A P R I L 1 9 8 5
by William Broyles, Jr.
WE crossed the bridge over the Tuy Loan River and stopped the car on the other side. Sweet potatoes and manioc were drying in the sun. The smell of sugarcane filled the air. The old bridge had been blown up in 1974, and at first I wasn't sure where I was. On the north bank, where our bunkers had been, there was now a brick kiln. On the south bank, where I'd had my command post, two men dressed only in shorts were sitting in a shed, patiently sawing logs. Across the road, near where we had set up our recoilless rifle, was a small roadside stand selling tea, cigarettes, and drinks. It had all changed. But the bend in the river was the same, and so were the mountains beyond. I looked in the distance for the old French fort in the foothills where my platoon had often set its foxholes for the night. I was stunned when it rose out of the foreground, scarcely a mile away.
Vietnam was so much smaller than I had remembered. When I fought here as a Marine second lieutenant, in 1969, Da Nang was a world away; today the drive took fifteen minutes. The old French fort had seemed miles from the bridge; now clearly it was only a short walk, just across the rice paddies and along a tree line. But those paddies had once meant booby traps and mines and being caught in the open, and that tree line had meant ambush and death. Now the scene was a peaceful Asian landscape, a nice place to have a picnic. Then it had defined my entire world; now it was only a Chinese watercolor of river, paddies, and foothills in the shadow of the mountains -- just another piece of Vietnam.
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Then a woman came up the road. Her name was Dong Thi San. I asked her if she had been here during the war. "Of course," she said. "I was the wife of a guerrilla. He was killed in Bo Ban hamlet by an American Marine patrol in 1969. And he left four children." She looked at me with steady eyes. In 1969 I had commanded a platoon of young Americans, their average age less than twenty. We had been through Bo Ban hamlet and had set out ambushes there. My platoon could have -- I could have -- killed her husband.
"But life goes on," she said. "The war is over now."
The last Americans fled Vietnam ten years ago this April, but for us the war never really ended, not for the men who fought it, and not for America. It was longer than the Civil War, the First World War, and the Second World War put together. We spent $140 billion and suffered 58,022 Americans killed, another 303,000 wounded. Perhaps a million and a half Vietnamese died. The war shook our confidence in America as a nation with a special mission, and it left the men who fought it orphans in their own country. It divided us then, and its memory divides us now. The debate over when and how to commit American power abroad is really a debate over how to avoid, at all costs, another Vietnam.
I spent four weeks there last fall. I drove hundreds of miles in North Vietnam and from the old DMZ to the Mekong Delta in the South, trying to come to terms with why we had fought there and how we lost, with the bravery and the lives wasted, with what we had done to Vietnam and what Vietnam had done to us. I had most wanted to see Hill 10, my old battalion base. It stood on a rocky hill in the path of the main route between the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in the mountains, and Da Nang, South Vietnam's second-largest city, a few miles to the east. Dozens of American bases in Vietnam were just like it. Hill 10 has no place in the history of the war and will most likely be remembered only by the men who fought each other in the rice paddies and the mountains that surround it. But I had seen the war there, and after all those years it was once again just around the curve in the gravel road, past the hamlet hidden in the trees. I got back into the car with my old enemy and we headed toward it.
HANOI
The flight from Bangkok into Hanoi follows the route that the American F-105s and F-4s based in Thailand had taken out of Takhli and Korat, over the mountains that the pilots had called Thud Ridge (after the nickname for the F-105 Thunderchief). Instead of the hail of flak, the SAMs (surface-to-air missiles), and the MiG-21 fighters that had greeted the American pilots, I saw only typical Vietnamese villages, set amid the inevitable paddies and surrounded by thick walls of bamboo. Oxcarts trudged slowly around the perimeter of the airport. Men on bicycles crossed the tarmac. The passengers on my flight were the only ones in the tiny terminal. After I claimed my baggage, a young man introduced himself in formal English. His name was Tien, and he was from the Foreign Press Center. We loaded my bags into a brand-new Toyota and headed for Hanoi.
Thousands of people crowded the road between the airport and Hanoi. They were threshing rice, fixing bicycles, driving pigs, carrying rocks, playing games, getting their hair cut -- all right on the pavement. There were fishermen and hunters and schoolchildren with briefcases and red scarves. There were oxcarts and cattle and flocks of ducks, and everywhere there were bicycles: bicycles being ridden by one, two, three, four, and even five people; bicycles carrying immense loads of rice, charcoal, lumber. livestock. There were a few trucks, but ours was the only car. Horn blaring, we charged through this sea of activity like a shark through a school of mackerel. This must have been how the French traveled when Vietnam was their colony, I thought -- as if this thick broth of peasant life simply did not exist.
Out in the rice fields were armies of peasants -- plowing, planting, weeding, reaping. Children rode water buffalo or bathed in the paddies; women bent over with their scythes, harvesting rice like insects taking tiny bites out of a huge golden cheese. Around each house dozens of people huddled, drinking tea, gesturing with cigarettes. There were brick kilns and charcoal racks and primitive sawmills. The effect was like that of a pre-industrial landscape by Breughel, in which each plane is filled with people engaged in dozens of activities, all centered on the agricultural pattern of plowing, planting, and harvest. In our hurtling car we were on some linear mission, but beyond us the world was revolving around something else -- a cycle of history, always repeated, seldom changing, the harvest of life deeply rooted in the harvest of rice.
It was peaceful, bucolic. But it brought back less peaceful memories. I could close my eyes and see tracers coming at me; could hear the crack of rifles, the booming of artillery, the velvet thong of an incoming mortar. And I could smell all those odors of war -- gunpowder, excrement, fear. Soldiers on the highway wore the same uniforms as the NVA regulars had worn when we did our best to kill each other. When I saw them, I had to struggle with the impulse to flee, to take cover. For a brief moment I wanted a weapon.
It seemed incredible that this backward place could have taken those boys riding placidly on the backs of water buffalo and made them anti-aircraft gunners and platoon commanders, could have organized them to build and maintain a vast logistic network across more than 3,500 miles of trackless mountains and jungle, could have found ways to defeat every new technological weapon we developed. It simply didn't compute. In combat the North Vietnamese troops had seemed so motivated, as if history were riding on their shoulders. But this pastoral, timeless landscape that nurtured them seemed outside of history. Nothing, I thought, ever happens here.
Hanoi is a city built by foreigners. and it appears deceptively familiar. Its wide streets and low pink-stucco buildings with tile roofs and green shutters give Hanoi the look of a sleepy French provincial town. It is like a city of the plain -- low, brooding, a large town really, nothing like a capital. The streets are clean, but there is a sense of crumbling, as if Hanoi's layer in some future archaeological dig were already prepared and the city were settling into it as fast as was seemly. Almost nothing remains of the ancient Vietnamese city, known as the Rising Dragon, and since the French left, in 1954, little seems to have been added. Visiting Hanoi is like coming upon an ancient city where the race that built it has vanished and another race inhabits the ruins. The Vietnamese themselves seem foreigners here; they have the air of people wearing someone else's clothes.
My hotel was the Thong Shat, the Reunification Hotel, which under the French was the Metropole, the jewel of Hanoi. Its elevators have long since quit, and the plaster is cracked and peeling. The bar sells Russian wine, champagne, and vodka, as well as Heineken and Coke. The prices of souvenirs in the window displays are listed only in dollars, an example of how the dollar has conquered Vietnam. The hotel had a special cashier, known among the guests as Madame Dollar, who handled American currency. Whenever I paid in dollars anywhere in Vietnam, there would be an interlude during which each bill was subjected to intense scrutiny; if it had the slightest nick or mark, it was rejected. The bills that passed muster were entered by serial number in a special book. I half expected them to be carried away on a silk cushion.
On my first morning in Hanoi I went to the Foreign Press Center, which is housed in an old French villa not far from the hotel. I entered through the back gate; two women were squatting on the ground, cooking over a small charcoal brazier, and a chicken wandered, pecking among the cobblestones. In a reception room with high ceilings, French doors, and a large portrait of Ho Chi Minh, I met the men who would coordinate the details of my visit. Duong Minh is the acting director of the Foreign Press Center. A man in his late forties, he is a smooth and efficient diplomat with a wry sense of humor and a masterly command of English idiom. I also met Nguyen Van Thuan, one of Duong Minh's senior aides, who was to do the complicated advance work on my travels in the North. Thuan was a regular soldier during the war, and was seriously wounded in a B-52 strike. He asked me where I had fought, and when I told him, he squinted and a sly smile crossed his face. "I thought I recognized you," he said, pointing at me in mock surprise.
Tien, the young man with a shy, formal manner who had met me at the airport, was serving an apprenticeship at the press center. He was to be my assistant guide. I was introduced to Lo Luong Minh, my guide and translator, who was to be with me throughout the trip and who would more than earn his meager 280 dong (about $1.20 at the black-market exchange rate) a month. Minh turned out to be a good traveling companion -- a man well versed in political philosophy and also a poet and a hopeless romantic. On long drives he would recite his poetry to me ("My love is like the bamboo tree . . ."), or recount Vietnamese folk tales and legends, or discuss passages from various American political memoirs that pertained to Vietnam. He had spent five years at Vietnam's embassy in Canada. "I have seen all the West has to offer," he told me. "All the material progress, all the consumer goods, the way of life. But my heart is in my village and my country. I would never think of being anywhere else. My father nor keeps the family altar. When he dies, as the eldest son I will keep it, I will light the candles, I will observe the feast days. I am a Communist, but I am also Vietnamese."
That afternoon Tien took me to the military museum, where we watched a marvelous sand-table re-enactment of the battle of Dienbienphu: artillery thundered, planes took off and landed, a ring of red lights advanced inexorably on the French, and, finally, a Viet Minh flag popped up over the French headquarters. I was sitting next to a delegation of Cubans, so the narration was in Spanish. The Vietnamese officer escorting the Cubans was very nervous about my being there, but he relaxed as soon as Tien took a few of my American cigarettes and gave them to him. I was quickly learning how Vietnam worked.
Later we went to the Hanoi art museum. Virtually all of the art is rooted in the wars of Vietnam -- the dau tranh, or struggle, that defines the Vietnamese as a nation. War is not an aberration; it is their central experience. They struggle, therefore they exist. I was struck by one painting, a depiction of an early patriot being tortured by Chinese soldiers. They have surrounded him and are piercing his body with a dozen lances. But he lies on his side, smiling, oblivious of the pain. The theme of martyrdom is everywhere. The pantheon of Vietnam is filled with heroes who were tortured, dismembered, and executed for the fatherland. The Vietnamese are intensely conscious of the atrocities committed against them; there are even "atrocity museums," not unlike the Holocaust memorials in Jerusalem and Dachau, filled with photographs of Vietnamese maimed and killed during the war. "We have suffered much," Tien told me as I gazed at the painting -- but he smiled when he said it.
I had expected Hanoi to have the devastated look of East Berlin in the 1950s. But the only visible damage was from decay and neglect. And so I asked to visit some of the areas that had been most heavily bombed. We set off in a black Russian Volga -- the driver apologized for being unable to bring the Toyota. We drove to Kham Thien Street, which supposedly had been obliterated by B-52s during the Christmas bombing of 1972. We drove up and dot n the street looking for the monument to the bombing, but only after asking many vendors and shopkeepers did we learn where it was. The street itself is like every other busy street in Hanoi; there is nothing to show it was ever bombed.
Our next stop was Bach Mai hospital, which for years has been on the visitors' circuit. Jane Fonda was there after it was bombed, and my hosts proudly displayed pictures of her standing in the rubble. I spoke with Dr. Tran Do Trinh, the deputy director of the hospital, a kindly, competent-looking man. "It was the night before Christmas in 1972," Dr. Trinh told me. "Most of the hospital had been evacuated, but about two hundred and fifty of us were still here. We lived and worked in the basement under the cardiology building. I was teaching a class about mitral stenosis when we heard the anti-aircraft guns begin to fire and then the terrible noise of the B-52 bombs coming toward us like thunder I kept lecturing -- there was nothing else to do -- and the students were taking notes when the bombs hit. The whole shelter collapsed. The living were mixed in with the dead. We had to break through the rubble that covered the entrances with our bare hands to remove the wounded. It tool; almost two weeks to extricate all the dead, and the smell of bodies filled the hospital. Three of the students in my lecture were killed." He shrugged. "But war is war. We must go on."
I spent some time touring the hospital. The doctors were particularly proud of some new ultrasound machinery from the Netherlands. "We found the first three cases of left-atrial myxoma in Vietnam with this machine," one doctor said. But to a casual visitor the benefits of medical technology seemed woefully uneven. A few exotic heart diseases were being diagnosed, but there was no blood in the refrigerator in the lab. The patients lay, some of them two to a bed, in their own clothes. Several pieces of simple equipment stood dusty and inoperable. "For two hours each day the power goes out," one doctor told me. "That's bad enough, but what's worse is we never know which two hours. It could be any time -- right in the middle of surgery." The hospital was a paradigm of Vietnam: a place of stoic suffering and maddening bureaucracy, where almost nothing works -- except the people, and they work incredibly hard. How, I kept thinking, did they run the war?
Many American advocates of air power believe that we failed because we did not bomb enough, that we needlessly limited our bombing (for example, the MiG airfields were off limits until 1967), that we allowed the North Vietnamese to believe that they had survived the worst punishment we could deliver. Wayne W. Thompson. who is writing the official Air Force history of the air war over North Vietnam, told me that if we had sent B52s against Hanoi in 1965, instead of waiting until the Christmas bombing of 1972, "their will to fight could have seriously been crippled." This argument is supported by the POWs who reported that their captors were panicked by the Christmas bombing. Certainly, it has its advocates among the men who fought the air war, who believe they were forced to take great risks, under complex restrictions, for dubious ends. But the argument has one basic flaw: whatever the price of winning the war -- twenty more years of fighting, another million dead, the destruction of Hanoi -- the North Vietnamese were willing to pay it.
American officers and military historians insist that the Christmas bombing hit "the same old targets" on the outskirts of Hanoi. According to Thompson, "B52s are less accurate than the fighter bombers we had used before. With the heavy flak and the SAMs coming up at them, they could be considerably off target; it's a great credit to the B-52 crews that there were as few civilian casualties as there were. The Vietnamese say they had about twelve hundred dead. From what I have discovered, that seems about right. And that figure proves our point, not theirs. Just one of those B-52 raids could have killed thousands of civilians, if that had been our goal. We could have firebombed, we could have hit the center of the city. If we had wanted to destroy Hanoi, we could have wiped it out."
Having been to Hanoi, I believe he is right -- the city itself was practically untouched. But the detached way in which Americans discuss the air war comes from having dropped the bombs; the Vietnamese have a very different view. To them, the B-52 was not simply a bigger and more terrible bomber; it was like the death star, flying so high and so fast as to be beyond sight, beyond hearing, beyond humanity. It attacked without warning. One moment all was peaceful; the next the ground erupted as if the very earth were exploding. To endure a B-52 attack was the ultimate experience of the war. To have been wounded by a B-52 was a special badge of honor. Over and over people volunteered the story of the time they were hit by a B-52; it was the one moment they would never forget. "The first time we shot down a B-52," a general told me, "was during the Christmas bombing. It was an occasion of great celebration throughout the country." The most popular exhibit at the war museum in Hanoi is the wreckage of a B-52 that lies in the courtyard beneath a MiG-17. Children gather around it throughout the day, staring, as if transfixed by the body of a slain beast.
Early one morning we left Hanoi for the Red River Delta, the agricultural heart of the North, a densely populated area south of Hanoi which was bombed frequently during the war. In the hotel restaurant I pondered what to have for breakfast. One of the waitresses gave me a small example of how a Vietnamese views the principle of consumer choice.
"Today, pho," she said -- pho being noodle soup.
"Okay," I said. "I'll have pho and maybe an omelet."
"No omelet. Pho."
"Okay, I'll have pho and toast."
"No toast. Pho, " she said.
"Okay, I think I'll just have pho."
"You want pho, then?"
"Uh, yeah, pho sounds great."
After a big bowl of pho we were on our way out of Hanoi, past the railroad yards with their museum-piece engines and railroad cars, across the venerable steel spans of the Paul Doumer Bridge, which stretches more than a mile across the Red River and was one of the most famous targets of the war. I asked Minh how badly we had hit it.
"You bombed it many times. You even knocked out a couple of spans. But usually we had it repaired within a few weeks -- or else we just used a pontoon bridge. No problem. "
We inched over the bridge behind bicycles and pedestrians, the old women loping along with fifty or a hundred pounds of banana leaves, vegetables, or charcoal on poles over their shoulders. There is another bridge being built; it was started years ago by the Chinese and then, after the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979, was taken over by the Russians. It is years behind schedule. "It will be finished this year," Minh said proudly. There were no workers to be seen anywhere. The bridge looked like an ancient ruin. Not in our lifetime, I thought.
Nam Dinh, a provincial capital in the Red River Delta, is a textile town of about 200,000 people. During the war it was an obligatory stop for people like Harrison Salisbury and Tom Hayden, who were brought here to wring their hands over the effects of American bombing. I was to meet with the People's Committee, whose headquarters were in the old French administrative offices. I was escorted to a room with red walls and a large chrome bust of Ho Chi Minh. On the table were a white tablecloth and red flowers, along with a teacup at each place, and a bowl of fruit. The members of the People's Committee took their seats, opposite me, and the meeting began with the customary formality of exchanging cigarettes. They offered Dienbienphus and Flying A's from Laos. I offered Salems I had bought in Bangkok, solely because they were the favorite cigarette of South Vietnamese soldiers. They accepted the Salems only out of politeness. The cigarette of choice in the North is 555, a British make popularly believed to have been Ho Chi Minh's favorite brand.
There were two men and one woman, who was described as having compiled information on "U.S. war crimes." These had been methodically divided into two files -- "the crimes of the LBJ period" and "the crimes of the Nixon period." The files looked worn, as if they had received a great deal of use. One of the men began to read from the LBJ file. "During this period Nam Dinh was bombed a hundred and seventy-eight times, including seventy-tow night raids. Sixty percent of the houses were destroyed." Then he went on to describe particular raids, for example: "On April 14, 1966, there was a raid against Hang Thao Street at six-thirty in the morning. The children were getting ready for school. Many of them were among the forty-nine people killed; two hundred and forty homes were destroyed." I asked if there had been a military target nearby. They smiled and said no, nothing, you can see for yourself.
Then they showed me photographs, each carefully labeled. I saw pictures of a woman crying over dead children, of a priest being pulled from the rubble of a church, of a destroyed school, of people digging in the wreckage.
The woman on the committee had been sitting quietly. Her hair was pulled back; her face was drawn and sad. She began to discuss the Nixon period: "This was worse than before. On June 12, 1972, we had the largest raid on Nam Dinh -- twenty-four planes attacked at three P.M. They dropped a hundred and two bombs. Many people died." I asked how she knew it was precisely 102 bombs; weren't they hard to count? "We kept careful records," she replied. I asked her opinion on why we had bombed here. "The Americans would bomb whenever they saw lights or crowds or any sign of life. There were no military targets. It was just psychological. They destroyed dormitories, schools, kindergartens, hospitals."
As it happens, Nam Dinh was not quite the helpless provincial town inexplicably attacked by American bombers that my hosts portrayed. "If Nam Dinh was so innocent," one former American pilot said to me later, "how come it lit up like a Christmas tree every time we flew over it?" In Siam Dinh there were gasoline storage tanks, textile plants, heavy equipment, and some of the most powerful anti-aircraft batteries outside of Hanoi and Haiphong. And the Vietnamese were fighting total war: they were not naive or overly scrupulous. American pilots tell innumerable stories of bombing runs that missed their targets and by mistake struck schools or dormitories, which then blew up with huge secondary explosions -- the Vietnamese had kept their ammunition there. Also, I would not be surprised if an American pilot, after long periods of being shot at from prohibited targets, had one day just decided that he was tired of seeing his buddies get shot down by anti-aircraft guns on the roof of a hospital, or from SAM sites parked next to a church. And the bombs -- understandably, in the pilots' view, this being a war -- would fall, just as they fell on the monastery at Monte Cassino when the Germans put a gun emplacement in its shadow during the Second World War.
My hosts brushed these points aside. "We would not have had anti-aircraft sites if you had not been bombing us," one of the officials said. "We were not attacking your planes on their carriers. You were attacking us. We had to protect ourselves."
"You know," the vice-president of the People's Committee said, "we were bombed so much people began to be bored with it. The siren would go off and we wouldn't want to get out of bed or leave the table and go into the shelter. Not again, we'd think. Not down into that hole again." The woman resumed her litany of bombings, of families killed, of children mutilated. The vice-president interrupted. "When you fight, you must have hatred. Whenever we needed someone for a dangerous mission or if in the South we needed a suicide fighter, we had to hold elections, because so many people wanted to sacrifice for the fatherland. When we were bombed, the best time to shoot down the planes was when they dove, but it was also the most dangerous. It took hatred to keep us out there, our fingers on the trigger, as the jets came in with their guns blazing."
Whenever I asked what it was like to be out in the open, firing at the diving planes, I was told that it was terrifying but necessary; but when I kept probing, I usually discovered that the men and women who had done it had in truth loved it -- it was a great sport, like shooting human skeet. They talked about shooting down American planes with a sort of childlike wonder about why the American pilots kept flying into their flak and their SAMs. There was admiration in their voices, but pity, too.
The next day we drove to another of the stops on Harrison Salisbury's 1966 trip, Phat Diem, one of the bishoprics of North Vietnam and the site of its most famous church. Along the road we passed women working on the railroad bed. Their faces were wreathed in checked scarves. They worked two to a shovel. One held the handle and filled the shovel; the other lifted it with a rope tied to the blade. Up, down, up, down, like metronomes, they dug. They were still at it, holding the same rhythm, when I returned, eight hours later. I passed a long line of bicycles, each loaded with five huge sacks of rice. One pole had been attached to the seat and another to the handlebars, so that a man walking alongside could steer. The men were moving with a rolling, steady gait. I his is how they built the Ho Chi Minh Trail, I thought; this is how they repaired the bombing damage. and this is how they moved all those supplies south -- bit by bit, shovel by shovel.
At Phat Diem I was introduced to the vice-president of its People's Committee, the redoubtable Mrs. Yu Thi Que. She was dressed simply, in black trousers and a white shirt, her hair pulled back with a ribbon. She is a beautiful woman in her forties, typically formal and earnest, but with a trace of a smile underneath. During the war her husband was away, fighting in the South, for nine years. She received one letter from him. "That seems like a long time," I said. "Everyone did it," she replied, with a shrug. We had tea and rice wine and grapefruit while she told me about Phat Diem.
"We were bombed fiercely from 1965 to 1968, and again in 1972. We don't have a siren, like in Nam Dinh. We had only a bell in a tower. I can still hear it ringing, ringing, ringing. They tried to hit the transportation systems at first, but never did. Instead they bombed the marketplace, pagodas, schools, neighborhoods. And then in 1972 they bombed the church and the monastery. Many people were killed here."
The main church is Oriental in architecture, as if pagodas had been dropped onto the towers of a Gothic church. It is some 250 feet long, built in the nineteenth century from local wood. The pillars were carved from massive trees; the altar is gold and bears pictures of missionaries' and priests, most of them French. Mrs. Que pointed out the damaged areas. "This was bombed August 15, 1972. The entire west wall was destroyed. So were three of the convents behind, and two of the schools." I could not tell, except by some slight change in the shade of the stones around the church, that it had ever been bombed. The nearby chapels and other churches are a different story. They stand roofless, the steel skeletons of their rafters exposed to the sky. Walls are in rubble. It looks like Coventry. It was the only place in four weeks where I could actually see the effects of bombing.
As we were about to leave Phat Diem, an older man, who had been silent throughout the visit, spoke up. "I was in the war," he said. "I was wounded twice at Dong Ha." He pulled up his trouser leg to show me the scar on his leg, and then pulled up his shirt to exhibit a long scar on his back.
"How were the American soldiers?" I asked, expecting the usual answer -- that we fought bravely but in the wrong cause.
He looked at me, knowing I had fought near where he was wounded. "Not good. Not good. They were afraid to leave their base, their helicopters, their artillery. They weren't brave."
Only the night before, I had felt guilt about the bombing of Nam Dinh, had in fact apologized, for all the good it would do. But at this moment I felt something entirely different. Got you, though, didn't we? I said to myself.
NUMBER ONE!
Hanoi wakes up to a little music-box tune played on the loudspeaker. When I went running at 6:00 A.M., the park around the Lake of the Returned Sword, in the center of the city, was filled with people doing their morning exercises. Old couples swatted badminton birdies back and forth, men did tai chi, and runners circled the lake. My running shoes were of intense interest, since the Vietnamese were jogging in shower shoes, tennis shoes, or bare feet. I was constantly stopped, so that my watch, my clothes, and my running shoes could be examined. Some young men playing soccer invited me to come and play, which I did. After twenty minutes we took a break and one of them asked me, in English, "What is your nationality?" I bent down, in the stooped posture that came to seem natural in a world where almost no one was taller than my shoulder, and told him I was an American. His face relaxed and he smiled broadly. "Number one," he said.
The most useful phrase of Vietnamese that I learned, the one that brought smiles and affection and opened doors for me everywhere, was "Khong phai Lien Xo" -- "I am not a Russian." At a small cafe near the lake in Hanoi two sullen Eastern Europeans were numbly pouring brandy from a paper sack into their coffee. The place was packed with bo doi, young Vietnamese soldiers in the uniform of my old enemies. "Lien Xo," a soldier next to me said to his friend, gesturing at me in disgust.
"Khong phai Lien Xo, " I said.
"East German?" the soldier asked in Vietnamese, suspiciously.
"No, I'm an American," I replied in Vietnamese. At once his and his friend's eyes lit up and their faces broke out in big grins. The soldiers bought me drinks and insisted that I try on their helmets and caps with the red stars on them. Over and over they kept saying, "America, Number One -- Russia, Number Ten." "American, tot!" (Good!). "Tot lam!" (Very good!) Similar scenes happened almost daily. In Hue I met a young man who had lived for six years in Moscow as a student and was part of the Communist Party elite. After giving me the familiar Party line, he changed the subject and began asking me about "this singer named Michael Jackson." After all those years in the Soviet Union didn't he prefer Russian music? He made a face and turned up Laura Branigan. "This is music," he said.
On one memorable evening a group of Russian tourists ate in silence while my driver played my tape of Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. I called him over and suggested that he turn the tape down.
"They're Russians," I said.
"You're right," he replied, and turned the tape up as loud as it would go.
After dinner the Russians danced awkwardly to the single most popular tape in North Vietnam, Disco Hits of 1980. The next morning, Sunday, they had to endure breakfast while the waitresses played an American gospel program on Voice of America. I never ceased to find their immersion in American culture in the heart of Vietnam amusing, but the fact that their own culture does not travel well makes the Russians palatable allies for countries afraid of the attractions of the West. Pham Van Dong, the prime minister, need not worry that the alliance with the Soviets will end up tempting his faithful flock to stray from its old values; no one, after all, is going to start wearing Russian fashions, listening to Russian music, or adopting the Russian way of life.
But after the North, with Russian aid, conquered the South, a strange thing happened: the South, with its Western culture and consumer society, began to transform the North. And though we lost the war, our culture is clearly winning. At the official bookstores in Hanoi there are thousands of books in Russian, which no one seems to buy. The few books in English are snapped up at once, and sold for high prices on the black market. Anything American is highly prized, particularly clothes. I gave a government worker in Hanoi a black LA Raiders T-shirt, and for two days he wore it to work.
The old men in the politburo carry in their hearts a nostalgic vision of a country that during the war was a pure culture. Through the long years of war no foreign music was allowed, no clothes were seen except black trousers and white shirts and army uniforms, and no one had anything to speak of. Everyone suffered together, and suffered for a goal that everyone could understand. When Ho Chi Minh said that nothing was more precious than independence and freedom, he clearly meant to include motorcycles, blue jeans, and tape recorders. But when one young man in a village or a neighborhood gets a motorcycle, and when one girl gets a pair of jeans and some makeup, then that idyllic world where one is for all and all for one and everyone suffers together is on its way to the dustbin .
Two weeks after I arrived was the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the liberation of Hanoi from the French. There were performances of traditional and popular music, speeches, a parade (for which the French ambassador, rather sportingly, I thought, stood at attention, wearing a special medal issued for the occasion), fireworks, and a concert in Lenin Park. At the concert most of the singers were tentative and wooden, but at the end a group came out with long hair and sharp outfits. The lead singer had a modest version of Mick Jagger's moves down. The audience sat in rapt silence. I went backstage after the concert and discovered what I should have known -- the first groups were from Hanoi, the last group was from Saigon. At another concert, when the rock music was over, a group began to play patriotic music. The crowd got up and left. It reminded me of what must surely be the worst of the politburo's fears -- it reminded me of America. Of such events are moral majorities and cultural resolutions made.
In the Western press the divisions in the Vietnamese leadership are customarily referred to as between the ideologues and the pragmatists, and the phrase almost exclusively refers to matters of economics -- the pragmatists want more individual incentive, the ideologues want less or none. But these battles are also being fought in culture, in the area of values. And America is going to be much more difficult to defeat in this battle than we were in the others: our clothes, our language, our movies, and our music -- our way of life -- are far more powerful than our bombs. We represent something else now -- we represent a future that many Vietnamese want, and that everyone, from the Communist Party leader, Le Duan, to the simplest peasant, knows the Russians cannot give him.
NOBODY'S DARLING
Mondays at 5:30 there is joggling in Lenin Park. Tuesdays there are movies at the French Embassy. Fridays there's the Billabong Bar, behind the Australian Embassy. Saturdays is International House, where local bands play bad Abba imitations and there's a rare chance to mingle with some Vietnamese. Every third Saturday is the pinnacle of social life in Hanoi: the Swedish disco. The foreigners in Hanoi live a sort of cruise-ship life, with the Vietnamese the surrounding ocean, opaque and occasionally hostile. Their movements are restricted, their contacts with Vietnamese limited. They fight an impenetrable bureaucracy to do their jobs, and they have almost no idea of what is going on.
Among non-Communist diplomats and UN people there are few who remain enthusiastic about Vietnam. Most hate the police state, they hate the way their employees are treated, and they hate the bureaucracy. "The Vietnamese never throw anything away," a young diplomat told me one evening over drinks. "So they've simply placed each new bureaucracy on top of the one before. The French bureaucracy was laid over the Confucian bureaucracy, and the Communist bureaucracy over that. It's impossible to figure out. Even the Vietnamese don't understand how it works."
"The worst thing is what happens to your employees," one UN official said, as we ate lunch with several aid officers. "They have to fill out reports on us: he talked to this person, he met with that person, he changed money at so-and-so's. They know everything about us. And they have to report on each other. And that produces real tragedies. If they don't like someone, they'll just say he's getting too close to the foreigners, give a few vague examples, and before you know it, that person is gone. It gets very tiring after a while."
Another UN official interrupted. "We have been trying to do a project for three years. We were getting nowhere. Last month I discovered that all this time we had been arguing with the wrong agency -- which no one bothered to tell us."
"Nothing is ever decided," said another. "you go out of a meeting and you feel you've accomplished something. Then the next day they start right back where you started the day before, as if it never happened. No one can approve anything. Everyone is afraid to take responsibility. So the smallest decisions get kicked all the way to the top."
"One agency brought in a special computer," a Western diplomat told me. "It was a gift for the Vietnamese government. But they impounded it in Saigon and insisted the agency pay $28,000 to transport it to Hanoi -- and it was for them!"
The head of a voluntary agency, checking on its projects in Vietnam, shook his head and told me of his experience at a hospital: "They spent an hour attacking the capitalists, and then presented me with a list of what they wanted: a hundred thousand dollars' worth of audiovisual equipment for remote villages -- where there's no electricity!"
During another conversation a European diplomat paused. looked out the window, and said in a flat voice: "All this is just bureaucracy. What matters is that they are evil, truly evil." He said this softly but with such passion that the whole table became quiet. When the conversation picked up again, it centered on how to smuggle antiques out in diplomatic pouches.
This disillusionment is not just the carping of bored diplomats. It's a symptom of Vietnam's most serious problem. Like Israel, Vietnam was much more popular as a victim than it is as a regional power. Despite its martial success -- or perhaps because of it -- Vietnam is a terribly poor country. It has the fourth-largest army in the world and a per capita income lower than India's. Its people suffer from malnutrition and curable diseases "out of a nineteenth-century medical textbook," as one Western doctor described them to me. These problems are compounded by a baby boom of enormous proportions: the population has exploded from some 38 million in the early 1970s to more than 60 million today. Vietnam desperately needs aid of all kinds, from medical supplies to developmental assistance, but the occupation of Cambodia has caused almost every country outside the Soviet bloc to terminate all direct aid. The United Nations projects continue, but even Sweden, Vietnam's staunchest friend in the West, is considering reducing its commitment.
Still, none of this pressure seems to have swayed the determination of the Vietnamese to stay in Cambodia; they have learned throughout their history that if they are stubborn enough, if they struggle long enough, they will get what they want. Sooner or later, they believe, the world will come around.
Having been part of a foreign army in Southeast Asia whose presence was considered an outrage by much of the world, I have to confess to feeling that there is a certain satisfying irony in my old enemy's being hoist with its own petard. Also, it has been particularly interesting to see the disenchantment of the left, which all but canonized the North Vietnamese during the war with us. In Da Nang I watched a film about the Ho Chi Minh Trail with a group of West German tourists. One of them came up to me later, and we began to talk.
"I was one of the radicals in Berlin in 1968," he said. "I was with Rudi Dutschke and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Every waking moment was spent working against the American war here."
"So how do you feel now?" I asked him.
"Very strange. Vietnam is not popular with the left anymore. After the reeducation camps, after the boat people. after Cambodia -- the left feels betrayed. We fought so hard for them, and they let us down."
To me, on the other hand, the Vietnamese were a formidable enemy, totally ruthless and fiercely committed. I was appalled by the boat people, by the reeducation camps, by the occupation of Cambodia, but I was not one bit surprised or disappointed. Now that I was back, I had discovered that Vietnam was bad -- but not so bad as I had expected. For the politically committed, however, such distinctions are not emotionally satisfying and therefore not politically relevant: you are either a friend or an enemy, you can do no wrong or you can do no right. So the ex-protester and the ex-Marine sat in the hotel in Da Nang, he attacking the Vietnamese and I more or less defending them, far into the night.
WINNING AND LOSING
In Hanoi I met military leaders who had fought and observed the war from a certain eminence. I wanted to find out what they thought were the reasons they won and we lost, and to test their perspective against my own and that of American generals and historians. The Foreign Ministry is perhaps the most beautiful of the old French colonial buildings. It sits in the shadow of the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, where normally Uncle Ho lies in eternal slumber. Unfortunately, he had been shipped off to Moscow, the world capital of embalming, for his annual refurbishment, and I was unable to view him. At the Foreign Ministry I did meet Hoang Anh Tuan, now the vice minister of foreign affairs but for many years a Viet Cong general in the South. General Tuan is from Hue. He joined the Viet Minh in 1945, when he was twenty.
He took my hand and put it to his face. "Feel that." I felt some grainy lumps near his eye. "Japanese shrapnel. I lost an eye fighting them in 1945. And look at this." He pulled up the leg on his perfectly tailored tan trousers. "I took a French bullet here. It's still there. Fortunately, you gave me no such souvenirs."
After the defeat of the French he went north, in 1954, and came back south in 1960 to renew the struggle. General Tuan commanded the Viet Cong second division from headquarters in the Que Son Mountains, south of Da Nang. His forces were among the major enemy units where I fought. Once we had established that we had fought in the same area, our conversation became relaxed. I was no longer just a reporter; I was a fellow veteran. He slapped me on the knee and told me about the war.
"When the Americans entered the war, we spent all our time trying to figure out how to fight you. Everyone, from the lowest soldier to the highest general, talked about it constantly. It was a matter of life and death. The incredible density of your shelling and your mobility were our biggest concerns. I myself saw the first B-52 raid, on Highway 13, on June 18, 1965. I will never forget it. Twenty-six B-52s dropped their bombs about four kilometers from me. It was horrible. Two or three hectares of land were simply blown away. Our losses were huge. We had to admit you had a terrible strength. So how could we preserve our forces but still engage you? We decided we had to force you to fight our way -- with chopsticks, piece by piece.
"And then it came to us that the way to fight the American was to grab him by his belt" -- at which point Tuan did just that -- "to get so close that your artillery and airpower were useless. The result was interesting -- our logistic forces, who were farther from the Americans, took greater losses than the combat units, who engaged you."
I asked him about the Tet offensive of 1968, when the Communists had launched attacks on cities and towns throughout Vietnam in an enormous surprise attack that is considered the turning point of the war.
"In the spring of 1967 Westmoreland began his second campaign. It was very fierce. Certain of our people were very discouraged. There was much discussion of the course of the war -- should we continue main-force efforts or should we pull back into a more local strategy? But by the middle of 1967 we concluded that you had done your best and the strategic position had not changed. So we decided to carry out one decisive battle to force LBJ to de-escalate the war. You thought that battle was Khe Sanh. It was the Tet offensive."
What about the view in America that Tet was a major military defeat for the Viet Cong forces?
"Listen," he said, coming closer to me. "We didn't have to defeat you the way the Allies beat the Nazis. We only wanted you to withdraw so that we could settle our own affairs. That was our goal, and we achieved it."
I asked him if that meant that they had won the war in 1968.
"Yes and no. Nixon began the withdrawal, but Vietnamization was a difficult period for us, at least in the beginning. Your years here, 1969 and 1970, were very hard. The fighting was fierce. We were often hungry. I was the division commander, and I went hungry for days. We had no rice to eat. For a while it was very bad."
The Vietnamese call the period from Tet, in 1968, to the Paris Peace Agreement, in 1973, "fight and talk." In 1969 they were on the defensive, as General Tuan admitted. But by then the talk was more important than the fight.
I met General Tran Cong Man, who is not the editor of the army's newspaper, in his office. He is a studious, professorial sort. He seemed very unmilitary, as if he had borrowed his uniform from someone else. I began by telling him about the controversy in the Westmoreland libel suit against CBS over whether to count the Viet Cong self-defense forces in figuring the strength of the enemy. General Man replied that to omit them would be unthinkable. In the Communists' view, their resources were seamless, from the armed regular soldier to the young boy who sold cigarettes and scouted American positions. "Our regular forces, compared with yours, were small, but everyone could fight -- with whatever he had. You were near Da Nang. There were tens of thousands of American and puppet troops there. But we seldom had more than one regiment in regular forces. Why couldn't you defeat us? Because we had tens of thousands of others -- scouts, minelayers, spies, political cadres."
I said that I agreed up to a point: I was sure it made no difference to American soldiers if a soldier or a nine-year-old boy had laid the booby trap that killed them. Still, it seemed to me that while these units were far too important to have been discounted, they did not win the war. It took regular North Vietnamese troops in corps and army-sized units, fighting a mobile war like Hitler's blitzkrieg, to win the final victory.
"You are right," he told me. "But that was possible only after you Americans had left. Without the self-defense forces we would never have gotten you out. If you were our commander and were told to attack the Da Nang air base and destroy the planes there, how many troops would you need? Several divisions. right? Well, we did precisely that with thirty men -- thirty! It was a new kind of war, and it was impossible without the self-defense forces."
I asked him how they had set out to fight the Americans.
"In 1964 we were on the verge of victory in the South," he replied, "but we concluded that the Americans would not let the puppets be defeated. The politburo convened a special meeting to mobilize the people for a long war with the Americans, to plan strategies and lay the groundwork for the defense of the fatherland in both the North and the South." In other words, in 1964 the North Vietnamese made the momentous decision to dispatch their own regular troops down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, giving the lie both to their claims during the early years of war that they had no troops fighting in the South and to their later claims that they sent troops only after the Americans did.
In the early years of the war, the American commanders -- with the exception of the Marines -- focused their major efforts against the main enemy forces: the North Vietnamese Army and the largest Viet Cong units. The Marines wanted to expand their beachheads by clearing out the local Viet Cong guerrilla units -- the tactic of pacification. General Westmoreland's view, however, was that the Marines, like the Army, should "find the enemy's main forces and bring them to battle, thereby putting them on the run and reducing the threat they pose to the population." Westmoreland's view prevailed, and the identification of the main forces as the primary enemy produced the tactic of "search and destroy" -- seeking out the main units wherever they could be found and bringing all the weight of our firepower and mobility against them. And it led directly to the reinforcement of Khe Sanh, just south of the DMZ, near the Laotian border, as the precursor of a major battle with the NVA. Instead the major attacks at Tet came not from the NVA units in the mountains but from the local Viet Cong, to devastating effect.
I asked General Man about Khe Sanh.
"Westmoreland thought Khe Sanh was Dienbienphu," he said. "But Dienbienphu was the strategic battle for us. We mobilized everything for it. At last we had a chance to have a favorable balance of forces against the French. We never had that at Khe Sanh; the situation would not allow it. We wanted to bring your forces away from the cities, to decoy them to the frontiers, to prepare for our great Tet offensive."
Some American generals and historians agree with him; General Westmoreland, among others, does not. "They put too much into it for it to have been simply a feint," Westmoreland told me after I returned from Vietnam. "They abandoned their attack because we made it impossible for them to win." And Khe Sanh, for Westmoreland, was not simply bait for the STVA or a blocking position to prevent the North Vietnamese from attacking Hue and cutting off the two northern provinces of South Vietnam. It had a potential role of great importance as the base for the campaign that had been crucial to Westmoreland's own offensive strategy since early in the war: a major operation down Route 9 and into Laos, with the purpose of cutting the NVA's single most important asset -- the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Without Khe Sanh astride Route 9 the attack would have been impossible; with Khe Sanh secure, Westmoreland could continue to hope that President Johnson would change his mind and allow a strike at the NVA's most vulnerable point. But Johnson never did, and Khe Sanh proved useless as a defensive position; during the Tat offensive the Communists ignored it and seized Hue anyway.
I asked General Man why the people hadn't risen up to join the Viet Cong during the Tet offensive, and if that didn't show that the Viet Cong had lacked the popular support they had always claimed they'd had.
"Not at all," he said. "Uprisings were very successful in 1959 and 1960, the early years of the war. But it would have been suicide to ask the people to rise up unarmed against American soldiers. Uprisings are appropriate only after the armed enemy is paralyzed."
"Why, then, did you call the Tet offensive 'the general offensive/general uprising'?" I asked him. "Isn't an uprising what you expected?"
He looked at me, his eyes harder. "We expected to win, and we did," he said.
But Tin is the Kilroy of Vietnam, who seems always to have been wherever history was being made -- from Dienbienphu, where he was a regular soldier, to Saigon, where as a North Vietnamese officer and journalist in 1975 he was present at General Duong Van Minh's surrender. Today he is the military correspondent for the Communist Party newspaper. In his opinion, the Americans lost for three reasons. "One weak point was your rotation of soldiers. You were strangers here anyway, and as soon as someone began to learn the country you sent him home. Your second weak point was to try to win the hearts and minds of the people while you were using bombs to kill them. And finally, you had a very bad ally: ninety percent of the puppet army were corrupt, and the ten percent that were good soldiers were not enough."
Bui Tin saw the best the Americans had -- the astonishing mobility of helicopters, the terrifying power of artillery and B-52s, and the huge losses that such a modern army could inflict. To the Americans, who were measuring progress in the war by counting bodies, those losses meant we were winning. Our logic was the logic of the trenches of the First World War: if you kill enough of your enemy's troops, sooner or later he will realize that the price is too high and give up. That may be true in the rational world of game theory, but it had no appreciable effect on our enemy in this war. In fact it was true, but for us -- we got to the point where our losses were too high, and we quit. The war was the equivalent of Muhammad Ali's Rope a Dope tactic: they let us pound them until we gave up.
I asked Bui Tin about the losses the Viet Cong suffered in the climactic battle of the war, the Tet offensive. "Some companies were wiped out," he said, "and in Saigon and Hue we suffered terrible losses. But we did not lose even one third of all the Viet Cong forces."
I said that seemed like a lot to me, the equivalent of the Americans' losing 180,000 men in one battle. Bui Tin brushed this aside, as every Vietnamese did every mention of the size of losses, underscoring how the American strategy of attrition was doomed to failure. "We had hundreds of thousands killed in this war. We would have sacrificed one or two million more if necessary. Every family has had relatives killed. I myself have closed the eyes on hundreds of my comrades. Many of my closest friends sacrificed their lives. But we had no choice!"
Late one afternoon, as the light was fading, I met with General Nguyen Xuan Hoang, the principal army historian of the war. He had joined the fight against the French in Hanoi in 1945. He fought at Dienbienphu and in 1965 was the aide to the general commanding the North Vietnamese forces at the first big battle with the Americans, the battle of the Ia Drang, in the central highlands, near the Cambodian border.
"I look back on that time with sadness," he told me. "By the end of 1964 our forces in the South had defeated the puppet troops. The war could have ended then, without so much bloodshed and suffering." (Later, in Saigon, a veteran of the Viet Cong told me the same thing, with an added barb. "If you had not come in," he said, "we Southerners could have won the war and set up our own government. Thanks to you, the Northerners had to come to our aid. They took over the war, and now they have taken over the country. And you are to blame.")
I asked General Hoang about the battle of the Ia Drang, which had done so much to shape the war's future tactics. He had fought there, and he told me how the thinking had developed.
"We could not indulge in wishful thinking. We were facing a modern army, very mobile, never short of firepower. When you sent the 1st Cavalry to attack us at the Ia Drang, it gave us headaches trying to figure out what to do. General Man [the NVA commander] and I were very close to the front, and several times the American troops came very near us. With the helicopters you could strike deep into our rear without warning. It was very effective. But your troops were never really prepared. The 1st Cavalry came out to fight us with one day's food, a week's ammunition. They sent their clothes back to Saigon to be washed. They depended on water in cans, brought in by helicopter.
"Our mobility was only our feet, so we had to lure your troops into areas where helicopters and artillery would be of little use. And we tried to turn those advantages against you, to make you so dependent on them that you would never develop the ability to meet us on our terms -- on foot, lightly armed, in the jungle. Because you depended on artillery, you built fire bases and seldom went beyond their range. And once you had built a fire base, you didn't move it. So we knew how to stay away from your artillery, or how to get so close you couldn't use it. Also, you seldom knew where we were, and you seldom had a clear goal. So your great advantages ended up being wasted, and you spent so much of your firepower against empty jungle. You fell into our trap. Our guerrillas served to keep you divided. You could not concentrate your forces on our regular troops, so your advantages were dissipated."
I replied that we had been more effective than that: the Viet Cong had been destroyed after Tet, and by 1969 pacification was working. The Communists were unable to mount a single major offensive in 1969, and much of the countryside was secure. Also, whenever American troops faced Communist regular forces in major battles, either we were clearly victorious or the outcome was a draw.
He smiled indulgently at me. "Of course we had many losses, suffered many defeats. But we never stopped winning the war. Time was on our side. We did not have to defeat you militarily; we had only to avoid losing. A victory by your brave soldiers meant nothing, did nothing to change the balance of forces or to bring you any closer to victory. That was because the people, the Viet Cong, and our regular forces were inseparable. If you had a temporary success against one, the other would take up the battle."
There was much tragedy in these bland words. The origins of John Kennedy's and Lyndon Johnson's war at least were understandable: the legacy of Korea and Cuba; Johnson's fears of being vulnerable from the right on the Great Society; our belief that we could do anything we set our minds to. But we were wrong: our commitments exceeded our ability -- or at least our will -- to meet them. We were tied to an unreliable ally in a country we did not understand; the premises had all changed, and after Tet it was clear that we could not win. Johnson realized that, and at the price of his presidency admitted defeat.
The Nixon years of the war are much harder to accept, both in the larger arena of strategy and in the dirty corners where the war was fought. After the spring of 1968 the war had lost its idealistic goals. We could no longer realistically believe that we were fighting and dying to save South Vietnam or to preserve democracy or even to stop the spread of communism, as we had in Korea. We were fighting, as Henry Kissinger put it, for "negotiating objectives," and to protect our credibility as an ally. And we were there because it was easier to continue than to admit failure and deal with the consequences. Before Richard Nixon was inaugurated, Clark Clifford told Kissinger that the new President had a rare opportunity to end the war at once, to put it behind us before it became his war, too, as it had been Johnson's. But Clifford's plea fell on deaf ears. Virtually half of the American deaths were still to come, along with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese deaths.
The veterans who fought in 1965 and in 1971 might as well have been in two different wars. The veterans of Nixon's war are much more bitter; they know that they were sent to die for diplomacy, nothing more. In 1969 we could have negotiated a departure not unlike that of the French. We had many cards to play, many ways to protect those who had depended on us. But we chose to fight for four more years, which meant that Richard Nixon's share of the war lasted longer than America's share of the Second World War. And we left in ignominy anyway, the Marine helicopters churning on the roof of the Embassy, the people who had depended on us left to the mercy of the victors.
"In the first analysis," John Kennedy said in 1963, "it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it." In the end it Eras their wag and all our dead and wounded, all our billions of dollars, all our resourcefulness and energy, changed nothing that would have happened in 1964 if we had never sent combat troops. What changed, instead, was that Southeast Asia was permanently destabilized. In Vietnam the heart and strength of the Southern guerrillas was destroyed, giving the North, our original enemy, far more influence than it would ever have had. Cambodia was brought into the War. to become first a charnel house and then a Vietnamese colony. And the original fear that had started it all, the fear of Chinese expansion? Well, we are now China's most important ally; and its bitterest enemy, the staunchest foe of its expansion into Southeast Asia, is of course Vietnam.
When I returned from Vietnam, l went to Washington to see Edwin Simmons, a retired Marine brigadier general who for the past thirteen years has been in charge of writing the official Marine Corps history of the war. During the last few months of my time in Vietnam I had been his aide. I told him what the North Vietnamese had said about the war. "Much of what they say is true," he said. "We violated many of the basic principles of war. We had no clear objective. Since we didn't have a clear objective, we had to measure our performance by statistics. We had no unity of command. We never had the initiative. The most common phrase was 'reaction force' -- we were always reacting to them. Our forces were divided and diffused
"I went back in 1970, and everything was just as I had left it in 1966. The same hamlets were giving us trouble. the same units were in the same place. The only difference was that macadam and plywood had replaced mud and canvas. Our base camps and fire-support bases had become fortified islands. Our helicopter mobility worked against us. The rule of thumb was, if it was more than four kilometers, you went by helicopter. This gave the illusion of controlling ground which we didn't really control."
Still, some American strategists believe that we could have won -- on the battlefield, at least -- if only we had had a clear strategy, if only we had not had so many political constraints, if only we could have used our great strength and gone for the jugular with enormous force, and not with piecemeal escalation. If only ...
The most articulate proponent of this view is Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., of the Army War College. He is the author of "On Strategic" an application of the principles of Clausewitz to the Vietnam War, which is becoming a bible among younger officers. Summers ignores the debate between Westmoreland and the Marines about pacification, and instead insists that Westmoreland paid too much attention to pacification, which in Summers's view was contusing the cape, the Viet Cong, with the bullfighter, the North Vietnamese. He contends that we should have fought the way we did in Korea: leave the pacification to the South Vietnamese and strive to isolate the battlefield by concentrating on the invading army, in this case the North Vietnamese. Summers suggests, for example, that we should have focused American troops on cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Westmoreland had, in face wanted to do just that as early as 1964; he also suggested an amphibious landing in North Vietnam like General MacArthur's landing at Inchon, in Korea. But President Johnson would never agree to widen the war.
I asked General Hoang whether this strategy might have worked.
"We considered those possibilities from the beginning," he said. "We were even prepared for an invasion in 1975. during the final battle. But this wasn't Korea. You couldn't ignore the fact that our forces weren't just in the North -- they were everywhere, on the spot. You yourself were in Da Nang; you know that wherever you were, we were. Cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail would not hare been easy; we had some of our strongest forces there. And it would have done no good; the puppets could never have fought us alone in the South. An invasion of the North would have caused us difficulties, we would have suffered losses, but you would have had to pay a far more terrible price, and it would never have worked."
"You know," he said, "your mistake was not in your tactics or even your strategy. You simply should not have gotten into this war in the first place. It is far easier to start a war than to end one -- that is a valuable lesson."
Copyright © 1985 by William Broyles, Jr. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; April 1985; The Road to Hill 10; Volume 255, No. 4; pages 90 - 112.
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