Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (31 page)

By 1967 the separate college-campus years of rage had long since commenced. Protesters followed government officials, obstructing their movements and interrupting speeches. In October 1966, the Socialist party leader Norman Thomas, frail and nearly blind, spoke out at Harvard against the war. “If I die before this war is ended,” he said, “I will feel that my whole life’s work for decency has been a failure.” Students struck at symbols of the power establishment. They campaigned to abolish Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs. Military recruiters and companies with war contracts got chased off campus. And not all the disruption occurred at the radical universities. By early 1967 even traditionally conservative Stanford had been pulled into the antiwar movement. When good-natured Vice President Hubert Humphrey spoke there, hundreds of students, in an orchestrated protest, stood up and left the auditorium halfway through his talk.

The protests swept beyond the campuses. They became part of the youth counterculture. Quick to respond to changes in the popular mood, folksingers wrote and performed antiwar songs. Phil Ochs, a handsome, angry folk artist emergent from the same Greenwich Village clubs as Bob Dylan, sang at protests across the country. As he sang, he talked— about the need to end the war and the country’s reactionary government. Introducing one song, he noted, “Now, for a change of pace, here’s a protest song. . . . A protest song is a song that’s so specific that you cannot mistake it for bullshit . . . . Good word, bullshit … ought to be used more often … especially in Washington . . . . Speaking of bullshit … I’d like to dedicate this song to McGeorge Bundy.” In 1967 Ochs helped to organize several rallies under the slogan “War Is Over.” The songs of Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, and other troubadours of the antiwar movement combined with the voices of frustrated students. The resulting lament echoed across the country.

The stalemate in Vietnam also undermined what the historian William Turley calls “the reflexive patriotism of ordinary citizens.” Some Americans opposed the war on fundamental moral grounds, while others believed Johnson was not fighting it properly. Whatever their explanations, most Americans were discouraged about Vietnam. In the summer of 1967 support for the war dropped under 50 percent for the first time. When Johnson went to Congress in August for a 10 percent income tax surcharge to pay for the war, it dropped even more. By October only 28 percent of the public said they supported Johnson. At the end of the month, more than 100,000 people gathered in Washington to protest the war; 35,000 of them showed up at the Pentagon entrance.

But it was hardly a unified movement. A. J. Muste and David Dellinger opposed all wars on moral grounds. New Left radicals like SDS leader Tom Hayden hoped to use the Vietnam War protest movement to attack racism and capitalism and build a new society. Liberal critics, among them Senator J. William Fulbright, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, decided that the United States was backing a corrupt regime and fighting an impossible war in a country unrelated to American national security. Protesters got to Americans who did not identify with the antiwar movement. They did so by keeping Johnson’s Vietnam policies at the forefront of public debate— week after week, month after month, year after year.

In response, Johnson launched Operation Chaos, a CIA domestic surveillance campaign to spy on antiwar leaders and discover communists among them. Eventually Operation Chaos developed files on more than 7,000 Americans and accused them, without real evidence, of being communists or communist stooges directed by Hanoi. Several years later the Nixon administration would add to those files. The president also set in motion a public relations blitz to rebuild public support for the war. The program included formation of the Committee for Peace and Freedom in Vietnam, a group dedicated to inspiring the “silent center,” or what Richard Nixon would later call the “silent majority.” Speakers went out around the country trying to prove the war was being won. The president decided on an encore performance by General Westmoreland. The April appearance before Congress had played to such good reviews. On November 21, 1967, Westmoreland spoke before the National Press Club, claiming, “We are making progress . . . . The enemy’s hopes are bankrupt.”

In a further effort to calm the antiwar movement, the president in a speech in San Antonio on September 29 tried to prove his willingness to negotiate. For the first time he slightly modified American demands. Instead of insisting on an immediate withdrawal of all North Vietnamese troops, he offered to stop bombing North Vietnam if Ho Chi Minh agreed to serious negotiations and promised not to use the bombing halt to increase infiltration into South Vietnam. Johnson even hinted at allowing the National Liberation Front to participate in the South Vietnamese government. Journalists quickly dubbed the proposal the “San Antonio Formula.” North Vietnam made no response, except to say that besides permitting a coalition government in Saigon that included the NLF, the United States should stop all bombing of North Vietnam, withdraw all troops from Indochina, and remove Thieu and Ky from office. It was the same message North Vietnam had been sending for years.

While lawmakers and the nation at large debated the war, marine officials were carrying out their own war on Westmoreland and the army. Since 1965 the marines had argued that attrition was not working. Victor Krulak wrote to Robert McNamara in 1966 that the “raw figure of VC killed … can be a dubious index of success since, if their killing is accompanied by devastation of friendly areas, we may end up having done more harm than good.” The northern five provinces of South Vietnam were thick with rain forests and rugged mountains, except along a twenty-five-mile strip between the South China Sea and the mountains, where 98 percent of the people lived. The marines wanted to spread out from bases at Chu Lai, Phu Bai, and Danang, mixing with the population, fighting the Vietcong when necessary but conducting pacification programs among peasants with combined action platoons. Campaigning in the mountains, where two percent of the population lived, was irrelevant because, as Krulak said, “there is nothing of value there.”

By mid-1967 there were already 55,000 marines in I Corps, commanded by General Lewis Walt. Twice a winner of the Navy Cross in World War II, Walt had grown up on a Kansas ranch before playing football at the Colorado School of Mines and joining the Marine Corps. He had the discipline of an offensive lineman, but in I Corps he found himself in an impossible situation. On the one hand Krulak wanted him to continue the combined action platoons and wait for the Vietcong to venture down to the coast, where the killing machine could cut them to pieces. But he was under the operational command of William Westmoreland, who ordered him to head into the Annamese mountains and kill the enemy. The marine contingent would peak at 70,000 troops at the end of the year, not enough to carry out both missions. Vo Nguyen Giap understood the problem. “The marines are being stretched as taut as a bowstring,” he said. The marine commandant Wallace Greene tried to make the case to the joint chiefs, but they sided with Westmoreland.

Ho Chi Minh had been watching American politics with great interest. It did not look much different from the political battles in Paris thirteen years before. Ho knew that Lyndon Johnson’s political base was eroding just at the moment that American military might in South Vietnam was reaching its peak. A later remark by Vo Nguyen Giap describes the American dilemma exactly: The “Americans will lose the war on the day when their military might is at its maximum and the great machine they've put together can’t move any more . . . . We'll beat them at the moment when they have the most men, the most arms, and the greatest hope of winning.”

Throughout 1967 the United States and North Vietnam fought a series of battles near the Demilitarized Zone in I Corps, along the Laotian and Cambodian borders in the Central Highlands of II Corps, and in the rubber plantations and jungles in III Corps northwest of Saigon. Since 1966 the NVA 324B Division had been pushing across the Demilitarized Zone, trying to draw the marines into the jungles and hills of I Corps. Westmoreland sent the marines after them, but the North Vietnamese then pulled back across the DMZ, only to return again and again over the next several months. By October the debate over strategy between Walt and Westmoreland was finished. Walt pulled the 3rd Marine Division out of Danang and established a series of fixed positions south of the DMZ at Gio Linh and Con Thien in the east, and along Route 9 to Khe Sanh, where they could fight North Vietnamese coming across the DMZ or in from Laos. That left the 1st Marine Division stretched out from Chu Lai in the south to Danang in the north. To reinforce them Westmoreland deployed Task Force Oregon to I Corps. It was a composite unit of the 11th Infantry Brigade, the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, and the 198th Infantry Brigade. They concentrated their efforts in Quang Nam, Quang Tin, and Quang Ngai provinces. Marine pacification was over.

The first of the border battles of late 1967 took place at Con Thien. Known as the “Hill of Angels,” Con Thien was actually three hills south of the DMZ in eastern Quang Tri Province. Troops from the 3rd Marine Division assumed a defensive position at Con Thien as part of McNamara’s electronic barrier, hoping to interrupt NVA troop movements across the DMZ. Early in September North Vietnamese troops, equipped with Soviet artillery, began shelling the marine positions. Convinced the enemy was setting the stage for a conventional battle, Westmoreland thought he would finally have an opportunity to take the NVA 324B and 324C Divisions head-on. He launched Operation Neutralize to relieve the marines at Con Thien, and during the next month more than 4,000 B-52s and fighter-bomber sorties, along with heavy naval bombardment, struck the NVA positions. By the last week of October the United States had dumped 40,000 tons of explosives on Con Thien, and the North Vietnamese suddenly broke off the engagement, leaving behind 2,000 dead.

No sooner had the siege of Con Thien been lifted than the Vietcong and North Vietnamese struck again, far to the south near the Cambodian border. On October 27, the 88th NVA Regiment attacked Song Be in Phuoc Long Province, and two days later the Vietcong attacked at the rubber plantations of Loc Ninh in Binh Long Province. For ten days the Vietcong 273d Regiment assaulted American positions defended by the First Infantry Division. When the battle was over, the First Infantry had lost 50 men while the Vietcong sustained 2,000 casualties, half of them combat deaths. The Vietcong disengaged early in November and retreated into Cambodia. Westmoreland proclaimed another great victory.

But in November the North Vietnamese staged a series of skirmishes near Dak To in Kontum Province, including an assault on the Special Forces camp there. Hoping to cut off infiltration through Laos into II Corps and relieve the attack on Dak To, Westmoreland dispatched portions of the 4th Infantry Division and the 173d Airborne Brigade. They were hunting for the 24th NVA Regiment. Throughout most of November the American troops assaulted fortified NVA positions, complete with tunnels and bunkers, along the ridge lines in the area. By November 20 the center of battle was focused on Hill 875, about twelve miles west of Dak To. Westmoreland hit the NVA positions with 300 B-52 and 2,000 fighter-bomber sorties before American troops went up the hill. By the time they got to the top, the North Vietnamese had already left. It was Thanksgiving Day. More than 1,200 North Vietnamese were dead, but so were 289 Americans. Helicopters flew in hot turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy, candied yams, cranberry sauce, hot rolls and butter, and lots of beer, Cokes, and ice cream. “We had soundly defeated the enemy without unduly sacrificing operations in other areas,” Westmoreland proclaimed. An American journalist at Hill 875 had the better judgment: “With victories like this, who needs defeats?”

But Westmoreland was never more certain that victory was at hand. By the end of 1967, the enemy death toll was more than fifteen times the 16,021 GI lives the war had taken. Nearly half of all the enemy battalions, Westmoreland claimed, were no longer combat-effective. The border battles were proof of American superiority. Enemy supply lines had been so decimated by American firepower that enemy troops had to keep close to the Laotian and Cambodian borders and the Demilitarized Zone. The communists were no longer capable, Westmoreland was convinced, of bringing the war to the heart of South Vietnam.

Johnson needed advice. Like Eisenhower and Kennedy before him, he listened to hard-liners and advocates of a scaling back, and he charted a middle course, hoping to secure the political integrity of South Vietnam without triggering a Soviet or Chinese intervention. Yet that middle course led inexorably to steady escalation. For another opinion, Johnson turned to the Wise Men.

On November 1, 1967, they assembled at the White House, the “best and the brightest” of two generations. Dean Acheson was there, as were McGeorge Bundy, Maxwell Taylor, Henry Cabot Lodge, W. Averell Harri-man, and George Ball along with General Omar Bradley, World War II hero and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Korean War; Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, one of Johnson’s closest advisers; Clark Clifford, another intimate of Johnson who had been a trusted Truman aide and head of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during the Kennedy administration; Douglas Dillon, former secretary of the treasury under Kennedy; and Robert Murphy, a prominent career diplomat.

Johnson asked the Wise Men whether he was on the right course, and they responded as he had expected. Straight from Acheson, the old cold warrior from the Truman administration, came the opinion that “We certainly should not get out of Vietnam.” McGeorge Bundy concurred, arguing that “getting out of Vietnam is as impossible as it is undesirable.” While he listened to the Wise Men, Walt Rostow became exultant, urging Johnson “to have a full leadership meeting of this kind, introduced by yourself, after which you could put the whole thing on television.” They all told Johnson what he wanted to hear, all except one. Former Undersecretary of State George Ball suddenly stood up and shouted: “I've been watching you across the table. You're like a flock of buzzards sitting on a fence, sending the young men off to be killed. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”