The War in Vietnam

Returning to Vietnam after an absence of several months, a correspondent whose experience in Vietnam covers the past twenty years dropped by the MAC-V information center to seek an updating on the current military scene. He was taken in hand by a lieutenant colonel who welcomed what he assumed to be a greenhorn with a richly embroidered and totally inaccurate account of Viet Cong reverses. Among his more exaggerated claims was the statement that with the exception of one major route all the main roads throughout the country were now secure.

“Do you mean I can drive from Saigon to Danang?” asked the correspondent.

“Why, certainly,” the colonel replied.

“Now isn’t that luck,” said the correspondent‚ tongue in check. I’ve just hired a car, and I’ve always wanted to make that journey along the coast.”

At this point, the briefing officer appreciated that he had overstepped the mark and qualified his statement with a reference to the need to check on local conditions from day to day. The correspondent went his way — which was not, needless to relate‚ through the Viet Cong domains on the coast road to Danang. The incident occurred this summer, but this sort of thing has been going on ever since the war began, sometimes because of ignorance‚ and sometimes because U.S. officials tend to equate facts with defeatism.

Kidding ourselves

The only truly significant advance in the war in the past year has been in the field of military intelligence. Yet to accept that intelligence as accurate comes close officially to admitting the inadmissible. At the time the MAC-V colonel was creating so cheerful and so positive a picture for the incoming correspondent, the same headquarters was wrestling with the problem of how to reveal that the combined strength of all enemy forces in-country was much closer to 392,000 than the figure of 292,000, which had been the official estimate since early in the year.

Since the problem posed political questions of credibility and also military questions of an even more disturbing nature‚ it was resolved‚ at least for the time being, by relegation to the appropriate pigeonhole. It was one matter to accept that Viet Cong armed strength jumped from 15,000 in 1961 to 45‚000 in 1965. After all‚ this was the purely “advisory” period of the war. But to reveal that the immense American buildup had been accompanied by a complementary increase in enemy strength, including a jump of 100,000 during the year of heaviest fighting and heaviest Viet Cong casualties, was also to reveal a lack of real progress that very few would care to admit.

Thanks to the troop-carrying helicopter and the Viet Cong’s present field deficiency in anti-aircraft defenses (by contrast, the anti-aircraft defenses in North Vietnam are probably the heaviest any air force has ever been subjected to)‚ past estimates of the numerical superiority required to crush the insurgents in a revolutionary war of this sort are not applicable in Vietnam. Neither the ratio of 12 to 1, which the British thought necessary in Malaya, nor 64 to 1, which the French regarded as an appropriate superiority after their experiences in Indochina or Algeria, can be regarded as a realistic yardstick for this war. The Americans and the South Vietnamese not only have unprecedented mobility, they also have overwhelming fire support and other material advantages. No one has calculated, for instance‚ how many guerrillas equal a battalion of 105’s‚ though such factors are obviously of importance in the equation.

When due allowance is made for these material advantages, however, it is readily apparent that there are not enough Allied troops on the ground. More specifically, the addition of roughly half a million Americans, Koreans, and others has not succeeded in swinging the military balance against the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies to anything like the extent Washington and Saigon expected.

The search-and-destroy operations with which General Westmoreland hoped to break up the main force enemy units of divisional and regimental size have been disruptive and richly rewarding in intelligence. But they have not succeeded in their primary purpose. The enemy is not abandoning his mobile and conventional war and falling back on purely guerrilla tactics‚ which, as Hanoi seems well aware‚ would be the beginning of the end. There have been some major Viet Cong reverses, notably in the secret base areas north and west of Saigon and in Binh Dinh Province in Central Vietnam, but in striking measure the late General Nguyen Chi Thanh, who was known to be in command of all Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam, offset these setbacks by seizing the initiative in I Corps south of the Demilitarized Zone, and by posing a threat of substantial proportions in the region of the central highlands in II Corps. His tactics were essentially diversionary, but they were successful. The effect has been to “fix” Westmoreland’s main striking forces, thereby setting back his own plans for maintaining the initiative which he seized so brilliantly‚ if so briefly, in operation Junction City at the beginning of the year.

In turn, the loss of initiative has ended hopes for early and decisive improvement in the revolutionary development program. Pacification cannot be taken seriously at this time in I Corps. Elsewhere, revolutionary development cadres, government officials‚ and village headmen are increasingly the target for attack. No one can blame them for seeking refuge at night in military compounds, or in secure district capitals, but the result of this caution is simply to increase the sense of rural instability. Until there is security there can be no pacification. And the corollary to this is that without pacification there can be no settlement that does not open the way to an ultimate political victory by the National Liberation Front.

Hanoi’s resources

“Sure we hoped things would go much better, but‚ intellectually, I doubt that we ever believed they would,” said a senior American official recently. This is true, perhaps, politically‚ but militarily there is no concealing the sense of surprise, and even shock, in the enemy’s capacity to absorb American firepower and to keep on coming. Many Allied strategists analyzing the defeats inflicted by the U.S. Marines on the 324B Division of the North Vietnamese Army in the summer of 1966 concluded that Hanoi had no alternative but to abandon set-piece actions and to revert from mobile and semiconventional actions to guerrilla war. Every regiment in the 324B Division was cut to pieces in a series of actions which spread across the coastal plain south of the Demilitarized Zone into the valleys leading to a curious, pyramidlike formation known as the Rockpile and beyond into the jungle-covered mountains. Yet this year the 324B Division not only returned to the action in the same area but was accompanied by the 341st Division and the 325th and a whole range of new weapons‚ including field artillery and rocket launchers. The battles were bigger and bloodier than ever before, and on both sides casualties were heavier.

Multiplicity of wars

The figure of 1177 American dead in May, nearly one tenth of all those who have been killed since 1961, reflected the damage on the Allied side. Not all of these casualties were Marines, of course‚ though their losses were proportionately heavier than other units’. It is impossible to make an accurate assessment of the Northerners’ losses‚ but, conservatively, they would run five or six times higher. For this outlay in blood, and in treasure, they captured no objectives of significance and added nothing to their territorial holdings. Next time — and no one doubts that there will be a next time — they may be expected to hit harder with bigger and more sophisticated weapons, including more effective anti-aircraft guns and artillery, and perhaps not to achieve more significant success in terms of territory won or positions captured.

What, then‚ is Hanoi’s objective? It is, in fact, fighting not merely a multifronted war but also a sophisticated multiplicity of wars‚ each with an interlocking purpose and design. The main force efforts, launched here and elsewhere from the privileged sanctuaries beyond the borders of South Vietnam, have a threefold intent: to cause maximum American and Allied casualties; to “absorb” the expanding Allied forces in defensive operations, thereby preventing the concentration of forces needed to protect and to expand the pacified areas; and to permit intensified small-scale guerrilla actions against the pacification program in particular and the Allied rear and base areas in general.

Hanoi seeks for a cumulative effect rather than striking successes. One of the more closely guarded secrets of the war is the ratio of front-line U.S. soldiers to the total committed force. Without prejudice to this secret, it is obvious that if the Communist forces could maintain the momentum of their operations at anything approaching the AprilMay level, the casualty expectancy rates among the real American front-line troops would far exceed those of the Korean War, or the Second World War. Time and again in his important military manual, People’s War, People’s Army, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese Defense Minister, emphasizes the point that a great victory like Dien Bien Phu is wonderful if the opportunity presents itself, but if it does not, a multiplicity of smaller actions can eventually have the cumulative effect of a Dien Bien Phu.

The erosion of manpower inherent in this type of operation is not confined to one side, of course. Everywhere, the cost to the regular units of the North Vietnamese Army has been high. But Hanoi is accustomed to, and expects, heavy casualties. Moreover, by the standards of the Indochina War, its casualties to this stage have been relatively light. Its trained and organized reserves in North Vietnam more than double its regular force commitment in South Vietnam; and Viet Cong recruitment in the rural areas, though suffering from competition with the Saigon government, is much less critical than reports of the induction of fifteen-year-olds into the guerrillas and regular forces might seem to indicate.

The North’s battlefield

Because of the nature of the terrain and the short haul for North Vietnamese reinforcement and resupply‚ the region immediately south of the Demilitarized Zone is likely to remain a major field of action. Unless Washington decides on a major escalation and approves the conting ncy plan to cut off Hanoi’s forces in the zone itself by an amphibious landing, an act as tempting tactically as it might be disastrous strategically, there is no reason why the North Vietnamese should not continue indefinitely to “fix” a substantially larger American force here by the always promised and sometimes fulfilled threat of a major attack. Bombing and shelling harass, but they do not fully deter.

Although it is obviously easier to exploit, the DMZ front is simply one of several which the Northern command now has the capability to activate. The patient and laborious extension of the Ho Chi Minh “Trail” through the mountains of eastern Laos and northern Cambodia has been one of the more remarkable Communist achievements of the war. There are now truckable roads through regions in which qualified Western specialists five years ago believed no roads could be built. Extraordinary engineering difficulties have been overcome. The “trail” is still no Brownie hike, but troops and supplies in ever increasing quantities do get through.

To meet the threat from the DMZ in April and May, General Westmoreland had to strengthen his forces there by redeploying three brigades from II Corps to III Corps. Almost immediately a second threat began to develop on the High Plateau, which necessitated moving the 173rd Airborne from III Corps to plug the hole there. After their battering in Tay Ninh Province early in the year, the Northern troops, and the local main force Viet Cong, were in no shape to exploit this reduction in regional American strength; but equally, Westmoreland lacked the resources to continue his multidivisional offensive here.

The simple answer to this stalemated situation might be to reinforce the American forces heavily, not by tens of thousands but by hundreds of thousands. Even Hanoi appears ready to believe that its tactics would not be proof against a force of a million Americans. Since any troop reinforcement appears likely to be modest, however, and the circumstances that have brought about this situation are not wholly military, other approaches are called for. As usual, though causes are not difficult to isolate, the effects sometimes seem almost beyond remedy. This was assuredly the case in Saigon until the last day of June, when Prime Minister Ky, under the strongest of pressure from the military Directory, abandoned his quest for the presidency and agreed to run for the vice presidency on the ticket led by the chief of state, General Nguyen Van Thieu.

The Ky factor

There have been few more important political developments in Vietnam in recent years. The combination of Ky’s will to win and the fear that he might not had produced a reaction among his intimates and associates that threatened to destroy the legitimacy of the election on September 3 and to discredit both Vietnam and the United States. In particular, the use of political censorship and the activities of the police were giving cause for the gravest concern. Day after day newspapers appeared with large blank spaces in their political columns. Political censorship under Ky was worse even than it had been under the Diem regime.

In response to American pressure‚ Ky terminated political censorship in mid-July, but military censorship continued. Under General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the military security service has become one of the most effective‚ and also one of the most ruthless, organizations the country has ever known. Every major political group opposing Ky believed that Loan was rigging the election on his behalf — and worse. There were charges of assassination, which could not be proven, and of opium smuggling, which could be.

Brass knuckles and corruption

In a scandal involving the Vietnamese Embassy in Vientiane, Colonel Khu Duc Hung, the military attaché and a member of Loan’s military security service, was dismissed from his post by the ambassador and sent back to Saigon. Countercharges by Loan that the ambassador himself was involved in the traffic led to the ambassador’s recall but did obscure the facts, which were well known to the government and to all Western embassies in Vientiane. When Saigon proposed the appointment of a new ambassador who was known to be a member of Loan’s military security service, Vientiane replied that the appointment would be unwelcome. It is impossible to estimate police profits from the opium and gold rackets and other extracurricular activities. A former cabinet minister gave as his informed opinion that the “secret” funds available to Ky’s supporters from these and other sources ran to some three billion piasters, or more than $25 million. It is true‚ of course, that secret funds have always been a part of normal government operations. Beginning with the Diem era, all leaders have had access to handout funds for which no budgetary accounting was made. The important difference now was in the size of the fund and the purposes for which it was to be used. Loan and Ky’s election campaign had become all but inseparable.

Beginning on May 10‚ national police and military security chiefs on the provincial level were summoned‚ Corps by Corps, to Saigon. Here they were briefed by Loan. “With me there is only black and white,” he told each group. “I don’t believe in shades of gray. Your mission in previous elections was to get people to the polls. This time you have a different mission. It is to ensure the election of the ticket by Nguyen Cao Ky.” But the effect was to consolidate concern with Ky and his tactics on the part of Americans and the Vietnamese military. This led to Ky’s last-minute withdrawal from the presidential race. It was hoped then that there was the prospect of an honest election.