In the end the colonel and I siphoned gas out of two state department Fords, and we left. By that time it was late in the day, and any thought of retrieving Kuat Minh Ngoc from the South Vietnamese reeducation camp, or wherever he was, had faded into unimportance. We drove back north to Phuoc Vinh in sullen anger, made more painful in my case because I was made to look like more of a fool than I knew myself to be. I never saw Kuat Minh Ngoc again, and I vowed to have no more to do with the goddamn US Department of State or, for that matter, the entire Philippine nation.
15
In the years since the war, I have read a number of books about the military and the political reasons for the American efforts, the successes and failures. To conclude that the full ten years of the war were valueless is a mistake, but a traditional victory it was not. Even back in the States there was no parade, no celebration for many years. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington took decades to complete, and it is still unclear what it means, reflective sadness to some and an insult to others. Many soldiers, politicians, and journalists have tried to explain what happened and where things, at least for the United States, went wrong. Was the war effort a product of American pride, bombast, and stupidity, or was it absolutely prescient in its opposition to communism? The following years have shown clearly that the Vietnamese, North and South, and their border friends, the Chinese, at heart did not want to be communist. The Chinese were and are capitalists to the bone, to an even greater degree than the Americans who were ready to fight to tell them what they should be. They work hard and they like money. They like industry. They like getting rich. And as we see now, they are driven by an Asian version of international mercantilism, furiously driven to establish market colonies in parts of the world that once tried to colonize them.
The best nonfiction book on the war came out in 1988 by a former war journalist, Neil Sheehan. Titled A Bright Shining Lie, it told in hellish detail of endless American waste and failure. It told of intelligence ignored and wisdom cast aside. The book is too great an accomplishment to try to summarize here, and I would not attempt to do so without a complete rereading, but it is a majestic work that took Sheehan more than ten years to complete. It established him as the foremost authority on this sad period of American history, the blindness, the carelessness, the cruelty, and a particular American brand of dimness and illogic.
After he finished the book, Sheehan came around on a book tour, and I was detailed by my newspaper in Boston to interview him since I was the only veteran on their staff. He was unsmiling, dour, and seemed, when I talked with him, very tired. We sat for a time and talked about the army, the country, and some politicians who figure in the story. He had raked over the history and the lessons of the war so many times that much of his talk seemed to be rote — and sadly so, as if further explanation to someone like me was probably not going to accomplish much. But he was gentle and took as much time as I wanted. At the end of the interview I had come to like him very much and appreciated his obvious dedication to getting the story right, even if it had diminished his affection for mankind and his country, and taken many years of his life. But at the end of the interview I asked him what, in so many words, the war meant.
He paused and said, looking, not at me, but at the floor, “They’ll never be able to do that again.”
I am not sure exactly how I put my response, but I waited a moment and said something like well, Mr. Sheehan, you’re a smarter man than I am, and you clearly know more than I ever will, but I think you’re wrong.
They, whoever he meant by “they,” could certainly do it again, and as the years have shown, they have tried to do it again. And again. Whatever the lessons of Vietnam were, they have been ignored and subsumed by administrations and congresses and courts. Thus, although I remember I didn’t say it at the time, what Americans learned by the inglorious conclusion of the war was not that there are provable limits to military solutions. They learned that failure could be ignored. In fact, if there is any reason for what I am writing today, fifty-plus years on, it is that we seem doomed to a sort of Vietnam-like quagmire every few decades. I can only begin to feel what deepening sadness Neil Sheehan must have felt watching the endless scrub wars and secret bombing campaigns that have, at least in my opinion, proved him wrong. A friend said we are an optimistic people, and that’s the problem. But there is another definition of optimism, sometimes called Jewish optimism, that says things are bad, but they could be worse.
In 1970 a good part of the army, the higher commands and the civilian authorities, were finally ready, as the decade rolled over, to face the truth of how hopeless things had gotten. The war, and the prosecution of it by the US, was ruining not the Vietnamese communists, but the American army. The civilian strife at home, with families and generations erupting in violent disharmony, with racial hatreds brought forward from wherever they were hiding, and with the costs mounting astronomically — all that was bad enough. But the evidence that the army itself was emerging as a casualty could not be ignored.
A great deal of the United States’ standing in the world, and in places a lot more important than the comparatively insignificant country of Vietnam, was based on the perceived strength of our military. If we had cut and run in 1970, as bad as that would look, we could have begun rebuilding both in reputation and reality. But if we stayed and continued this long, awful, destructive slog to what could only be defeat, our reputation, and the power it conferred, would be lost forever. How could a nation that had been a major factor in winning the Second World War lose to a third-rate former colonial nonentity like North Vietnam? Even if that question were never actually asked, the doubt and the perception of weakness would affect American success in much more important struggles. And worse, it would show that the United States, which thought it was unbeatable, was beatable.
What was needed was a way out, and that required a demonstration of power, a telling and provable win against the communists, an act to threaten and scare anyone else getting ideas about listening to Soviet promises. We had come to Vietnam to advise and train the South Vietnam forces, to support the government, and to make a stand for democratic capitalism. We had in fact failed in all three aims, but some sort of final victory, even if it only lasted for enough time, a year, a few months, whatever we could get, would allow a less ignominious retreat for the US.
16
The way out was called Lam Son 719, an operation named after a small village with historical significance to the Vietnamese. Lam Son was the birthplace of Le Loi, a legendary Vietnamese emperor who held back the Chinese attempts to subjugate the country way back in the 1400s. Amazingly Le Loi was able to do this without American advisers. Operation Lam Son would empower the South Vietnamese army, after years of training and even more years of being advised by the United States, push the North back across the Laotian border and into the hills, and cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The trail by that time was nearly a mile wide, made up of myriad smaller trails and roads. It had been bombed ceaselessly so that it was jungle scar tissue, overgrown in places and barren in others. Arms and supplies were carried just as ceaselessly among the thousands of craters. The plan was for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to enter Laos and cut off this valuable supply line. The operation went on despite the fact that no one, no American officer or ARVN officer, no American politician, no student of military history, and none of America’s allies, had any confidence that it would work.
To help make matters infinitely worse, the United States Congress, torn by indecision and distrust, enacted a restriction that no American soldiers were to accompany the ARVN. That sort of meant that no US soldiers could be in Cambodia or Laos. But the American command interpreted this restriction narrowly, taking it to mean that US personnel could not be on the ground but could still be in the air, piloting helicopters. Obviously, this was a clever way of disobeying the congressional intent, but no one seemed to be able to stop this horrible and frankly dishonest
interpretation.
Coupled with the clumsiness and impossibility of these decisions was the reopening of a base, close to the Cambodian border, named Khe Sanh. In the late 1960s, Khe Sanh had become a slaughterhouse for the US Marine Corps. It was a large, flat area surrounded by heavily wooded hills. The marines were on the flat area, and the North Vietnamese were in the hills from which they poured mortar shells and rockets at the marines. In the middle of these attacks the flat area was cleared of vegetation and a short air strip was built. Clearing the vegetation made it even easier for the North Vietnamese to aim the mortars. The marines were visible. The enemy in the hills was not. More than a thousand marines would die. And for nothing.
A worse fighting position for the US could not have been imagined. Finding the enemy in the thick growth in the hills was nearly impossible, and the onslaught went on for weeks. At some point the marine command realized two things. First, that things were not going to get better, and second, that Khe Sanh was of absolutely no military value, or any other value. And had never been. Whoever made the decision to fight there should have been court-martialed and shot. But in the American forces he probably received a medal for bravery. In American military thinking hopelessness equaled bravery.
Also deserving to be shot was whoever decided in 1970 that the Americans — army and marines — plus a good number of ARVN troops should go back and reopen Khe Sanh to begin Operation Lam Son. I could imagine the North Vietnamese generals’ disbelief when they were told by their intelligence people that the Americans were reestablishing in the exact place where so many of their people had been killed. There was a theory that to the enemy crazy equaled scary. It certainly worked for me. If the enemy could be convinced that the American leadership was crazy, they might be less inclined to continue fighting. Nixon’s people toyed with the notion that if Ho Chi Minh thought Nixon had lost his reason, Ho would be more inclined to sue for peace. But Ho Chi Minh had decided on American insanity long before. Nixon was an afterthought.
Following the congressional rule against US soldiers on the ground in Laos, ARVN troops were flown across the border, into the thickly covered Laotian mountains. The helicopters were piloted by Americans. The troops were South Vietnamese who were to be deposited on the tops of the mountains. That was about the only place pilots could safely land their helicopters. The enemy positioned itself on the sides of the mountains, where they could not be seen, and fired mortars upward to land on the summits. As soon as this was apparent, the South Vietnamese soldiers decided that they did not want to leave the American helicopters and refused orders to disembark. It is difficult to make soldiers leave a helicopter if they don’t want to. Soldiers are all armed, which makes it even more difficult. Meanwhile mortars landed on the summits during the attempted landings. The entire operation, if it could be called that, descended into disobedience, revolt, and bloody chaos.
You must remember that the initial setting of the tone for this utter disaster, and for the war in general, was the fact that it was a civil war. The South Vietnamese people did not hate or even dislike the North. The northerners did not really hate the South. There was no religious hatred or revulsion between the two sides. In addition, the South Vietnamese, not hating the North, did not want to be in Laos and did not feel any passion worth dying for. And the North Vietnamese didn’t want to be there, either. And the American pilots didn’t want to be there and didn’t hate anything worth getting shot out of the sky for. To make the helicopter pilots even less inclined to be energetic, the Russian heat-seeking missiles, compact items that could be shoulder-fired, were more plentiful. The rockets that sought out sources of heat in the air, like helicopter turbine exhausts, just to take an example, flew into the turbine exhausts and exploded. These weapons, maybe because of their Russian derivation, were not very accurate. But the threat was enough to make the American helicopter pilots wonder about getting home to their families. The pilots didn’t really hate the North Vietnamese, or love the South. Their emotions were under constant review.
Within this whirl of desperately wrong military planning it was realized that if the troops on the ground were Vietnamese and the pilots in the air were American, a language disconnect had to be bridged. The American helicopters were armed with rockets, a pod of about thirty on either side of the ship. Ordinary land-based artillery was too far away from the invasion, and American artillery troops were not permitted to set up batteries on the Cambodian or Laotian side of the borders. Rockets from helicopters, or aerial rocket artillery, ARA, were inaccurate and hardly as plentiful as ground-based. In addition, since the pilots could not see where the enemy was hiding in the forests, they could fire their rockets only sort of generally, more or less, toward where they thought the enemy might be, and hope to hit something. And even if an ARVN unit called for a target to be hit, the rocket-firing helicopter pilots had another drawback. Where exactly was the target? Land-based artillery can be very accurate because the battery knows exactly where their guns are positioned, and they stay there. It can plot things like azimuth and elevation and drop a shell pretty accurately on an enemy unit. But helicopters are moving around and can only approximate their firing position. Needless to say, the aiming of rockets from helicopters is imprecise to the point of mere guesswork. The official military term for this is non-discriminatory, a term that sounds a little better than all over the place.
I had by that time a group of seven or eight ARVN interpreters, whose command of English was about the same as my command of Vietnamese. They were sort of assigned to me, and I was sort of their commander. But the relationship between us was a type of very worried collegiality. Like many squads with a knowledge of what was really going on we looked out for each other and talked over the situation frankly. We were even more worried when we were told to go north to assist in communication between the American pilots and ARVN troops in operations leading up to Lam Son. I had read of the plight of Napoleon’s soldiers when he abandoned his foray in Russia, and my interpreters knew of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu.
We were quartered with units of the 1st Air Cavalry and the 9th ARVN, forty or fifty miles more or less north of Saigon. Some of my interpreters had their families close by. The most senior of my interpreters was Sergeant Xuan, who was closest to me in age and temperament. He had children, and he was a worrier. He explained that although he would go north with me to see what the situation was like, the others had pretty much decided that…well, they had decided nothing, and I could decide for myself about their reliability. He was a friend I guess, whatever friendship means in really threatening situations. Sergeant Xuan and I talked everything over.
The prospect of deserting the South Vietnamese forces occurred to him, but there were obvious problems. First, desertion was punishable by a short hearing and then being shot. There was no open court-martial or due process. Second, Sergeant Xuan had spent several years in the ARVN; he had a family. He made little money, but it was still something. Third, no one knew what the outcome of the war would be — stalemate, reunification, defeat, or victory for the North. There would doubtless be a period of judgment and punishment. And lastly, the Americans might leave. The Americans had a track record of leaving their allies to deal with the messes they left behind. This is not widely reported, but it’s true. Sergeant Xuan could not believe that the Americans would abandon the entire nation of South Vietnam, and frankly neither could I, or anyone I knew. But the possibility of an American abandonment, after all the expense and death, seemed to skirt the horizon like a line of tornadoes, a slowly approaching hell. Sadly, I thought that the US would stay in South Vietnam in one form or another if only to save face, if only because it would preserve their honor before the rest of the world, if only because they had never lost a war before. Xuan believed that and so did I. Amazing what you can believe when you are not thinking too clearly.
My orders, never written out but generally voiced by three different superior officers with inexac
t parameters, were that my interpreters and I would fly from where we were in the south up to a base near Khe Sanh, a firebase near the demilitarized zone. And there we would be assigned jobs listening to radio sends from the ARVN on the ground calling for more rockets or, as I could imagine, desperate calls for evacuation of the wounded. If the radio signals weren’t clear enough, we would have to move as close to the Laotian border as needed. How close? Sergeant Xuan said he wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure, either.
Coupled with my distrust of any army planning, my conviction that the South Vietnamese army would not do anything it was told was another factor that made me the wrong person to rely on. I was, as the term had it, short. I had less than a month left in my strange year in the war zone. Being able to have survived this far without getting killed as a result of all my dilatory cleverness made me even more fearful that, like a very mean-spirited joke, my story would end with me being blown apart within weeks of my ignoble goal. I couldn’t sleep even though I knew that my apprehensions of Operation Lam Son were worse than the reality. I decided that I would obey the order and make additional plans en route.
We — six translators, Sergeant Xuan, and I — started north in a Chinook whose outer skin I distinctly remember was dented and scratched and filthy with dust and streaks of oil. Chinooks are twin-rotor transport helicopters, big clumsy things that could carry nearly a full platoon of soldiers and their gear. We shared the trip north with some utterly lost Vietnamese women and children. The military nature of this trip was not strengthened by weeping native women and bawling children. I never knew who they were exactly or why they were with us. Sergeant Xuan had fallen into silence. The trip was also very cold. On ground level the land is heavily humid and hot, but above about three thousand feet, the temperature drops. I was freezing. Odd what you remember.
Lieutenant Dangerous Page 13