Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  The Nixon administration debated an invasion of Cambodia or North Vietnam, but Abrams argued forcefully for severing the enemy supply lines in Laos. Nixon, Kissinger, and Westmoreland ultimately agreed with him. While the Winter Soldier Investigation was going on in Detroit, planning for the invasion of Laos was under way. Late in 1970 the United States 101st Airborne Division and the 1st Brigade of the 5th Infantry Division reoccupied the former marine base at Khe Sanh as a staging area for the campaign. To divert enemy attention, a navy task force with the 31st Marine Amphibious Unit aboard hovered off the North Vietnamese city of Vinh, threatening an invasion. The ARVN objective was to drive west from Khe Sanh up Route 9 to Tchepone, about twenty-five miles away, cutting across the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  South Vietnam committed 21,000 troops to the effort. Supported by B-52s and fighter-bombers from the American air force and navy, they invaded Laos on February 8, 1971. The attack was code-named Lam Son 719 after a small village in Thanh Hoa Province, the birthplace of Le Loi, the Vietnamese hero who had defeated an invading Chinese army in 1428. But Laos was not Cambodia. North Vietnam was protecting its lifeline there, not isolated sanctuaries. The region surrounding Tchepone contained 36,000 NVA troops—nineteen antiaircraft battalions, twelve infantry regiments, one tank regiment, one artillery regiment, and elements of the NVA 2nd, 304th, 308th, 320th, and 324th Divisions.

  For the first twelve miles, ARVN encountered only token resistance. But as heavy rains turned Route 9 to mud, the offensive fell short. The South Vietnamese troops fought well, but they were in an impossible position. ARVN air cavalry troops took Tchepone on March 6, but three days later Nguyen Van Thieu ordered a general withdrawal. It took two weeks of bitter fighting along Route 9 for the South Vietnamese to get back out of Laos, and without American air power they would not have made it at all. By the time they reached Khe Sanh, the South Vietnamese admitted to 1,200 men dead and 4,200 wounded, while MACV estimated the dead and wounded together at 9,000.

  Abrams claimed publicly that Lam Son 719 had inflicted 14,000 casualties on the North Vietnamese. Back in Washington, President Nixon was even more effulgent, telling the White House press corps that “18 of 22 battalions conducted themselves with high morale, with greater confidence, and they are able to defend themselves man for man against the North Vietnamese.” In a televised speech on April 7, the president proclaimed, “Tonight I can report that Vietnamization has succeeded.” At the Pentagon, however, the private assessments were grim. Most of the ARVN troops had proven themselves, but in fact they suffered a major military defeat, besides having no success in severing the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The attack, as well as Vietnamization, was a failure.

  Lam Son 719 had important strategic implications for both sides. For South Vietnam and the United States, it widened the field of battle and with fewer resources. For the North Vietnamese, the victory proved that they could prevail over ARVN, even the new 1-million-man ARVN backed by American technology. It was clear to both sides that ARVN was not yet prepared to go it alone. Lam Son 719 inspired another series of antiwar protests. On April 20, more than 200,000 demonstrators gathered in Washington. At John Kerry’s instigation 1,000 Vietnam Veterans against the War, many of them paraplegics and amputees, joined by mothers of men killed in action, held a memorial service at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Nixon secured a court order prohibiting them from camping out on the Mall and laying wreaths on graves of fallen comrades at Arlington Cemetery. That was a jpgt to the press. The veterans and the mothers defied the order, and the administration declined to arrest them. Over police barricades on the Capitol steps, on April 23 nearly 2,000 veterans threw away medals they had won in Vietnam. They wanted to help the nation understand, Kerry explained, “the moral agony of America’s Vietnam war generation—whether to kill on military orders and be a criminal, or to refuse to kill and be a criminal.”

  In the case of one governmental figure, the Winter Soldier Investigation sharpened an agony already close to unbearable: Daniel Ellsberg, born of Jewish converts to Christian Science and blessed, and like everyone with a conscience cursed, with a moral passion and a sense of personal responsibility.

  After graduation from Harvard in 1952, Ellsberg had spent a year at Cambridge University doing graduate work, and then joined the Marine Corps. He wanted to serve his country. When his marine tour ended in 1957, Ellsberg returned to Harvard for doctoral work. He left Harvard in 1959 for a job with the Rand Corporation, a civilian think tank. Ellsberg received the highest security clearances. When John Kennedy won the White House in 1960, Ellsberg got a leave of absence from Rand to serve on McGeorge Bundy’s staff, and in 1964 he became special assistant to John McNaughton, deputy for foreign affairs at the Pentagon.

  Despondent about the breakup of his marriage in 1965, Ellsberg volunteered for the Marine Corps again. When the marines turned him down, he secured a spot on Edward Lansdale’s pacification team. He came back to the Defense Department convinced that success in Vietnam would require massive social and political changes, not just military victories. When Robert McNamara commissioned a study in 1967 of the history of American policy in Vietnam, Ellsberg was one of the senior researchers. A few months at the task convinced him that American policy in Vietnam was a disaster born of a political fact: “no American President, Republican or Democrat, wanted to be the President who lost the war. . . . That fear was sustained by years of duplicity, lies, exaggerations, and cover-ups.”

  By 1968 Ellsberg suffered from a profound guilt about his own role in formulating Vietnam policy. Throughout 1968 he called for a bombing halt and wrote policy papers for Senator Robert Kennedy and then Senator George McGovern. When Richard Nixon was elected in November, Ellsberg sank into a deep depression, and early in 1969 he began photocopying the secret Pentagon study and carrying it page by page to his Washington apartment. He covertly delivered documents to Senator J. William Fulbright so “that the truths that changed me could help Americans free themselves and other victims from our longest war.”

  The Winter Soldier Investigation deepened Ellsberg’s sense of personal responsibility for the war. When he learned of the invasion of Laos later that month, he decided to hand over the secret documents to the New York Times. On June 13, the Times began publishing them, now known as the Pentagon Papers. Nixon was incensed. He ordered the wiretapping of dozens of administration officials to make sure no similar leaks of classified information would occur. The Justice Department secured a court order stopping the New York Times from publishing the documents, but the Boston Globe and the Washington Post continued to make them public. On June 29, 1971, Ellsberg was indicted for conspiracy, theft, violation of the Espionage Act, and converting government property to his personal use. The next day the Supreme Court, by a vote of six to three, overturned the injunction against publishing the Pentagon Papers, citing the First Amendment freedoms of speech and the press. The Pentagon Papers dramatized what the press had long spoken of as the credibility gap, a recognition that the public could not believe anything the government declared.

  South Vietnamese politics deepened disillusionment within the portion of the public that followed events with any attentiveness. President Nguyen Van Thieu was still embarrassed about the election of 1967, when he won office with only 35 percent of the total vote. The debacle in Laos in February and March increased his need for an overwhelming political victory in the October elections. In March 1971 he exempted all civil servants and ARVN from paying income taxes, and the CIA provided him with funds to bribe members of the National Assembly. He secured a bill requiring presidential candidates to receive nominations from forty legislators or 100 of the country’s 554 city and provincial counselors. Thieu then eliminated all of Nguyen Cao Ky’s supporters from the cabinet. When Ky submitted the nominations in July, the Supreme Court of South Vietnam disallowed them. In August several American newspapers revealed that Thieu already had elaborate plans for stuffing ballot boxes and jailing opposition leaders. On election day, 6.3 m
illion people voted and gave Nguyen Van Thieu, the only candidate, a 94.3 percent plurality. Thieu finally had his “mandate from heaven.”

  While the antiwar protests, the controversy over the Pentagon Papers, and the South Vietnamese election were going on, American troops were leaving South Vietnam. In April 1971 the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), the 1st Marine Division, and the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment departed. American troop levels were down to 240,000 men. Three months later the 1st Brigade of the 5th Infantry Division and the 173rd Airborne Brigade departed. The Americal Division left in November, just as President Nixon announced that all remaining American combat operations would be exclusively defensive in nature. On New Year’s Day 1972, Creighton Abrams had only 157,000 troops left. If the United States was going to get out of the war with any grace, it would not happen on the battlefield. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had to find another way.

  “They’re just a bunch of shits. Tawdry, filthy shits,” exploded Kissinger in frustration to Nixon. In encounters during the cumbersome negotions, Kissinger found Le Duc Tho to be impossible. Tho was rigid and doctrinaire, his hatred of Western imperialism embedded in his psyche by years in French colonial prisons. He was also antiforeign to the point of xenophobia and fiercely patriotic, a “Vietnamese chauvinist” in the words of William Turley. Back in February 1971, at a small house on the Rue Darthe in the Paris suburb of Choisy-le-Roi, Kissinger held the first of many secret meetings with Le Duc Tho. But meetings at the house on Rue Darthe were as disappointing as the formal talks at the Hotel Majestic. The United States was still approaching the negotiations on exclusively military terms, proposing a ceasefire, mutual withdrawal of American and North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam, and an exchange of prisoners of war. Le Duc Tho insisted on a comprehensive political settlement: total withdrawal of all American troops, removal of Nguyen Van Thieu from office, immediate participation of the Provisional Revolutionary Government in the government of South Vietnam, exchanges of prisoners of war, and a cessation of hostilities—in that order. Four years of talking and fighting had not yielded a thing.

  Well, they achieved one thing. By early 1972 the negotiators in Paris were in agreement on the shape of the table: a circular table twenty-six feet in diameter, without name plates, place settings, flags, or identifying markings of any kind, where the chief negotiators would sit, and two rectangular tables, three by four and one-half feet each, placed eighteen inches from the circular table and at opposite sides. Nguyen Cao Ky has left a comment on the table debate: “Oh! that table . . . it was of fundamental importance to us. There was no way we were prepared to negotiate with the NLF, who in our view were traitors, and therefore we insisted that the agreement not to distinguish the NLF as a separate party to the talks must be carried out to the letter—and this meant not sitting down ‘officially’ with them at the same table.”

  North Vietnam’s Lo Duc Tho and U.S. negotiator Henry Kissinger meet in secret at Saint-Nom-La-Broteche near Paris to seek agreement on a ceasefire in Vietnam. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)

  Le Duc Tho had a long memory. In 1954 the Vietminh had accepted a military settlement at Geneva and agreed to postpone the political issues—the nebulous promise of free elections two years down the road. The elections never took place. On his deathbed in 1969, Ho Chi Minh warned Pham Van Don and Le Duc Tho not to make the same mistake. It had cost them fifteen years and nearly two million deaths. None of the superpowers—the Soviet Union, France, the United States, and the People’s Republic of China—could be trusted. “Don’t sign the next agreement,” Ho Chi Minh insisted, “until we’re certain of the political outcome.”

  The whole messy business of Vietnam was for Kissinger a distraction from his grand design for a new relationship among the superpowers. By 1971 the Chinese were more afraid of the Soviet Union than of the Americans, and Kissinger thought the time was right for the United States to seek a rapprochement. As an increasingly powerful Vietnamese military spread along China’s southern border in Indochina, and huge Soviet forces arrayed themselves at its northern frontier, Chinese leaders might be ready to talk. They were. Kissinger met secretly with Chinese representatives several times in 1971, and the talks were productive. Kissinger further realized that improving relations between Washington and Beijing would alarm the Soviet leaders, increasing their willingness to negotiate in good faith, particularly on such critical issues as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks then going on at Geneva. A unique opportunity to play the USSR off against the Chinese and improve the American diplomatic position vis-à-vis both was at hand. Kissinger called the new diplomatic initiative “détente,” a mutual, morality-free process of cooperation and accommodation among the superpowers. Throughout 1971 and early 1972 Kissinger planned summit meetings in Moscow and Beijing so that Richard Nixon, the old militant anticommunist, could reshape modern international politics. Nixon began that process in February 1972 with a triumphant visit to Beijing. The summit with the Soviet Union was scheduled for May.

  Between Kissinger and destiny stood Vietnam. If the United States lost the war, the political repercussions back home would be severe. The right wing might rise up in self-righteous indignation and set off another McCarthy era, wrecking any hopes Kissinger had of implementing a new relationship with the USSR and the Chinese. If the United States withdrew without achieving “peace with honor,” its reduced credibility would abort détente because neither the Soviet leaders nor the Chinese would take the United States seriously. Kissinger needed an acceptable settlement of the war in Vietnam.

  Nixon worried constantly that the public would interpret endless negotiations as a sign of weakness. He was in his tough mood, as if George C. Scott’s version of George S. Patton had become his alter ego. He was up for reelection and needed to do something to prove himself, to show the public that his “secret plan” of 1968 to end the war was more than campaign rhetoric. But at the end of 1971, Vietnamization was playing into Le Duc Tho’s hands. In just a short while, there would be no American troops to cope with. As far as Nixon was concerned, Kissinger had a weak hand to play in Paris. The only military option left to the president was bombing, and he was ready to use it. “I’m going to show the bastards,” he told Kissinger in the spring. “Unless they deal with us I’m going to bomb the hell out of them.” Nixon was in an anxious mood; the madman device was turning from strategy to psychological condition.

  In the spring of 1972 the North Vietnamese tested the madman. The huge reduction in American forces and the failure of ARVN during the Lam Son invasion made possible the thought of winning. Combined with the increasing confidence in success was a new urgency about seeking it. The improvement in relations between China and the United States threatened to pull Vietnam’s northern neighbor away from its commitment to Hanoi. That danger was confirmed in late 1971 when the Chinese intimated that Vietnamese reunification might be a matter of years, not months. A major figure behind the determination to act quickly was Vo Nguyen Giap, who guaranteed “a great victory over the Americans and their Saigon puppets.” The Politburo in 1971 decided on “a decisive victory” to force “the United States to end the war by negotiating from a position of defeat.”

  Abrams was expecting an attack. Since 1968 the North Vietnamese had used the Tet holidays for offensives, and as early as October 1971 MACV was warning ARVN to get ready. February 1, 1972, came and went, with no attack. ARVN maintained an alert status throughout most of February, but the American warnings grew stale. ARVN commanders relaxed, and Giap traded the Vietnamese New Year holiday for the American Easter celebrations.

  The North Vietnamese offensive began on Good Friday, March 30. By that time there were 95,000 American troops still in South Vietnam, only 6,000 of them combat forces. Under a heavy, advanced artillery barrage, more than 30,000 North Vietnamese, accompanied by 200 Soviet tanks, crossed the Demilitarized Zone and attacked Quang Tri Province in I Corps. Giap had moved long-range 130-mm artillery just north of the Hieu Giang River,
bringing under bombardment Quang Tri City and an area five miles south. Heavy cloud cover limited the effectiveness of American tactical air strikes. The NVA troops kept up the artillery assault on ARVN posts, and on April 27 they attacked Quang Tri City. Thousands of South Vietnamese refugees fled the city for the protection of Hue, but the North Vietnamese targeted the 130-mm artillery on Highway 1, exacting a heavy toll on the refugees. The ARVN 3rd Division was caught off guard and began falling back along Highway 1. On May 1, the 304th North Vietnamese Division took control of Quang Tri City.

  Giap hoped to inspire a deployment of American and ARVN troops north into I Corps while he prepared for three other attacks. Another 35,000-man contingent of North Vietnamese troops, the now-reinforced remnants of the units attacked in Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971, assembled in Cambodia for an assault on Saigon, while 35,000 more soldiers prepared for a campaign against Dak To in the Central Highlands. Giap hoped the battle in the north would distract ARVN forces, increasing the possibility of success in the scheduled attacks in the Central Highlands and on Saigon. On April 2 North Vietnamese troops moved out of Cambodia¸ employing tanks and armored personnel carriers. They moved down Highway 13, seized Loc Ninh, surrounded An Loc, and severed the route to Saigon. One week later North Vietnam attacked Dak To with the objective of taking Kontum. As the commanders planned it, if Kontum fell they would drive toward the South China Sea and cut South Vietnam in half. To prepare for that possibility, two North Vietnamese divisions invaded Binh Dinh Province and took control of several districts along the South China Sea, cutting Highway 1 and the link between Hue and Saigon. The combined total of Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops committed to the offensive was 200,000.