Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (29 page)

And that was not the worst of it. Between 1965 and 1972 more than one million civilians died in South Vietnam and another one million were wounded, most from the “friendly fire” of American forces. One-third of the South Vietnamese population, and nearly 50 percent of the rural population, either lost their homes or were killed or wounded by American firepower. South Vietnamese civilian casualties reached almost two-thirds the number of Vietcong and North Vietnamese killed. In Quang Ngai Province of I Corps in 1967, the artillery and aerial bombardment was so intense that by year’s end more than 300 of the province’s 450 villages had been completely obliterated and the number of peasants killed or wounded from indiscriminate shelling was averaging 1,000 people a week. When the journalist Neil Sheehan asked Westmoreland whether the civilian casualties bothered him, the general replied, “Yes, Neil, it is a problem, but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?”

In more subtle ways the American presence disrupted the social fabric of traditional Vietnamese society. The destructiveness of the war drove millions of South Vietnamese into the cities, but so did the billions of dollars being pumped into the country. The entire urban Vietnamese economy revolved around providing services to Americans. By 1967 most Vietnamese workers were either Vietcong, ARVN soldiers, or service workers for Americans. So Vietnamese employees of the United States government would have something to spend their money on, Americans brought in a cornucopia of consumer goods—transistor radios, television sets, motor scooters, and watches. Indigenous Vietnamese industries shriveled up and died; inflation skyrocketed; and corruption was rampant.

Given this level of destruction and social disruption, the idea of winning the “hearts and minds” of these peasants through pacification was absurd. Pacification became a bureaucratic backwater of the war, a hodgepodge of programs to which the United States paid lip service only. The most prominent civilian pacification program was the Agency for International Development’s $500 million-a-year effort to build schools, health clinics, and agricultural stations. At the same time the CIA had its own pacification program—political action teams of trained South Vietnamese cadres whose mission was to find and eliminate the Vietcong infrastructure. Army Special Forces conducted pacification programs among Montagnard peoples. And in response to American pressure, South Vietnam launched its own pacification effort. The New Life Hamlet Program, successor to the defunct Strategic Hamlet Program, was just as unsuccessful, for it too forcibly relocated peasants and ARVN troops brutally carried out the relocations. In 1966 the New Life Hamlet Program gave way to the Ap Doi Moi Program, which translated as “Really New Life Hamlets.” Like its predecessors, it was riddled with official corruption and angered peasants who did not want to leave their ancestral homelands.

The United States simply did not understand its enemy, a cardinal sin among military commanders who aspired to victory. For two thousand years, the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu’s advice had proved true again and again: “Know your enemy.” The entire American political establishment had too much faith in firepower and too little an understanding of Vietnamese staying power. The other side was not about to crack and give up. Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap were willing to accept staggering losses—in the millions of people—in order to expel the United States and reunite the country. The pacification programs had been ineffective and counterproductive.

Westmoreland chafed at the numbers of civilians, CIA agents, and ARVN troops engaged in such disjointed pacification efforts, and he wished to bring them all under the MACV umbrella. In November 1966 Ambassador Lodge created the Office of Civil Operations to coordinate pacification, but Westmoreland kept up his demands and in May 1967 President Johnson finally gave in. He established a new agency—Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS)—to control all pacification efforts. Placing CORDS under the direct control of Westmoreland and MACV militarized the pacification effort.

As director of CORDS and deputy commander to William Westmoreland Johnson named Robert Komer. Born in Chicago in 1922, Komer was a CIA veteran with a Harvard MBA who had arrived at the National Security Council in 1961 preaching the gospel of pacification. He was self-confident, pushy, and abrasive, nicknamed the “Blowtorch.” According to one of Lodge’s aides, Komer was “a Guildenstern at the court of Lyndon I—willing to please his President at all costs.” By 1966 Komer was a special assistant to Johnson. He insisted that South Vietnam would have to win peasant loyalty before a long-term political settlement was possible. Soon there were 8,000 Americans directly engaged in pacification, and within months Komer claimed progress in winning “hearts and minds.” Still again, technology was supposed to give the answers. Komer established the Hamlet Evaluation Survey, an elaborate, computerized system for measuring the number of South Vietnamese peasants living in areas “controlled” by the Saigon government. Using eighteen political, economic, and military variables, the survey classified villages into one of five categories, depending on the extent of loyalty to Saigon. At the end of 1967 Komer confidently told Johnson that approximately 67 percent of the South Vietnamese were loyal to their government. Antiwar activists dismissed the estimate. In 1963 General Paul Harkins had also declared 67 percent of the peasants loyal to Saigon. “Politically, we failed to give due weight to the popular appeal of the Viet Cong . . . or the depth of factionalism among traditional South Vietnamese elites,” Komer would later confess. “We only grasped belatedly the significance of the steady attrition of GVN authority . . . in the countryside . . . which was directly linked to how the Viet Cong conducted the war.”

All the pacification efforts foundered on the strategic reality of the war. For every American dollar spent on pacification, nearly one hundred were spent on military operations. For every American worker engaged in land reform, health care, and education, sixty soldiers were busy blowing the country up. Neither the United States nor South Vietnam could provide villagers security from the Vietcong. During the last seven months of 1966, the Vietcong murdered or kidnapped more than 3,000 Revolutionary Development personnel. Whatever good the pacification programs achieved was undone by the indiscriminate bombardment. Four million peasants were driven from their ancestral villages. Nothing could compensate for that.

“Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” folk artist Pete Seeger sang of such scenes as this one. (
Courtesy, Library of Congress.
)

 

Over time, Komer worried more about the political consequences of American bombing and artillery fire in South Vietnam, especially as the number of accidental civilian deaths approached one million people. When the United States first entered South Vietnam, one of its supreme objectives had been to protect peasants from the depredations of the Vietcong. But instead of safety and security, the United States brought death, destruction, and homelessness on a wide scale, and it was easy for Vietcong and North Vietnamese propagandists to convince many peasants that their miseries came from the United States, not from the communists.

Adding to Washington’s frustration over the government of Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu was their inability to reach an accommodation with the Buddhists. Both Ky and Thieu were Roman Catholics; both were drawn to the French; both were critical of Buddhist values; both were military officers. Led by Thich Tri Quang, the most prominent Buddhist monk in the country, northern Buddhists demanded a civilian government sympathetic to Buddhist culture and Vietnamese independence. The most prominent of the Buddhist dissidents was Nguyen Chanh Thi, the “Warlord of the North,” a close associate of Thich Tri Quang. Thi had risen through ARVN ranks to become commander of I Corps in 1965. American marines in I Corps respected Thi for his courage and aggressiveness. In March 1966 Ky traveled to Hue for some military conferences, but Thi snubbed him, calling Ky “my little brother” and ridiculing him in public. Upon returning to Saigon seething with anger, Ky relieved Nguyen Chanh Thi of his command and put him under house arrest. It was just the signal the Buddhists had been waiting for. Thich Tri Quang organized widespread protest demonstrations throughout the northern regions of South Vietnam, claiming that the military government was capricious and dictatorial and calling for creation of a civilian, constitutional democracy. At the end of March, protesters seized the radio stations in Hue and Danang. Promising to “liberate Hue and Danang from the communists,” Ky led two Vietnamese marine battalions into Danang and waited for the protests to die out. When they did not do so, he attacked Danang and had to fight his way through ARVN troops still loyal to Thi. The battle, some of it house-to-house combat in Danang, lasted more than a week. In Hue demonstrators attacked the United States Consulate, and Ky had to take military control of the city early in June.

The civil war in Danang and Hue in 1966 raised more doubts in the United States about Nguyen Cao Ky. Breaking the back of the Buddhist political movement had been expensive, especially in American public opinion. American troop levels were approaching 300,000, casualties were mounting, and now television was broadcasting images of South Vietnamese fighting South Vietnamese. Relative casualty figures were also affecting American public opinion. By the end of 1965 there were supposedly 514,000 men serving in the South Vietnamese armed forces along with 184,000 Americans. In 1966 more than 6,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam, as did nearly 12,000 South Vietnamese soldiers. But in 1967, as the pace of the war quickened, the statistics changed. American troop levels climbed to 485,000 men at the end of 1967, and ARVN forces went up to just under 800,000 soldiers. That year nearly 10,000 Americans died, compared to 12,716 South Vietnamese. In the election campaign of 1964 President Johnson had promised that “American boys shouldn’t die in a war Asian boys should be fighting,” but that is exactly what was happening.

On March 20 and 21, 1967, Westmoreland met with President Johnson and several other administration officials at Guam to discuss the war. The previous June, Johnson had agreed to increase American ground troops to 430,000 by mid-1967, but at Guam, Westmoreland asked for more. A week later he suggested 542,000, calling it a “Minimum Essential Force.” He also let Johnson know that what he really needed was an “Optimum Force” of 678,000, which would finish off the enemy in about three years. Johnson could not give Westmoreland 678,000 troops without calling up the reserves and raising draft calls to 60,000 men a month, both of which would raise the ire of Congress and inspire more vehement antiwar protests. Westmoreland would have to make do with 542,000 men. The Vietnam War was already bigger than Korea.

And when he got back to Saigon, Westmoreland learned that MACV intelligence had estimated that Vietcong and North Vietnamese troop strength, including paramilitary and local self-defense troops, exceeded 500,000 people. The general was visibly shaken and wondered, “What am I going to tell the press? What am I going to tell Congress? What is the press going to do with this? What am I going to tell the president?” Still confident of victory, Westmoreland decided on a simple solution: Don’t count the paramilitary and self-defense troops. The general did not believe they had much impact on the war anyway, but more important was that “The people in Washington were not sophisticated enough to understand and evaluate this thing and neither was the media.”

The Buddhist crisis of 1966 and the inability of ARVN to fight at an acceptable level was meanwhile convincing American leaders that Ky had to go. He was too unpredictable, and he had failed to get ARVN into sustained combat. Ambassador Lodge recommended replacing Ky, and Westmoreland concurred. Nguyen Van Thieu decided to run for president in 1967. The decision caught Ky off guard. He viewed Thieu as a rival, and enjoyed baiting the chief of state by arriving at meetings early and parking his helicopter on the pad Thieu intended to use. The prospect that both of them might run for president gave the American leaders nightmares of a divided military, a civil war, or electoral victory by a weak civilian candidate. They persuaded Ky to accept the vice presidency.

The Thieu-Ky ticket ran a presidential campaign of a kind to be expected of Saigonese politics. The two arrested Buddhist leaders and denied serious rivals positions on the ballot. The election was marked by voter coercion, multiple voting by ARVN troops, fraudulent vote counts, and widespread stuffing of ballot boxes. With all that, Thieu and Ky managed to secure only 35 percent of the vote and win, while a virtually unknown Buddhist peace candidate, Truong Dinh Dzu, came in second with 17 percent. Johnson praised the elections as the “birth of democracy in Southeast Asia,” but network broadcasts carried a different message: The sideshow of South Vietnamese politics had concluded another performance. Observers came to the same conclusion. Vietnamese tradition held that political authority was a mandate from heaven. Legitimate political leaders should have overwhelming support from the people, and 35 percent was hardly a heavenly mandate.