by Tom Bissell
“Do you feel sympathy for the Vietnamese who were killed here?” I asked my father.
He looked at me as though I had gone mad. “What's the matter with you? Of course I do.”
“How about the soldiers who killed them?”
Now he realized why I had asked and what I was actually asking. He looked away. “Yeah, I do. And probably more than I should.”
“I don't. I don't have any sympathy for them. I just realized that. I wish they'd all hanged. Medina especially.”
“You weren't here. You'll never understand.”
“I'm sick of that argument. Being present during a war doesn't automatically trump all other moralities. What war does is distort normal feelings, not validate abnormal ones. War may be a reason, but it's no excuse.”
“You could be right.”
“So what do we do?”
“You do what I've been trying to do for the past ten minutes, which is stand here and quietly pay my respects.”
The heat seemed to gain a drowsy, atmospheric weight. As we stood there, the day went on obliviously, just as it had thirty-five years before. A dragonfly used my shoulder as a landing pad, then took off. The filthy water burped up a small black frog, which investigated the tip of my father's Hush Puppy and hopped away. The emboldened dogs had edged closer to us, and my father lowered for a moment to pet one of them. I wanted to tell him that what those who attempted to rationalize atrocities such as My Lai did not understand was that atrocities helped lose wars. As Michael Bernhardt put it during the investigation, “[My Lai] didn't have strategic value to it at all.… When you go out and do something like this, I believe what you are doing is breeding more Viet Cong.” Bernhardt was right. Shortly after the massacre the Vietnamese countryside was papered in NLF propaganda publicizing the massacre: “In the operation of 15 March [sic] 1968 in Son Tinh District the American enemies went crazy. They used machine guns and every other kind of weapon to kill 500 people who had empty hands.” When the National Liberation Front Committee of Quang Ngai province wrote up its official denunciation of the massacre, the propaganda was far more overt: “This was by far the most barbaric killing in human history.… The Heavens will not tolerate this! The blue ocean waters will not wash away the hatred. These murders are even more savage than Hitler.” The NLF of Quang Ngai put the number killed at 2,060, quadrupling the actual number killed. When the U.S. military claimed 128 “enemy” dead, it was of course guilty of the same fourfold distortion.
Before I could share any of this, my father looked up across this miserable ditch into a verdant neighboring pasture. “I wish Hien were here,” he said. Did he have, finally, a better answer for him as to why some men only kill while others, amid the same killing, think to save? No, actually. He wanted to know if that was corn or wheat growing over there or what.
Query: Could the United States have won the war in Vietnam?
Because of the lack of agreement, both during the war and among historians and scholars today, about what “winning” the war would have entailed, or meant, or cost, this question is more problematic than any other that lingers around the Vietnamese War. Townsend Hoopes, for instance, the undersecretary of the Air Force, said in 1968 that “Anything resembling a clear-cut military victory in Vietnam appears possible only at the price of literally destroying [South Vietnam].”
The major problem confronting U.S. war planners was the hydralike nature of Vietnam's unrest. It was a political struggle, a proxy fight, a revolution, a civil war, a conflict thick with colonial residues, and the attempted hostile takeover of one nation by another all in one. This was difficult enough for the Vietnamese themselves to parse, much less a foreign force with a dewdrop of historical experience in the region. The only lasting solution to such a war would have been a careful alchemy of approach that attempted to address all of these issues, but North Viet nam's ceaseless destabilization disallowed any such potion from developing. Doing nothing would have led to South Vietnam's collapse. Doing too much, it was feared, might cause World War III—for which the Joint Chiefs of Staff had a winning strategy that envisioned killing 325 million Soviets and Chinese, absorbing tens of millions of U.S. casualties, and, with fallout factored in, causing the incidental deaths of 500 million to 600 million other people, many of them in allied European countries. (These were the Joint Chiefs’ own estimates!)
Did winning mean an independent South Vietnam free of insurgents or a South Vietnam weighed down by a heavy U.S. troop presence for decades? Did it mean democracy or autocracy? Did it mean the downfall or eradication of Ho Chi Minh's government? What would “victory” in Vietnam have looked like, and would the common people of Vietnam have recognized their country afterward? There are no answers to these questions. What can be addressed is what the United States could have done differently in Vietnam, both diplomatically and militarily.
Many have argued that the war could have ended far earlier had negotiations with North Vietnam been conducted properly, yet Hanoi never wavered from its one most important position: the United States had absolutely no right to dictate its policy to either North or South Vietnam. Thus most of its attempts to negotiate with the United States were as rigged as a basket toss, including its “Four Points” peace proposal from 1965. The first three points—no foreign soldiers in either Vietnam, recognition of the Vietnamese people's basic rights, and that Vietnam's two “zones” refuse any foreign alignment and third-party military assistance until formal reunification—were acceptable to most in the U.S. government. The fourth—that South Vietnam's government, along with the NLF, work out its shared political future according to the NLF platform—was not, even though it was essentially the same deal Kissinger and Nixon would cut with North Vietnam in 1973. It is hard to argue, however, that the United States was any less intransigent during the war's numerous halfhearted negotiation attempts. In The Pentagon Papers, one finds the directive that the United States should define its negotiation position “in a way which makes Communist acceptance unlikely.”
Rarely, then, did either North Vietnam or the United States negotiate in good faith. (Ho Chi Minh and Lyndon Johnson's scant epistolary exchanges suggest something of this: Johnson told Ho he would halt the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam if North Vietnam stopped sending its troops into the South. But Ho was seeking the bombing halt precisely because it would allow North Vietnam greater mobility in moving its troops south. Johnson could not stop the bombing, since one of its major purposes was to frustrate North Vietnam's incursions. Hanoi did, however, offer a reciprocal pledge not to invade or bomb the United States.) North Vietnam in particular was a talented violator of any number of accords, and one of its favorite tricks was to wage massive offensives after coming to a gentleman's agreement with the United States that both nations’ forces would stand down during negotiation attempts. What this suggests, among other things, is a severe disparity of purpose. The fate of Vietnam was worth only a limited war to the United States, while the men of Hanoi were willing to fight until the end for their country—which, rightly or wrongly, for them included South Vietnam.
Many have pointed out that North Vietnam's leaders were less willing to fight until the end than to send millions of North Vietnamese to certain death, which is indisputably true. But every member of North Vietnam's Politburo knew Hanoi could have been wiped out in an afternoon if the United States chose to do so. For all the talk of the “limitations” placed on the U.S. military during the Vietnamese War, it is important to recognize that the North Vietnamese had little idea of these limitations and believed they were getting the worst the United States had to offer. (“Hanoi, Haiphong, and other cities may be destroyed,” Ho Chi Minh warned his people in one postbombing address, “but the Vietnamese people will not be intimidated.”) They prepared for the U.S. invasion of North Vietnam on at least two occasions and greatly worried about the possibility of an invasion throughout the war. Despite General Giap's reported postwar statement that the war “would not have evolved in ou
r favor” had the United States invaded North Vietnam, most North Vietnamese were willing to die, if it came to that, in the “unlimited” war that many argue to this day should have been fought against a determined and xenophobic enemy in the enemy's own country. As Daniel Ellsberg writes, “In South Vietnam we were not fighting all the population; even so, we were thoroughly stalemated with five hundred thousand U.S. troops. In North Vietnam we would have been fighting every man, woman, and child.”
A former peace activist, long after the war, once asked Colonel Bui Tin, who accepted South Vietnam's surrender in 1975, if there was anything the United States could have done to win the war. The peace activist was clearly expecting Tin to say there was not. But Tin admitted that if the Ho Chi Minh Trail had been severed, Hanoi could not have forced South Vietnam's surrender. Later Tin would argue that if “the American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon in 1969, they could have punished us severely.” Such comments have given ammunition to a group of largely American revisionist scholars and historians who might best be known as the We Almost Won School. By the time Tin offered these thoughts, he had already turned against Vietnam's Communist regime and been chased into exile in Paris. Tin believes that while the war was “unwinnable” in the sense that South Vietnam was unlikely to have ever become a viable nation without massive U.S. aid, he persuasively argues that a different military strategy could have resulted in “a seesaw situation, one in which there could be no (clear) winners or losers, and perhaps have forced a compromise resulting in a fairer settlement.” The way to have done that, as he told the peace activist, was to strangle off the aid South Vietnam's insurgents received from the North.
In December 1963, North Vietnam's Politburo dispatched Bui Tin to South Vietnam to learn if the war could be won solely by the NLE Tin returned to inform the Politburo that the only way to win was to send PAVN divisions south and “move from the guerrilla phase into conventional war.” Shortly thereafter the Ho Chi Minh Trail (known to the Vietnamese as the Truong Son Strategic Supply Route) began to be developed. The decision to augment the trail, which had existed in aboriginal form and been used by insurgents since the late 1950s, was so secret that there are no records—at least, none that have been released—attesting to when it was first approved or, indeed, who approved it. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was not one trail but a network of paths and switchbacks and roads and highways that began in North Vietnam, wended through Laos and Cambodia, and emptied into South Vietnam. Ultimately the trail covered 10,000 miles, and many important storage and destination sites had more than ten separate feeder roads. By 1968, the trail was blessed with “bungalows” for visitors, rest stops, a fuel pipeline, telecommunications, garages, bunkers, mechanics’ shops, and truck parts facilities. Between 1959 and 1975, millions braved the trail, upon which, in one Vietnamese's estimation, there were twenty-four different ways you could die. Causes of death ranged from tiger attack to snakebite to bombs to road accidents to tumbling off cliffs to an arrow in the back courtesy of the local indigenous peoples to the trail's primary cause of death, which was plain old febrile sickness.
One revisionist historian argues that cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail should have been “the primary combat mission of US ground forces in Indochina,” a position with which it is difficult to take issue. The trail was the very doom of Westmoreland's war of attrition, as it allowed the North Vietnamese and South Vietnam's insurgents to endlessly replace lost weapons and personnel. Yet decisively “cutting” the trail—a possibility that terrified North Vietnam—meant to many U.S. strategists invading the notionally neutral nations of Laos and Cambodia. Laos was not aligned with North Vietnam but was too weak to do much of anything about its neighbor's illegal appropriation of Lao territory. Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk had a secret 1964 agreement with the North Vietnamese that allowed troops to operate in his nation “so long as they respected its inhabitants,” according to the historian David P. Chandler.
The first U.S. bombs landed on Cambodia's Communist sanctuaries, of which there numbered at least fourteen, in 1969. This was called Operation Menu and kept hidden from the American people. Prince Sihanouk, wary of the Vietnamese Communists, allowed the bombing as long as Cambodian civilians were not affected. When news of the illegal bombing got out, President Nixon defended his decision by using, of all things, the Hague Convention of 1907: “A neutral country has the obligation not to allow its territory to be used by a belligerent. If the neutral country is unwilling or unable to prevent this, the other belligerent has the right to take appropriate counteraction.” As one historian writes, “The whole matter had a surrealistic cast to it. The Cambodians pretended that the North Vietnamese had not taken over the border areas of their country, the Americans pretended that they were not bombing those enemy sanctuaries, the Cambodians pretended not to notice the bombing, and the North Vietnamese pretended they weren't there in the first place.”
When it became clear that the bombing was not fatally effective, 80,000 U.S. and South Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia in 1970. This short-lived and limited “incursion,” as Nixon pointedly called it, saw the NLF and PAVN abandon their Cambodian sanctuaries and draw deeper into the jungle, just beyond the approved reach (thirty kilometers) of the U.S. invasion. The raid netted six months’ worth of NLF supplies and ammunition. As one lieutenant general said at the time, “Why didn't we do this years ago? Why don't the American people understand why we're doing this?” While these sanctuaries were attacked by ground troops in force, the trails they fed were not. Bui Tin writes, “It defies imagination to think that the American side was willing to send U.S. troops into Cambodia in May 1970 yet never dared to touch this strategic link [the Ho Chi Minh Trail] to the southern theater.” As Tin notes, such a move would not have generated anywhere near the moral outrage as did the Cambodian invasion. While the occupation of important trail exit points (which, as Tin notes, could have been “carried out by as few as three thousand GIs”) does seem a ruinously lost opportunity, to have delved deeper into Cambodia does not. It was known that Vietnamese and Cambodian Communists in Cambodia were engaging in much of the same agitation they employed in South Vietnam: establishing cadres, forming political structures, luring villagers into their web, and working to subvert all government institutions. If the United States had chased the Communists deeper into Cambodia or been allowed to operate there on a long-term basis, many of the problems the U.S. military faced in South Vietnam would have been replicated.
The invasion of Laos came in 1971 (though the country had been secretly and devastatingly bombed by the United States since 1964), shortly after the passage of the Cooper-Church Amendment to the defense appropriations bill that forbade the United States to finance any ground war in Laos or Cambodia. The United States could only accompany ARVN forces to the borders of those countries and support them by air. By the time Laos was finally invaded, North Vietnamese soldiers had been operating there for more than a decade, as had an indigenous army of Lao tribesmen funded and controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency. (A 1962 diplomatic agreement among the United States, the USSR, North Vietnam, and Laos forbade the military use of Lao territory by third-party nations. Every party mostly obeyed this agreement, with the exception of North Vietnam, which did not obey it at all.) According to the North Vietnamese, a permanent PAVN deployment numbering 7,000 soldiers was kept in Laos at all times, though few were battle-hardened. The ARVN incursion into Laos to destroy these illegal stay-behinds resulted in a 1971 battle known as Lam Son 719. Lam Son, named for the birthplace of the fifteenth-century Vietnamese patriot Le Loi, was a disaster for several reasons, some (inclement weather) beyond U.S. and ARVN control, others (ARVN's military ineptitude) less so. After a promising start, 150 ARVN tanks were abandoned—many of them still running—by retreating and terrified South Vietnamese soldiers. During the operation the ARVN took more than 8,000 casualties, thereby wiping out some of its most elite units, and the final outcome was “successful” only because of U.S. air su
pport. These bombings punished the massed North Vietnamese forces greatly, resulting in around 17,000 dead. Despite Nixon's claim that Lam Son 719 was a great victory for the ARVN, the battle suggested how difficult eliminating North Vietnam's sanctuaries in Laos would be.
What could and could not get down the Ho Chi Minh Trail is still fiercely debated. Lewis Sorley, one of the war's most thoughtful revisionist historians, writes that after the Tet Offensive, “in order to get one ton of material down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the enemy had to put approximately ten tons into the pipeline, since interdiction would destroy or block 90 percent of what he tried to move.” By July 1968, “the enemy had been moving more than 1,100 trucks a day, the most traffic ever observed on the trail. One week into the new interdiction campaign, that had been cut in half, and less than a week later by half again.” But the North Vietnamese had shifted tactics. As the former CIA analyst Frank Snepp writes, in 1970 the U.S. Embassy in Saigon learned that “nearly eighty percent” of the weapons recently injected into South Vietnam had been “shipped in by boat from North Vietnam and unloaded at the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville,” a revelation Snepp calls “a shock to everyone.” Although use of the trail was hindered, thousands of tons of arms were still reaching South Vietnam from Cambodian sanctuaries—this at the point when the United States and ARVN believed they were intercepting and destroying more incoming materiel than ever before. The North Vietnamese were going to keep figuring out how to evade aerial countermeasures. The more the trail was bombed, the more its “carrying capacity” was enhanced by desperately inventive engineers.