Embers of War (113 page)

A secret U.S. war was under way. Ostensibly, Americans were serving purely as advisers and never engaging the Viet Cong except in self-defense; in reality, their involvement extended further—in the air as well as on the ground. “I’d heard stories that U.S. pilots were actually dropping bombs,” Associated Press bureau chief Malcolm Browne, who arrived in the fall of 1961, later recalled, so “I went out to Bien Hoa, the biggest military airfield in South Vietnam, to have a look. I was barred from entering but I watched from outside the perimeter fence and saw two-seat T-28s taking off with full racks of bombs. When they returned, I could see that their racks were empty and there were smoke stains behind the guns. As often as not, a Vietnamese was sitting in the back and the actual pilot was blond and blue-eyed and obviously not from Vietnam. By reporting that, I was threatened with expulsion. The official American line was that the U.S. role in Vietnam was subordinate to that of our Vietnamese ally.”
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The truth was plain to see. Homer Bigart, the venerable military correspondent of
The New York Times
, minced no words in a front-page article in February 1962. “The United States is involved in a war in Vietnam,” the piece began. “American troops will stay until victory.” Bigart noted the “passionate and inflexible” U.S. support for South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and speculated that the United States “seems inextricably committed to a long, inconclusive war.” He quoted Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who on a visit to Saigon that month vowed that America would stand by Diem “until we win.”
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Never mind that a principal stated rationale for the containment policy in Asia, namely the need to check a worldwide Communist expansionist conspiracy directed from Moscow, demonstrably no longer pertained, if it ever had. For years, evidence had accumulated of a Sino-Soviet split; by 1960, Soviet economic and military assistance to China had ceased, Soviet technicians had been withdrawn, the ideological war of words between Moscow and Beijing had become intense, and international Communism had become fragmented. U.S. intelligence analysts were well aware of these developments, yet at the highest levels, officials made few adjustments. In January 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara of the strategic advantages that could accrue to the “Sino-Soviet bloc” if the United States did not deepen her involvement in Indochina.
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By mid-1962, American military advisers in Vietnam numbered 8,000, by the end of the year over 11,000, and by the time of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963, almost 16,000. Just three weeks before the Dallas tragedy, Ngo Dinh Diem had himself been murdered along with his brother Nhu, after a U.S.-sanctioned coup d’état by dissident generals. The coup followed months of widespread anti-government agitation in urban as well as rural areas. Notably, Buddhist monks protesting the Roman Catholic Diem’s religious persecution poured gasoline over their robes and ignited themselves in the streets of Saigon. Intellectuals stepped up their long-standing complaints about government corruption and Diem’s penchant for concentrating power in the hands of family members, and they condemned his policy of jailing critics to silence them. Kennedy and his aides vacillated before determining that Diem and the influential Nhu should go.

In 1964, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, the number of military advisers grew to 23,000, and Congress voted to authorize the president to use military force as he saw fit in Southeast Asia. The vote came after U.S. destroyers, operating in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam, twice within three days reported coming under attack from North Vietnamese patrol boats. Many senior Democrats—including the entire Senate leadership on foreign policy—expressed misgivings about a deepening American involvement in the war, but they were not about to defy their president in an election year and with U.S. troops in harm’s way. Despite a lack of evidence that the second attack had occurred, Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes against selected North Vietnamese patrol boat bases and an oil depot.
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The aid and advisers helped, but not enough to achieve American purposes. Political turmoil was endemic in Saigon, no less after Diem’s ouster than before. The string of governments that followed his fall continued to suffer from infighting and lack of broad popular support. Militarily too, the Viet Cong scored steady gains, despite the inferiority of their weaponry and training. A pattern repeated itself. The Viet Cong, like their Viet Minh forerunners, liked to operate at night and in the bush; the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), with its formidable U.S.-supplied firepower, was afraid of the darkness and the jungle, just as the French Union forces had been. At twilight, the enemy took over. Virtually no ARVN officers had fought on the side of the Viet Minh in the earlier struggle; most, indeed, had served under the French. A clear majority were from privileged backgrounds, well-to-do, urban, disdainful of the peasantry that still made up the vast bulk of the Vietnamese populace.

Journalist Theodore White offered a sobering assessment in a letter to his friend John F. Kennedy, describing a scene eerily reminiscent of that which pertained during JFK’s visit a decade earlier: “The situation gets steadily worse almost week by week.… Guerrillas now control almost all the Southern delta—so much that I could find no American who would drive me outside Saigon in his car even by day without military convoy.… What perplexes the hell out of me is that the Commies, on their side, seem able to find people willing to die for their cause.”
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For true believers on the American side, the problems were all surmountable, and there could be no thought of turning back. Edward Lansdale, whose role in U.S. policy making on Vietnam had dwindled in the second half of the 1950s, reemerged early in the Kennedy years to argue for a robust prosecution of the war
and
for the need to be sensitive to local Vietnamese needs and mores. His faith in the precepts of counterinsurgency was undiminished and uncomplicated, never mind that previous attempts at such warfare—including by the French, in this very place—had yielded meager results. “Just remember this,” he told a group of U.S. military officers in 1962, with perfect matter-of-fact simplicity. “Communist guerrillas hide among the people. If you win the people over to your side, the Communist guerrillas have no place to hide, and you can find them. Then, as military men, fix them … finish them!”
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For Lansdale and others of like mind, the French experience was largely irrelevant to America’s concerns. France, after all, had been fighting a colonial war; the United States would be fighting one of popular opposition to Communism. She would represent the Third Force, neither Communist nor colonialist. Furthermore, the French had lacked military strength and sophistication, shackled as they were by their humiliating defeat in 1940 and their dependence on African colonial units and the German-dominated Foreign Legion, devious and narrow of vision. The United States, on the other hand, was honest and selfless and massively powerful, not least in political terms. Untainted by colonialism, possessor of the mightiest arsenal the world had ever seen, she was the champion of freedom, the engine in the global drive to stamp out rapacious Communist expansion. On the human side, the French experience with the cupidity and the fence-sitting
attentisme
of their Vietnamese collaborators would not repeat itself, Lansdale willed himself to believe (the evidence from the late 1950s might have given him pause), because this time the Vietnamese truly had something to fight for.

And besides, hadn’t the British shown in Malaya that Communist insurgencies could be defeated? The so-called Emergency, which had been proclaimed in 1948 and was declared finished in 1960, when the British defeated the Communist Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), seemed to offer lessons that could be applied to the revolutionary situation in Vietnam. Or so it appeared—when pressed, Lansdale had to concede the particular advantages the British enjoyed in Malaya, beginning with the fact that the guerrillas were almost all ethnic Chinese, isolated from the bulk of the population; few Malays joined the movement. They also faced chronic and debilitating food shortages and, unlike the Viet Minh and now the Viet Cong, they did not have the benefit of neighboring sanctuaries or powerful outside patrons. Finally, the MNLA always had to cope with a colossal inferiority in numbers—perhaps as high as 35 to 1 (300,000 men under arms versus 8,000 guerrillas), as compared to a ratio of no better than 1.5 to 1 during the Franco–Viet Minh War.
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Other observers, seeing the parallels between the French war and this new American one, and sensing the dangers of innocence in a difficult and complex society such as Vietnam, found themselves thinking more and more of that fictional Lansdale, Alden Pyle. “We used to sit in the small French cafés [in Saigon] and talk about Greene’s book,” journalist David Halberstam—whose captivating, sprawling
The Best and the Brightest
remains an essential source on America’s war—later recalled of himself and other reporters covering the early 1960s buildup. “It seemed at that time … the best novel about Vietnam. There was little disagreement about his fine sense of the tropics, his knowledge of the war, his intuition of the Vietnamese toughness and resilience, particularly of the peasant and the enemy.” Only one element, Halberstam went on, raised reservations: “It was only his portrait of the sinister innocence of the American that caused some doubt, that made us a little uneasy.” The public affairs officer at the U.S. embassy, Halberstam added, was particularly bitter about Greene’s novel: “He called it an evil book, made worse, he said, because it was so effective, so slick.”
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The “innocence” notion should not be exaggerated. By the early months of 1963, if not before, a bleak realism permeated much U.S. official analysis about the war’s prospects, at least behind closed doors. In the intelligence community, pessimism was now the order of the day, and apprehension was also growing in Congress, even on the part of former Diem stalwarts such as Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield. Kennedy too grew increasingly wary, hinting to aides in the final months of his life that he wanted to withdraw from Vietnam following his reelection in 1964.
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Johnson, for his part, in 1964 began to question the long-term prospects in the struggle, even with major American escalation, and to wonder about the war’s ultimate importance to U.S. national security. In September, for example, he said of the hapless Saigon leaders: “I mean, if they can’t protect themselves, if you have a government that can’t protect itself from kids in the streets, what the hell can you do about an invading army?” A few months after that, LBJ dejectedly noted that “a man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam, there’s not a bit.”
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But like his predecessor, Johnson was careful to articulate these sentiments only privately and even then only to a select few. In public, he and his top advisers—all of them holdovers from Kennedy—stuck close to the received wisdom, insisting that the outcome in Southeast Asia was critically important to American interests and that they were committed to defending their Saigon ally against aggression “imposed from the outside.” Whatever problems might be hampering the war effort would be overcome in due course. And whatever the price of victory, the cost of defeat would be far greater. The sentiments, sometimes the very rhetoric, echoed that of their Paris counterparts a decade before. And by using such unambiguous language in public, U.S. leaders found—again like the French before them—that backing away could be extremely difficult. Hawks, they knew, stood ready to remind them of their stark words should they so much as hint at a change in course. By their categorical public pronouncements, that is to say, as well as by their escalatory actions, both American presidents painted themselves into a corner.

It mattered here that Kennedy’s and Johnson’s freedom of maneuver was already constrained by the choices of their predecessors—by Truman’s tacit acknowledgment in 1945–46 that France had a right to return to Indochina; by his administration’s decision in 1950 to actively aid the French war effort; and by the Eisenhower team’s move in 1954 to intervene directly in southern Vietnam, displacing France as the major external power. LBJ had the added burden of Kennedy’s expansion of U.S. involvement in 1961–63. For more than a dozen years, the United States had committed herself to preserving a non-Communist toehold in Vietnam, and both men feared that to alter course now, even under the cover of a fig-leaf negotiated settlement, could be harmful in terms of “credibility”—their country’s, their party’s, their own. They weren’t willing to risk it. If this stance speaks poorly for their political courage, it also had political logic behind it. Then again, so did the skeptics’ reply: that the credibility would suffer much more if America got sucked into a bloody and drawn-out slugfest—as seemed all too possible—in a conflict of peripheral strategic import in forbidding terrain seven thousand miles from the coast of California.

The skeptics had been there all along, since before the shooting started. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt was their champion, and it’s not fanciful to believe that had he lived beyond 1945, FDR would have tried to keep France from forcibly reclaiming control of Indochina, and might well have succeeded, thereby changing the flow of history. But Roosevelt died, and soon thereafter patterns of thought were laid down that would drive U.S. policy for the next twenty years. American leaders in this era always had real choices about which way to go in the anti–Ho Chi Minh struggle, choices evident not only in retrospect but also at the time, yet the policy always moved in the direction of deeper U.S. involvement. Successive administrations could have shifted course, but they never did. Hence the danger in focusing exclusively on contingency: It can blind us to the continuities that permeate the entire American experience in Vietnam. And hence the vital importance, if we are to understand the U.S. war, of reckoning seriously with the earlier era.
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