Fire in the Lake (44 page)

In the spring of 1965 the U.S. commander in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, judged the military situation so critical as to require deploying the American troops even before an adequate supply or logistics system could be constructed. In March a Marine Expeditionary Force arrived in Da Nang with the mission of defending the airport against enemy attack. Over the next few months Westmoreland reinforced this contingent, bringing it up to more than division strength, and sent it into combat with the ARVN. In September the First Cavalry Division set up base in the area of Pleiku and soon afterwards engaged three North Vietnamese regiments in the bloody battle of the Ia Drang valley. The concentration of troops in central Vietnam was a product of Westmoreland’s theory that the enemy’s intentions were to “cut the country in half” at a latitude close to Pleiku. What this phrase meant was difficult to say, as the NLF had already “cut the country in half” in the sense that it controlled most of the central Vietnamese countryside and had confined the GVN to air traffic between the province capitals. On the other hand, a military occupation of the northern-most cities did not seem a likely strategy for the NLF, given the weight of American air power. Apparently even Westmoreland did not entirely believe his own theory, for in the fall of 1965 he judged the enemy threat to Saigon great enough to warrant the deployment of the First Infantry and elements of the Fourth Infantry to Binh Duong province, just north of the city. By the end of 1965 American troop strength had reached 184,000 men, and, with the addition of a few Korean units, five combat divisions.
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The American military achievements in 1965 promised anything but a quick end to the war. What progress there was could be discovered only from a negative point of view. Westmoreland himself later claimed merely that his troops had “defeated a concentrated North Vietnamese effort to cut the country in two.”
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Rather more concretely, it could be said that the First Cavalry had repulsed a North Vietnamese attack on a Special Forces camp in the jungle region of the Laotian border, and that the very presence of the U.S. troops with their air and artillery support had reduced the chances for an enemy occupation of the major South Vietnamese cities. The American troops fought well, but apart from two large-scale battles their activities were confined to small-unit patrolling supported by artillery and tactical bombing, as well as by “strategic bombing” in the south by B-52s stationed in Guam. It was not until the next year, when U.S. troop strength rose to well over 200,000, that Westmoreland took the offensive with a series of “search and destroy” missions against enemy units and base camps. At that point enemy strength in the south was far more formidable than it had ever been, for with all the bombing of the north and all the enemy deaths recorded by American troops, the North Vietnamese and the NLF main forces in the south had grown to 221,000.
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Still, despite their less than decisive performance of the first year, the American troops brought a surge of optimism to the American mission in Saigon. The embassy officials and military advisers were not, after all, concerned with the long-range goals of U.S. policy, but rather with their own appointed task of saving the Saigon government. As they looked at it, the President had finally recognized their plight and given them the wherewithal to get the job done. They could not imagine that the administration would take on something that it could not finish. The Vietnamese officials seemed to have the same confidence. The Americans who weathered 1964–1965 saw a startling change come over their Vietnamese allies. The morale of the ARVN rose appreciably, and the city bourgeoisie no longer seemed to fear the prospect of an NLF victory. There was a sense among Vietnamese and Americans in Saigon that a crisis had been passed.

As if to underscore the change in the war, Washington sent a new group of American officials to Saigon. In place of Maxwell Taylor, with his distressing experience of coups, riots, and military defeats, there came Henry Cabot Lodge, the handsome, imperturbable Bostonian. Having left Vietnam in June 1964 to take part in the Republican political campaign, Lodge missed the teenage mobs and the sectarian murders. But then he seemed a man who would never have contact with such unpleasantness. Charming and bland in an upper-class Bostonian way, he ignored the routine desperation of his officials, took naps, and spent an hour or more at lunchtime every day swimming laps in the pool at the Cercle Sportif. Whatever the crisis, he and his wife would attend services every Sunday at the small Episcopalian church in the center of town. To be near Lodge was to forget that such things as misery, deceit, corruption, and brutality existed in the world. Brought up at a military school, Lodge looked upon the military profession as a noble calling. He saw no reason to exert strict civilian control over U.S. military operations and, though he held veto power in the mission council, he rarely, if ever, used it. The aggressive, almost high-handed manner with which he had treated General Harkins during the Diemist crisis was no longer in evidence. Curiously enough, he, as a politician, had much less interest than General Maxwell Taylor in a civilian government for the Vietnamese. With his air of benign disinterestedness he managed to develop a friendly, almost paternal, relationship with the new military leaders.

Lodge’s second-in-command at the embassy was Deputy Ambassador William J. Porter. A career diplomat of some distinction but without previous experience in Vietnam, Porter took over the job of reorganizing the civilian operations and putting together a new pacification program. His task of reorganization was an enormous one, for, as the American troop commitment increased, the civilian mission grew with it into a replica of Washington, D.C., a small satellite state of bureaucrats on the other side of the Pacific. By the beginning of 1966, USAID and JUSPAO (the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office) alone included hundreds of people ranging from agricultural experts to hospital administrators, film makers, sociologists, artificial limb manufacturers, and water pollution experts. Where before there were but a few voices there was now a cacophony in which each specialist, seizing upon the Vietnam problem, a sphere of unknown proportions, proposed to move it from the particular angle of his own expertise. The attendant bureaucratic power struggles were therefore acute and never-ending: reformers of the GVN police fought with reformers and expanders of the RFPF program, advocates of industrialization fought with those of agricultural development. Land reform, education, “motivational research” — every possible “solution” turned up at least once in the roulette wheel of priorities. The result was that most of the top mission officials, such as William Porter and the shrewd, articulate head of JUSPAO, Barry Zorthian, spent most of their time working on administrative problems and dealing with other Americans. This preoccupation put a certain distance between them and the Vietnamese reality.

One exception to this rule of bureaucracy was to be General Edward Lansdale. Again at the behest of the CIA, Lansdale returned to Vietnam at the end of 1965 with a team of enthusiastic young men and the general mission of injecting some new ideas into the counterinsurgency program. This vague definition of role did not serve him as it once had. Lansdale’s zeal for political conversion and his disapproval of the very scale on which the American operations were now conducted made him an uncomfortable neighbor for the “regulars” at the mission. In a series of careful jurisdictional maneuvers, the bureaucrats narrowed his “area of responsibility” to the point where they had effectively cut him off from the mission command and from all work except that of a symbolic nature. For the next few years Lansdale would spend most of his time in talk with Vietnamese intellectuals, a few ex–Viet Minh officers, and his own American devotees. Living in his grand villa, isolated from the press, he would become an American counterpart to the elusive Vietnamese “Third Force,” a hero to idealistic young American officials who saw the failure of American policy as a failure of tactics.

Lansdale’s bureaucratic defeat was only an indication of the general shift in emphasis of American policy. With the commitment of American troops Washington began to look upon the war as an American affair. The Vietnamese seemed to recede into the background, and along with them those Americans who had spent years in Vietnam and believed in the regeneration of a non-Communist nationalism. The romantic warriors, such as Frank Scotton and Jean Sauvageot, who, like Lansdale, spoke and thought Vietnamese, who loved the exoticism of the villages and believed with fervor in a non-Communist liberation front — they were to remain merely the “characters” in a generally faceless enterprise. With all the civilian infighting, the talk of political strategies and “winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people,” the American war was to be a conventional military operation. As commander of the U.S. forces in Vietnam and head of the advisory and assistance mission, General William C. Westmoreland was to exercise the primary influence and bear the primary responsibility for it.

In his
Antimémoires,
André Malraux wrote that he found it instructive when dealing with generals mentally to strip them of military uniform and reclothe them in civilian dress. In the case of Westmoreland the mental disrobing would have been most useful, for Americans in Vietnam tended to regard him as a man above praise or censure, the commander
par excellence.
With his square, jutting jaw and his ramrod bearing, Westmoreland certainly looked like the essence of general. And to a great extent he was the model representative of the post–Second World War American army. A Southerner and the son of a textile manufacturer in South Carolina (the contrast is nice with his civilian counterpart, Cabot Lodge), he had in conformity with family loyalties gone to West Point, where he had succeeded not so much by intellectual achievement as by that mysterious quality that army officers and corporate managers know as “leadership.” During the Second World War he saw action as an artillery officer in North Africa and Sicily, ending up as chief of staff of the Ninth Division. Afterwards he moved quickly up through the ranks by way of Maxwell Taylor’s General Staff, the 101st Airborne — the elite helicopter-mobile unit that Taylor and later Kennedy saw as the advance guard of the entire army — and finally West Point again, where at the age of forty-six he held the august position of superintendent. An innovator in artillery and helicopter assault tactics and an administrator who had learned McNamara’s cost-effective approach to large organizations at the Harvard Business School, Westmoreland possessed those credentials that the modern army required. His personality seemed to suit his experience. He lacked the brilliance and eccentricity of the great Second World War generals, but he also lacked the towering ego and political ambition of a man such as Douglas MacArthur. So much was invaluable to Johnson in this particular war. He worked well in committees, maintained excellent relations with superiors, and was liked rather than feared by his troops. The French commanders in Vietnam had been counts and cardinals in military dress; Westmoreland was a clean-living, upright, corporate vice-president, his professionalism tempered by decency and good manners. In all, he made a perfect representative of the United States in Vietnam — with the perfectly representative blind spot that he neither understood, nor particularly cared for, the Vietnamese.
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Westmoreland arrived in Vietnam at the beginning of 1964 to serve for a few months as deputy commander before taking up his new post. During his first year — a year of chaos within the GVN — he undertook a large-scale program for the pacification of the guerrilla-held provinces around Saigon. The theory behind the program was that the GVN troops would move outward from Saigon, clearing and securing the adjacent ring of hamlets and then moving outwards again while the GVN established its administration behind the troop shield. This so-called “oil slick” theory had a long ancestry tracing back to the French concept of
quadrillage
— the pacification of small squares of the countryside at a time — and to Sir Robert Thompson’s ideas for the Strategic Hamlet program. Westmoreland’s program (known as HOP TAC) worked no better than its predecessors, for the undertaking was something like that of trying to stop a brush fire with rotten sticks. As even Westmoreland admitted, HOP TAC was a disaster. Moved precipitously down from its old territorial base in the Second Corps area, the ARVN Twenty-fifth Division fell apart; its soldiers deserted in droves to escape their enemy or to rejoin their families in Second Corps.
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The police hid from the experienced NLF political cadres, and the Vietnamese ministries failed to deliver the American supplies that were to show the peasantry the desirability of life in the GVN-held areas. The experience removed whatever illusions Westmoreland had had about the Saigon government. After 1965 he concentrated his attentions almost exclusively on the American troops — a narrowing of perspective that was to explain much of his later reporting. Like most American officials, he believed that if only the Saigon government would cease their interminable wrangling, the U.S. forces could accomplish the task the President had set for them.

The expansion of the war brought a proportional expansion in the American press corps in Saigon. By the beginning of 1966 some five hundred journalists were accredited with MACV — the television crews and administrators far outnumbering the reporters. The news corps included senior editors from New York, cub reporters from home-town papers, Ivy League graduates, crime reporters with two-syllable vocabularies, spaced-out young photographers, combat veterans of Korea and the Second World War — everything, in fact, except a determined opponent of the war. But such was the sense of the country at the time. With the commitment of American troops the old, and perhaps natural, reaction to support the troops and believe in the wisdom of the President once again triumphed — though there was no great enthusiasm for the war. The reporters would express doubts and make criticisms of American tactics, but almost all of them, including the old Vietnam hands — Robert Shaplen of the
New Yorker,
Sol Sanders of U.S.
News and World Report,
François Sully of
Newsweek,
and Takashi Oka of the
Christian Science Monitor
— accepted the broad lines of American policy. The important question for them was whether or not the United States could win in an acceptable amount of time. And the arrival of the American troops brought a new confidence on this score. The conflict that these experienced reporters had been watching for years now seemed to have changed in character.