Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (38 page)

In Saigon, General Creighton ("Fighting Abe") Abrams had replaced William Westmoreland back in 1968. At fifty-three, Abrams was everything Westmoreland was not. Shorter, rounder, and coarser, and able to curse with the lowliest private, Abrams was a hard-drinking, cigar- chomping former tank commander, one of the great combat officers of World War II with George Patton's 3rd Army.
Time
claimed that Abrams could“inspire aggression from a begonia. ” Yet there was complexity in this devotee of classical music who liked to retreat into the solitude of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concertos and sonatas. He admitted that Tet had been a psychological and political and therefore strategic disaster for the United States. Abrams understood that he was working under new strategic assumptions. In 1968, 14,589 Americans died in South Vietnam. Similar casualty levels were out of the question. Abrams would not get any more troops, except for the 12,000 already scheduled to arrive. Westmoreland had tried to win the war; Abrams knew that his mission was to reduce American casualties, keep the Vietcong and North Vietnamese off guard, and get out of the country with some hope that South Vietnam was prepared to defend itself. But he did want“to kill as many of the bastards as he could. ”

During the last half of 1968 Abrams developed a tactical approach to fit the new strategic reality. Instead of continuing with Westmoreland's broad search-and-destroy missions, Abrams advocated smaller unit action on a more continuous basis. He liked musical analogies:“Sometimes you need to play the
1812 Overture
and now and then you have to let the violins play. ” It was time for the violins. The Vietcong and North Vietnamese usually found out about large-unit actions before they were even launched.“We work in small patrols, ” Abrams explained to a group of journalists, “because that's how the enemy moves—in groups of four or five. When he fights in squad size, so do we. When he cuts to half squad, so do we. ” Between May 1967 and May 1968, Westmoreland had launched more than 1,200 operations of battalion size. In 1969 Abrams reduced that number to about 700.

Abrams's tactical innovations fitted perfectly with Nixon's decision to begin withdrawing American troops. In late 1968 Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford had sanctioned Abrams's two-stage process for modernizing South Vietnamese military forces and gradually turning the war over to them. Melvin Laird resurrected Clifford's proposal and called it “Vietnamization.”

The idea had a long past. In 1951 the French had called it
jaunissement
or “yellowing. ” France established the Vietnamese National Army, and central to the ill-fated Navarre Plan of 1953–1954 was the assumption that the Vietnamese would take on greater responsibility for combat against the Vietminh. The United States picked up where the French left off. Vice President Richard Nixon summed up American opinion about South Vietnam in April 1954 when he argued, “The Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war by themselves or govern themselves. ” J. Lawton Collins claimed that “the American mission will soon take charge of instructing the Vietnam army.... The aim will be... to build a completely autonomous Vietnamese army. ” During the Kennedy administration, American advisers concentrated on training ARVN officers. In October 1963 General Charles J. Timmes proudly announced, “We have completed the job of training South Vietnam's armed forces. ” Yet two years later the major rationale for committing United States ground forces was to buy time to build an effective South Vietnamese army and turn the fighting over to it. In a letter to Duong Van Minh on January 1, 1964, Lyndon Johnson promised that as “the forces of your government become increasingly capable of dealing with this aggression, American military personnel in South Vietnam can be progressively withdrawn. ” Westmoreland and the joint chiefs lost sight of that objective in their naive assumption that the killing machine would make short work of the enemy, but even then Vietnamization was in the back of their minds. In his speech to the National Press Club in November 1967, Westmoreland announced that in two years “we will be able to phase down... our military effort, withdraw some of our troops, with the understanding that the Vietnamese will be prepared to take over those functions that are being now performed by our troops. ” Vietnamization, then, had been French and American policy for twenty years. The only difference in 1969 was that as opposition to the war grew, Richard Nixon had little choice but to turn the war over to South Vietnam and begin withdrawing American troops. He took his time in doing so, not wanting to be the first American president to lose a war.

The reaction to Vietnamization was mixed. John Paul Vann enraged General Creighton Abrams with his observation that “The first 100,000 Americans to leave would be for free. They are the clerks, the laundry- men, the engineer battalions building officers' clubs throughout the country. So many extraneous things are soaking up people not essential. ” Others had heard it all before. Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi argued that the United States “would be badly mistaken if we think we can depend too much upon this South Vietnamese army winning this war.... I don't believe they will be able to do it and I believe Hanoi knows this better than we do.... We'll have to stay there for ten years at best. ” But Nixon did not have years. He had months.

On February 22, 1969, the North Vietnamese launched that year's Tet—New Year's—offensive, and although they achieved none of the surprise of a year before, 1,140 American soldiers died in three weeks of fighting. In April the number of United States troops in South Vietnam peaked at 543,400 men, and in mid-May Nixon offered a new peace plan. But like all of the earlier proposals, it was primarily a military document, a cease-fire, rather than a comprehensive political settlement. Nixon wanted mutual, simultaneous withdrawal of all American and North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam, release of all prisoners of war, and establishment of an international body to supervise the ceasefire. Pham Van Dong and Nguyen Van Thieu dashed Nixon's hopes for peace. In Hanoi, Pham Van Dong said that peace would come to Vietnam only after the complete withdrawal of all United States soldiers, the removal of Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky from office, and the participation of the National Liberation Front in the government of South Vietnam. Thieu reiterated what he called his “Four No's": “One, coalition government. Not negotiable. Two, territorial integrity. Not negotiable. Three, the Communist party in the Republic of South Vietnam. Not negotiable. Four, neutralism. Not negotiable. ” There was nothing to negotiate.

Fighting in the A Shau Valley in May 1969 brought Nixon more political problems. The North Vietnamese considered the A Shau critical to their logistical effort. Throughout 1967 and 1968 American forces had conducted search-and-destroy sweeps of the area, and in May 1969 Abrams decided to attack. Between May 10 and June 7, the 9th Marine Regiment and elements of the 101st Airborne Division carried out Operation Apache Snow. The battle captured the attention of the American press when a protracted struggle developed on Ap Bia mountain in the A Shau Valley. The North Vietnamese had elaborate bunker complexes on the mountain. Abrams called in B-52 strikes and heavy artillery bombardment to pulverize the mountain before the American assault, but just before the troops attacked on May 18, a torrential rain fell. The bombardment denuded the top of the mountain, and the mud made the attack difficult. American troops went up the mountain twelve separate times. Before taking the summit on May 20, the Americans suffered fifty-six deaths and hundreds wounded. They found 630 dead North Vietnamese troops in the bunkers. The marines titled Ap Bia “Hamburger Hill. ” The press loved the description and splashed it all over American newspapers and televisions at the end of May. Eventually, 241 Americans died in Operation Apache Snow.

That Hamburger Hill was a tactical success in keeping the NVA off balance mattered little to the public. When Abrams abandoned Ap Bia on May 27, just a week after the battle, a cry went up. Senator Edward Kennedy charged that “President Nixon has told us, without question, that we seek no military victory, that we seek only peace. How then can we justify sending our boys against a hill a dozen times, finally taking it, and then withdrawing a week later? ” Combined with the stalled peace talks in Paris, Hamburger Hill seemed like more of the same—more firepower, more carnage, more for nothing.

As the first phase of Vietnamization, MACV upgraded ARVN firepower. During 1969 ARVN units received 700,000 M-16 rifles, 12,000 M- 60 machine guns, 6,000 M-79 grenade launchers, 500,000 jeeps and trucks, 1,200 armored vehicles, and 1,000 pieces of artillery. The Vietnamese Air Force got F-5 fighters as well as 400 aircraft and 100 helicopters. The total value of American arms transfers to South Vietnam was $725 million in 1968, $925 million in 1969, and another $925 million in 1970. On June 8, 1969, Nixon flew to Midway Island for a summit meeting with Nguyen Van Thieu on Vietnamization. Out of it came Nixon's announcement: “I have decided to order the immediate redeployment from Vietnam of the divisional equivalent of approximately 25,000 men. ” On August 27, 1969, the United States 9th Infantry went home.

There was other progress in Vietnamization as well. The plan to get ARVN to assume more responsibility for offensive operations began to yield fruit late in 1969 and in 1970. The number of enemy troops killed in action by ARVN increased from 20 to 32 percent. Nguyen Van Thieu removed a major peasant complaint against his government in 1969 by restoring the village elections and autonomy that Ngo Dinh Diem had eliminated a decade earlier. Thieu also accelerated a land reform program and recognized titles to land given to the peasants by the Viet- minh and Vietcong.

At least on the surface, still further things were going well for Saigon and the United States. The presence of 543,000 American and nearly one million ARVN troops, the Accelerated Pacification Campaign, and the Phoenix Program were preventing the Vietcong from recovering from the Tet offensive. Tran Van Tra, according to his own account, had to break up the Vietcong 320th Regiment into platoons and squads to restore the Vietcong political infrastructure: “Sending a concentrated main force unit to operate in such a dispersed manner was something we did reluctantly, but there was no alternative. ” The situation was serious enough that North Vietnam even flirted with the possibility of getting Chinese troops into the war. The Chinese already had 60,000 people in North Vietnam—soldiers, railway maintenance workers, storage personnel, and antiaircraft crews. But the Chinese were very cautious; they wanted to help North Vietnam, but they did not want to get into another Korea. In fact, the $525 million worth of goods North Vietnam received from China and the Soviet Union in 1968 dropped to only $200 million in 1970.

In light of both the real reformist activity on the part of Saigon and the problems of the communists, Nixon's scheduled reduction in ground forces seemed to make sense. Nixon had already scheduled the troop withdrawals. The 3rd Marine Division was supposed to leave in late November and the 3rd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division two weeks later. By the end of 1969, if both Nixon and Kissinger had their way, American troop levels would be down to 470,000 people. But neither the wreckage Tet had effected upon the communists nor the advances South Vietnam was making toward taking seriously its own responsibilities made enough difference. Unless Washington agreed to some tactical innovations, the North Vietnamese would take over just as soon as the last American troops left. The only substitute for American troops was increases in American firepower and a widening of the war. Arc Light raids of B-52s over South Vietnam had begun in 1965, and in the battle of Khe Sanh army and marine infantry commanders discovered just how much damage the super-bombers could do. To maximize his strength, Abrams called in saturation B-52 raids on suspected enemy strongholds before sending in his soldiers. Lifting conventional restraints was another consequence of Vietnamization. Since 1965 American military officials had requested authority to invade Laos and Cambodia in pursuit of the enemy, to cross the DMZ into North Vietnam, and to mine Haiphong harbor. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, policymakers avoided those alternatives for fear of triggering a Koreanlike response from the Chinese. But the Cultural Revolution that disrupted China in the mid-1960s made that much less likely. Nixon and Kissinger listened to Wheeler and Westmoreland and asked them to draw up contingency plans. The White House was preparing to take the war beyond Vietnam.

In February 1969 Abrams reported that the communist Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) was five miles across the border in Cambodia and that there were supply dumps all along the border. The general was eager to destroy them with B-52 raids. In response, Nixon in March authorized Operation Menu to limit enemy use of those sanctuaries. Nixon also had a “madman strategy. ” He believed that Eisenhower's secret messages to China and North Korea in 1953 threatening nuclear weapons had brought the North Koreans to the negotiating table. Nixon aimed to convince North Vietnam's leaders that he had none of Lyndon Johnson's reservations, that he was “tougher, ” willing to escalate the war if necessary, perhaps by arming the raiders with nuclear weapons. Large-scale bombing of Cambodia would send a signal to Hanoi that there was a “new kid on the block who wouldn't put up with the old bullshit. ” Nixon wanted the North Vietnamese “to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word... that 'for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communists. We can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button'—and Ho Chi Minh... will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”