Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (20 page)

Operation Farmgate was also expanding. Because American pilots found the Vietnamese too cautious, they assumed more and more responsibility. By mid-1964 more than one hundred air force pilots were flying regular combat missions to support ARVN operations. Farmgate flights did not come to light until May 1964, when Captain Edwin G. Shank was shot down in his T-28 fighter. Shank had written a letter to his wife, claiming: “They won’t tell you people what we do over here. I'll bet you that anyone you talk to does not know that American pilots fight this war. . . . [The Vietnamese] are stupid, ignorant, sacrificial lambs, and I have no use for them. . . . They’re a menace to have on board.” Shank’s wife released the letter to the press, and it was published nationwide through the wire services.

The air force was building up its sortie count through Operation Ranch Hand as well. American advisers had long complained about the ability of the Vietcong to melt back into the jungles where they could not be located. As early as 1961, Walt Rostow and Robert McNamara learned that army chemists had developed new herbicides; the most powerful was Agent Orange. Here was a technological solution. If the jungle kept advisers and pilots from locating the enemy, then eliminate the jungle. In January 1962 the Kennedy administration had Air Force C-123 aircraft dump defoliants on selected areas of the Ca Mau Peninsula. In 1964 Johnson increased the Ranch Hand sorties. Using the motto “Only you can prevent forests,” Ranch Hand pilots turned more than 100,000 acres of jungle and rice paddies into mud.

By that time the debate between policymakers who saw the war primarily in diplomatic or political terms and others who saw it as a military venture was coming to an end in Washington, and the militarists had the upper hand. That new consensus reflected itself in a number of important personnel changes. Roger Hilsman was the first to go. At the time, he was an assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs and an advocate of the political, “hearts-and-minds” war. President Johnson took an immediate dislike to Hilsman. His close relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, whom Johnson loathed, was one strike against him, and strike two was his opposition to the hard-line approach of Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow. Strike three came at a dinner party when Johnson overheard Hilsman insult General Lyman Lemnitzer for losing control of the Vietnam situation in 1960 and 1961. When Hilsman got word that Johnson was about to fire him, he resigned. The president replaced him with William Bundy. The president also exiled W. Averell Harriman. During the Kennedy administration the old diplomat had made himself useful, negotiating the Laotian settlement and shuttling back and forth with messages from Washington. Like everyone else, Harriman did not want to see South Vietnam fall to communism, but he did not think the solution was on the battlefield. The only permanent settlement was political and diplomatic, a position he advocated insistently, much to the anger of Rostow, Rusk, McNamara, and Taylor. And because of Harri-man’s close ties to the Kennedys, Johnson did not “trust him to take out my garbage.” Early in 1964 the president relieved Harriman of his Asian duties and assigned him, in Harriman’s own words, “to the oblivion of African affairs.”

Hilsman and Harriman were gone, and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., joined them. By the spring of 1964 Lodge believed that he had completed his assignment in South Vietnam. Lodge was preoccupied with politics at home. A moderate Republican, he worried about the shrill voices of “Barry Goldwater and the Neanderthals” in the GOP’s right wing. He wanted to get back home in time for the presidential primaries, in which, he hoped, he could deny Goldwater the nomination. Lodge even flirted with the idea of a dark-horse candidacy of his own.

After some indecision, Johnson asked Maxwell Taylor to step down as chairman of the joint chiefs and take over the embassy in Saigon. Taylor preached escalation—enough American advisers, money, and air power to win the war. He was convinced that the United States must make the war too expensive for Hanoi to pursue and so bloody for the Vietcong that they could not replace their casualties. The North Vietnamese saw what was happening—the full militarization of the dispute over the future of Vietnam, the dispatching of a major American general to take control of a difficult situation. Vo Nguyen Giap wrote that the “appointment of Taylor to South Vietnam reminds us of such top French generals as De Tassigny and Navarre going to Indochina every time the French Expeditionary Corps was in serious difficulty. Our compatriots in the South and the heroic southern liberation troops . . . will certainly reserve for Taylor . . . the fate our people reserved for the former defeated French generals.” History would repeat itself.

To take the place of Taylor, Johnson appointed the army general Earle G. Wheeler chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Wheeler’s career had been spent in planning and logistics rather than in infantry combat, but he was known as a superb organizer and manager. As deputy chief of the nation’s European command and then as army chief of staff in the early 1960s, Wheeler listened to the debate over the war, but he had few doubts. It was simply a matter of military strength. The United States should crush the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese.

When Taylor went to Saigon in 1964, Paul Harkins came home. He retired from the army when he realized that Wheeler was going to get the chairmanship of the joint chiefs. Johnson held a special ceremony at the White House for Harkins and decorated him, but the name “General Blimp” and the phrase “pulling a Harkins” followed him everywhere. He had proclaimed success too many times. Instead of victory, he left behind a quagmire of confusion and bitterness. Harkins’s successor was General William C. Westmoreland. Westmoreland who had punched all the right tickets—West Point graduation in 1936, World War II combat in North Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany, postwar command of the 101st Airborne Division, superintendent of West Point, and secretary to Maxwell Taylor and the joint chiefs. Coming from a distinguished family in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Westmoreland looked every bit the southern gentleman-turned-soldier. He was six feet tall, but his ramrod posture, dark eyebrows, and white hair made him seem taller. A century earlier in Confederate gray, Westmoreland would have been a perfect compatriot for Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee.

Westmoreland disagreed with proposals to bomb North Vietnam in the absence of a sizable force of American ground troops. Air bases needed protection from Vietcong attacks, and ARVN troops could not be trusted with the job. And if ARVN was tied up defending American air bases, it would not be in the field fighting the Vietcong. It was already hard enough to get South Vietnamese troops out there. The need for defensive perimeters around places like Bien Hoa and Danang would give ARVN commanders another excuse for staying put. ARVN was so laced with corruption and incompetence that it would take years of serious training before it was ready to take on the Vietcong. By that time the United States, with the application of enough firepower, could wipe out the Vietcong as a fighting force, leaving no enemy for ARVN to worry about. As for hearts and minds, Westmoreland looked with contempt on “rice paddy peasants” and believed they would gravitate naturally to whatever government exercised power. With the Vietcong gone, Saigon would be the only nationwide power to which they could turn. What Westmoreland wanted was American ground troops, as many as 200,000 of them. He planned to fight a defensive war for a year or so until he could build the infrastructure to support a major military effort. Once that infrastructure was in place, Westmoreland would unleash the American military on the communists. Through what Westmoreland called “search-and-destroy” missions, American infantry could aggressively seek out the enemy while artillery, armor, bombers, and gunships cut the foe to pieces. According to William DePuy, Westmoreland’s chief of operations, “We are going to stomp them to death.”

A major policy decision was imminent in Washington. ARVN desertions had reached epidemic levels, exceeding 6,000 people a month in 1964. Politically the Vietcong controlled up to 40 percent of the territory of South Vietnam and more than 50 percent of the people. Early in 1963 the Vietcong had 23,000 troops organized into a hodgepodge of undermanned battalions, companies, platoons, and squads. They also had another 50,000 local self-defense militia troops. By late 1964 all that had changed. Those 23,000 soldiers became 60,000 men organized into seventy-three battalions of six hundred men each. Of those seventy-three battalions, sixty-six were full infantry units and seven were heavy weapons and antiaircraft machine gun battalions. The battalions were organized into regiments complete with communications and engineering units. And behind those 60,000 troops were 40,000 people engaged in full-time support services. Another 100,000 village self-defense forces rounded out the communist order of battle. Vietminh veterans trained the Vietcong well, creating highly motivated soldiers, real “sledge hammer battalions” in the words of Neil Sheehan. Westmoreland was convinced that ARVN would be completely unable to deal with them. “The VC,” he argued, “are destroying battalions faster than they were planned to be organized under the build-up program. . . . The only possible US response is the aggressive employment of US troops together with Vietnamese general reserve forces to react against strong VC/DRV [Vietcong and North Vietnam] attacks.” Only the vaunted American killing machine could handle the Vietcong.

Most American policymakers believed that the revolt in South Vietnam was directly connected to its support base in North Vietnam and that the United States would have to take the war to Hanoi to achieve a complete victory. Maxwell Taylor, along with Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, and Robert McNamara, called for expansion of the war north of the seventeenth parallel through strategic bombing. The idea was simple: Raise the pain level to the point at which North Vietnam could stand it no longer.

The Johnson administration’s understanding of the connection between the war in South Vietnam and support in North Vietnam was quite accurate. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s politicians in North Vietnam had debated the question of how much assistance to send south. The debate was inextricably connected to the larger competition between Moscow and Beijing. Under Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union in the early 1960s preached the gospel of peaceful coexistence. North Vietnamese politicians who wanted to focus on building up their own country, as well as military officials worried about a confrontation with the United States, used the Soviet ideology to advocate caution. Their leader was Truong Chinh, a moderate who served as the Marxist theorist in the Lao Dong party and always favored caution and negotiation. But most of the North Vietnamese leadership lacked the prudence of the USSR. So did Mao Zedong, who called for wars of national liberation to overthrow United States influence in the Third World. The bitter anti-American posture of the Chinese encouraged General Tran Van Tra, commander of Vietcong military forces in South Vietnam, together with Le Duan and others in Hanoi’s hierarchy. They wanted a total commitment to destruction of the South Vietnamese regime, expulsion of the United States, and reunification of the country, regardless of the cost. When the Central Committee of the Lao Dong party met in Hanoi in December 1963 to evaluate the situation, the debate continued. If North Vietnam increased its support of the revolution in South Vietnam, it might alienate the Soviet Union and place itself in the Chinese camp, which no Vietnamese politician wanted to do.

But if North Vietnam did not support the Vietcong, it might never be able to get the United States out of Indochina. The debate continued into the next year. Finally, in a meeting on March 27–28, 1964, Ho Chi Minh called for a unified effort and whatever sacrifice was necessary to bring the revolution in South Vietnam to a successful conclusion. A week later North Vietnam began training northern-born Vietnamese for deployment south.

Robert McNamara was convinced that “current trends . . . will lead to neutralization at best and more likely to a Communist-controlled state.” He wanted a “tit-for-tat” policy in which the United States made Hanoi suffer for any damage done by the Vietcong. Privately, Johnson referred to the policy as the “titty program.” Johnson’s advisers drafted plans for attacking North Vietnam. A leading figure in the development of those plans was McGeorge Bundy’s older brother William. After graduation from Yale and the Harvard Law School and a stint with the CIA, William Bundy had become a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Kennedy administration. On March 1, 1964, he proposed bombing North Vietnam and mining Haiphong harbor both to stop infiltration of supplies to the Vietcong and to demonstrate that the United States possessed the will to win. Later in the month McGeorge Bundy produced what became known as National Security Adviser Memorandum (NSAM) 288, providing for gradually escalated bombing of military and economic targets in North Vietnam, particularly in response to Vietcong attacks in South Vietnam. NSAM 288 also committed the United States to the survival of an independent noncommunist government in Saigon. It argued that the United States would have to increase its level of military and economic assistance and South Vietnam must prepare for a full-scale war. McGeorge Bundy warned that such military measures “would normally require a declaration of war under the Constitution. But this seems a blunt instrument carrying heavy domestic overtones and above all not suited to the picture of punitive and selective action only.” Bundy urged the president to consider seeking a special congressional resolution supporting limited military action.

During April and May, the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and MACV in Saigon developed what became known as Operations Plan 37–64. Its objective was “to conduct graduated operations to eliminate or reduce to negligible proportions DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] support of VC [Vietcong] insurgency in the Republic of Vietnam.” The plan involved three projects: military action in Cambodia and Laos to eliminate Vietcong sanctuaries; increased levels of Oplan 34-A attacks on North Vietnamese coastal installations; and South Vietnamese and American strategic bombing of ninety-eight preselected targets in North Vietnam. In his White House office, Walt Rostow, the “Air Marshall,” taped a large map of North Vietnam on the wall and, with the help of econometric models, selected targets for the bombing runs.