The commanding officer, a reserve major, was guilty of taking the war, and himself, seriously. This was a dangerous sort of personality, prone to theatrically overworking the staff and giving patriotic talks to the men. He was probably at the most interesting and imaginative point in his life, full of military fustian, lots of saluting and squinting. He didn’t like me, but by that time, about two months in country, I had lost my usual concern about personal popularity. On the desk in front of him was a letter from Senator George Aiken, my senator from Vermont to whom I had written, complaining about my misassignment. The major took a long minute to squint at me. But by this time I had been squinted at before, and this had almost no effect. I had heard that the army took a dim view of politicians interfering in their methods. And it was more than understandable that they should resist any senator or congressman trying to influence their operations or personnel assignments. The major inquired in clipped tones if I thought he had nothing to do all day but respond to politicians back home, prompted by complaints from miserable little shits like the one standing in front of him. He hadn’t heard of George Aiken, or of Vermont, either, I thought. Senator Aiken, a venerable Republican of pronounced Yankee ethics, had famously condensed the frustration of the nation with the length and expense of the war by suggesting a terse solution. He said we should simply announce that we had won and come home. This solution had nearly universal appeal by being practical, pragmatic, and just slightly smart-assed. It was one of those suggestions that is probably impossible, but no one can tell you why.
Within days I was relieved of my temporary command and sent north to the division headquarters. I was given a brief welcoming interview with the commanding general. No one had the slightest idea what to do with me. The general asked if I understood Vietnamese. I admitted that at one point I did, but some time had passed, and a lot had been forgotten. That’s just fine the general said tiredly. I’ll do the best I can, I volunteered. Well, if you need anything…the general said, and turned to other concerns. I was left with the division chaplain for advice and guidance.
The chaplains in the Vietnam War, at least in the army, were oddly interesting. This chaplain became a friend. He was nominally a Catholic, intelligent and genial. I should have written down his name, and maybe his order. I should have written down a lot of things, but I didn’t. We discussed the war and its deeper meanings, and he seemed to be a philosopher edging toward the secular side of religion. Even so he liked to examine our curious situation, in a war we both hated, but which we were pursuing against odds stacked against us, at least on a personal level. Being a war chaplain gave him points in his church career, a fact that he quietly confessed to be proud of. He counseled American troops of all faiths, and some ARVN soldiers, both Catholic and Buddhist. I asked him if being there and adding to America’s impending defeat was the right thing for a thinking Christian to do. We agreed that to make the war turn out as the US government seemed to want would take a miracle. I had no interest in what made the Catholic Church run, but he told me that if nothing else they fed a lot of people who wouldn’t be fed otherwise. He said it would help if I believed in God or miracles. I said I didn’t believe in God. He asked well, then, how about in miracles? For example, he was also sure that there was no God. And that, he said, leaning over the table in the officers’ mess (he had pale blue eyes and a map-of-Ireland face), that was the miracle.
10
You will remember that I began writing all this after a discussion about the war with a group of young people who had asked about it. I tried to make my role, if not heroic, at least understandable. Tales of all these failures of planning and operations, many years after the fact, illustrate that I also was personally a profound failure. It is the soldier’s right to complain. The process of complaining should involve checking to see if your complaints were heeded and the faults corrected. But I never did, and that is shameful. Part of my self-excuse was that it was not my job to fix obvious shortfalls in planning. I wanted nothing from the army, or the war, but to get home safely.
The headquarters of the 1st Cavalry Division was in a town named Phuoc Vinh, the district capital of Binh Duong province. I have been back there, in 1993. There is nothing left of the American base. There is however a large golf course and club for Japanese businessmen. In 1969 the 1st Cavalry had taken over the base from units of the 1st Infantry and had expanded its area. The 1st Cavalry had also expanded its name to the 1st Air Cavalry with the inclusion of a great many helicopters. They had Hueys, the basic transportation helicopters; Loaches or light observation helicopters; and Cobras, narrow-bodied attack gunships, loaded with machine guns and rocket pods. The tactical theory behind all these helicopters was that the army could move troops in, support their advance with rockets and machine-gun fire, and then pull the troops back out quickly after the effect had been gained. The only question not sufficiently answered was why. Why move into an area, shoot it up, and then retreat? No answer. But this was done time and time again. In short, it was part of a holding plan, holding until someone came forward with a long-range political solution. And as of 1969, no one had.
Helicopters filled the air, buzzing around, attacking the enemy, picking up wounded, dropping supplies to the troops in the field, delivering the mail, and taking certain troops to Saigon for an R&R week (rest and recuperation) or back to Tan Son Nhat when their yearlong assignment in Vietnam was over. Troops at E5 rank and below went by truck. It had seemed for the early years of the war that with enough helicopters you could control the military situation because you could move quickly, wait overhead until you saw something to shoot at, shoot at it, and then zip back to the security of your base. General Westmoreland was quoted saying that the army was “freed forever from the tyranny of terrain.” This claim, boosted by its dim-witted alliteration, and probably not original with Westmoreland, hinted at a breakthrough in infantry tactics, solving most of the problems field commanders faced. Of course, there was a problem.
The problem was that helicopters were up in the air, above the fighting, not only visible for miles but also audible with a distinctive chopping sound. Besides, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese had no helicopters, so that if the noise were heard it meant there were Americans, so shoot at them. And a second besides — helicopters are powered by turbines. Turbine engines’ rear ends were red-hot exhaust orifices. The Russians had developed rudimentary heat-seeking missiles to use against jet fighters. These were too slow to catch American F-4s or other supersonic fighters. But they could easily detect a Huey helicopter, lumbering along through the air at three thousand feet, and fly up the turbine’s exhaust pipe. The horrible prospect of having a surface-to-air missile fly up your exhaust pipe and blow you out of the sky made many pilots and commanders think again about what wonderful things helicopters were.
Phuoc Vinh base housed about three thousand US troops, trucks, commando cars, jeeps, helicopters, small fixed-wing aircraft, tents, bunkers, mess halls, command centers, communication centers, radio towers, water purification trailers, artillery batteries, large generators, storage trailers, impromptu showers, and outhouses. It had been built up over the years of the war without a real plan. Drainage hadn’t been thought of, so that when it rained water collected in large ponds mixed with diesel fuel, garbage juice, and unclassifiable sewage. It most closely resembled an open sore on the earth in which people lived. The idea that the war might be a permanent thing evolved slowly. This idea directed that little thought be given to permanent structures. The Corps of Engineers kept the roads on the base more or less together by soaking them with a tar-based liquid. This stuff, called peneprime, was tracked everywhere, and made everything stick to everything else.
A second reference to Joseph Conrad if you’ll permit. Joseph Conrad wrote that his main objective duty as a writer was “to make you hear, to make you feel…above all to make you see.” I think you should also be asked to smell. The cool morning air at Phuoc Vinh base was mixed
with a miasma of burning shit. The army had no choice but to incinerate its feces. Outhouses had no holes beneath them. Instead, fifty-five-gallon drums, cut down to about sixteen inches, were under each seat. In the mornings these pots were drawn out, filled with two inches of diesel fuel and a piece of cloth, and set afire. In time the whole mess burned off in thick, black clouds. It didn’t do well to think about what you were breathing on a US Army base. There were supposedly humorous stories about the burn pots being placed back in under the seats while still smoldering and toasting some colonel’s balls.
I was assigned to the intelligence people at the headquarters, again because I was supposedly a translator. I would help with interrogations and the seeking of information from prisoners of war, or civilians who might know something. At times these interrogations happened out in the jungle on a patrol with the infantry. So my plans to make all sorts of efforts to stay away from the infantry had failed. They failed not only because I wound up with the infantry anyway, but secondarily because nothing of any real value was gained from my interrogations. Not ever. Well, at least not intentionally or according to any plan. Sometimes we found out glaring shortfalls in parts of our own intelligence.
For example, on the base was a large trailer housing some computer equipment. The machines were made by the National Cash Register Company in an early attempt to welcome in the computer era. The machine operated on cards punched with an early form of code that is now so far back in computer memory as to raise a laugh among retirees at Microsoft. Nevertheless, the thing did sort of work. It swallowed thousands of cardboard cards and held the information on large spools of magnetic tape. It made loud noises and used a lot of electricity, both advantages in American military thinking. But for me, and others who wanted to be in the trailer with the NCR computer machines, there was another benefit. The computer and the cards had to be air-conditioned. Outside the trailer a generator and an air-conditioning unit hammered away, tended by a small Vietnamese man who sat under his very own lightbulb all night.
Americans raised to think that air-conditioning is specified in the Bill of Rights are always shocked and saddened in areas where it doesn’t exist. If you were hot and sweaty in a place like Phuoc Vinh, and grimy with the dark morning air, climbing into an air-conditioned enclave was past wonderful. Silently you resolve that you will never leave, and if that can’t be arranged, that you will come back as much as possible. Which I did. I spent time in the air-conditioned NCR trailer in my early weeks at Phuoc Vinh until I thought someone might notice I was missing.
But while hanging around the computer trailer and ardently thinking of passable reasons for me to remain there, I made another troubling discovery. The Vietnamese language, as I discussed tiresomely some pages back, is a tonal language. Each word has a diacritical tone mark accompanying it. There are six tones. There are also a number of added vowels and consonants shown with extra flourishes, dots and squiggles, on the basic phonetic alphabet characters. (I could show you, but it wouldn’t help.) The designers and inventors at the National Cash Register Company did not include any of these diacritical marks or extra consonants in their machine, or in the printers that were attached. It didn’t occur to them that Asian languages would be used in their printouts. (Communism had blinded people to the thought that Asians would ever have anything to do with computers.) As a result the printouts were as close to meaningless as they could be. Lists of the villages in Vietnam that were considered pacified, or pro-government, were produced, but without the extra little tone marks and unique consonants they had no meaning at all. And any attempt to decipher which place-names or village names or river names or road names were considered safe or passable, and which should be avoided or attacked, was not only useless but also possibly dangerous. These lists were distributed to unit commanders. The only saving feature might have been that the lists, if captured, were useless to the enemy as well.
I discussed this with the two specialists who manned the computer who, with no knowledge of or interest in the language, could barely fathom what the problem was. I explained to them that their work was worthless, and possibly misleading, even dangerously misleading, to any commanders creating infantry mission plans. To fix this was impossible of course, and there was a worse possibility. Horrible really, which you would understand only if you were there. If the computer work was declared useless someone might shut the whole thing down and the air-conditioning would be turned off. We spent time thinking about what to do.
I could see that my responsibility was to inform the highest level of the division command, the general or his staff, and warn that any reliance on these computer printouts was dangerous. This required some talking to God, as it was called back then. But I finally succumbed to the advisability of doing the right thing. I made my doubts about useless computer-generated lists of intelligence known to one of the assistant division commanders, a one-star general. I showed him the useless printed lists of safe villages and pro-government areas. “What is that?” he asked. As I explained further I became slowly aware that he didn’t even know about the computer, or anything about the language, or about tonal diacritical marks, or about the National Cash Register Company. But I had done my duty, and for the time being the air-conditioned computer trailer was safe.
What other actions could I have taken? Writing letters of complaint to authorities back home had to be thought through completely. Vietnam soldiers and veterans were suspect. The war was not just unpopular, it was loathed. That it was expensive and bloody paled next to the emerging realization that there was no end in sight. Lyndon Johnson said he could see the light at the end of the tunnel. This phrase, borrowed from politicians and generals seeking to quell dissatisfaction, sounded like desperate assurance and quickly became a laugh line. How did the US get into this tunnel in the first place, and why? What was the light? Promises of victory were scoffed at. The painful realization dawned that the Cold War was endless and pretty much meaningless and unwinnable, and certainly no longer cold. The idea of victory was tarnished and then laughed at. Vietnam was the hot part of the Cold War.
So my thoughts of writing a letter to someone up the line, or the government in Washington, or another whining complaint to George Aiken, remained on hold. The promise of a computer helping to win the war probably entertained military thinkers back in the US. But the thing didn’t work. And in fact, it couldn’t work. Forced to reveal their thinking, the Pentagon would have to admit that they had no idea what computers could do, or couldn’t do, and that, in typical Pentagon style, they just bought a bunch of expensive things and wanted to see what would happen.
11
The war was a civil war in which the nation of Vietnam, divided north and south, was at war with itself. One side was communist and the other side, our side, was not. According to the political advisers the war resembled the misery of our own civil war, as well as other civil wars: the troubles between the north and south in Ireland, in Korea, the religious bloodletting in India, and so on. We were going to stay and win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese, and they would take over the fighting with conviction. Winning Hearts and Minds created a telltale acronym — WHAM — but that was just unfortunate.
How would the local population support the war effort? Several ways were suggested, all of them more theatrical than strategic. Of course, the South Vietnamese could send their sons off to join the ARVN, but what about the women with children, and people too young or too old to be part of an actual army? How could some citizens be organized to defend their own villages and farms? For this role some highly placed military thinkers, in the US and in South Vietnam, invented something called the DIOCC, the District Intelligence and Operations Control Center. You can tell by this long and glorious name that the idea was clumsy and ripe for failure. You can picture this on some oddball flow chart, a PowerPoint slide, showing how local support would counter Vietcong activities. And assigned to this tactical nonsense near the Phuoc Vinh
base was my friend Jack Desmond. Well, he was my friend for a while, but later he was not.
Small units of semi-military village forces were called regional forces and popular forces, or rough puffs. They were given guns and radios and someplace to gather. And they were assigned an American adviser. If they were lucky the adviser had a realistic opinion of how useless these efforts were and kept them out of harm’s way. If they were less lucky they had someone like Jack Desmond. Jack was from the Boston area, and at first I thought I detected a suspicion in him that the war was a morbid joke and we should refrain from making it any worse. But as sometimes happens in war there is a hallucinogenic effect that makes men want to do something, anything, however ill advised. Something happened to Jack, and he got serious. He began to train his unit of mothers and grandparents, teenagers and walking wounded, to be able to mount operations, go on patrols, stand guard, and generally get in the way. He made plans pretty much all by himself.
I was, for a time, put on night operations duty. I was to make sure that our artillery wasn’t fired at our own people or in areas where we might hit our own aircraft. I worked in a fortified bunker full of radios and maps. Flight plans and unit locations were all logged with us to avoid friendly-fire disasters. Jack did not log any such information with us. He had by that time only a moderate contact with reality. One day I spied Jack leading a troop of villagers off on a trail across some tapioca fields. They were armed, sort of, with rifles and a radio. On my own volition I went after this motley crew and caught up with them. Jack and I discussed what I saw as his tactical errors. His people were dressed in black pajamas and conical hats, pretty much the same outfit the Vietcong wore. They were accompanied by no helicopter support. There was no way of preventing their getting hit by our own artillery or shot by American troops. I asked him politely what the fucking hell he thought he was doing, and things went downhill from there. The members of his patrol watched us arguing and began to drift away. The concept of Americans as loons was not challenged that day.
Lieutenant Dangerous Page 9