A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (121 page)

Krulak showed prescient wit when he warned in his December 1965 strategy paper that trying to interdict columns of men and supplies moving to the South “can be likened to fighting an alligator by chewing on his tail.” That Sharp and the carrier admirals and Air Force generals under him would consent to preside over this phantasmic enterprise was a study in how obsession and ambition can warp judgment. The “truck kill” was the central measure of the effectiveness of interdiction in the air war. Year after year, Sharp and his senior air commanders traded complicated jets that, depending on the type, cost the American taxpayers from $1 to $4 million each (the rough equivalent of $3 to $12 million in 1985 dollars), and brave airmen in whom hundreds of thousands of dollars and the faith of the nation had been invested, for the Russian version of two-and-half-ton trucks and Vietnamese drivers who were born with their courage and whose education in plane dodging was acquired on the job. A number of trucks destroyed for every plane shot down over the North did not improve the exchange. The trucks cost about $6,000 apiece to make, in the estimate of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and were one of the items the heavy industry of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe happened to produce in abundance, and that China also manufactured in sizable quantity. It was a comparatively minor expense to replace every truck lost and to oblige the Vietnamese by simultaneously increasing the convoy fleet. In a report to the Joint Chiefs at the end of 1967, Sharp made an admission that was remarkably honest under the circumstances. He admitted that after another year of bombing there were just as many trucks in December as there had been in January. There probably were more. The number of trucks sighted in Laos during 1967 showed a 165 percent increase over those seen during 1966. Robert McNamara estimated in 1967 that the Vietnamese had 10,000 to 12,000 trucks coursing the roads.

The solution did not lie in closing Haiphong and the other ports of the North with mines and bombs, as Krulak and Greene thought and as Sharp and Greene’s fellow members of the Joint Chiefs now increasingly
clamored to do. Closing the ports appeared to be the answer because, except for food and lives, practically all the essentials of the war came from Russia and Hanoi’s other Communist allies; the bulk arriving by sea. Freighters just happened to be the most convenient means of transport. China was willing, with its foreign-policy goals of the moment, to permit the Soviets to transship equipment and supplies to the Vietnamese on Chinese railways. Had the ports been shut the Vietnamese would have brought the weapons and other essentials down from the China border by rail and truck, as they were to do after Nixon belatedly closed their ports in 1972. They made arrangements for such transshipment in the spring of 1967, and some Soviet supplies began coming through China by rail that year.

The foolish expectations of the POL raids in the summer of 1966 upset McNamara so much that he was able to discern the truth. He warned Johnson that the only way they could achieve decisive results with the air war was to target the people of North Vietnam. “To bomb the North sufficiently to make a radical impact upon Hanoi’s political, economic and social structure, would require an effort which we could make but which would not be stomached either by our own people or by world opinion; and it would involve a serious risk of drawing us into open war with China,” he told the president in a memorandum that October.

Dan Ellsberg helped to disabuse McNamara of his illusions about the ground war in the South. Ellsberg remembered the moment as “the height of my bureaucratic career.” It occurred that same October of 1966 aboard a “McNamara Special” bound for Saigon, one of those windowless KC-135 jet tankers the Air Force had fitted out for longdistance VIP travel and that the secretary used on his frequent shuttles. Nicholas Katzenbach was along on his first trip to Vietnam as the new under secretary of state. Porter had sent Ellsberg to Washington to brief Katzenbach and to travel with him as his escort officer.

The seats in the nonsleeping section (there were separate compartments with cots so that the VIPs could arrive refreshed) were arranged around desk-tables at which one could eat a meal or work. Ellsberg happened to be seated across the aisle from his former Pentagon superior, John McNaughton, McNamara’s deputy for foreign affairs. McNamara was sitting on the opposite side of the table from McNaughton. Not without calculation, Ellsberg had brought along a briefcase full of his best memos, more than 200 pages of them, including a vivid account of the three days he had spent with Vann in Hau Nghia
in the fall of 1965. As soon as the plane lifted off from Andrews Air Force Base he opened the briefcase and passed a memo to McNaughton with the suggestion that he might find the reading interesting enough to while away flight time. McNaughton glanced through the memorandum and handed it to McNamara, who looked at it and then began to read. Ellsberg fetched another memorandum from the briefcase for McNaughton, who started to read carefully too.

McNamara and McNaughton were both swift readers, and Ellsberg had emptied his briefcase before the plane had gone far toward Saigon. McNaughton called him aside a bit later and said that McNamara wanted a copy of the Hau Nghia memo, the best official writing Ellsberg was to do in Vietnam, rich in detail of the moral depravity and buffoonery of the Saigon side. McNamara had another request, McNaughton said. In the interest of maintaining civilian-military relations, would Ellsberg please not show this memorandum to General Wheeler.

Disaffection, once begun, acquires a momentum of its own, and by now more than the failure of the air campaign was at work on Robert McNamara. The sudden receptivity to realities he had ignored for years was what apparently led him that fall of 1966 to approve the proposal by Alain Enthoven, the chief of his Pentagon brain trust, the Office of Systems Analysis, to hire Vann as the head of the new Asian Division that Systems Analysis was forming. McNamara’s report to the president on his October 1966 trip to Vietnam was a watershed. The McNamara of just a year earlier could absorb the shock of 230 Americans dead in four days of fighting in the valley of the Drang and urge the president to “stick with” Westmoreland’s war and “provide what it takes in men and matériel.” Now he wanted to put a clamp on Westmoreland, to end “the spectre of apparently endless escalation of U.S. deployments.” The general should be told he could have a total of 470,000 men and no more. Where the air war in the North was concerned, McNamara no longer had any stomach for the blackmail of bombing pause and ultimatum and escalation. He wanted Johnson to try to coax the Vietnamese Communists into negotiations by halting the bombing in all of North Vietnam, or if the president thought that too generous, in the northeast quadrangle—the Hanoi-Haiphong region up to the China border. The Joint Chiefs made it clear they would revolt if the president did anything of the kind.

McNamara was beginning to learn, and the more he learned the more disturbed he became. Although Enthoven had been unable to hire Vann, he did hire as an analyst in 1966 a young statistician named Thomas Thayer who had spent two and a half years in South Vietnam working
for the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. McNamara started to get a stream of what he understood, numbers, and these were the right numbers about the war, the kind McNamara had not been in a mood to heed when Krulak had earlier sought to rouse him with them. Thayer’s own experience in Vietnam had taught him what mattered, and he was wise enough to test his statistical findings against the reflections of canny fighters whose analyses had been distilled from the battlefield. He interviewed Hal Moore after Moore relinquished command of the 3rd Brigade of the Air Cav and came to Washington in the fall of 1966 to serve as a staff assistant to McNaughton. Moore was convinced that one of the reasons the Vietnamese had struck the Cav so boldly and repeatedly at the Drang and had resisted so ferociously at Bong Son was that they had been intent on learning how to fight the Americans. They had learned, Moore said, and moreover had got the Americans to fight the war their way. They were leading the Army and the Marine Corps by the nose.

In the spring of 1967, when the insatiable general in Saigon wanted still more troops, this time his “Minimum Essential Force” of 550,500 Americans by mid-1968, or an “Optimum Force” of 678,000 if the president wished to hasten victory, Thayer was ready. He and a staff of analysts he had assembled within Systems Analysis in a special Southeast Asia Office had done sufficient research to demonstrate that Westmoreland’s war of attrition was an absurdity. Enthoven transmitted the findings to McNamara with his memoranda urging the secretary to oppose any troop increase beyond the ceiling of 470,000 men.

A study of fifty-six representative engagements in 1966 from platoon-size to multibattalion showed that the Viet Cong and the NVA had
initiated
the action in about 85 percent of the clashes, either by attacking the American unit or by choosing to stand and fight from fortified positions. The enemy also had an element of surprise in his favor nearly 80 percent of the time. In only about 5 percent of the cases did the U.S. commander have “reasonably accurate knowledge of enemy positions and strength” before the shooting started. Thayer had confirmed his results by checking them against the mass of after-action reports submitted by the field commanders and against an earlier study of a different set of engagements in late 1965 and the beginning of 1966. This earlier study had found that the Viet Cong and the NVA started the shooting 88 percent of the time.

To make attrition work in his favor, a military leader must be able to force his enemy to fight, as Grant could force Lee to fight when he had Lee locked into a defense of the Confederate capital of Richmond
in the last year of the Civil War and as the American and British armies could make Hitler’s Wehrmacht do after the landing at Normandy in 1944. Thayer’s findings proved that Westmoreland was unable to force his enemy to fight, because the Vietnamese had an overwhelming grasp of the initiative. The Vietnamese controlled their own rate of attrition. Furthermore, because of Westmoreland’s insistence on giving battle whenever and wherever the Vietnamese appeared, they controlled his rate of loss to a significant degree as well. They could raise or lower U.S. casualties by their willingness to sacrifice their own people.

Even if one set aside this determining factor of who held the initiative, and if one gave Westmoreland all the American soldiers he wanted and accepted the most indulgent projections, Thayer’s analysis showed that the general’s strategy still did not make sense. With 678,000 Americans to do the killing and the Vietnamese getting themselves killed at roughly twice the average rate, Hanoi would be losing about 400 men per week beyond what its manpower pool enabled it to replace. “In theory, we’d then wipe them out in ten years,” Enthoven wrote McNamara.

Robert McNamara, the technocratic manager extraordinary who had run out of solutions, performed an act of abundant moral courage in May of 1967. He gave the president of the United States a memorandum saying that the president could not win the war in Vietnam and ought to negotiate an unfavorable peace.

John McNaughton, who shared McNamara’s anguish because he shared his high responsibility for the bloodshed, drafted the memorandum for him. They did not state baldly that the war could not be won; that would have been too impolitic in the circumstances of the moment. McNamara and McNaughton let this conclusion become apparent from the actions they proposed and the peace they described. They wanted the president to abandon the officially engraved goals of defeating the Vietnamese Communists and establishing “an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam” and to issue a secret policy directive setting out new “minimum objectives.” These amounted to a fig-leaf political settlement in the South that would enable the United States to gradually disengage from Vietnam. This “circumscription of the U.S. commitment … may cause a ‘rush for the exits’ in Thailand, in Laos, and especially inside South Vietnam,” the memorandum acknowledged, but its pains were “fewer and smaller than the difficulties of any other approach.” McNamara and McNaughton urged the president to start moving toward this settlement by holding Westmoreland to another 30,000 troops and
no more and by halting the bombing of North Vietnam above the 20th Parallel, i.e., confining the air raids to the infiltration routes that ran down the Panhandle.

What McNamara had done so much to set in motion he could no longer influence. Lyndon Johnson had invested close to 11,000 American lives and his place in history in the Vietnamese war by the time of McNamara’s awakening, and he was listening to other men like Komer and Rostow and Rusk who did not see what McNamara saw. The president continued to employ McNamara as a foil against the military. He had no intention of providing the 678,000 men for Westmoreland’s “Optimum Force,” because this would require mobilizing the reserves, an act that would destroy Johnson’s Great Society legislation and profoundly exacerbate domestic dissent over the war. Nor did he intend to provide all of the 550,500 men for the general’s “Minimum Essential Force,” because Westmoreland did not convince him during a trip to Washington in April that this many Americans were essential to win. The president had come to see Westmoreland’s troop demands more as bargaining parameters than genuine needs. He sent McNamara to South Vietnam again in July, when Vann saw him alone for the first time, to haggle the general down. Westmoreland finally agreed that he could make do with an additional 55,000 troops beyond the previous ceiling to give him 525,000 men by the middle of 1968.

Running an errand for the president was not to be confused with enjoying his trust. Lyndon Johnson began to put Robert McNamara at a distance.

McNamara lost his friend and confidant John McNaughton to a midair collision between a small private plane and a commercial aircraft over a North Carolina airport that July. McNaughton’s wife and an eleven-year-old son also died on the airliner. The loss must have been difficult for McNamara, because he had started to show his emotions. He had let the President glimpse them in a description of the bombing of the North in the memorandum in May. “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”