Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (41 page)

Rogers had no idea what was going on. On March 27 and 28, American helicopters accompanied battalion-size ARVN forces on an invasion of Cambodia. Communist forces escaped to the west and began dumping their weapons on the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia's communist insurgents. Serious consideration of an invasion undertaken together with ARVN and American troops had been under way for months, but Prince Norodom Sihanouk, though acquiescing in Operation Menu as well as the presence of Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops in Cambodian territory, wanted to maintain at least a formal neutrality. Sihanouk was trying desperately to save his country. If he did not allow the North Vietnamese use of the sanctuaries, they would provide assistance to the Khmer Rouge, who were trying to overthrow him. When Sihanouk cooperated with Hanoi, the North Vietnamese limited their support of the Khmer Rouge. But by tacitly cooperating with Hanoi, Sihanouk risked the ire of the United States. He wavered back and forth, walking a deadly political path. MACV intelligence reports enticed Nixon, Kissinger, and Abrams with the prospects of capturing the elusive Central Office for South Vietnam. But Nixon could not invade Cambodia as long as Sihanouk was in power. It would be a violation of Cambodian sovereignty. What Nixon and Kissinger needed was a pro-American government in Phnom Penh.

Lon Nol was their man. Born in 1913 in French Cambodia and educated in French colonial schools, between 1935 and 1954 he had held a number of important posts in the French colonial administration and became close to Sihanouk. After independence in 1954, he was minister of national defense. Throughout the early 1960s Nol, a devout Buddhist and anticommunist, urged Sihanouk to side with the United States against the Vietcong, but the prince maintained Cambodian neutrality. Lon Nol started scheming. Sihanouk was a short, round man who loved Parisian suits but hated having to wear a size 48 short. Each year he took off for the Cote d'Azur in France, where he spent a couple of months in a high-class fat farm. Lon Nol knew that no matter how desperate the political situation, the prince would never forgo the trips. Late in 1969 Sihanouk had already purchased fifty new suits, all of them 44 or 42 short. He left for France in January 1970. In March, with Sihanouk in Paris, Lon Nol deposed the prince.

Lon Nol fanned political support by moving against the more than 400,000 Vietnamese living in Cambodia, where ethnic hatreds were intense. Within days of assuming power, he launched murderous attacks on the Vietnamese community, slaughtering thousands of civilians and raising ethnic rivalries to a fever. He also expressed to Richard Nixon his fears about the spread of the Vietnam War westward and the inability of Cambodian forces to handle the situation. Lon Nol doubled the size of the Cambodian army in a month and appealed to Nixon for arms. Nixon agreed.

On April 19 the president flew out to Hawaii to visit the crew of Apollo 13, who had just returned from a harrowing voyage to the moon. In Honolulu, Admiral John McCain, Jr., commander in chief of the United States Forces in the Pacific (CINCPAC), briefed him. An Annapolis graduate and a submariner during World War II, McCain replaced Ulysses S. Grant Sharp at CINCPAC in July 1968. Known as the “Red Arrow Man, ” McCain was a hard-boiled anticommunist given to placing red arrows on open world maps to show communist expansion around the globe. For reporters in Hawaii and Saigon, his briefings were laughably infamous, full of gloomy descriptions of “Reds, ” “Commies, ” and “Chicoms. ” McCain's son was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, which intensified the father's passion. McCain unfurled a map before Nixon, and, sure enough, there were the big red arrows, “McCain's Claws ” according to the reporters. Half the country was painted red, and the claws were reaching out for Malaysia and west to Thailand. “The Cambodians need more than a few thousand rifles, ” McCain told the president. “If you are going to withdraw another 150,000 troops from South Vietnam this year, you must protect Saigon's western flank by an invasion of the Cambodian sanctuaries. ”

Developments back home upset Nixon. In April the Senate rejected both of his nominations to fill the vacancy left on the Supreme Court by Abe Fortas's resignation. The Senate turned down Clement Haynsworth for the apparent mediocrity of his credentials and G. Harrold Carswell for his hesitancy on racial change. Nixon was so angry at the sixty-one senators who had voted against his appointments that he publicly called them “vicious hypocrites. ” That month he watched private screenings of the film Patton. Nixon loved George C. Scott's portrayal of the lonely, misunderstood but tough general who had defeated the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge. Cambodia became a way for Nixon to express his toughness, to seize the political initiative back from the Senate. “Those Senators think they can push me around, ” Nixon told Kissinger. “But I'll show them who's tough. ”

On April 30, 1970, President Nixon went on television with an important national security announcement. It was vintage Richard Nixon. He wanted to sound like George C. Scott being Patton. Sweat forming on his upper lip from the camera lights, Nixon stridently warned: “We live in an age of anarchy. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilization in the last five hundred years…. Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and without. ” The president declared that “only the power of the United States deters aggression. ” To protect American lives and guarantee Vietnamization, he had authorized an invasion of Cambodia. “We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war … but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam, and winning the just peace. ” Searching for military victory or at least a satisfactory withdrawal, the killing machine moved into Cambodia.

It was a joint “incursion, ” as Nixon defined it. The United States 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, along with the 1st ARVN Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 3rd ARVN Airborne Brigade, invaded the Fishhook, a region of Cambodia about fifty miles northwest of Saigon. It was the ultimate search-and-destroy mission, the hunt for COSVN. If the troops could locate and annihilate the enemy's command headquarters, they could finish off the trouble from that part of Cambodia. Melvin Laird begged Nixon not to include in his speech any reference to COSVN: “Right up to the time he gave that speech I was pleading to have that out because COSVN was never a single headquarters…. So again the American people were misled by not having a real understanding of what it was about. But the speech … was made … COSVN was listed as a major military target. ” Laird got it right. COSVN was hardly what most American officers thought of as a command headquarters. It was not a fixed installation like MACV but a small number of senior officers and staff assistants.

The reports Nixon received on the first day of the invasion were so optimistic that he ordered the Pentagon “to take out all the sanctuaries. Make whatever plans are necessary and then just do it. Knock them all out so that they can't be used against us. Ever. ” Two weeks later the 25th and 9th Infantry Divisions attacked the Dog's Head, a region about twenty-five miles southwest of the Fishhook, and the 4th Infantry Division invaded Cambodia west of Pleiku. Nixon renewed the bombing of North Vietnam, although he confined the strikes to areas just north of the Demilitarized Zone.

But the troops never found COSVN. Nearly 80,000 American and ARVN soldiers spent a couple of months slogging through eastern Cambodia, unloading tens of thousands of tons of explosives, but making little contact with the enemy. Communist troops were there, but the invasion actually drove them deeper—further west—into Cambodia. The destruction associated with the invasion sent a flood of refugees pouring into Phnom Penh. Creighton Abrams claimed that the invasion had resulted in more than 11,000 enemy deaths, but the CIA disputed the claim, arguing that the bombardment had been so intense that “civilians and non-combatants [were] being included in the loss figure. ”

Although they never found COSVN, the troops captured a wealth of enemy supplies: 15 million rounds of ammunition, 143,000 rockets, 14 million pounds of rice, 23,000 firearms, 200,000 antiaircraft rounds, 5,487 mines, and 62,000 hand grenades. They destroyed 11,700 North Vietnamese bunker complexes. Nixon announced that the captured supplies and weapons were “enough to keep the North Vietnamese going for a year. They will be crippled now. ” Westmoreland defended the Cambodian invasion as the event that had finally pushed North Vietnam past the elusive crossover point. But there was so little contact with the enemy that Abrams could not afford to have the United States troops on a walking tour of Cambodia. All ground operations in Cambodia by ARVN and the United States were over by the end of June. No sooner had they left than new battalions of North Vietnamese troops moved down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and back into the Fishhook, Parrot's Beak, and Dog's Head, as did the enemy soldiers driven west into Cambodia by the initial invasion. The enemy, as it had been so many times in so many places, was back.

In other ways the invasion was a disaster. Once in Cambodia, ARVN troops behaved badly, stealing everything in sight. North Vietnam gave strict orders to its troops to avoid the civilian population, and political cadres then went in behind the ARVN troops and appealed to the Khmer peasants, telling them that communism, not South Vietnam and the United States, offered the best hope for freedom. When it was over, the invasion had given the Khmer Rouge new weapons as well as a civilian population ripe for recruitment.

The administration also paid a heavy political price at home. Nixon had completely miscalculated the public reaction. On April 19 the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, sponsors of the huge, nationwide antiwar rallies in October and November 1969, announced that it would close its Washington office. The troop reductions convinced Americans that Nixon was scaling down the war. That changed on April 30, when Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia. The incursion breathed new life into the antiwar movement. The president found himself facing one of the worst eruptions of civil disobedience in modern American history. On college campuses mass demonstrations disrupted classes. At Kent State University, National Guard troops called out by Ohio Governor James Rhodes to keep order fired into a crowd of students, killing four and creating martyrs for the antiwar movement. Similar violence occurred at the black Jackson State University in Mississippi. On May 8, some 100,000 people marched into Washington.

The extent of the protests bore deep into Nixon's paranoia. What had started out to be a military victory was turning into political disaster. In the White House, Nixon had an anxiety attack and could not sleep. After 10:30 p.m he made nearly fifty phone calls to friends and political associates, seeking reassurance and vindication. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he ordered the limousine to drive him over to the Lincoln Memorial to visit the camped protesters. But he was not at his best. Sleepless and tired, he talked with the students but not about the war. To a group of Ohio State students, Nixon rambled on and on about Woody Hayes and times of glory. For one student from California, the evening was surrealistic: “Here we are protesting an immoral war and the president of the United States shows up in the middle of the night to tell us about baseball and how great the surfing is in California. It was unbelievable. ”

It was just as bad in Congress. Senators Mark Hatfield and George McGovern sponsored an amendment requiring total American withdrawal from South Vietnam by the end of 1971. Although the Hatfield McGovern Amendment failed to pass in the Senate, it indicated the frustration many Americans felt about the war. Senators John Sherman Cooper and Frank Church were somewhat more successful. Cooper, a Republican from Kentucky, and Church, a Democrat from Idaho, sponsored an amendment prohibiting the United States without congressional approval from sending advisers into Cambodia, providing combat air support for Cambodian troops, or financing the sending of troops into Cambodia by other nations. On June 30, 1970, the amendment passed the Senate over bitter administration opposition, fifty-eight to thirty-seven.

So in the end, the invasion of Cambodia forced Nixon to accelerate the troop withdrawals even while Henry Kissinger was arguing that those reductions weakened his hand diplomatically. The historian William Turley writes that the need to exploit mountain regions and supply routes in Laos Cambodia had long forced North Vietnam to see Indochina as “a strategic unity, a single battlefield. ” The Cambodian invasion showed that the United States viewed Indochina in the same way. And in the words of Senator Lee Metcalf of Montana, “With the Cambodian invasion, Nixon has made it his war. ”

10

The Fall of South Vietnam, 1970–1975

The real problem is that the enemy is willing to sacrifice in order to win, while the South Vietnamese simply aren’t willing to pay that much of a price in order to avoid losing.

—Richard Nixon, 1972

They were probably the most influential antiwar group of all—the Vietnam Veterans against the War. Organized by six veterans in 1967, the VVAW had thousands of members by 1970. John Kerry, the VVAW spokesman, staged the Winter Soldier Investigation, and for three days between January 31 and February 2, 1971, 116 veterans testified of atrocities. Kerry argued that “the My Lai massacre was not an aberration, the isolated act of a ne’er-do-well second lieutenant gone berserk. . . . It was symbolic of a war gone berserk.” With the world press focused on them, John Kerry’s men testified that “at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks.” Their testimony was riveting, and the Nixon administration knew it. Time was running out on “peace with honor.”

Nixon had to accelerate the troop withdrawals. The 3rd Brigade of the 9th Infantry Division went home in October, and in December, Abrams lost the 4th Infantry Division and the 25th. At the end of 1970 he had 335,000 troops at his disposal, and the 3rd Marine Amphibious Force, the 1st Marine Division, and the 11th Armored Cavalry were scheduled to leave in a few months. Already North Vietnam was increasing the infiltration of troops and supplies.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail had become a work of art maintained by 100,000 Vietnamese and Laotian workers. It included 12,000 miles of well-maintained trails, paved two-lane roads stretching from North Vietnam to Tchepone, just across the South Vietnamese border in Laos, and a four-inch fuel pipeline that reached all the way into the A Shau Valley. The CIA estimated that between 1966 and 1971 North Vietnam had shipped 630,000 soldiers, 100,000 tons of food, 400,000 weapons, and 50,000 tons of ammunition into South Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Abrams wanted to invade Laos, cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and starve the North Vietnamese troops waiting in South Vietnam. But because the Cooper-Church Amendment prohibited the use of American troops outside South Vietnam, Abrams would have to rely on ARVN soldiers. During Nixon’s first two years in office, nearly 15,000 American troops were killed in action.

The Nixon administration debated an invasion of Cambodia or North Vietnam, but Abrams argued forcefully for severing the enemy supply lines in Laos. Nixon, Kissinger, and Westmoreland ultimately agreed with him. While the Winter Soldier Investigation was going on in Detroit, planning for the invasion of Laos was under way. Late in 1970 the United States 101st Airborne Division and the 1st Brigade of the 5th Infantry Division reoccupied the former marine base at Khe Sanh as a staging area for the campaign. To divert enemy attention, a navy task force with the 31st Marine Amphibious Unit aboard hovered off the North Vietnamese city of Vinh, threatening an invasion. The ARVN objective was to drive west from Khe Sanh up Route 9 to Tchepone, about twenty-five miles away, cutting across the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

South Vietnam committed 21,000 troops to the effort. Supported by B-52s and fighter-bombers from the American air force and navy, they invaded Laos on February 8, 1971. The attack was code-named Lam Son 719 after a small village in Thanh Hoa Province, the birthplace of Le Loi, the Vietnamese hero who had defeated an invading Chinese army in 1428. But Laos was not Cambodia. North Vietnam was protecting its lifeline there, not isolated sanctuaries. The region surrounding Tchepone contained 36,000 NVA troops—nineteen antiaircraft battalions, twelve infantry regiments, one tank regiment, one artillery regiment, and elements of the NVA 2nd, 304th, 308th, 320th, and 324th Divisions.

For the first twelve miles, ARVN encountered only token resistance. But as heavy rains turned Route 9 to mud, the offensive fell short. The South Vietnamese troops fought well, but they were in an impossible position. ARVN air cavalry troops took Tchepone on March 6, but three days later Nguyen Van Thieu ordered a general withdrawal. It took two weeks of bitter fighting along Route 9 for the South Vietnamese to get back out of Laos, and without American air power they would not have made it at all. By the time they reached Khe Sanh, the South Vietnamese admitted to 1,200 men dead and 4,200 wounded, while MACV estimated the dead and wounded together at 9,000.

Abrams claimed publicly that Lam Son 719 had inflicted 14,000 casualties on the North Vietnamese. Back in Washington, President Nixon was even more effulgent, telling the White House press corps that “18 of 22 battalions conducted themselves with high morale, with greater confidence, and they are able to defend themselves man for man against the North Vietnamese.” In a televised speech on April 7, the president proclaimed, “Tonight I can report that Vietnamization has succeeded.” At the Pentagon, however, the private assessments were grim. Most of the ARVN troops had proven themselves, but in fact they suffered a major military defeat, besides having no success in severing the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The attack, as well as Vietnamization, was a failure.

Lam Son 719 had important strategic implications for both sides. For South Vietnam and the United States, it widened the field of battle and with fewer resources. For the North Vietnamese, the victory proved that they could prevail over ARVN, even the new 1-million-man ARVN backed by American technology. It was clear to both sides that ARVN was not yet prepared to go it alone. Lam Son 719 inspired another series of antiwar protests. On April 20, more than 200,000 demonstrators gathered in Washington. At John Kerry’s instigation 1,000 Vietnam Veterans against the War, many of them paraplegics and amputees, joined by mothers of men killed in action, held a memorial service at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Nixon secured a court order prohibiting them from camping out on the Mall and laying wreaths on graves of fallen comrades at Arlington Cemetery. That was a jpgt to the press. The veterans and the mothers defied the order, and the administration declined to arrest them. Over police barricades on the Capitol steps, on April 23 nearly 2,000 veterans threw away medals they had won in Vietnam. They wanted to help the nation understand, Kerry explained, “the moral agony of America’s Vietnam war generation—whether to kill on military orders and be a criminal, or to refuse to kill and be a criminal.”

In the case of one governmental figure, the Winter Soldier Investigation sharpened an agony already close to unbearable: Daniel Ellsberg, born of Jewish converts to Christian Science and blessed, and like everyone with a conscience cursed, with a moral passion and a sense of personal responsibility.

After graduation from Harvard in 1952, Ellsberg had spent a year at Cambridge University doing graduate work, and then joined the Marine Corps. He wanted to serve his country. When his marine tour ended in 1957, Ellsberg returned to Harvard for doctoral work. He left Harvard in 1959 for a job with the Rand Corporation, a civilian think tank. Ellsberg received the highest security clearances. When John Kennedy won the White House in 1960, Ellsberg got a leave of absence from Rand to serve on McGeorge Bundy’s staff, and in 1964 he became special assistant to John McNaughton, deputy for foreign affairs at the Pentagon.

Despondent about the breakup of his marriage in 1965, Ellsberg volunteered for the Marine Corps again. When the marines turned him down, he secured a spot on Edward Lansdale’s pacification team. He came back to the Defense Department convinced that success in Vietnam would require massive social and political changes, not just military victories. When Robert McNamara commissioned a study in 1967 of the history of American policy in Vietnam, Ellsberg was one of the senior researchers. A few months at the task convinced him that American policy in Vietnam was a disaster born of a political fact: “no American President, Republican or Democrat, wanted to be the President who lost the war. . . . That fear was sustained by years of duplicity, lies, exaggerations, and cover-ups.”

By 1968 Ellsberg suffered from a profound guilt about his own role in formulating Vietnam policy. Throughout 1968 he called for a bombing halt and wrote policy papers for Senator Robert Kennedy and then Senator George McGovern. When Richard Nixon was elected in November, Ellsberg sank into a deep depression, and early in 1969 he began photocopying the secret Pentagon study and carrying it page by page to his Washington apartment. He covertly delivered documents to Senator J. William Fulbright so “that the truths that changed me could help Americans free themselves and other victims from our longest war.”

The Winter Soldier Investigation deepened Ellsberg’s sense of personal responsibility for the war. When he learned of the invasion of Laos later that month, he decided to hand over the secret documents to the
New York Times
. On June 13, the
Times
began publishing them, now known as the Pentagon Papers. Nixon was incensed. He ordered the wiretapping of dozens of administration officials to make sure no similar leaks of classified information would occur. The Justice Department secured a court order stopping the
New York Times
from publishing the documents, but the
Boston
Globe
and the
Washington Post
continued to make them public. On June 29, 1971, Ellsberg was indicted for conspiracy, theft, violation of the Espionage Act, and converting government property to his personal use. The next day the Supreme Court, by a vote of six to three, overturned the injunction against publishing the Pentagon Papers, citing the First Amendment freedoms of speech and the press. The Pentagon Papers dramatized what the press had long spoken of as the credibility gap, a recognition that the public could not believe anything the government declared.

South Vietnamese politics deepened disillusionment within the portion of the public that followed events with any attentiveness. President Nguyen Van Thieu was still embarrassed about the election of 1967, when he won office with only 35 percent of the total vote. The debacle in Laos in February and March increased his need for an overwhelming political victory in the October elections. In March 1971 he exempted all civil servants and ARVN from paying income taxes, and the CIA provided him with funds to bribe members of the National Assembly. He secured a bill requiring presidential candidates to receive nominations from forty legislators or 100 of the country’s 554 city and provincial counselors. Thieu then eliminated all of Nguyen Cao Ky’s supporters from the cabinet. When Ky submitted the nominations in July, the Supreme Court of South Vietnam disallowed them. In August several American newspapers revealed that Thieu already had elaborate plans for stuffing ballot boxes and jailing opposition leaders. On election day, 6.3 million people voted and gave Nguyen Van Thieu, the only candidate, a 94.3 percent plurality. Thieu finally had his “mandate from heaven.”

While the antiwar protests, the controversy over the Pentagon Papers, and the South Vietnamese election were going on, American troops were leaving South Vietnam. In April 1971 the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), the 1st Marine Division, and the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment departed. American troop levels were down to 240,000 men. Three months later the 1st Brigade of the 5th Infantry Division and the 173rd Airborne Brigade departed. The Americal Division left in November, just as President Nixon announced that all remaining American combat operations would be exclusively defensive in nature. On New Year’s Day 1972, Creighton Abrams had only 157,000 troops left. If the United States was going to get out of the war with any grace, it would not happen on the battlefield. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had to find another way.

“They’re just a bunch of shits. Tawdry, filthy shits,” exploded Kissinger in frustration to Nixon. In encounters during the cumbersome negotions, Kissinger found Le Duc Tho to be impossible. Tho was rigid and doctrinaire, his hatred of Western imperialism embedded in his psyche by years in French colonial prisons. He was also antiforeign to the point of xenophobia and fiercely patriotic, a “Vietnamese chauvinist” in the words of William Turley. Back in February 1971, at a small house on the Rue Darthe in the Paris suburb of Choisy-le-Roi, Kissinger held the first of many secret meetings with Le Duc Tho. But meetings at the house on Rue Darthe were as disappointing as the formal talks at the Hotel Majestic. The United States was still approaching the negotiations on exclusively military terms, proposing a ceasefire, mutual withdrawal of American and North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam, and an exchange of prisoners of war. Le Duc Tho insisted on a comprehensive political settlement: total withdrawal of all American troops, removal of Nguyen Van Thieu from office, immediate participation of the Provisional Revolutionary Government in the government of South Vietnam, exchanges of prisoners of war, and a cessation of hostilities—in that order. Four years of talking and fighting had not yielded a thing.

Well, they achieved one thing. By early 1972 the negotiators in Paris were in agreement on the shape of the table: a circular table twenty-six feet in diameter, without name plates, place settings, flags, or identifying markings of any kind, where the chief negotiators would sit, and two rectangular tables, three by four and one-half feet each, placed eighteen inches from the circular table and at opposite sides. Nguyen Cao Ky has left a comment on the table debate: “Oh! that table . . . it was of fundamental importance to us. There was no way we were prepared to negotiate with the NLF, who in our view were traitors, and therefore we insisted that the agreement not to distinguish the NLF as a separate party to the talks must be carried out to the letter—and this meant not sitting down ‘officially’ with them at the same table.”