by Tom Bissell
Krulak and others worked to establish a basic Marine strategy whereby the three Marine bases at Hue, Danang, and Chu Lai would expand in their areas of control, like peaceably growing blobs, until they all met— a strategy popularly known as “clear and hold”—causing the NLF to gradually lose the food and support of the Vietnamese people. Other Marine pacification projects included building medical clinics staffed by volunteer Navy doctors and a moderately successful (though little-used) program that joined a dozen Marines to small, select South Vietnamese militia units living among Vietnam's villagers. These were called Combined Action Platoons, or CAPs, and were invented by Lieutenant Colonel William Corson. Essentially, Corson's was an attempt to out-NLF the NLF. “Counterguerrilla forces,” one State Department official responsible for urging forward the CAPs initiative wrote, “must adopt the tactics of the guerrilla himself.” Indeed, there were reports of some CAPs Marines exchanging their uniforms for black pajamas. One successful aspect of the CAPs program was that it prevented the NLF from collecting taxes, as even villagers emotionally committed to the insurgency resented the ever-increasing and ever more spontaneous nature of NLF tax collection as the war went on.
Despite this, General Westmoreland did not have much faith in Marine-led pacification and maintained that only ARVN soldiers should be charged with pacification duty—not realizing or caring that many ARVN soldiers were far more likely to harass the Vietnamese population than pacify it. (He also worried, perhaps presciently, that prolonged contact between the U.S. military and Vietnamese civilians would lead to “unfortunate incidents”) Westmoreland so frowned on the CAPs program in particular that he did not allow Marines to mark their time spent living with the Vietnamese as “days in the field.” “Pacification,” one of Westmoreland's aides later explained, “bored him.”
The most crucial component of Westmoreland's preferred war of attrition was the search-and-destroy patrol—a term Westmoreland hated, preferring “offensive sweep.” Amazingly, less than one percent of all search-and-destroy patrols actually encountered the enemy, and 90 percent of those encounters were enemy-initiated. Search-and-destroy patrols were not, as some have argued, a “corpse-exchange” program with the NLE The idea was to initiate enemy contact and then quickly broadcast the enemy's position to nearby artillery or bombers. The NLF did not always allow U.S. forces effective use of artillery or bombing, either by sticking so close to Americans troops that to call in artillery fire became suicidal or by swiftly breaking away after an ambush. U.S. Army Major General William DePuy, in a moment of frustration, once said that NLF ambushes were “kind of a coward's way of fighting the war.” But blasting men from artillery placements seven miles away was hair-shirt gallantry itself.
As the Army's search-and-destroy patrols floundered, the NLF and PAVN lured Marines from the populous coast toward Vietnam's center, where the Communists believed the geography was more in their favor. This was a conscious attempt to stall the pacification effort, the ultimate efficacy of which is still debated by scholars and historians. Some believe it more or less worked in harmony with the war of attrition, others believe it only appeared to work (none of the pacification efforts survived the United States’ departure), and revisionists believe it worked so well that it triggered the desperate Tet Offensive. My father and I discussed the pacification effort, and I learned that in his opinion the Marines pretty much had everything under control at all times. It seemed pointless to argue. Instead I asked him, “What's with you Marines and your nicknames, anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“‘ Brute’ Krulak. Lieutenant General Lewis ‘Chesty’ Puller. General Lewis ‘Silent Lew’ Walt. Whenever I come across the name of some prominent Marine, there's always this nom de guerre sandwich. So how about you? Did you have a nickname?”
My father stopped walking and looked back at me. By this point even Hien was listening to our conversation. “Actually, I did have a nickname: Captain lohn ‘Nice Guy’ Bissell.”
I studied what I could see of the eyes floating behind his sunglasses’ county-sheriff tint. “You're serious.”
A shrug. “That's what they called me.”
“Was it ironical?”
“I don't think so.”
“‘Nice Guy’ was your Marine Corps nickname?”
“One of them.”
“Why did they call you ‘Nice Guy’?”
“Once,” my father said, “we were rolling down a highway probably not too far from here, and I had more problems than you can imagine. We were taking sporadic fire all along the road. And this general up there in a helicopter monitoring the situation is telling us to move out, which, for Christ's sake, we were already doing. Well, in moving out we plowed over and killed a water buffalo, which I had to explain to the general. ? don't give a fuck,’ the general said. I said to him, ‘Hold it, this is Charlie six. We've both heard the orders about destroying the local people's animals: “If it happens, you will recompense them.” General, I intend to obey those orders.’ So what I did was take every dime from our recreation fund to recompense this poor, frightened peasant. I knew that the water buffalo was his tractor, his jeep, his engine, his car. So I paid him off, saying, ‘I'm so sorry, I'm so terribly sorry’ And the general, who's still following me in the air, is shouting down, ‘You get your ass out of there! That's an order, Lieutenant!’ I finally grabbed the radio and said, ‘Please fuck off, General.’ I almost got a court-martial.”
“Nice Guy was almost court-martialed?”
“For a while there it seemed to be almost a weekly deal for me. I was not rebellious. I just tried to do the right thing.”
We came to the center of Chu Lai. All that remained of this storied military city—where for almost a decade tens of thousands of Americans had worked and eaten and defecated and slept—were bundled infestations of fist-sized green-gray cacti, several stands of breeze-blown pine trees, an occasional strip of buckled sidewalk, and the paved remnants of the odd runway. Beyond that: nothing. The writer Tim O’Brien once made a pilgrimage to his site of wartime deployment with the U.S. Army. “You'd think,” O’Brien wrote, “there would be something left, some faint imprint.” But everything from the landing zone to the medical tents to the post exchange was “utterly and forever razed from the earth.” Indeed, at Chu Lai it was as though some great hand had swept this place clean of all that was man-made, leaving everything else fibrous and drab beneath an overcast sky.
“So,” my father said, “this is where I lived all those horrible months.”
“There's nothing left,” I said.
He looked at me. “You expected there to be?”
“A Communist indoctrination center, at least, or some crappy museum showcasing the glories of the resistance. Something.” This was not an unreasonable expectation, given what had happened around Chu Lai. Operation Starlite, for instance. Initially called Operation Satellite but garbled by an overworked Marine clerk, Starlite was hatched when rumors of large-scale NLF massing around Chu Lai reached the ears of General Lewis Walt, commander of the Third Marine Amphibious Force, in the summer of 1965, shortly after my father arrived. The Marines’ quickly arranged surprise attack was a dyad assault by air and sea. Despite the offshore hammering the NLF took from two destroyers and a heavy cruiser, the first Marines to alight upon the nearby battle-field's landing zone found themselves in a wasp's nest of bullets and flak. According to Edward E Murphy, the fire was so intense that, in the words of one Marine helicopter pilot, “You just had to close your eyes and drop down to the deck.” My father served as part of a “blocking force” during Starlite and now claimed to remember little of the battle other than running around and prodigiously discharging his weapon. The first two Medals of Honor bestowed upon Marines in Vietnam, one of them posthumously, were awarded after Starlite, and the battle's final tally was more than 600 slain NLF and 45 dead Marines (though the NLF claimed in its propaganda to have killed 900). American analysts maintained that if the United
States could lose one soldier for every twelve lost by the NLF, as in Starlite, the war would be handily won. The NLF and North Vietnamese believed that if they could control how long battles lasted and limited their losses, the Americans would weary and go home.
My father walked alone twenty feet from where we stood, stopped suddenly, and turned back to us, nodding. “I remember some of this. Right here there were roads honeycombed every which way. And over there was the air base; we had a ton of jets and choppers there. I think the runways were something like eighty-five hundred feet long. Over in this direction was the mess tent, and over here was the bank.”
“The first quality of a soldier,” according to Napoleon, “is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty, privation and want are the school of good soldiers.” How would Napoleon have felt about the forty ice-cream factories built for U.S. soldiers in Vietnam? The 340 pounds of supplies every soldier used up each day? The 10 million field rations eaten and 80,000 tons of ammunition used a month? The mountains of Coca-Cola and Pepsi on ice at every U.S. base? The fact that doughnuts and pastries were available if one woke up early enough? The shrimp cocktails and fresh strawberries?
To contrast this excess with the Napoleonic privation faced by the NLF and PAVN was revealing. The average NLF insurgent found himself at the begging end of a supply line that took porters two full months to travel. In lean times, NLF guerrillas received, if they were lucky, one can of corn. Per squad. PAVN soldiers typically received one or two khaki shirts, a pair of trousers, sandals made of tire treads, and a sewing kit. Those receiving this equipment were informed that it had to last for half a decade.
I thought of O’Brien again while looking upon the weedy remnants of Chu Lai, in particular his great story “The Things They Carried.” After finding a “VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen,” O’Brien's American soldiers note that when the boy died “he had been carrying a pouch of rice, a rifle, and three magazines of ammunition.” One character says, “You want my opinion, there's a definite moral here.” Was the moral that the NLF and PAVN, in the words of the left-leaning historian James P. Harrison, “vanquished perhaps the greatest odds in the history of warfare”? Or was the moral how unseemly it was for Americans to complain about the result of a war in which the United States enjoyed every imaginable technological advantage? These advantages ranged from armored personnel carriers to the availability of artillery fire to napalm bombs to quick-loading grenade launchers to helicopters loaded with Gatling guns capable of firing 100 rounds per second. The United States had access to so much in Vietnam, it did not even know how to use what it had. A surface-to-air missile defense system was installed in South Vietnam, for instance, at the order of Lyndon Johnson, even though for most of the war the North had no offensive air force to speak of.
What I said next to my father I felt I had to say: “Dad, forgive me, but how the hell did you guys manage to lose? You had every imaginable advantage.”
“Funny,” my father said, looking away. “I was just thinking about that myself. What can I tell you? When I was here I was always under the impression we were winning. In the end, I just don't know what happened. There was a lot of death, a lot of disillusionment. I think half a million Marines in total came through Vietnam. Thirteen thousand of them were killed, and ninety thousand, I believe, were wounded. That's one in five—a higher casualty rate than what the Marines suffered during World War II. Think about that. We had a lot of advantages—that's certainly true. But this wasn't our country. We were all a long way from home.”
With these words—perhaps the most human sentiment I had ever heard my father utter about the war—pinned and wiggling upon my mind, we walked over to the cliff along which part of Chu Lai had been arranged and gazed down at the shoreline's anthracite black rocks and then out onto the ocean itself. No bobbing junks, no swift and wave-slicing boats, not a single hardy swimmer. The rough, sparkleless water heaved about in the farther reaches of our sight, and closer in gathered itself for whitened shoreward rushes. The spume flew up and covered us: when I licked my lips, my tongue took away a deposit of salt. My father had spent his first months in Vietnam contemplating these same waves, this same dreadfully vast sky. Somewhere behind us, hidden in the jungly pines, a water buffalo mooed. The same water buffaloes were mooing when my father walked amid Chu Lai's billions of dollars of weapons and equipment. Chu Lai could not have been a pleasant place under the best of circumstances. One combat memoirist noted that “Chu Lai was a free-fire zone. I was instructed to shoot at everything not American, ROK [Republic of Korea], or ARVN,” and a U.S. Army major operating out of Chu Lai said, “We are at war with ten-year-old children. It may not be humanitarian, but that's what it's like.” I wondered how significantly life had really changed for the poorest people in and around Chu Lai. Earlier Hien had mentioned that Chu Lai was currently designated an “economic revival zone” for which the government was “seeking for investors.” Swords had become plowshares here, but only because all the swords had been shattered.
My father asked if there was a way to walk down to the rocks, but Hien told him it was forbidden. My father removed his sunglasses to reveal tired eyes. “Yeah,” he said under his breath, “what the fuck isn't?” Suddenly he was pointing. “I think we used to go swimming down there, near those rocks. Sometimes we'd tie ropes around our waists and go diving for lobster.”
Hien nodded. “Lobster is very good with beer.” This was quite possibly as philosophical a statement as Hien's growingly evident politics could allow him.
My father wanted, finally, to find the site of the old Marine post exchange, which took us back through the thick and pointy scrub. Shortly we stumbled upon two ancient women sitting along the path.
They wore conical hats badly stained by salt water and were picking berries. When they smiled, they unleashed twin red crescents of betel nut-stained teeth. (Betel nuts are not nuts but seeds of the betel palm tree. Betel nut, when wrapped in leaves and cut with lime and chewed, provides a mildly mouth-numbing effect—that is, if you do not projectile vomit.) We smiled back at the old women and a few moments later found what my father believed had been the location of the PX. If it was possible, this area seemed even more neglected. The brush here had a dry, tindery feeling, and it was difficult to step anywhere without taking a wooden stiletto in the ankle or shin.
“Home sweet home,” I said. “So. Were you a chronic mail checker like I am?”
My father shook his head and kicked at a tree stump. “I barely ever came to the PX. We were out in the field most days. We'd come back here at night to defend our base, then be gone again the next morning. Day after day after day. It became very tedious.” He paused, and up floated a professorially clarifying index finger. “Until, one night, the VC or Revolutionary Force or whatever you'd care to call them broke through our lines. Now, these were brave men. They took dynamite packs, got ‘em under three aircraft, and then blew the planes and themselves up. They did a lot of damage and scared the bejesus out of all of us, believe me. Very, very brave men.”
The extent to which the insurgents relied upon “suicide squads” in battling the Americans was truly startling. One NLF directive from 1967 spoke of how its members needed to seek out every “opportunity to avenge evil done to our families…. All Party members and cadres must be willing to sacrifice their lives for the survival of the Fatherland…. To conduct an uprising, you must have a roster of all the tyrants and spies and be familiar with the way they live and where they live. Then use suicide cells to annihilate them by any means.” By 1964, in one historian's estimation, these zealous insurgents had “destroyed or damaged” half the bombers the United States had dispatched to South Vietnam. The tactical advantages of using suicide bombers were obvious: if the Marines invaded an enemy base, they needed a division; the Vietnamese needed three men.
“What was that like,” I asked, “to see these suicide attacks?”
“Frightening. And it m
ade you angry, because you couldn't stop them. We had missile launchers placed all around us here. They were all over. We used to shoot them off for nothing sometimes, for practice. But what good are missiles against small groups of men willing to destroy themselves? I mean, that's war. It's horrible. You can't do a thing about it.” He put his sunglasses back on. For the first time during this trip, I could hear anger in my father's voice. His head swung back and forth. “I remember some things so vividly. There was a Huey, I guess right over there. Someone out in the bush needed help—Christ, I can't remember. But we couldn't use it. ‘We need that chopper here!’ Care to guess why? It was for the news media. There were so many fuckups, all due to personal perverseness. False pride, not caring about people's men, not caring about the war effort overall. But most of our problems had to do with unit integrity.”
Many authorities agreed: the lack of unit integrity was cardinally disjunctive to U.S. morale during the war. Personnel rotation in Vietnam worked in many ways, most of them unprecedented in the history of warfare. Officers above second lieutenant, for instance, were rotated out of combat assignments every six months. While this policy came from the sensible recognition that men under fire could not function indefinitely, it nevertheless meant that officers “still pissing stateside water,” in Lieutenant General Harold G. Moore's memorable words, often replaced experienced officers in the middle of complicated combat maneuvers. The Marines rotated everyone out after a thirteen-month tour—one month longer than any other U.S. branch of service— thereby rendering useless, once again, whatever battlefield knowledge individual Marines had gleaned about various NLF tactics. The NLF, significantly, did not follow such procedures. In most cases an NLF insurgent fought until he died (or deserted). Thus the NLF learned how to counter seemingly insurmountable disadvantages while American soldiers had to keep figuring out how to fight the NLF.