A few days from now these soldiers will probably be as aghast as anyone at what they’ve done, and the so-called mementos will be quietly thrown away or buried, but for now it’s a sort of revenge for lost buddies in a war in which dead enemy are found but no one knows exactly who killed them. It’s an emotional outlet.
There were no officers or noncommissioned officers present when this took place. They probably would have stopped this, and, if one must rationalize, we have no indication of what happens to the bodies of American dead which fall into Viet Cong hands.
Don Webster, CBS News, with units of the First Division near Lai Khe, South Vietnam.
Short of not running the piece at all, Webster seemed to do everything possible to place the barbarous act in a sympathetic, or at least understandable, context. But his words were lost in this case, overwhelmed by the visual presentation of disembodied ears. Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson heard immediately from congressmen and senators, and he passed his concern along to Westmoreland, who passed it along to his aides, who went looking for answers in Lai Khe. The word came back that the ear-cutting incident did happen, though at first soldiers blamed it on the cameraman, saying that he encouraged them to cut off another ear after noticing an earless head. Westmoreland told Johnson he would supply a complete report as soon as the First division investigation was completed.
“I regret very much this incident,” Westmoreland said in a cable to Johnson. “It is, of course, absolutely contrary to all policy and cannot be defended…. A reminder relative to policy on this matter is being issued to the entire command.”
In addition to the wounded son of a fellow general and ears being knifed off near Lai Khe, Westmoreland was also preoccupied with two impending visits. Retired Lieutenant General James M. Gavin, his former boss at the Eighty-second Airborne Division, had accepted an invitation to take a firsthand look at the war zone, and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey was also coming at the end of the month to represent the Johnson administration at the inauguration ceremonies for South Vietnamese president Thieu. Humphrey could be counted on to show the flag. From Westmoreland’s perspective, Gavin’s visit was by far the more ticklish of the two. This was not just another obliging old general desperate to relive his glory days by reviewing the troops one more time. Gavin was a mature star in the American military constellation, the heroic “Jumping General” of World War II who had led his airborne troops into battle at Sicily and Normandy and across the Elbe. Rather than fade away in retirement, he had served as ambassador to France under President Kennedy and had become an increasingly outspoken and independent voice on matters of foreign policy and military strategy. Once long ago, a year after the end of the Second World War, Gavin had taken Westmoreland under his wing, recruiting him to run his 504th Parachute Regiment at Fort Bragg. Now the two men were at odds over Vietnam.
In his public writings and speeches Gavin had denounced Westmoreland’s search-and-destroy policy, saying it was a grave mistake to believe that the war could be won through attrition. Even if the United States brought in massive numbers of men and firepower, enough to win on the battlefield, the strategy would only backfire, Gavin argued, by drawing the Chinese further into the war. For similar reasons he considered it a mistake to bomb North Vietnam. He suggested instead that the United States develop an “enclave” policy in which U.S. troops withdrew from the jungles and set up protective cordons around the population centers of the South. In the meantime they should halt the bombing of the North and push for a negotiated settlement. Westmoreland thought Gavin was mistaken in all respects, that he was too removed from the conflict to form an accurate assessment, and that a visit to Vietnam might soften his public posture if not change his mind. But once the invitation was accepted, Gavin loomed as a problem. Telexes from the Pentagon apprised Westmoreland of Gavin’s latest public utterances and made it clear that the White House—meaning President Johnson himself—was “quite concerned about what may eventuate” from the visit.
Gavin would be given the complete tour, Westmoreland assured Washington, with one full day in each corps and a final day in Saigon. It was important, he said, that the retired general spend at least five days in country. With that amount of time they could make the case that the war was being won. (In this, as in many things, Westmoreland was overly confident. After the tour Gavin would return to the United States and declare of Vietnam: “We are in a tragedy.”)
In Westmoreland’s victory scenario, which although optimistic still envisioned the war lasting at least two more years, the First Infantry Division played a central role. The Big Red One had to come through for him. Westmoreland had been insisting all summer and fall that the war of attrition was gaining momentum. The military situation, he maintained, had finally reached what he called the “cross-over” point—which meant that the number of enemy soldiers lost in battle exceeded the number being added through infiltration or local recruitment. His argument was partly a matter of political mathematics—who would be counted in the enemy order of battle and who would not be counted. (He agreed with his new intelligence chief’s decision to drop 120,000 Viet Cong self-defense militia from official estimates that fall, a controversial move that infuriated some analysts at the CIA, created a major internal dispute for months, and remained at the center of the Vietnam debate for decades thereafter.) But it was also a matter of offensive warfare. Westmoreland needed his generals to apply constant pressure, to stay on the offensive, search and destroy. And that meant he had to keep pushing the commander of the First Division, Major General Hay.
“Handsome John” Hay was by all outward appearances the very model of a modern major general. He rose from the Rocky Mountain West, a hunter, horseman, and skier from Montana with the rugged good looks that his nickname conveyed. He was six foot three with a sharp, clean face and perpetual tan. He had commanded a platoon and then a company of the famed Tenth Mountain Division in Italy during World War II and later served under Westmoreland as a battle-group commander with the 101st Airborne Division. But from the time he took over the Big Red One in Vietnam in February 1967, there had been a slightly uncomfortable rub in his relationship with the war managers at MACV headquarters.
Westmoreland and the III Corps commander, Major General Frederick C. Weyand, thought Hay was too slow, deliberate, and cautious. They went through the same routine after almost every battle. His superiors would bury Hay with faint praise, congratulating the Big Red One for its performance and then ask, pointedly, why Hay’s troops had failed to pursue the enemy at battle’s end and allowed it to slip away. Hay’s answer to Westmoreland, as he later recounted, was usually the same. “I told him that we pursued by fire (artillery and air) and that risk to troops pursuing overland into territory more familiar to the Viet Cong was not worth it unless we knew where they were.” Hay assumed that Westmoreland, who would have preferred “an aggressive overland pursuit World War II–style,” nonetheless understood and accepted his reasoning at least to the extent that he was not relieved of command. That was, in fact, a bit of self-deception: in correspondence with the Pentagon that October, Westmoreland had been plotting a rearrangement of his generals in which Hay would be shifted from command to a staff position, to be replaced by someone with “flexibility.” According to the transcript of a private discussion between Westmoreland and Weyand about the generals commanding their divisions, Weyand also wanted to have Hay moved.
“Hay has done a tremendous job with that division, but I can’t tolerate this business of walking away from a fight just because it gets dark,” Weyand said. “We have to hit these people when we have them, not just worry about night defensive positions.”
“The enemy isn’t attacking night defensive positions anymore anyway,” Westmoreland said. “You should have a heart-to-heart with John. I got the impression talking to him that he’s planning aggressive tactics.”
Hay felt the pressure and thought that he was being unfairly criticized, even conceding his naturally delibe
rate nature. The enemy main force units in his tactical area of operations had been only intermittently active during that rainy season of 1967 and were “hard to find.” The other side could strike and then move across the Cambodian border in a few hours. Also, the weather made it difficult, as did a shortage of helicopters for offensive operations.
Like most commanding officers of his generation, Hay was steeped in the history of the Big Red One, and an unavoidable character in that military story was General Terry Allen. Hay knew all about Terrible Terry and his days leading the Fighting First in North Africa. Alpha Company’s Jim George once overheard a radio conversation between Hay and Terry Allen Jr. during which Hay called him Terry (instead of Allen or “Dauntless Six,” the code name for a 2/28 Black Lions commander) and said, “Terry, your dad was a great soldier!” In their command styles Hay and the elder Allen could not have been more different. Hay was a man of routine who went by the book, slow and steady, fond of distributing long “Commander Notes” on subjects like how to clean a .45, how to brief your troops, how to cross a river, and how to prevent malaria. Members of his staff knew that if they asked him a question, they were likely to get a lecture. General Allen had been a stickler mostly about one thing: fighting. When he wrote, he wrote about fighting. The rest of it was less important to him. He was a doer, not a talker.
Terry Jr. was somewhere in the middle, not as bold as his father nor as pedantic as Hay. He was personally selected for the job, like all of Hay’s battalion commanders, and had to undergo an “audition,” showing the general how he would conduct a combat assault. “I demanded perfection and insisted they follow our division SOP [standard operating procedure] to the letter,” Hay explained later. Being a battalion commander under him “was not an easy job,” he acknowledged, because he “perhaps oversupervised…not allowing them very much leeway in a fight, particularly new commanders,” lest they “do something stupid” and get a lot of men “killed needlessly.”
But now they had a Viet Cong regiment in their sights. The 2/28 Black Lions were moving and preparing to strike. They had a chance to search and pursue and destroy. Pressure flows downhill, and here it came thundering down in a molten flood. Down from Lyndon Johnson to William Westmoreland to John Hay. And down from there, down to William Coleman, Hay’s deputy; down to George (Buck) Newman, who ran Operation Shenandoah II for the First Brigade; and then down to Terry Allen. Pour the steel on.
Yet even then, unknown to the public, and out of sight of Terry Allen and his Black Lions and the other men who did the fighting, a dispute was roiling among the war managers in Washington about whether Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition through search-and-destroy missions could ever succeed. General Gavin’s grave skepticism on the subject was shared privately by many of McNamara’s top analysts at the Pentagon, led by Alain Enthoven and his so-called whiz kids in the Office of Systems Analysis, who had been pointing out the weaknesses in the concept for months in private memos and studies related to Westmoreland’s request for more troops. The essence of Westmoreland’s strategy was that if the war had reached the mystical crossover point where more enemy troops were being killed than North Vietnam could provide or the Viet Cong could recruit in the South, then the United States, with an even larger force, could search and destroy more of them and improve the crossover ratio to the point of eliminating the enemy army in ten years and debilitating it long before that.
Enthoven’s analysts tested this thesis in a study of fifty-six pitched battles fought in Vietnam during the previous year, and they found it illogical. Their central conclusion, in fact, was that “the size of the force we deploy has little effect on the rate of attrition of enemy forces.” The determining factor was not battlefield superiority, which usually went to the Americans, but the choice of battles. In a vast majority of cases, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese controlled whether they would stand and fight. And when they did, according to the study, it was usually because they had initiated the battle. Some 66.2 percent of the battles began with an enemy attack on U.S. troops: the enemy attacked as U.S. troops landed to deploy on the battlefield (12.5 percent), or attacked a static U.S. defensive perimeter (30.4 percent), or ambushed a moving U.S. unit in a preconceived battle plan (23.3 percent). When another category was included—attacks on a moving U.S. unit by the enemy in a dug-in or fortified position in which the engagement came as a virtual surprise to the American tactical commander (12.5 percent)—the percentage of battles involving some element of enemy initiative rose to 78.7 percent. This meant that even though U.S. forces had vastly superior kill ratios on the battlefield, the enemy, at almost any time, could limit losses—and frustrate Westmoreland’s attrition strategy—by simply refusing to stand and fight.
ON THE MORNING of the sixteenth, Clark Welch’s Delta led the way for the Black Lions, with Kasik’s Bravo following. They headed out on a search-and-destroy mission at two minutes before eight, marching in a southeasterly direction through an open stretch of heavy bamboo and then moderate-growth jungle. They stayed south of the Ong Thanh but crossed to the far side, or east, of what the Americans called a draw and the Vietnamese identified as the lower extension of a stream. The trees in the jungle beyond the draw were about 120 feet tall at the highest and at places formed a complete canopy overhead. The marshy soil underfoot, littered with deadfall brush and trees, made for slow moving.
Welch felt most comfortable when his company was placed in the lead, as it was that morning. In two-company patrols, the lead company commander had substantial control of the operation, while the rear company commander was there mostly for backup work. The lead commander could set the pace of the march. He could decide how and when to cloverleaf to assess where the enemy might be. Even while taking orders from the battalion commander and others above him, he could make instinctive judgments on where to place his men and whether to diverge slightly from the planned route. And he could control artillery support from the big guns located at fire bases a few miles away.
Welch and his new artillery forward observer, Pinky Durham, had melded into a smooth team in their few days together. They shared a philosophy of using artillery aggressively and proactively. Welch would order what was known as marching fire as soon as he left camp, directing mortar and artillery rounds in front of him, and sometimes to the sides, as his platoons moved forward. This had a dual purpose. The obvious one was to discourage the enemy from setting up an ambush. The less obvious but to Welch more important purpose was to establish an early and continuous dialogue with the artillery officers on the other end of the radio (in this case at a Thirty-third Artillery fire base camp, Caisson V, near the village of Chon Thanh on Route 13), so that when real trouble arose, they would have the bureaucratic procedures authorizing the use of artillery already out of the way, the coordinates established, enough rounds of 105-millimeter shells broken down, and everything ready to aim and fire.
Walking point in front of Delta’s troops that morning was a little squad that Welch liked to bring along for patrols through unknown territory. It was a provincial reconnaissance unit comprised of Vietnamese scouts from nearby Ben Cat. Some were former Viet Cong, some were thrill seekers, most were local men who signed up for the money. They were paid as independent contractors—cold cash handed out at the end of a day’s work—and they worked only when they felt like it. Their numbers on any given day ranged from two to six men from a pool of twenty. Army Captain Bernard Francis Jones of Coalton, West Virginia, served as their adviser. Jones could speak Vietnamese fluently and implicitly trusted his little squad of irregulars. They looked out for each other, Jones said, and performed important work that went largely un-appreciated.
“Important work” in this case meant killing people, an estimated four to five suspected Viet Cong a week. Welch, who understood Vietnamese but was not fluent, was among the few who appreciated them. He believed that the closer the Americans worked with the Vietnamese, the more they understood about Vietnamese behavior patterns, and the more th
ey tapped into local knowledge of the geography, the better they could fight the war. Nonetheless many American soldiers viewed the scouts—Kit Carsons, they were informally called—with skepticism. To them Vietnam was a forbidding and alien place, its people difficult to read. They felt they could trust nothing. A persistent rumor rustling through the enlisted ranks was that some Kit Carsons were surreptitiously working for the other side.
Welch walked near the front of his second platoon, accompanied by his dependable first sergeant, Bud Barrow, and his two radiotelephone operators, both Scotts from Michigan, Jimmy Scott from Detroit and Paul D. Scott from Flint. Scott Up and Scott Down, he called them, Up carrying a radio for contact with battalion headquarters, and Down on a frequency with the platoon leaders. They were both experienced soldiers, and Paul D. Scott had been through several major operations before, including Junction City and Billings. Also in the group was the medic, Joe Lovato Jr., a large and friendly man who knew Welch’s fighting tendencies all too well. Lovato carried two stretchers with him that morning, each weighing twenty pounds, along with his oversized medical bag.
What are you carrying two stretchers for? Welch asked.
God damn, Lieutenant Welch, Lovato answered. Whenever you go out, guys get hurt.
Welch could not argue; he knew it was true. He had a way of finding the action. His men might get hurt, he conceded, but not killed.
He moved his company south and east with extreme caution. Late in the morning they were a mile from the NDP. At 11:17 they reported back to the operations center that they had located an oxcart trail running through the high brush. An hour later they were in the canopied jungle when a Vietnamese scout scooted back to the command group and reported that they had spotted a few enemy soldiers in what appeared to be a base camp. They could hear them and smell them.
They Marched Into Sunlight Page 28