting only three other students who were combat veterans. There may have been others. If so, they were not anxious to share their experiences in the law school’s bitterly antiwar environment.
It is often said that Vietnam was a draftee’s war, fought by the poor and the minorities. More accurately, it was a war fought mainly by volunteers, including two-thirds of those who served and 73 percent of those who died, who came heavily from traditionalist cultures such as the Scots-Irish. Minorities were well represented, but not overly so. African-Americans made up 13.1 percent of the age group, 12.6 percent of the military, and 12.2 percent of the casualties. And most glaringly, the generation’s academic elites largely sat out the war. Harvard had lost 691 alumni during World War II,6 but in Vietnam, Harvard College lost twelve men from the 12,595 who made up the classes of 1962 through 1972 combined. Princeton’s 8,108 male undergraduates during this same period lost six. MIT’s 8,998 lost two.7
The differences between these two extremes went much further than the war. In the eight years since that 1964 summer, when the Civil Rights Act had first been signed and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution signaled the beginning of a major escalation in Vietnam, t
he nation had been sundered by war, urban violence, massive protests, and political assassinations. Along the way the baby boomer generation suffered a schizophrenic divide that has yet to fully mend. And forget all the talk of the “generation gap”; this rupture was largely along cultural and class lines, with racial issues sometimes blurring class distinctions. On one side were self-described political radicals, peaceniks, Black Power activists, flower children, and others who believed the American system was irretrievably broken. On the other were the traditionalists who were fighting the war, working in the coal mines and the factories, studying in less eminent colleges and universities, and worrying that the American system as they knew it was being destroyed by the forces of dissent.
Eight years of turmoil had created an irreversible inertia in both camps. This bifurcation of viewpoints had accelerated since the pivotal nightmare of 1968, which had seen the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, and the street riots during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The national uproar following the shooting deaths of four students during antiwar protests at Kent State in 1970 accelerated it even further. To the antiwar movement and even in popular culture, the Kent State tragedy represented the actions of a government gone gruesome and mad. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young warned darkly in a huge hit song of “tin soldiers and Nixon coming,” and opined that “we gotta get back to where soldiers aren’t gunning us down,” as if antiwar protesters were somehow being hunted on a daily basis by the army. Among those who had served in combat, the incident was tragic but hardly emblematic, and the media attention given to it seemed disproportionate if not absurd. The ill-trained National Guardsmen, hounded and physically assaulted by protesting crowds for days, had fired above the heads of those who were pursuing them, their bullets accidentally killing innocent bystanders. And how many U.S. soldiers were killed in Vietnam that week? No one in the media seemed to know or care. The bitterness over this disparity in media treatment ran deep. Long after the war ended, many Vietnam veterans kept bumper stickers on their cars that read “Vietnam / Kent State. 58,000 to 4.”