A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (110 page)

The B-52S delivered only a third of the bomb tonnage. Two-thirds was delivered by the fighter-bombers, and they were under no such restriction. By the end of 1966, fighter-bomber sorties were up to 400 a day. Each day, if one included the B-52S, about 825 tons of bombs and other air munitions were let loose on a country the size of the state of Washington. From the window of an airplane or the open door of a helicopter the big brown blotches of the bomb craters disfigured the beauty of the Vietnamese landscape in every direction.

The planes dropped more than bombs. In 1966 specially equipped C-123 transports of Operation Ranch Hand destroyed nearly 850,000 acres of forest and crops by spraying them with chemical herbicides, also called defoliants. The spraying had begun in the early 1960s as another of John Kennedy’s mistakes, urged on him by Diem in his cruelty and by McNamara in his search for technological solutions. With the arrival of the U.S. armed forces in 1965 the defoliation had, like everything else, expanded geometrically. By 1967, 1.5 million acres a year of forest and crops were being destroyed in an effort to deny the Communist soldiers food and places to hide. Leaky spray nozzles on the C-123S, wind drift, and vaporization of the herbicides from the high temperatures also wilted
fruit trees and killed large sections of crops that were not officially targeted. Eighteen million gallons of the herbicides were to be sprayed over 20 percent of the forest land of the South. The most commonly used defoliant, Agent Orange, contained minute amounts of dioxin, a highly poisonous substance. The dioxin accumulated from the repeated spraying, lingering in the silt of the streambeds and entering the ecosystem of South Vietnam. After the war scientific tests indicated that the Vietnamese of the South had levels of dioxin in their bodies three times higher than inhabitants of the United States.

The tonnage of high explosive and shrapnel detonating from howitzers and mortars roughly equaled that of bombs, for whereas the ARVN fired thousands, the U.S. Army fired tens of thousands of shells on its “search-and-destroy operations” against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese regulars. The rates of expenditure far exceeded those the logisticians had established on the basis of experience in World War II and Korea. DePuy was rewarded by Westmoreland in the spring of 1966 with command of the 1st Infantry Division, and a second star for his work in planning the war of attrition. He shot off so much artillery in the rubber-plantation region that Seaman (1st Division was part of his corps) started rationing the supply of shells to him. ‘The solution in Vietnam is more bombs, more shells, more napalm … till the other side cracks and gives up,” DePuy told Ellsberg over lunch at his tent command post.

Army Field Manual 27-10, “The Law of Land Warfare,” which interprets the Hague and Geneva conventions that are legally binding on the U.S. military, enjoins officers to “conduct hostilities with regard for the principles of humanity and chivalry.” As in Operation Masher at Bong Son, the American leaders in Vietnam looked away. The peasant victims were left to what AID might provide. A compassionate Air Force surgeon, Maj. Gen. James Humphreys, on detail to AID as its chief of public health in Vietnam, tried. He asked for two transport planes and five helicopters to evacuate civilian wounded to the province hospitals and to transfer patients in need of more specialized treatment to the better civilian hospitals in Saigon. Gravely injured victims who did not have the good luck to be put on a military helicopter were dying before they could reach help, and a long, bumpy ride in an ambulance to a Saigon hospital was sometimes enough to finish off a severe head-wound case. In a country that was to hold squadrons of U.S. transport planes, 2,000 helicopters by the end of 1966, and more than 3,000 by the end of 1967, General Humphreys was told that military necessity precluded sparing any for regular evacuation of civilians.

Humphreys devised a plan to have three U.S. military hospitals built
for the treatment of civilian wounded. He calculated that the toll of wounded civilians might soon rise to about 75,000 a year. (It was to approximate 85,000 during 1968.) Senator Edward Kennedy, the only political figure in Washington to take a consistent interest in the plight of the Vietnamese civilians through his Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with Refugees and Escapees, arranged for Humphreys to brief the president on his plan at another strategy conference at Guam in March 1967. Lyndon Johnson approved.

The hospitals could have been built in ninety days. The Army medical bureaucracy did not want the responsibility and sought to sabotage the proposal by delay. A medical survey team of distinguished American physicians headed by the executive vice-president of the American Medical Association, sent to South Vietnam in the summer of 1967 by AID, also opposed the idea. Among other objections, the team was afraid the Army would draft more doctors to staff the hospitals. Under badgering from Kennedy, the Army allotted 300 beds in its existing hospitals to civilian casualties in October 1967, adding another 200 in December. The first two of the three military hospitals to treat civilians finally opened in the spring of 1968 and the third in the middle of that year. They handled roughly 10 percent of the civilian casualties before they closed in 1971. Humphreys and his successor gradually obtained surgical teams for all of the province hospitals from the U.S. military and from allies of the United States in Vietnam like Australia and South Korea. AID also sent out volunteer American physicians recruited by the AMA for two-month tours. None of these efforts ever raised the province hospitals above the level of charnel houses.

Vann was convinced that this “generating” of refugees and its concomitant toll in civilian casualties was not an accidental outgrowth of an attempt to bludgeon the enemy, but a policy deliberately fostered by the high command. Whenever we talked about it he would get as mad as he had at the 25th Division advisor who had reasoned that if the peasants were willing to live with the Communists “then they can expect to be bombed.” His neck and face would redden to that hue of rage peculiar to Vann, and his side of the conversation would become a staccato of curses.

In all probability, Westmoreland had not set out with the intention of causing a massive movement of population and civilian casualties on the scale that was occurring. Rather, he apparently began with the thought that came as a reflex to him and DePuy to “stomp” the enemy to death. There appears to be no doubt that once he saw the collateral effects of his strategy, he decided to reap what seemed to him an advantage
and that he was conscious—as were those in authority above and below him—of what he was doing. Westmoreland is a courteous man, and he was forthcoming with the press during these early years of the American war. Before a resident correspondent left for reassignment elsewhere he was given the privilege of a day in the field with the commanding general on one of Westmoreland’s regular trips by helicopter to visit American units. I took advantage of the privilege shortly before leaving for the Washington bureau of the
Times
in August 1966. At one point in the trip I asked the general if he was worried about the large number of civilian casualties from the air strikes and the shelling. He looked at me carefully. “Yes, Neil, it is a problem,” he said, “but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?”

The destruction was not confined to the physical. The building of the killing machine had become an end in itself. In this small country with a simple agrarian economy, Westmoreland proceeded to construct as fast as he could four new jet air bases (the Air Force soon pressured him into making it five) to add to the three he had at Tan Son Nhut, Bien Hoa, and Da Nang before the buildup started (he was enlarging these as well); six new deep-water ports with twenty-eight deep-draft unloading berths for freighters to end his dependence on the port of Saigon and the single pier then in existence at Cam Ranh Bay; four central supply and maintenance depots; twenty-six permanent base camps for combat and support troops; seventy-five new tactical airfields long enough to handle four-engine C-130 Hercules transports (he already had nineteen such airfields in 1965, but the objective was to put as many points as possible in South Vietnam within quick reach of a good runway); twenty-six hospitals with 8,280 beds; and a new two-story, prefabricated headquarters for himself next to Tan Son Nhut with air-conditioned office and work space for 4,000 people. Everything was to be connected by the latest in secure electronic data and teletype circuits and by a direct-dial telephone network called the Southeast Asia Automatic Telephone System—220 communications facilities in all, with 13,900 circuits.

Each of the jet air bases was a panoramic installation. There was a 10,000-foot runway, a parallel taxi way, high-speed turnoffs, and tens of thousands of square yards of apron for parking and moving aircraft—initially laid with aluminum matting that was later replaced by concrete—along with hangars, repair shops, offices and operations buildings, barracks, mess halls, and the sundry other structures that go with airfields
of this size. Many of the base camps were small cities. Long Binh, Seaman’s headquarters just northeast of Saigon and down the road from Vann’s office compound, was literally to grow to the status of a city. It was selected as the site of one of the four central supply and maintenance depots and then additionally as the headquarters for U.S. Army Vietnam, USARV, the chief administrative and support command under Westmoreland’s MACV. Long Binh covered twenty-five square miles and was inhabited by about 43,000 Americans at its height.

Another arsenal city rose on the peninsula that forms the upper reach of Cam Ranh Bay on the Central Coast 185 miles northeast of Saigon. Cam Ranh is considered the finest natural harbor in the world after Sydney, Australia, but the region has always been sparsely populated, because the dark green of the rain-forested Annamites touches the emerald green of the South China Sea there and what level land exists around the bay is either sand or sandy. The French had built a small naval station and airstrip that the Saigon navy had kept up. Big floating piers were now towed from the East Coast of the United States around the tip of South America and across the Pacific to create the largest of the new ports, with ten unloading berths for deep-draft vessels. The empty sands in the middle of the Cam Ranh peninsula were suddenly occupied by warehouses, ammunition storage areas, and tank farms filled with aviation fuel and other petroleum supplies, called POL, for petroleum, oil, and lubricants, by the military: Cam Ranh was the logical place to construct the second of the four central supply and maintenance depots. (The third and fourth depots were located farther north at Qui Nhon and Da Nang.) A 10,000-foot runway of gray aluminum matting for one of the new jet air bases cut across the upper end of the peninsula where the neck begins to narrow and curve back toward the mainland.

The construction program Westmoreland set in motion with maximum speed all over South Vietnam entailed 10.4 million square feet of warehousing, 5.4 million square feet of ammunition storage, enough tank-farm capacity to hold 3.1 million barrels of POL, 39 million cubic meters of dredging, about 2,550 miles of new hardtop road, and 434,000 acres of land clearing.

The panoply included transporting to South Vietnam the amenities of American civilization. These began for the enlisted men with base camps that had well-ventilated wooden barracks on concrete-slab foundations, hot water in the showers, and flushing toilets, and for the generals and colonels at Long Binh with courts of air-conditioned trailers that had lawns and flower beds tended by Vietnamese. To serve hundreds of thousands of men in a tropical country 10,000 miles away
three meals a day of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy products nearly identical to those on the Army’s U.S. Continental Master Menu requires an extraordinary number of cold-storage lockers, but the Army quartermasters began accomplishing the feat by early 1966. The task of furnishing dairy products eased as early as December 1965 when Foremost Dairy opened a milk-recombining plant the Army had paid the company to build and operate in Saigon. Meadowgold Dairies was subsequently given a contract to construct and run two other plants at Cam Ranh Bay and Qui Nhon. To be sure the troops got enough ice cream, the Army also installed forty small ice cream plants at less accessible locations. Although the men of the fighting units still had to face C rations along with the hardship and danger of campaigning, they frequently ate “A ration” meals cooked at the kitchens in the base camps, placed in insulated containers to keep the food hot, and flown to them by helicopter.

With the senior officers at the higher headquarters setting an example of climatized living, everybody else who could do so put air-conditioners in their living quarters, mess halls, and offices. Given the other electricity demands of the U.S. military, the local generating capacity was immediately overwhelmed. Power had to be shut down on alternating days in different sections of Saigon. Tactical generators proved inadequate. The Army bought more than 1,300 commercial generators in the U.S. and Japan and rushed them to South Vietnam while it withdrew World War II tankers from the Maritime Reserve Fleet and hired the Vinnell Corporation to convert the ships into floating generator barges and to build high-voltage central systems at the inland bases.

The amenities were completed by constructing an additional air-conditioned world of PXs, movie theaters, bowling alleys, and service clubs generously supplied with soft drinks, beer, whiskey, plenty of ice cubes to keep the drinks cold, milk shakes, hamburgers, hot dogs, and steaks, all at giveaway prices. The PXs were not mere canteens where a soldier could buy cigarettes, shaving articles, and candy. They were emporia that offered him a proper assortment of the fine things to which Americans have become accustomed—radios, tape recorders, hi-fis, watches, slacks and sport shirts to wear on his rest-and-recreation leave (R&R) if he survived the first six months of his one-year tour, and cosmetics to help raise the living standard of Vietnamese women. (It was difficult for the PX managers to keep hair spray in stock.) Should the soldier want an electric fan, a toaster, a percolator, a television set, a room air-conditioner, or perhaps a small refrigerator that the PX did not have in stock, he could pick it out of a catalogue and have it sent to him by a
mail-order service. The official theory was that giving the American military man access to this consumer’s paradise would reduce spending on the local market and thus hold down inflation in South Vietnam.