by Tom Bissell
The trail was born of necessity, developed out of necessity, and partially abandoned by necessity. Its occupation was certainly possible and probably advisable, but the trail itself is one of the most profound arguments against the long-term success of “cutting” it. Apart from thousands of U.S. and ARVN soldiers along the South Vietnamese side of the Lao and Cambodian borders, flotillas of ceaselessly patrolling swift boats along every adjoining river, Marines in the mountains, and flocks of surveillance planes, the North Vietnamese were always going to be able to send arms and soldiers south. What they sent might not have been able to win the war, but they did not need to win the war, only lengthen it.
Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all forbade the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam, though with Kissinger Nixon occasionally toyed with the idea: “The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?… I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.” Johnson and Nixon also rejected the slightly less monstrous Joint Chiefs’ idee fixe of bombing North Vietnam's irrigation dikes on the Red River, which would have inflicted hundreds of thousands of incidental starvation and flood casualties on North Vietnamese noncombatants. Nixon toyed with that idea, too, though: “I still think we ought to take out the dikes now.” In lieu of the imposition of an apocalypse in miniature, it was decided that North Vietnam had to be conventionally bombed until its leaders saw the error of their ways.
The received wisdom about the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam holds that it was as brutal as the campaigns that had annihilated Germany and Japan during World War II, but in fact only 7 percent of the total bombing conducted during the war was against North Vietnam. The truth is that, despite the unprecedented number of bombs dropped upon North and South Vietnam during the war (16 million tons of explosives—the equivalent of seven hundred Hiroshimas—not to mention 19 million gallons of herbicide), Lyndon Johnson, in deference to the accepted logic of graduated pressure, mainly stayed his hand when it came to bombing civilian areas in North Vietnam. The bombing of South Vietnam, which with Laos received the dreadful brunt of the U.S. air war, caused far more civilian casualties. It was also self-defeating in a conflict in which broad success was dependent upon knowing exactly whom one was killing. (“Hearts and minds, after all,” the American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn wrote, “live in bodies”) As Daniel Ells-berg notes, the language the U.S. government used in describing the bombings (“one more turn of the screw,” “pain in the North,” “would be even more painful to the population of the North,” “It is important not to ‘kill the hostage’“) is, in fact, the language of torturers.
Although Richard Nixon once claimed in a televised address that the bombing of Vietnam had been conducted with a “degree of restraint unprecedented in the annals of war,” he was less concerned with civilian casualties than Johnson had been. As Nixon said to Henry Kissinger, “You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care.” The two major air operations ordered by Nixon were known as Linebacker I and Linebacker II. The first Linebacker operation was a response to North Vietnam's treacherous Easter Offensive of 1972. Forty-one thousand sorties were unleashed upon North Vietnam over an eight-month period, during which six of its power plants were blown up, every one of its oil storage facilities was annihilated, and tens of thousands of PAVN soldiers were killed. Said one U.S. lieutenant general, “Linebacker was not [Lyndon Johnson's campaign of] Rolling Thunder—it was war.” After Linebacker I, North Vietnam was crippled for more than two years.
Many revisionists have cited the effectiveness of the devastation to argue that similar butchery should have been the order of the day far earlier in the war. But the growing U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam had been one of the Easter Offensive's triggers, and Linebacker I was a response to unambiguous and in many ways unprecedented enemy aggression. A Linebacker I-style bombing earlier in the war, in response to less definitive belligerence, might well have been too much for most Americans to stomach. Even the gentle caress of President Johnson's Rolling Thunder, during which all but 5.8 percent of the Joint Chiefs’ requested targets were allowed to be bombed, gave many Americans pause. Preserving the freedom of the imperiled people of South Vietnam was not the same thing as annihilating the people of North Vietnam, although many were prepared to make such an argument.
More complicated is Linebacker II, an eleven-day bombing campaign said to have been ordered in December 1972 to compel the North Vietnamese leadership back to the peace table in Paris, though the North Vietnamese themselves claimed only to have asked for a suspension of the talks while the Politburo consulted. Popularly vilified as the Christmas Bombing, Linebacker II had a much-debated effect upon the North Vietnamese. In the analyst Douglas Pike's words, during Linebacker II “Hanoi officials experienced true, all-out strategic air war for the first time. It had a profound effect, causing them to reverse virtually overnight their bargaining position at the Paris talks.” Henry Kissinger called Linebacker II “jugular diplomacy” but was later cowed and humiliated by Le Due Tho when the Paris talks resumed for “bombing North Vietnam, just at the moment I reached home.” The North Vietnamese have thus always denied the neatly beribboned explanation that the bombing forced them to reevaluate their willingness to settle matters with the United States in Paris. Given the ghastly results of Linebacker II's “all-out” war, this is hard to believe, even if one grants that the North Vietnamese were bombed unfairly.
Twenty thousand tons of bombs were dropped on North Vietnam during Linebacker II. Anything even remotely industrial (rail yards, oil facilities, warehouses, missile storage areas) was destroyed. Linebacker II also wiped out a poor Hanoi neighborhood, Hanoi's Bach Mai Hospital, the Indian Embassy, the French Consulate, a water filtration plant, a noodle factory, and a hundred schools. Although the mayor of Hanoi claimed 10,000 civilian victims of U.S. “carpet bombing,” news of which was quickly seized upon by antiwar activists, the actual civilian deaths were (a not inconsiderable) 2,000, with thousands more injured. These numbers would have been far more severe had not Hanoi and Haiphong been largely evacuated earlier in the war. Yet it is important to note that North Vietnam was not helpless during the bombings and in many cases welcomed civilian deaths by placing its antiaircraft guns in the middle of populated areas. (Though, from the North Vietnamese perspective, what was the alternative? Putting their guns in places where they could be easily bombed?) During the operation, the North's extremely sophisticated batteries of Soviet-installed surface-to-air missile launchers knocked from the sky more than two dozen U.S. aircraft, leading to the death or capture of nearly a hundred American pilots. The only reason the North Vietnamese stopped firing on the planes was that they ran out of missiles. But Hanoi was not leveled, as can be attested to today by a nighttime stroll through its surviving old quarters. Other parts of North Vietnam, particularly the cities of Nam Dinh and Vinh, the latter an entrance point to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, were not so fortunate. Sixty percent of Nam Dinh was flattened, and the Vinh that exists today is an entirely new (and famously unlovely) city built from the ground up by Soviet and Vietnamese architects after the war.
Did winning the war really require, as some revisionists today claim, that Hanoi share Vinh's fate? In 1967, Robert McNamara told a closed-door session of the Senate Armed Services Committee that bombing could not win the war—” short, that is, of the virtual annihilation of North Vietnam and its people.” Senator Strom Thurmond said he was “terribly disappointed” by McNamara's reluctance to wipe North Vietnam from the face of the earth, as this was clearly a strategy of “appeasing the Communists.” Perhaps the revisionists are right, then, as this surely would have been the most straightforward way to measure the cost of the war. By destroying the place entirely, we finally would have known if Vietnam was worth Vietnam.
Here is Lewis Sorley: “There came a time when the war was won. The fighting wasn't over, but the war was won. This achievement can probably best be dated in late 1970.… By then the South Vietnamese countryside had been
widely pacified, so much so that the term ‘pacification’ was no longer even used.” (Sorley does not note that the process by which parcels of countryside were upgraded to “pacified” was often wishfully subjective.) The war would have kept being won, Sorley writes, if the United States had maintained its support for the South and continued to provide the sort of air strikes it would later unleash during the Easter Offensive. It did not, and so, “unsurprisingly, the war was no longer won.” It does not take a logician to see the problem with this summation. Sorley is on firmer ground when he argues for the improved tactical situation after the Tet Offensive in 1968, when, it is largely agreed, the war in Vietnam went from an insurgency with conventional components to a conventional war with insurgency components. (At least 80 percent of the fighting after 1970 involved PAVN regular forces rather than NLF guerrillas.) The war's new vectors did not always favor the North Vietnamese or the NLF. In the early 1980s, one former NLF guerrilla said of those days that there “was nothing to eat. We were discouraged, very discouraged. We seriously considered surrender. But each time we were tempted we talked about our traditions, about our country, and we kept on fighting.” Does a starved and desperate enemy truly mean the United States was on the verge of winning the war, even though by 1970 “winning” only meant ensuring that the South Vietnamese could defend themselves? As Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker put it at the time, “[W]hen we talk of winning the war, we mean it in the sense of an acceptable political settlement which gives the Vietnamese people the opportunity to choose freely their own government.” Even Henry Kissinger admitted that much of the post-Tet fighting was “for negotiating objectives,” not victory, and Nixon recognized that “total military victory was no longer possible.”
The limited success of the post-Tet years was largely to the credit of Westmoreland's replacement, General Creighton Abrams, a short and pugnacious World War II tank commander. The signature feature of Abrams's tenure was his “one-war strategy,” which integrated pacification, combat operations, and advising the South Vietnamese into a cohesive battle plan. Abrams also provided badly needed moral leadership when he maintained that the most hitherto neglected area of the war was “human relations … a respect for the Vietnamese. It's sensitivity, a sensitivity to humans.” Things did improve. The arming of and reliance upon South Vietnam's Regional and Popular Forces (essentially, village militias) increased under Abrams—there were 1.3 million armed Vietnamese fighting for the South by 1971—and these soldiers proved ferocious enemies of the NLF and PAVN, as the South Vietnamese could always be relied upon to fight well when their own families were in danger. In addition, the ranks of the NLF, which were routed after Tet, were increasingly filled by North Vietnamese who did not hesitate to use terrorism against South Vietnam's people. The percentage of South Vietnamese living in what the U.S. military charitably described as “relatively secure” areas increased to 90 percent immediately after Tet, and at one point (in November 1969) U.S. public support for the war reached 77 percent, which somewhat belies the common revisionist supposition that dour media reporting poisoned Americans on the war. Everyone from Daniel Ellsberg to The New Yorkers Robert Shaplen (who famously said that Abrams was so good, it was a shame he did not have a better war to fight in) to Vo Nguyen Giap noticed these improvements.
Unfortunately, they were most keenly felt and most often highlighted by men near the top of the U.S. and ARVN commands. Many American and South Vietnamese infantrymen felt numb and defeatist, which is to say, realistic. To this state of affairs there were many contributors, such as General Westmoreland's outgoing order as the U.S. drawdown gathered momentum to rotate stateside the most experienced American soldiers. Westmoreland's rotation decision was, in the words of one general, “a disaster.” Incoming units brought with them everything (racism, drug abuse, disillusionment) that was plaguing the United States from Portland to Portland. American soldiers’ deaths creditable to drug overdose went from 16 in 1969 to 700 in 1970. A later study indicated that by the early 1970s at least 34 percent of U.S. troops in Vietnam regularly used heroin. Worldwide desertions from the U.S. military increased sharply from 1968 to 1970, while instances of “fragging” (men killing their commanding officers) more than doubled during the same period.
Many U.S. veterans who served in the early 1970s have described going on “search-and-avoid” patrols rather than search-and-destroy patrols, or “sandbagging” their missions and calling in fictitious reports. In 1970, one U.S. Army division had thirty-five cases of “combat refusal.” (“Is this a goddamned army or a mental hospital?” General Abrams complained. “Officers are afraid to lead their men into battle, and the men won't follow. lesus Christ!”) None of this suggests a U.S. force confident of its post-Tet mission.
The common American grunt had some reason to withdraw into an individual nepenthe. An enemy document known as Resolution 9, written in response to the failed second Tet Offensive of 1969, was captured by the South Vietnamese three months after its issue. Resolution 9 did not admit that the war had been won by the South Vietnamese and the United States. What it did was admit that current tactics were not working, urge an increase in terrorism and other counterpacification efforts, and finally suggest outlasting the United States as a winning strategy, which, in fact, it was. Contra Sorley, the Vietnamese War being fought in the early 1970s was at best a stalemate, and around the following facts there is no easy way: The Soviets were not bombing South Vietnam as the United States was bombing North Vietnam. No Soviet soldiers were fighting for North Vietnam. Nor were any Chinese. North Vietnam had access to a far smaller war chest than did South Vietnam, yet South Vietnam, even with American help, could not decisively end the war or, for that matter, protect itself. Had the offensive of 1975 failed, as the offensive of 1972 failed, as the offensive of 1969 failed, as the offensive of 1968 failed, there would have been an offensive of 1977, and 1979, and 1981. As Pham Van Dong once said to an American reporter, “How long do you Americans want to fight? One year? Five years? Twenty years? We will accommodate you.”
This brings us to the scholar C. Dale Walton's The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam. Called by no less than Walt Rostow”a breath of fresh air” in the literature of the Vietnamese War, Walton's is among the more interesting and well-argued revisionist takes on the war. It is also hopping mad. Walton: “[T]he United States was an immensely wealthy superpower, while its major opponent was a small, impoverished country with little industry and less-than-reliable great power allies. There was no fundamental reason why—compared to most weighty military-political tasks undertaken by great powers throughout history—the odds for US success in Vietnam should not have been very high.” The “fatal error,” according to Walton, was that “the United States enjoyed a robust military advantage in Vietnam, but the American home front was vulnerable. The strategic military efforts of the United States were not, as themselves, fatal for the war effort, but, in misjudging the patience of the American people and the tenacity of the enemy, US leaders provided a key strategic opportunity to Hanoi.”
But—and this is essential—it was not that the American people considered the war unwinnable after 1968. It was that it was clear that winning the war was going to require more time and lives than seemed appropriate or reasonable. For this Walton has some potential solutions: “At no point did the US government pledge to take specific actions that would grievously damage North Vietnam, topple its government, or even prevent it from conducting an expeditionary war by, for example, striving to curtail imports to and disrupt road traffic within that country. This vague and irresolute position put steel in the negotiating posture of the North Vietnamese, and confused the American public about the nature of the war.”
Undeniably, there were peculiarities of decision that hampered the U.S. war effort in numerous ways. For instance, the command structure of the U.S. effort in Vietnam was formidably bizarre. Generals Westmoreland and Abrams were in charge of ground forces in Vietnam but not of the air war against
the North. Air-attack targets in North Vietnam were scrupulously reviewed and approved by civilian policy makers and even by the president himself. The reason for this, as noted, was because the civilian war planners had no faith that the U.S. military would not drag China into the war. And here Walton's book enters the seventh dimension.
Of the possibility of war with China, Walton notes that Mao Zedong “was apparently inclined to avoid unnecessary confrontation with the United States.” That is a big “unnecessary” and a gargantuan “apparently.” The degree to which China was willing to enter the war will remain, at least until Chinese archives are completely opened, controversial. For what it is worth, former South Vietnamese Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky told me in Saigon in 2005 that, in his opinion, the North Vietnamese would have “never asked the Chinese” to help defend them from a U.S. invasion. Complicating matters is Bui Tin's assertion that the North Vietnamese had dolefully accepted by the mid-1960s the reality that China would not come to their aid. Yet many scholars maintain that China would have intervened the moment U.S. forces crossed the Seventeenth Parallel trip wire and moved into North Vietnam. Walton admits that throughout the 1960s, “the Chinese government hinted that it would intervene militarily in Vietnam if the United States invaded [North Vietnam]. After US air attacks on [North Vietnam], Premier Zhou Enlai warned the United States that the PRC [People's Republic of China] might not idly stand by while the United States committed ‘aggression.’ “Other Chinese leaders claimed that “the Vietnamese people are intimate brothers of the Chinese people” and that China “will absolutely not stand idly by without lending a helping hand. The debt of blood incurred by the United States to the Vietnamese people must be repaid.” Walton claims that China “tended to qualify” its more combative rhetoric. China also tended to complicate its rhetoric: in 1965, Mao told the Soviets that “as long as China itself was not attacked” he would not intervene in Vietnam, but months later he told Ho that he would intervene if North Vietnam was invaded.