Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (25 page)

Within that strategic fog, William Westmoreland tried to fight a war.

He was convinced that the United States should focus on destroying the enemy just as the Allies had done to Germany and Japan during World War II. The American economy was unmatched in its ability to produce and deliver military firepower, and Westmoreland planned to build, in the words of the journalist Neil Sheehan, a“killing machine,” a huge army backed by the latest in technology and organization. Westmoreland projected a conflict in three stages. In 1965 and early 1966 he would build the infrastructure to support a large, modern army. He estimated it would take one soldier in a logistical support role to maintain each soldier in the field. The second stage would begin in late 1966. Westmoreland planned to establish a system of fortified firebases in South Vietnam, each with the capability of covering a large area in artillery fire. From those bases infantry patrols could go on search-and- destroy missions to locate the enemy. GIs would use the old technologies—aircraft surveillance and tracking dogs—as well as the latest: hand-carried radar, infrared spotting scopes, and urine-detection“people-sniffer” devices. IBM 1430 computers back in Saigon consumed huge amounts of CIA and MACV data, developed probability curves, and tried to predict when and where the enemy would attack. Operation Ranch Hand would be expanded. Westmoreland wanted to rely mostly on tactical firepower, directing artillery, helicopter gunships, fixed-wing gunships, and B-52 bombers on the enemy. In the final stage, ARVN was to move into the area for“clearing operations”—killing any enemy troops who survived the bombardment—and local militia would then maintain security.

The weak link in the strategy was ARVN together with the Regional Forces and Popular Forces, which American troops derisively termed“Ruff-Puffs.” But Westmoreland was confident that even if they did not do their job of clearing and securing behind the killing machine, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong could not long stand the heavy losses they would incur.“We'll just go on bleeding them,” Westmoreland said,“until Hanoi wakes up to the fact that they have bled their country to the point of national disaster for generations.”

Operation Starlight, for Westmoreland at least, proved his point. On August 18 at the Batangan Peninsula in northern South Vietnam, the 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Division came ashore while the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Division flew into landing zones to the west, chasing the 1st Vietcong Regiment. Fighting was heavy, and the marines called in artillery, naval bombardment, and tactical air support. More than 6,000 marines participated. Operation Starlight was the first large battle with Main Force Vietcong. When the battle of Chu Lai, as the marines called it, was over, the United States claimed 573 Vietcong dead, compared to 46 marines dead and another 204 wounded. Westmoreland's“boys” had inflicted death at the rate of twelve to one. The math was self-evident. How long could the enemy hold out?

Westmoreland wanted to invade across the seventeenth parallel and hold territory there, bringing the ground war home to North Vietnam. But at the White House memories of Korea, of crossing the thirty-eighth parallel only to be attacked by hordes of Chinese soldiers, were still vivid. Johnson did not wish to awaken the slumbering giant. He confined American troops south of the seventeenth parallel. Westmoreland also sought to invade Laos south of the seventeenth parallel to stop the infiltration along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and cross into Cambodia to attack enemy staging areas along the border. But Johnson remained cautious and prudent, too prudent and too cautious for Westmoreland.

Logistical planners and strategic bombing experts told Westmoreland that cutting off the flow of supplies by bombing raids and military occupations of large amounts of territory would stretch American resources without achieving acceptable results. A much easier approach was to mine or blockade Haiphong harbor, the depot where most of the Soviet and Chinese supplies entered North Vietnam. Johnson balked because it increased the probability of a confrontation with Moscow. Westmoreland's memoirs record his opinion that“Washington's phobia that … mining the harbor would trigger Chinese Communist or Russian intervention was chimerical.”

Westmoreland faced obstacles in the command structure as well. MACV was a“subordinate unified command.” Though Westmoreland eventually directed 543,000 American troops fighting a land war in Asia, real authority over the war was in Honolulu with CINCPAC. During Westmoreland's four years with MACV, CINCPAC was Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp. To get requests to the president and the joint chiefs or to receive decisions from them, Westmoreland had to go through CINC- PAC. Command of air operations was even more complicated. Westmoreland controlled the air force sorties inside South Vietnam and on the southern parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, but CINCPAC controlled naval air strikes over North Vietnam and northern Laos.

The Marine Corps had misgivings about Westmoreland's strategy. Trained as assault troops, the marines at Danang found themselves holding static positions and defending territory. That had never been part of their historical mission. Their main purpose was to overrun the enemy, take heavy casualties, and evacuate, leaving army infantry to hold the positions. In instances that did involve holding territory for long periods, the Marine Corps was better at it than the army. For decades before World War II, marine detachments had occupied Central American and Caribbean countries, where they worked with local governments and emphasized pacification.

Prominent among the critics of Westmoreland's war was General Krulak, one of the few senior military officers convinced that the key to victory was political, not military. Big engagements between Americans, ARVN, Main Force Vietcong, and the North Vietnamese, he declared,“could move to another planet today, and we would still not have won the war because the Vietnamese people are the prize.” He wanted his marines together with the army to fight small-unit actions while investing most of their energies in pacification. Krulak proposed placing a marine rifle squad with a South Vietnamese local militia company in what he called a combined action platoon. The CAPs would provide security while pacification programs—health, education, economic development, and land reform—won over the peasants. But Westmoreland vetoed the plan; he was just going to solve the problem militarily.

While muddled strategic thinking bedeviled the American effort in Southeast Asia, North Vietnam had a simple political goal that enjoyed clear strategic expression: Expel the American military from Indochina, conquer South Vietnam, and reunify the two countries. The North Vietnamese knew they could not match American firepower. The war would be won or lost, Ho Chi Minh repeated over and over again, in the mind of the typical American citizen and the will of the typical South Vietnamese peasant.

Vo Nguyen Giap looked on the American buildup with incredulity— amazement at the wealth and technology but disbelief that such resources would be invested so poorly. In 1969, looking back on the first four years of the enlarged war, he remarked,“The United States has a strategy based on arithmetic. They question the computers, add and subtract, extract square roots, and then go into action. But arithmetical strategy doesn't work here… . If it did, they'd already have exterminated us… . When a whole people rises up, nothing can be done.” Giap was right. Westmoreland measured progress by adding up the dead, the“body count,” along with the numbers of prisoners taken, weapons captured, tonnages exploded, sorties flown, and“battalion days in the field.” But those statistics did not measure commitment. Even the American bombing of North Vietnam, originally designed to break the people's will, only made them more angry and resentful, more willing to sacrifice everything on Ho Chi Minh's bold course. Ho estimated that rural South Vietnam and all of North Vietnam could produce 250,000 to 300,000 new military recruits a year. For a war of attrition to erode Vietnam's ability to stay with the war, Westmoreland would have to kill that many people every year. American leaders could not imagine Vietnam's making such a sacrifice. But Ho Chi Minh was willing.

Just as critical were the American people. Vietnam had already waged one war against Westerners who grew tired of it. Ho Chi Minh expected Americans to be no different. Vietnam was a little place a long way from Main Street. Once the boys started coming home in body bags, the American people would insist on a settlement. While Westmoreland planned a war of military attrition, Ho Chi Minh waged a war of political attrition. When his generals pushed for more aggressiveness, Ho Chi Minh reassured them:“Don't worry. I've been to America. I know Americans. They are an impatient people. They will leave.”

Vo Nguyen Giap, though still an influential member of the Politburo in Hanoi, no longer controlled war strategy. Those decisions were firmly in the hands of Le Duan, the militant advocate of reunification who was now general secretary of the Lao Dong party. Late in 1964 Duan named Nguyen Chi Thanh head of the Central Office for South Vietnam, which controlled the Vietcong effort in South Vietnam. He argued that the North Vietnamese should engage the United States in big-unit, conventional battles before American firepower reached its peak. If the North Vietnamese inflicted heavy losses on the American army early in the war, Lyndon Johnson would stop the buildup. Giap countered that the North Vietnamese should not get into a slugging match with the American heavyweight. For a brief period, Thanh prevailed.

The battle of the Batangan Peninsula in August 1965 intensified the debate. The losses were heavy, but Thanh held the battle to be proof that“the Southern Liberation Army is fully capable of defeating U.S. troops under any circumstance, even though they [United States troops] have absolute superiority of … firepower.” To Giap's insistence that casualties were too high Thanh responded that the Americans had suffered 250 dead and wounded soldiers, a casualty rate that the United States would be politically unwilling to accept. Le Duan sided with Thanh. But then came the battle of the Ia Drang Valley.

The 1st Air Cavalry Division, deployed to Vietnam in September 1965, was the latest in tactical innovation. The helicopter was to airborne warfare what the tank had been to armored cavalry—a new tactical development providing mobility and firepower. The“air cav” deployed to II Corps in the Central Highlands to stop any enemy attempt to cut South Vietnam in half by driving to the South China Sea. Late in October, North Vietnamese troops attacked a United States Special Forces camp at Plei Me. Westmoreland sent in the air cav. But in mid- November, when 400 American troops went through what they thought was the unoccupied Ia Drang Valley southwest of Plei Me, the North Vietnamese 65th Regiment surprised them. Four days of fighting followed before the enemy withdrew. In the three weeks after the attack on Plei Me, American firepower buried the enemy in exploding shells: nearly 35,000 artillery rounds, more than 7,000 rounds of aerial rockets, and over 50,000 helicopter sorties. For the first time in the war, B-52 bombers flew in tactical support. When the battle ended, nearly 1,800 North Vietnamese were confirmed dead, with probably that same number wounded or soon to die. The American dead numbered 240.

In Hanoi the extent of the losses gave Vo Nguyen Giap the advantage in his debate with Nguyen Chi Thanh. To limit the effectiveness of American artillery and air power, Duan and Thanh now developed a tactic termed“clinging to the belt,” engaging the Americans at close quarters under heavy jungle cover—short-range firefights, ambushes, and hand-to-hand combat—and forcing officers to call in artillery and air strikes close to their own positions or even on them. The North Vietnamese had to keep the tactical initiative by staying out of the way of American search-and-destroy operations. From July to September 1965, the United States had inflicted forty deaths for every American death. That was clearly too heavy, and by determining when and where to fight, North Vietnam reduced those figures to fifteen to one by the end of the year. While Westmoreland expected the North Vietnamese to move into what Mao Zedong called the“third phase of revolutionary warfare"— large-scale conventional battles at the battalion, regimental, and division levels—North Vietnam had returned to engagement by small units.

In Saigon, Westmoreland used Ia Drang to boost his troop requests up to 375,000 men, with the option of asking for 200,000 more. Robert McNamara was visibly shaken by the deaths of 240 Americans in one battle. He told Johnson that“U.S. killed-in-action can be expected to reach 1,000 a month and the odds are even that we will be faced in early 1967 with a 'no decision' at an even higher level.” That would soon pose a colossal political problem. The war was becoming the central theme of the Johnson administration, eclipsing the Great Society domestic programs. Anticipating a hostile political reaction at home and abroad to more troop requests, McNamara suggested that“We must lay a foundation in the minds of the American public and world opinion for such an enlarged phase of the war and … we should give NVN [North Vietnam] a face-saving chance to stop the aggression.” Johnson accepted McNamara's proposal for another pause in Rolling Thunder. On Christmas Eve 1965 the bombing stopped. But Ho Chi Minh still insisted on the unconditional withdrawal of all American troops and participation of the National Liberation Front in the South Vietnamese government. On January 31, 1966, Johnson resumed the raids.

While Johnson offered peace, the battle of the Ia Drang Valley boosted Westmoreland's morale. The deaths of 240 Americans did not startle him; he viewed those deaths in the context of a military victory. The boys had died nobly, giving the enemy a real thrashing. The foe had lost nearly half a division; attrition was working.“The death of even one man is lamentable,” Westmoreland said of the Ia Drang Valley,“and those were serious losses, yet I could take comfort in the fact that in the Highlands … the American fighting man … performed without the setbacks that had sometimes marked first performances in other wars.” Throughout the last half of 1965 and most of 1966 Westmoreland built the infrastructure he desired. To the jet air bases at Tan Son Nhut, Bien Hoa, and Danang he added four along with six new deep-water ports, four central supply and maintenance depots, twenty-six permanent base camps, seventy-five new tactical airstrips, and twenty-six hospitals—more than 16 million square feet of construction. He built 2,500 miles of paved roads and installed the Southeast Asia Automatic Telephone System, complete with 220 communications centers and 14,000 circuits. To supply electricity needs, he brought in 1,300 commercial generators and dozens of World War II tankers converted to floating generator barges.