Dragon's Jaw

by Stephen Coonts

  General Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi recognized the greater truth: Tet was a strategic victory over the hearts and minds of American civilians.

  The Communist shock-and-awe campaign left Washington stunned. CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite interjected a personal opinion in a late February newscast, saying, “We are mired in a stalemate.”

  Watching the program, Johnson reportedly exclaimed, “If I’ve lost Walter I’ve lost Middle America.”18 Finally—finally—the Capitol Hill arm twister grasped the fact that he could not hustle the hard-eyed pragmatists of the Hanoi politburo.

  Out in the heartland nonpolitical Americans with a visceral dislike for Communism had to face the fact that their government had apparently bitten off more than it could chew. The vultures began circling: this sitting president faced challengers in the Democratic primaries for the presidential nomination for the November election.

  The one bright spot in all this angst was that Robert McNamara departed, eased out by the president, with his last day at the Pentagon on February 28, 1968. He officially departed on July 1 to become president of the World Bank.

  Savaged by the press, “Johnson buckled,” Henry Kissinger said years later. Ever the fool, Lyndon Johnson decided to try another bombing pause, even though the previous ones had been abject failures. This time he would do it with a twist: on March 31, 1968, he announced, “Tonight, I have ordered our aircraft and naval vessels to make no attacks on North Vietnam except in the area north of the Demilitarized Zone where the continuing enemy buildup directly threatens allied forward positions and when the movements of their troops and supplies are clearly related to that threat.

  “The area in which we are stopping our attacks includes almost 90 percent of North Vietnam’s population and most of its territory. Thus there will be no attacks around the principal populated areas, or in the food-producing areas of North Vietnam.”

  Johnson ended his speech with these words: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.”19

  Johnson had just admitted that his leadership of America’s effort in Vietnam had failed. The air campaign over North Vietnam, which McNamara’s Whiz Kids had orchestrated, Johnson also believed to be a failure. And the way he and McNamara had run it, it certainly was. Unwilling as ever to fight hard enough to win in Vietnam, Johnson began trying to extricate America from the Indochina quagmire. But it was too little, too late: America was in to its neck.

  The irony is that the military campaign had actually begun to bear fruit. Tet was a military defeat for the Communists and arguably should have been followed up with all the military pressure it was possible to apply. In his book White House Years Henry Kissinger remarked, “There is much evidence that at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive Hanoi was on the point of exhaustion when saved by our unilateral bombing halt. There is no doubt in my mind that the resumption of bombing in May 1972 hastened the end of the war.”20

  And then, miraculously, just three days after Johnson’s announcement of the bombing halt, the North Vietnamese agreed to negotiate in Paris. Americans soon realized that the Communists’ move to the bargaining table was a Pyrrhic victory. Months were spent arguing about the shape of the conference table—square or round? When that was finally settled, Hanoi made its demands: the United States must leave Vietnam and overthrow the South Vietnamese government. There was nothing to negotiate: Hanoi demanded an American surrender. This farce continued for years, making it politically very difficult for the Americans to resume bombing while “negotiating.” This was the political impasse into which Lyndon Johnson had adroitly maneuvered America.

  The bridge missions on January 28 were the Vietnam War in microcosm: American technology and persistence pitted against Asian patience and resolve.

  When Johnson’s announcement of the end of bombing came two months later it was anticlimactic. The Americans had done everything possible to drop the Dragon’s Jaw and had nothing left to throw at the bridge.

  Since the start of the war at least twelve aircraft had been lost on missions against the bridge: six F-105s, two F-4s, two A-1s, an F-100, and a C-130. Thirteen fliers were dead or missing in action and seven captured. Only one man, F-105 pilot Major Robert E. Lambert, had been rescued, back in May 1965.

  In August in Chicago the Democrats held their convention to nominate a presidential candidate. As the nation watched on television, antiwar protesters rioted outside the convention hall as clouds of tear gas wafted through the downtown and leaked inside.

  In October the last bomb fell on North Vietnam. Rolling Thunder was over.

  In November the Democrat nominee, Hubert H. Humphrey, the “Happy Warrior,” lost the presidential election to Republican Richard M. Nixon.

  At year’s end Apollo Eight orbited the moon and returned to earth. It was an amazing irony: America couldn’t defeat Ho Chi Minh or extricate itself from Vietnam but was well on its way to putting a man on the moon.

  On the Ma River at Thanh Hoa the twisted, blackened, scarred steel of the Dragon’s Jaw Bridge still stood.

  CHAPTER 15

  “COURAGE IS FEAR THAT HAS SAID ITS PRAYERS”

  Former Republican vice president Richard M. Nixon was handily elected president in November 1968. Nixon’s victory was won partly on the basis of his “secret plan” to end the war.

  The policy was “Vietnamization”—turning over the heavy lifting to Saigon while America gradually pulled troops from the country. Anyone who read newspapers realized that without the US Army and Marine Corps, South Vietnam would have collapsed under the Communist juggernaut at Tet in 1968. If and when the United States pulled its soldiers and Marines out of South Vietnam, the Republic’s days were numbered unless a political settlement could be reached that North Vietnam would honor.

  So Lyndon Baines Johnson left the White House in January 1969, following Robert Strange McNamara, the number-crunching Whiz Kid from Ford, out the door. McNamara’s gradual application of military pressure had been a spectacular failure. He ultimately came to the conclusion “that we could not achieve our objective in Vietnam through any reasonable military means” and told the president just that. “President Johnson was not ready to accept that. It was becoming clear to both of us that I would not change my judgment, nor would he change his.”1 Johnson sent McNamara to the World Bank and, after Nixon took office, went back to Texas.

  Rolling Thunder ended on November 2, 1968, forty-five months to the day after it began in March 1965. In stark contrast, America’s involvement in World War II against Japan, Germany, and Italy also lasted forty-five months, from December 1941 until August 1945. Johnson’s vacillating policy had involved seven partial or complete bombing halts lasting days or even months. The total respite Johnson had given North Vietnam was an amazing twelve of those forty-five months.

  Part of the problem seems to have been racial or cultural condescension in Washington. Certainly the Air Force and Navy airmen who flew against North Vietnam’s air defenses fully appreciated their opponents’ courage, competence, resiliency, and dedication. Lyndon Johnson was apparently ignorant of the writings of Renaissance Italian theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, whose advice to the prince was: “Never do your enemy a small injury.” Machiavelli practically defined the school of realistic statecraft; LBJ flunked the course.

  Make no mistake, the Rolling Thunder air campaign against the North had caused the Communists severe damage: the Air Force claimed destruction of 1,305 bridges and damage to nearly 1,800. The airmen also reported destroying or damaging 2,800 AAA sites, 170 SAM sites, and 260 radar sites. Yet the air war was geographically limited: North Vietnam’s vital population and industrial centers of Hanoi and Haiphong were immune from attack for much of that period. Even worse, for political reasons the United States refused to make the effort required to win air supremacy over North Vietnam. Some MiG bases were bombed in the spring of 1967. Runways were cratered, some planes were destroyed on the ground, but Washing
ton vacillated, as usual. The effort came to little.

  An eyewitness account of the conditions in North Vietnam after Rolling Thunder was provided by John Colvin, a British intelligence agent and diplomat in the region dating from World War II. He wrote, “My traveler told me that there had been, as a result of the bombing, only one undamaged bridge between Hanoi and Thanh Hoa in the southeast of the DVR (Democratic Republic of Vietnam).… Between Phu Ly, a town along the main route to the South which had been largely evacuated in 1966 and later almost totally destroyed, and Thanh Hoa, he saw electric lights on two occasions only.… He saw no piped water supply in any town or villages of the area. The center and the main streets of Thanh Hoa had been heavily damaged; shops open sold little more than oil, salt, cloth and, occasionally, cigarettes.”2

  Still, militarily, the destruction had been insufficient. The hard truth remained: before Rolling Thunder North Vietnam was an agrarian society barely on the verge of the modern era, and the air campaign had not set it back much. After the air campaign most villagers lived precisely as they had before—without electricity, telephones, or running water and working in the rice paddies, tending small gardens, and fishing in coastal waters. Manufacturing, such as it was, was accomplished by hand or animal power.

  Yet the most important fact was that North Vietnam was an absolute dictatorship. Any Vietnamese who lived north of the 17th parallel who thought that the politburo should discuss peace terms with the Americans and stop the bloodshed kept their mouths firmly shut.

  That was not the case in America, and the Communists understood that the war would be won when the American public refused to allow it to go further. They fought with every weapon available to influence American public opinion in their favor. As Kamejiro Senaga, a Japanese Communist politician, said, “We will create hate for your soldiers in the minds of your people.”

  Offensive wars are always difficult for a democracy to wage. Lyndon Johnson should have read the masterwork of the ancient Greek, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War. This account of democratic Athens’ thirty-year war against Sparta, which Athens lost, should be required reading for every politician.

  History and hindsight tell us Johnson made several mistakes. First, regardless of John F. Kennedy’s commitment to Vietnam, Johnson should have reevaluated and asked the basic question: Is a military adventure in Vietnam in America’s national interest? Arguably, even in the middle of the Cold War, it wasn’t. If there is historical evidence that the Johnson administration ever addressed this basic policy question after JFK’s assassination, the authors are unaware of it.

  Secondly, once Johnson decided to get into a shooting war with North Vietnam, he made the egregious error of not getting a declaration of war from Congress when it could have been his for the asking. When he needed it to keep the nation rallied around a national cause, such a declaration was beyond his grasp.

  His third error was persistently refusing to solicit or follow the advice of the military professionals on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If anyone in Washington knew what military arms could and could not accomplish, it was those men. Certainly it was not Robert S. McNamara nor his civilian “Whiz Kids.”

  Military aviation attracted some of the nation’s best, brightest young minds in post–World War II America. On July 21, 1969, two military aviators, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, walked on the moon. They had both been fighter pilots who logged combat time in Korea. Neil Armstrong was a junior naval aviator who flew from a carrier. Upon leaving the Navy he completed his engineering degree at Purdue. He was a highly skilled, experienced civilian test pilot when NASA selected him for astronaut training. In 1970, after his moon walk, he earned his master’s in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California. After leaving NASA he went on to become a professor of engineering at the University of Cincinnati.3

  Buzz Aldrin, born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. (he later legally changed his name to Buzz), went to the Air Force upon graduation from the US Military Academy. Flying F-86 Sabre jets, he shot down two MiG-15s over Korea. He earned a doctorate in astronautics from MIT in 1963. A career fighter pilot, although he was not a test pilot, he was accepted as an astronaut after NASA dropped the test pilot requirement. Aldrin served twenty-one years in the Air Force, retiring in 1972 as a colonel. Despite having no test piloting experience outside of NASA, his last posting was as commandant of the Air Force Test Pilot School. Like Armstrong, Aldrin too ultimately went into academia. He joined the University of North Dakota’s faculty in 1985, helped develop the university’s space studies program and recruited its first department chair from NASA.4

  But few of America’s military aviators would walk on the moon; several hundred of them were imprisoned in Hanoi. And the Vietnamese Communists fully intended to use them to manipulate American and international public opinion.

  Prisoners of war (POWs) possessed military information that was usually time limited. Aircrews seldom knew upcoming targets and could claim—truthfully—that such information was never passed down to their level. Technical data had a longer lifespan, but much of it was generic. Pilots didn’t design, manufacture, or maintain weapons systems. Interrogators were far more likely to torture prisoners for political advantage, especially propaganda statements.

  The North Vietnamese interrogators had plenty of help. Russians participated in some sessions. Cubans tortured a dozen or more POWs and beat at least one American to death. Upon repatriation, surviving prisoners were told by their own government not to mention third-world interrogators due to “diplomatic ramifications.” When the Obama administration normalized relations with Cuba in 2016, no mention was made of Fidel Castro’s staff in the Hanoi Hilton nor the Cuban MiGs that murdered four Americans in international airspace in 1996.5

  In addition, committed leftists, such as American Trotskyite writer Mary McCarthy and actress Jane Fonda, were given access to the POWs. Later McCarthy wrote that she considered Robinson Risner “a gaunt, squirrel-faced man” who “had not changed his cultural spots.” In other words, he resisted Communist extortion. Yet at the time of their enforced meeting she exhibited some concern, asking the guards if she could send prisoners a Bible and some food. The turnkeys said Bibles “would cause problems” and the air pirates received “plenty of wholesome foods.” In truth, many prisoners were sick and emaciated. Their diet frequently consisted of rice with boiled pumpkin or cabbage soup.6

  Jane Fonda’s behavior was so special it earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane,” which she has carried with her through the date of this writing and will probably be featured in prominent headlines in her obituaries. She went to Hanoi in July 1972, where seven POWs were paraded to interviews with her for propaganda photo ops. She claimed they asked her to tell their friends and family to support presidential candidate George McGovern because they feared they’d never be freed during a Richard Nixon administration. Back in the states Fonda said about the torture the POWs endured that “these men bombed and strafed and napalmed the country. If a prisoner tries to escape, it is quite understandable that he would probably be beaten and tortured.”7

  Symptomatic of the passions the war unleashed, “[I]n March 1973 the Maryland state legislature held a hearing to have Fonda and her films barred from the state. William Burkhead, a Democrat state delegate from Anne Arundel, said, ‘I wouldn’t want to kill her, but I wouldn’t mind if you cut her tongue off.’… She continued to openly question the accounts of the US government and American POWs, who told devastating stories of the torture they endured at the hands of the North Vietnamese.”8

  Fonda had a gift for infuriating people. In the eyes of many Americans her greatest sin was posing with a North Vietnamese 57-millimeter gun crew, seated in the gunner’s seat. The photo was reproduced in almost every newspaper on the planet. She apologized for that photo in the years that followed, but it still defines her. She was an actress who lent her celebrity to far-left causes without understanding them. In fact, she defines the stereotype.r />
  Several leading lights among the POWs had been shot down attacking the Thanh Hoa Bridge or in the vicinity. Smitty Harris had been downed on the second bridge strike in 1965 and was instrumental in efforts to resist the Communists in prison. With three others he implemented the tap code that POWs used to communicate with each other.

  Bob Peel, the Tennessee athlete and F-105 pilot, found, like many POWs, that faith and humor were essential in Hanoi’s extortionist pressure cooker. He explained,

  This faith helped POWs to maintain a sense of humor that carried them through dark hours of torture. When doors would slam, and tramping feet would notify each prisoner that some new punishment was at hand, one of them came up with the statement, “If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t have joined.” This would ease the tension and help us face with a smile whatever was in store for us.

  Another example is the ability it gives you to laugh for a while during torture. This is something the captors in North Vietnam could never understand. During beatings or other forms of torture you would be told to say you are a criminal, you are a criminal. You answer, “You are a criminal, you are a criminal,” and it blows his stack. How can you make fun of him when you are powerless to resist anything he wants to do to you? It helped our morale, as on the Hanoi march, many heads were “bloody, but unbowed.”9

  Ray Merritt, also an F-105 pilot, was shot down on the same day as Robbie Risner, September 10, 1965. Like so many prisoners, he found an upbeat aspect to a terrible situation: “In one way, [being a POW] was a positive. You know that you can survive. You can dig down deep to find whatever is necessary to keep you going, whether it is military training or schooling or your God.… We knew that even if we were shot down, our job was not done. We knew that if we could tie up the enemy’s assets that they would have to deal with us instead of shooting at our planes.”10