Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (22 page)

The terms themselves were couched in vague enough language to allow for varied interpretation, and for an uncertain future for the Communist revolutionaries. The country was divided temporarily at the 17th parallel into two zones: Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and a pro-Western state, initially under Bao Dai in the south. French military forces would be regrouped to the south and Vietminh forces to the north within 300 days. Free movement of the population between the zones would be allowed for the same length of time. An unsigned declaration called for a “free general election” in July 1956 to unite the country under one government, but the partition and election formula was cloudy. While the declaration established a cease-fire, it left the political future of Vietnam essentially undecided. Neither the United States nor the government of what would soon be known as The Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) signed the documents.

Although Washington officially “took note” of the agreements and agreed to refrain from using force to disturb them, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made it clear that the United States was deeply unhappy
with the arrangements and that the Eisenhower administration would take actions, diplomatic and otherwise, to shape the political landscape of Indochina to fit its own interests. Within a few months the National Security Council in Washington called for the use of “all available means” to undermine the Communist government in Hanoi, and to “make every possible effort . . . to maintain a friendly noncommunist government in South Vietnam and to prevent a Communist victory through all-Vietnam elections.”
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By the end of the year, a CIA team under Colonel Edward Lansdale implemented a clandestine program of harassment of the DRV. The American crusade in Vietnam had begun in earnest. George Herring, a pioneering historian of America’s war in Vietnam, summarizes the Eisenhower administration’s policy in Southeast Asia nicely:

The Eisenhower administration in 1954 and after firmly committed itself to the fragile government of Ngo Dinh Diem [head of state in South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963], eased the French out of Vietnam, and used its resources unsparingly to construct in southern Vietnam a viable, non-communist nation that would stand as “the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia.” . . . Had it looked all over the world, the United States could not have chosen a less promising place for an experiment in nation-building. . . . In southern Vietnam, chaos reigned. The colonial economy depended entirely on exports of rice and rubber to finance essential imports. It had been devastated by nearly fourteen years of war and was held together by enormous French military expenditures that would soon cease. . . . Diem’s government lacked experienced civil servants. Tainted by long association with France, it had no base of support in the countryside or among non-communist nationalists in Saigon.
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7

THE LONG STRUGGLE IN THE SOUTH BEGINS: 1954–1965

The American War, as the conflict in South Vietnam from 1954 to 1975 is called by the Vietnamese today, had an unusually protracted and complicated gestation period. The origins of the conflict between the United States, its Vietnamese allies, and the forces of the Communist Revolution lie in the unyielding commitment of both Hanoi and Washington to establishing a society in their own image in South Vietnam. Hanoi refused to recognize the legitimacy of the US-sponsored Republic of Vietnam, or Government of Vietnam (GVN). That entity was the successor to the State of Vietnam, formed in 1949 by the French. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), widely known as “North Vietnam,” supported the successor movement to the Vietminh in the south. Without a formal sobriquet until 1960, this movement was called the Vietcong insurgency in the West; after 1960 it was christened the National Liberation Front (NLF) although
Americans continued to use the term “Vietcong” to denote the Communists in South Vietnam.

Throughout the American War, Hanoi claimed the NLF functioned independently as the true voice of the people of South Vietnam. In fact, neither the Republic of Vietnam nor the NLF was a truly independent entity. The Republic was a child of the United States, just as the NLF owed its survival to the DRV.

After 1958, the military forces of the NLF, the People’s Liberated Armed Force (PLAF), were formally integrated into the PAVN chain of command. The armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam were never formally integrated into the US chain of command, but for all intents and purposes, they did America’s bidding in Vietnam until US combat forces arrived in strength in 1965. After that, they operated in support of American forces and in effect took their orders from the US military command.

Neither the Americans nor the Communists in Hanoi intended to engage each other directly in a major war after France’s defeat. Indeed, between 1954 and early 1965, Hanoi and Washington went to extraordinary lengths to achieve their core objectives
without
deploying large numbers of forces from their own regular armies. Both sides made strenuous attempts to halt the march toward full-scale war through political maneuvering, diplomacy, and military assistance to their proxies on the ground in the south. They failed to do so for a variety of complex reasons.

Between 1954 and 1965, the United States and the DRV would pursue strikingly similar strategies of incremental military escalation, in which one side and then the other stepped up military and economic support for its proxy in the South. Most historians today believe that President Lyndon Johnson’s reluctant decision to deploy US ground forces in early 1965 was triggered by the imminent collapse of South Vietnam. By that juncture, Hanoi’s post-1954 strategy of breaking down the authority of the GVN had paid great dividends in the countryside. Whole districts had fallen under the control of the Revolution. Moreover, Communist regulars, now fighting at battalion level as members of the PLAF, were embarrassing Saigon’s army in the field. Defeat followed defeat.

NGO DINH DIEM

After the 1954 Geneva conference, the United States firmly committed itself to constructing and defending a pro-Western state in the south as a
bulwark against Communist expansion in Asia. When a young senator from Massachusetts remarked that “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike. . . . It is our offspring, we cannot abandon it, we cannot ignore its needs . . .”
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he was neatly summarizing the rationale for President Eisenhower’s Vietnam policy. When John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, he made it clear that the United States was in Vietnam to stay until the insurgency there was defeated, even as it became clear that this objective could not be achieved without sustaining far greater costs than the American foreign policy establishment in the mid-1950s had envisaged.

Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, was, if anything, more firmly committed to seeing the war through to a successful conclusion than Kennedy had been. He viewed success in Vietnam as vital to maintaining American prestige and influence on the international stage. Like his predecessors, he ascribed to the domino theory and saw the fall of South Vietnam to the Communists as a disaster on a major scale. No American president had lost a war. If LBJ faltered in Vietnam, his dream of achieving greatness as a champion of civil rights and the Great Society at home would go up in smoke.

The United States put its money where its mouth was. Between 1954 and 1961 alone, it poured $1 billion of military and economic aid into the Republic of Vietnam. Although South Vietnam had neither stability nor a social structure compatible with Western ideas, Washington set about energetically attempting to create a democratic nation sustained by Western values and institutions. The uncanny ability of Hanoi to hang tough despite its considerable limitations in military and economic assets only heighted Johnson’s commitment to vanquish Communism in South Vietnam by any means necessary, save nuclear war or invasion of the DRV.

So it was that the struggle in Vietnam took on the vestments of an American crusade. It was at one and the same time referred to as a test case of the American commitment to defending freedom in a dangerous world, and a noble experiment in nation building.

After a short period of grave questioning and doubt over his capabilities, the United States installed a mysteriously aloof former colonial official named Ngo Dinh Diem as head of state in South Vietnam in 1955. He remained so until late 1963, when his intractability and repression of political dissent led to his assassination by a coterie of South Vietnamese generals, with Kennedy’s tacit consent. As the leader of a fledgling republic,
Diem was well out of his depth, but at the time of his rise to power, there seemed to be no better alternative. The most inspiring anti-Communist nationalists had been killed in Giap’s purge of 1946 or had been tainted by collaboration with the French.

A devout Catholic steeped in Confucianism, Diem was astutely described by the veteran American correspondent Stanley Karnow as “a mixture of monk and mandarin” imbued “with a sense of his own infallibility . . . Diem expected obedience . . . Above all he could not comprehend the magnitude of the political, social and economic revolution being promoted by his communist foes.”
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Diem was an ardent patriot and anti-Communist, but he was utterly lacking in charisma or the organizational-managerial skill that Ho and Giap possessed in such abundance. Diem had no blueprint to transform Vietnam from a war-ravaged society stunted by a long history of colonialism into a prosperous modern state. Yet to the surprise of his many detractors, he was able to maintain control over its fledgling army and defeat a 1955 coup attempt by the Binh Xuyen—a kind of crime syndicate of warlords—a feat that prompted the Eisenhower administration to refrain from engineering his removal from office at the last minute.

Soon after taking over the reins of power, Diem launched a “Denounce the Communists” campaign against the 15,000-man clandestine infrastructure the Vietminh had left behind in the countryside. Communist sources claim that some 2,000 cadres were executed by Diem’s secret police and another 25,000 sympathizers imprisoned.
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Diem’s strong-arm tactics hurt the Communists badly, leading to the breakdown of much of the infrastructure in a number of strategic areas, and to something of a crisis among the senior cadres operating in the South. His success in decimating the Communists prompted the Eisenhower administration to launch a major pro-Diem propaganda campaign aimed at the American public as well as the Vietnamese people. But the anti-Communist program, brutal and indiscriminating as it was, also alienated South Vietnam’s political class and its intelligentsia. Hanoi challenged the American propaganda campaign with one of its own. Its efforts along these lines surely deepened opposition to the authoritarian government in Saigon, but they had little impact on public opinion in the United States, where Vietnam remained a back-page story until the mid-1960s.

Despite the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations’ extensive support during his eight-year tenure, Diem resisted increasingly strident
American pleas to institute social and political reforms. In the cities, corruption and nepotism ruled, feeding on kickbacks to government administrators from vast quantities of American aid. Diem came to rely almost exclusively for political advice on his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, an opium-smoking megalomaniac in charge of the secret police. In the villages, corrupt and poorly trained administrators replaced the traditional elected councils of respected elders as arbiters of law and order. Government funds earmarked for educational and medical improvement programs were siphoned off into the pockets of officials. And Diem’s support in the countryside, never robust, dropped off precipitously. American aid created an artificial sense of prosperity, but only among those with connections to Diem and his close circle of family advisers and senior military officers. Hundreds of tons of consumer goods flooded into Saigon, Danang, and other cities, and a small army of American military and civilian advisers and administrators arrived to build up South Vietnam’s army, infrastructure, and social institutions.

But this massive influx of American wealth and know-how, observes historian George Herring, clearly “fostered dependency rather than laying the foundation for a genuine independence.”
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In fiscal year 1957, the United States paid all costs associated with South Vietnamese defense, 70 percent of its government expenditures, and 90 percent of its imports. Nonetheless, an endless flow of reports and articles from American journalists, military advisers, and the US embassy in Saigon extolling progress in South Vietnam made their way to senior decision makers in Washington, and to the American public, reinforcing the impression that the American crusade against Communism was a glowing success. So began the chronic American penchant for interpreting events in Vietnam not as they were, but as the United States wished them to be.

As a new decade came into view, ominous signs for the United States and Saigon were on the horizon in the South. In January 1959, Giap and Ho had decided to begin to shift Communist strategy in South Vietnam from widespread political subversion to a combination of armed and political struggle. The effects of Hanoi’s more aggressive policies immediately made themselves felt in the countryside. Guerrilla attacks by well-trained squads and platoons intensified. A highly intimidating assassination program aimed not only at government officials but at health workers and teachers—anyone who could build up trust and loyalty between the people and the government in Saigon—ate away at the vitals of Saigon’s effort
to control the population. Communist guerrillas stepped up their base-building areas deep in the Cau Mau Peninsula in the Mekong Delta, northwest of Saigon, and in the jungles of the Central Highlands (more about these developments follows later in this chapter).

The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) seemed incompetent and lethargic in responding. In part this was the fault of the Americans. The US Military Advisory Group later expanded to become Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) trained the ARVN to fight in conventional mobile operations with air and artillery support. But the army didn’t possess sufficient material assets to engage in such operations, nor did it have sufficiently trained personnel. Meanwhile, little emphasis was placed on counterinsurgency tactics appropriate for dealing with Communist guerrillas. But far more significant factors in the army’s lethargy and incompetence were the yawning gap between the French-educated officer corps and the peasant-class enlisted men they looked down upon with disdain.