To replace the gun tubes my detachment had to fly by helicopter to the firebases with new tubes, replace the old tubes, and fly back. The tubes were slung under the helicopter, and sometimes the whole gun was replaced. An entire 105 mm gun could be airlifted by a Huey. Sometimes the gun, hanging on an arrangement of straps, would begin swaying back and forth after we were up in the air, pulling the helicopter this way and that. I asked if there was any emergency disconnect so that if the weight of the gun and the swaying was endangering us, we could just drop the damn thing and save ourselves. No one, it seemed, had thought of that.
My mechanical mind thought that an emergency disconnect arrangement, an explosive bolt, or some kind of solenoid gizmo that would cut the gun loose and save the passengers was not just helpful but mandatory. Two terrifying thoughts struck. First was that there was no way of dropping a gun and saving us. Second was that the people who should have thought of this, hadn’t. Why hadn’t they? And what else hadn’t they thought of? This realization aroused a desperate anxiousness in me. The rest of the army seemed to accept a sloppiness and carelessness that others have noted is an American failing. In short, since we are convinced that God is on our side, details don’t count. God would take care of the details.
So within the first weeks in country I was flying back and forth to firebases, half in amazement and half in terror. In addition I had to somehow not show the interior terror, a task that requires an extra effort. Sometimes the terror was pushed aside by the amazement I felt toward the machinery of the pieces and parts of how the war worked. For example, a helicopter, which is, I will admit freely, an amazing machine. The principle of flight is turned into a precise rotary tool. You think about this and you are amazed. And then you think about the actual machinery involved. The blades are spun around and have their angle adjusted by one, rather small, intricate bearing that is powered by the jet turbine engine. The entire weight of the helicopter hangs on this extremely complicated machinery, rotating at a blinding speed. Between life — that is, getting home safely with the crew to live another day — and screaming death from three thousand feet with your life passing before your eyes, there’s just this whirling, spinning metal hub, designed and produced by the same American engineers with the same unproven hope that God was on our side.
It doesn’t pay to think about these things, certainly not with all the other dangers in a war zone — mortars, mines, incoming rifle fire, rockets, and sappers. In the time not spent in actual fighting you should be able to think about your family, your children, your future and their future. Reality interrupts when rank stupidity and nonsense is presented by commanders who deny the general lunacy of the situation. It took me about two weeks to begin an increasingly self-centered attitude. I would ignore idiotic orders and obey my inner coward, and if challenged I would freely admit this attitude. I heard one enlisted man respond to a major yelling at him about a mistake: “Sorry, sir, this is my first war.”
8
Obviously, some people, men for the most part, want to be soldiers, want to fight, want to prove their mettle (whatever mettle is) and enjoy competitive violence. These people start wars. The rest of us are left to finish them. In the case of the Vietnam War the initiators were largely the US Air Force. When pressed, and even when not pressed, and even when told to shut up, I could recount the historical failings of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. In the decade after the Second World War, the US Air Force told the politicians that Soviet and Chinese communist expansion could be controlled surgically from above with something called, fingers crossed, strategic bombing. If an insurgent force, like the Vietcong, for instance, attempted to take over a democratically elected government, they could be bombed into retreat. This was because being bombed was such a horrific, frightening, unbearable experience that rebels would not want to challenge it a second time. Certainly not a third.
Except that this is complete crap, proven in every war since the Blitz. Bombing raids must be followed by troops taking over a ruined city or desperate countryside and holding it. Bombed people are twice as angry as they were before. Young men whose fathers you have killed are now resolved to fight you to their own deaths. Fathers whose children you have killed are your sworn enemies forever. They are willing to die to get revenge. It was a repeated maxim that Asians did not revere and value life as much as Americans did. More crap, not tested and not proved. We could not control rebellions or communist insurgencies by dropping bombs on people. Historical examples were so numerous that only by resolutely ignoring history could anyone conclude that strategic bombing would work. To resolutely ignore this evidence, we had the air force.
Sometime in the 1950s the air force, no longer a part of the army, developed a concept known, either officially or jocularly, as the Air Force Plans for Peace. These plans were developed to counter the equally unproven theory that intercontinental ballistic missiles could keep people in line. For the air force the challenge was to keep the need for manned aircraft alive. If missiles were accepted as effective, why would jet fighters and huge bombers be needed? Why would anything other than missiles be needed? For a time John Kennedy was at least partially convinced that this was true. Fear of obsolescence ran through the upper ranks of the air force. Bombing would work. Especially nuclear bombing.
And then reality raised its ugly, grinning head. Bombing did not stop enemy insurgents. In fact, it gave the enemy the one thing they desperately needed, an enemy. Being bombed by the capitalist Americans meant, among other things, that Lenin, or Mrs. Lenin, was right. In World War II bombing didn’t defeat the British, but never mind that, either. In fact, the air force concluded that the example of the Blitz could be used to make their point. Bombing did not defeat the British because, wait for it, Göring stopped too soon. Well, there, you see? He didn’t bomb enough. That was his problem. We Americans would not make that mistake. Not us! We learned from history.
Bombing would work, the air force said, if you did it long enough. With this lesson from history firmly in mind, the Air Force dropped a tonnage of bombs on North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia so great that they, even today, cannot calculate it accurately. The popular claim is that the tonnage exceeded the total of all bombs dropped by all sides in World War II, but as previously asked, that means exactly what? Flying from bases in Thailand, the air force loosed hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs on the supply lines coming down through the jungle from the north, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In theory, without supplies the North would capitulate. And maybe it would have, if the supplies were being transported on railroad trains. But the supplies, food, ammunition, medicines, and so on, were being transported on bicycles. The air force hadn’t thought of that. They were dropping bombs on bicycles. Their theory was that the powerful and destructive American bombs would convince the North Vietnamese to stop fighting and give up. The bombing went on, year after year. The failure obviously was not bombing enough. Assurance was given that with another year of bombing, with more plentiful, more explosive bombs, the North would capitulate. They are a simple people, not very bright you see, and they are slow to get the point.
But in fact, they did get the point. The bombs raining from the sky proved that their leaders, Ho Chi Minh, General Giap, and others, were right. The Americans were the same as the French before them. They sought Vietnam’s wealth, whatever it was, and they would, like the French, corrupt the government and enslave the people. It had nothing to do with communism. And like the French, the Americans could be defeated. The day would come when the Americans would pack up and leave. The indisputable fact was that bombing didn’t bring victory in populated urban areas, and it was even less effective in the thick mountainous jungles of North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Anyone in the Pentagon could have figured this out, and perhaps they did, but it was never admitted.
In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad early on describes a European warship firing a cannon at the African coast. There is a loud noise and a puff
of smoke and the cannonball disappears into the huge, dark immensity of Africa. All to no effect. No one is impressed except maybe the gun crew on the ship. There is a loud noise and an echo, and then the silence returns, unchanged. Conrad was showing that what impressed the Europeans as superiority in weapons actually had no effect against the vastness of the African continent. It was similar to what the American bombing accomplished. It could not lead to victory, and it actually contributed to the chances of American defeat.
A bomb falls and explodes in the jungle, a ferocious roar, tons of dirt fly up in the air, trees are knocked over, the air is shocked. Fifteen seconds later the dirt has come down to earth, the trees lie there, and the stillness returns. Anyone not within about two hundred yards of the explosion is unhurt. A bit dazed perhaps, but free to march on. Not only has the explosion been ineffectual, but it has also dug a hole deep enough to be a fine shelter for the next attack. The bomb craters were just about everywhere after years of bombing. Thus, there were plenty of handy places to take cover. And how would a North Vietnamese on the ground know that it was time to take cover? No mystery there, either. The bombers, mostly B-52s, made lots of noise. They could be heard approaching, and thus gave warning that it was time to jump into the shelter provided by the previous bombs.
Certainly, some enemy were killed by US bombing. But the Ho Chi Minh Trail was nearly a mile wide in some places. If anyone with a logical military mind had added up the pluses and minuses of the nearly ten-year bombing campaign, they would have concluded that it was a failure. That conclusion could have been reached sometime well before the Tet Offensive in 1968, when the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies were surprised and pushed back by weapons and explosives brought down the Ho Chi Minh Trail quite safely.
Shortly after I arrived and was assigned to the ordnance detachment, the US command in Saigon decided to make a major incursion over the border into Cambodia. No one paid any attention to protests from the Cambodian government, which was as close to no government as possible. The leader, as far as anyone could see, was Prince Sihanouk, who seemed to be the last of a questionable royalty. Prince Sihanouk added a touch of comedy to an already tragic series of events. He was short and rotund, with a squeaky voice and a series of idiotic explanations of Cambodia’s role in the war. The US incursion was to find a North Vietnamese supply depot of stuff brought down the trail. The North evidently planned to use the items in a full-scale onslaught against the Saigon area. The depot, called Rock Island East, was an enormous accumulation of weaponry, Chinese rifles and machine guns, Russian mortars, rockets, mines, and grenades. And bicycles. Thousands of Chinese-made bicycles that were used to transport the weaponry south, and then were of no further use. My detachment followed the mechanized US infantry up the highway and over the border.
Back home Nixon explained the significance of this operation on national television. His explanation was later revealed to have gotten it all wrong. His misinterpretation and his confused performance before a map was amusing enough in itself. Nixon had scant knowledge of Southeast Asia, and I believe little interest. Nixon relied on a man, I guess, named Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser at the time. Kissinger was a great sack of unwarranted self-regard who had Nixon in a trap. When his errors were later pointed out, there was cause for embarrassment. So the Nixon administration came up with the excuse that it had intentionally told the American people an erroneous tale because the enemy would be watching and might gain from an accurate rendition. Kissinger had the special intellectual skill needed to come up with such face-saving explanations. It was a misplaced skill without doubt, but still, in its perversity, special.
I traveled with a convoy of sorts north from Tay Ninh and over the border to Rock Island East. We would destroy any weaponry that couldn’t be carried back to Vietnam. Somehow in the confusion of my assignment it had been assumed that, like most ordnance officers, I had some skill in explosive demolition. I did not. I was not qualified as EOD, explosive ordnance disposal. The very idea was scary enough, but that an army screwup had put someone, me, who knew nothing about explosives in a position to actually do something with explosives was frightening.
I came back across the border to Vietnam with the 15th Transport Battalion in heavy-duty off-road stake-and-platform trucks full of the collected weapons, Chinese rifles, mortar tubes and shells, rockets, hundreds of thousands of rounds of rifle ammunition, and thousands of Chinese bicycles. I wondered, why not leave the bicycles? We could have given some of them away to the villagers, but no one gave such orders. The villagers watched us go by, nearly invisible in the clouds of dust. This huge volume of weaponry had been transported down the trail, on dirt tracks, through jungles and forests, across rivers, and all under daily bombardment by the air force. Anyone who gave this some analytical thought would conclude that these people, the North Vietnamese in particular, would be hard to beat.
What happened to all the weapons and matériel brought back from Cambodia in this huge operation was unclear. Some was donated to the South Vietnamese army, but I suspected that they wouldn’t want it. They already had great amounts of American armament. In all probability it was mostly sold in some Saigon market and, in additional probability, sold back to the Chinese. Rumors, logical rumors, of wild corruption were traded everywhere. All were impossible to trace but easy to believe. By 1970 stories about failures of American planning and execution were valued by journalists and their editors back home much more than tales of heroism or success. After the 1968 Tet attacks, reports of failures were believed and reports of successes were not.
As the war went on, American commanders increased their distrust of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the ARVN, our allies. With good reason. The top ARVN officers had their positions because of cronyism and family connections. Even if some ARVN commanders had their positions because of military skills and bravery, Americans felt they were poor commanders. In the early years of the war, the American role was called an “advisory” one. Based on the US’s overwhelming military superiority, from the Second World War on, the presumption was that we could help an ally by advising in tactics and strategy, but not actually getting into firefights. At times we would help with weapons and training, and strategic bombing, and maybe even some road and bridge construction. It’s easy to see how this role could expand. In addition, the term advisory had more value as a way of gaining approval from the American government. Congressmen could more easily explain that the sons and daughters of their constituents were going to Southeast Asia to advise, in a friendly, avuncular way, rather than actually killing people.
The more important of the two US command structures in Vietnam was MACV, the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam. This bureaucratic mass of personnel was stationed near Saigon in a huge agglomeration of buildings, all air-conditioned and well PX’d. It had pools and gyms, and card rooms, and numerous officers’ clubs. MACV headquarters duty was as luxurious as a war has ever been.
But the second command structure was USARV, the US Army in Vietnam. It was the regular American army, somewhat separate, and it kept its own counsel not only from its Vietnamese allies but also from MACV. The American army and the South Vietnamese army seldom shared intelligence. There were numerous examples of valuable foreknowledge about enemy operations and locations that the USARV developed but did not willingly share with anyone. Not even MACV. Why? The first reason was that it didn’t trust the advisers because they were too close to the ARVN. Officers in the ARVN had ulterior motives — family connections, property to protect, infighting for promotions, and mutual distrust of the Americans. The second reason was a good deal worse — the Americans’ lack of knowledge of the history of Vietnam. The American advisers either didn’t know the country’s history or didn’t care. But the officers of the ARVN did. They knew that Vietnam had been at war somewhere or with someone for nearly all of its existence. The American phase of this constant state of war would come to an end.
In the minds of ARVN officers and Vietnamese officials, it would be much less than a victory for the American allies, probably a stalemate, and possibly a defeat. So where then was the motivation to risk anything, lives, limbs, or anything of value?
I was assigned for a time as an adviser, helper, liaison, whatever I chose to call it, to the 9th ARVN Division. This assignment was only a marginal improvement over my role as an ordnance officer, and thankfully it only lasted about a month. The living conditions were actually worse than I had in Tay Ninh. Certain technological improvements were lacking. Rat traps, for example. The ARVN had none. The bunkers were full of large rats and other Asian specialties. The ARVN troops waged a battle against the rats by leaving out food and then shooting the rats that showed up to eat. Isolated shots rang out in the night, making sleep impossible. Sleep was impossible anyway, so there was little to effectively justifiably complain about.
Lieutenant Dangerous Page 7