Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (17 page)

The Kennedy administration also faced a communist insurgency in Indonesia. In the former Dutch East Indies, nationalists had proclaimed the independence of Indonesia in 1945, but the Dutch did not recognize sovereignty there until 1949. A period of liberal democracy ensued until 1957, when Sukarno proclaimed martial law and imposed a virtual dictatorship. The Communist Party of Indonesia launched an insurgent movement aimed at overthrowing Sukarno and proclaiming a communist state. Financial chaos and gross corruption in the capital of Jakarta provided fertile ground for communist recruitment among Indonesian peasants, and the communists steadily increased in power. Because of its vast oil deposits, Indonesia dwarfed Vietnam and Laos in economic significance. Early in the 1960s, when it appeared that the communists might come to power in Indonesia, the Kennedy administration flirted with the idea of military intervention, but decided against such action. With its huge population scattered across thousands of islands, Indonesia was six times larger in area than South Vietnam and equally rugged in terrain. Convinced that Indonesia would become a military quagmire, Kennedy decided against the introduction of American ground troops. South Vietnam would become the testing place for military intervention in Southeast Asia.

Compared to South Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaya had been easy. Communism and nationalism fused in the minds of millions of Vietnamese, northern and southern, and Ho Chi Minh wore the mantle of independence. The Diem government was corrupt and isolated, its Roman Catholicism alien in a Buddhist society. The Vietcong and the South Vietnamese were the same people ethnically and culturally, which made it almost impossible to identify the enemy. The Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) spent eight years trying to prepare ARVN for conventional war, but the Vietcong were getting bolder and better. ARVN still needed more flexible military training. The United States would have to buy the time.

On February 12, 1962, Kennedy made the first purchase when he established the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam or “Macvee,” to direct the United States military effort in South Vietnam. Maxwell Taylor personally selected “one of my boys” to command MACV—General Paul Harkins.

A 1929 graduate of West Point, Harkins had earned the nickname “Ramrod” during World War II because of the ruthlessness with which he implemented every whim of General George S. Patton, whom he served as deputy chief of staff. When Patton died in 1945, Harkins attached himself to Taylor, who as a commander of the Eighth Army in Korea was a rising star. Harkins knew that military careers are built on successful efficiency reports, and immediately after arriving in Saigon in February 1962 he started issuing a daily “Headway Report” showing the steady progress being made against the Vietcong. There was a common theme in all the Headway Reports: The war was going well, but Harkins needed the “3Ms—more men, more money, more materiél.” It was not long before the Saigon press corps dubbed him “General Blimp” for his inflated success reports. Among American younger officers, the phrase “pulling a Harkins” became synonymous with bonehead decisions and bureaucratic foul-ups. But Harkins got his 3Ms. At the end of 1962 there were 11,300 American military personnel in South Vietnam, and the United States was spending $500 million a year to keep the war going. By mid-1962 huge Globemaster transport planes were arriving hourly at the Tan Son Nhut airbase delivering military equipment. Francois Sully, a veteran reporter on Indochina, had seen it all before when French troops poured into Indochina in 1953. He remarked to an American journalist that it “was
déjà vu
. The American planes bringing American equipment and confident young soldiers dressed in American green fatigues. It looks like 1953 all over again.”

As the number of military advisers exceeded 11,000, more and more troops came down with local diseases or suffered from accidents and combat wounds. To meet these medical needs, the army’s 8th Field Hospital deployed to Nha Trang in 1962; the unit included dozens of army nurses, most of whom were women. As the responsibilities of the embassy staff expanded during the Kennedy administration, several hundred female employees of the State Department were transferred to Saigon. All of the service branches, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency, had women employees in South Vietnam during the early 1960s. American women with the United States Army, the Agency for International Development, and the Peace Corps found themselves working in South Vietnam during the Kennedy years.

It “is fashionable in some quarters,” observed General Earle Wheeler in November 1962, “to say that the problems in Southeast Asia are primarily political and economic rather than military. I do not agree. The essence of the problem is military.” Harkins agreed. He placed American officers and noncommissioned officers at every level in ARVN, where they planned and provided tactical advice for military operations. At the battalion level, advisers accompanied ARVN in the field.

In February 1962 two Vietnamese pilots attacked the Norodom Palace in strafing runs trying to kill Diem. He became so paranoid that he kept the best ARVN units near Saigon, where they could quickly suppress any uprising. But that left the countryside to the Vietcong. Harkins wanted ARVN to “take the war to the enemy,” but Diem was terrified that losing battles or sustaining heavy casualties would create political discontent and undermine his regime. Nor was he much more enthusiastic about victories, which produced popular generals who might pose a political threat. Caution and conservatism infected ARVN at every level.

The military advisers on the ground, then, had much prodding and nagging to do. So did the 4400th created in April 1961 and nicknamed “Jungle Jim.” Crew members trained Vietnamese pilots in tactical air support, dropped propaganda leaflets over Vietcong territory, and supplied ARVN outposts along the Cambodian and Laotian borders. When the Vietnamese pilots proved less than aggressive, American pilots began assuming greater initiative than had been allowed them at the beginning. By 1962 and 1963 they were flying combat missions on their own.

In 1961 the Marine Corps launched Operation Shufly. From bases at Soc Trang in the Mekong Delta and Danang along the northern coast of South Vietnam, marine helicopters carried ARVN troops into battle, while marine advisers instructed ARVN in amphibious assault tactics. But the real entrance of the navy and Marine Corps to Vietnam began with Victor Krulak’s brainchild—Operation Plan 34-A, Oplan 34-A in Pentagonese.

For years the navy and marines had conducted clandestine “DeSoto Missions” against the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea—covert intelligence gathering by commando teams and naval vessels. Krulak thought that North Vietnam, with its long coastline, was perfect for even more aggressive activities. He wanted PT boats to attack radar sites in North Vietnam while Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, and Filipino mercenaries blew up highways, bridges, and ammunition dumps, before being quickly extracted. The plan struck Kennedy’s fancy: PT boats, commandos, blackened faces, frogmen, secrets, passwords, adventure. He approved Oplan 34-A on November 20, 1963, three days before his assassination. By mid-1963 the number of American military personnel in South Vietnam had approached 15,000 people.

The men, money, materiél, and training bore some fruit. By late 1962 ARVN forces totaled 210,000 troops augmented by 142,000 militia. Equipped with M-14 rifles and M113 armored personnel carriers, backed by tactical air support from Farmgate pilots, informed by good intelligence reports from the CIA and Special Forces, and enjoying MACV operational planning, some ARVN units—particularly the ARVN Airborne Division, the First Infantry, and the ARVN marines—began to attack the Vietcong. They even had some unexpected success in War Zone D north of Saigon, in the U Minh Forest on the Gulf of Thailand, and in the Plain of Reeds west of Saigon.

Harkins thought he was creating a killing machine, a mobile army force to do what George Patton’s Third Army had done to the Germans in World War II. The word was “attrition,” wearing down the Vietcong to the point at which they could not keep fighting. Harkins started adding up the numbers of combat operations, search-and-destroy missions, tactical air sorties (round-trip attacks run by one aircraft), bombing tonnages, weapons captured, ARVN troop increases, and weapons distributed to militia. By the end of 1962, the numbers looked good. “Every quantitative measurement we have shows we’re winning this war,” Robert McNamara assured the reporters at a press conference. The most important statistic of all was the “body count,” the number of Vietcong killed. General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1960–1961, viewed the American mission as teaching ARVN “to kill Communists.” One day in 1961 when Douglas Pike, a psychological operations officer with the United States Information Office in Saigon, remarked that the French had killed or wounded more than a million Vietminh, Lemnitzer had a simple answer: “Didn’t kill enough then. We’ll teach’em to kill more.”

Harkins also wanted to improve the morale of South Vietnamese peasants, strengthen their loyalty to Diem, and reduce their vulnerability to Vietcong recruiting. Counterinsurgency rested on two fundamental principles, both of which had evolved out of the experiences in the Philippines and Malaya and Rostow’s theories about economic development. Peasants needed security against Vietcong attack; they needed to be able to go to sleep at night in peace. And when they awakened in the morning, they needed land, jobs, and schools with which they could build economic prosperity. People enjoying the good life would not fall prey to communistic rhetoric.

The American military arm of counterinsurgency in Vietnam was the Special Forces. During the 1950s the Michigan State University Advisory Group had launched economic development projects in South Vietnam, and the CIA formed local militias—Civilian Irregular Defense Groups among Montagnard tribesmen. Organized in 1952 to allow the army to fight covertly behind enemy lines, the First Special Forces Group had sent a few advisers into South Vietnam in 1957. But in 1961 they caught President Kennedy’s fancy. An avid reader of Ian Fleming’s “James Bond” novels, Kennedy was fascinated by the paraphernalia of espionage, covert action, double agents, and guerrilla war. Against the wishes of army brass, in 1961 he authorized the Special Forces to wear the Green Beret. He increased them from 2,500 to 10,000 men and sent the 5th and 7th Special Forces Groups to Vietnam. Late in 1962 the Green Berets took over CIDG training from the CIA.

While the Special Forces were replacing the CIDGs, and MACV was trying to get ARVN to fight its own war, Roger Hilsman and Robert Thompson were putting in motion the Strategic Hamlet Program. It was a new version of the older Agroville program. “Strategic hamlets” were peasant villages surrounded by barbed wire and mine fields. Inside the strategic hamlets there would be schools, a community center, a small hospital and pharmacy, and homes for the peasants. American pilots could then open fire on the Vietcong, who by definition were all the people outside the hamlets. Unable to hide, the Vietcong would be crushed by the killing machine. The job of building the strategic hamlets MACV turned over to Diem, who just as promptly turned it over to Nhu, who went about the construction process with a vengeance. By the end of the summer of 1962, Nhu claimed to have built 3,225 hamlets and placed 4.3 million peasants behind the barbed wire. Robert Thompson was appalled by Nhu’s slipshod approach: “No attention was paid to their purpose. Their creation became the purpose itself.”

Harkin’s daily Headway Reports were contradicted by pessimistic dispatches from journalists in Saigon. For an independent look, Kennedy asked Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana to go to Saigon in December 1962. Mansfield, a devout Roman Catholic and former professor of Asian affairs, had been an early supporter of Ngo Dinh Diem. But in Saigon he received alarming information from the press corps, and he gave Kennedy a pessimistic report: “Vietnam, outside the cities, is still... run largely by the Vietcong.... Out of fear or indifference or hostility the peasants still withhold acquiescence, let alone approval of the [Saigon] government.... In short, it would be well to face the fact that we are once again at the beginning of the beginning.” The report caught Kennedy off guard. He lashed out at Mansfield, accusing him of defeatism. When a reporter asked Kennedy whether Mansfield’s opinion did not justify a withdrawal, Kennedy replied, “For us to withdraw would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam but of Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there.” Mansfield was still gloomier with his congressional colleagues, to whom he declared that the war “could involve an expenditure of American lives and resources on a scale which would bear little relationship to the interests of the United States or, indeed, to the interests of the people of Vietnam.”

Kennedy was growing more and more frustrated. He wanted out of Vietnam but did not know how. “I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely,” he commented to one of his aides, “and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him.” Still, he dreaded anything resembling the defeat at the Bay of Pigs. But he did not want the war to become a large-scale conflict. That was why Mansfield’s report had been such a blow. The war was already costing a fortune, and, according to someone Kennedy trusted, the investment made no difference at all. Now, in 2006, we have the word of fifteen contemporaries that Kennedy hoped to withdraw after defeating the Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Kennedy asked Roger Hilsman and Michael Forrestal, a White House Far Eastern affairs adviser, to evaluate the situation. They returned from Saigon in January 1963 with an optimistic report. Two weeks later Kennedy sent Victor Krulak and General Earle Wheeler, the army chief of staff, to Saigon. They castigated Mansfield and predicted early victory. All the heavy brass worried Harkins, so he issued his most optimistic prediction of all: Kennedy could withdraw 1,000 troops from South Vietnam at the end of 1963, and all the rest by the end of 1965.