A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (122 page)

More troubled him than bloodshed. Another associate who worked closely with him in 1967 remembered how ashamed McNamara had become of all the bad advice he had given two presidents in earlier years, ashamed of what he saw as his failure at the most important task of his life. In June he commissioned the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret inquiry into U.S. involvement in Indochina from its origins in the French
era, an inquiry that was to burgeon into a forty-three-volume archive of the war, more than 7,000 pages and two and a half million words of classified history and documents. He gave Leslie Gelb, who was to direct the project, a list of about a hundred questions he wanted the study to answer. One of the first questions on McNamara’s list condemned as unnecessary everything he had brought to pass: “Was Ho Chi Minh an Asian Tito?”

Perhaps in part because he paid so little attention before, he was now willing to subject himself to the details of the killing and destruction. In the fall of 1967, Jonathan Schell, then a twenty-four-year-old writer for
The New Yorker
, had just finished an account of what Task Force Oregon, the provisional Army division Westmoreland had formed and sent to Chu Lai in the spring to replace the Marines, was doing in Quang Ngai Province and in the southern end of Quang Tin. Schell had spent several weeks during the summer observing the operations of the division, most of the time from a vantage that gave him a panoramic view of the havoc—the rear seat of one of the Air Force L-19 spotter planes that controlled the air strikes.

The damage to rural society and the killing of civilians in Quang Ngai had become serious two years earlier, as I had learned in November 1965, when I found the five hamlets on the coast in which hundreds had perished under bombs and naval gunfire. During 1966 the Marines had staged a number of operations in Quang Ngai that turned brutal because of the resistance they encountered from the Viet Cong, an unyielding peasantry who stood behind the guerrillas, and NVA troops who infiltrated down the Annamites to reinforce. The pacification strategy Krulak and Walt had been attempting to implement acted as something of a checkrein on the local Marine commanders. The inhibition disappeared in the spring of 1967 with the arrival of Task Force Oregon. The Army, with its corpse-exchange strategy, was not interested in securing hamlets and protecting ground. The machine was freed of all restraint, and the ravaging expanded geometrically.

Where I had learned that at least ten other hamlets had been flattened as thoroughly as the five along the coast and a further twenty-five heavily damaged, Schell discovered that fully 70 percent of the estimated 450 hamlets in Quang Ngai had been destroyed. Except for a narrow strip of hamlets along Route 1, which was patrolled after a fashion, the destruction was proceeding apace. Day after day from the back of the spotter plane Schell watched the latest smashing and burning in bombings and shellings and rocket runs by the helicopter gunships and in the meandering progress of flames and smoke from houses set afire by the
American infantry. He tallied up the previous destruction from the traces of the houses and, going to the military maps, carefully checked his estimates with the L-19 pilots, officers of Task Force Oregon, members of the CORDS team in Quang Ngai, and several local Saigon officials.

A lot of the peasants had returned to the shards of their homes, even though many of the communities had been officially condemned in free-fire zones, and were living in underground bomb shelters. They preferred to chance an existence from their cratered rice fields and to endure the peril of being frequently blasted and shot at rather than accept the certainty of hunger and filth and disease in the refugee camps. The province hospital had been admitting an average of thirty wounded civilians a day since Task Force Oregon had arrived. A volunteer British doctor who had been working in Quang Ngai for more than three years gave Schell an estimate that put the total civilian casualties for the province, including the dead and the lightly wounded, at a current annual rate of about 50,000. (A conservative formula worked out by Tom Thayer of Systems Analysis from hospital admissions throughout the country would have given a figure of about 33,000 civilian casualties a year for Quang Ngai.)

Schell happened to tell Jerome Wiesner, the provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, what he had witnessed. Wiesner was a scientist who had lent his talent to the U.S. military ever since he helped to perfect radar at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory during World War II. He had been Kennedy’s science adviser and was a friend of McNamara’s. He arranged for Schell to see the secretary in his big office over the River Entrance to the Pentagon.

Jonathan Schell had gained considerable notoriety from an earlier
New Yorker
article on the forced evacuation by the Army in January 1967 of 6,100 guerrilla family members and sympathizers from the so-called Iron Triangle northwest of Saigon and the razing of Ben Sue and several other hamlets in which they had lived. Although Vann did not believe in forced relocation, because of his experience with the Strategic Hamlet Program, he had handled their resettlement in his first major task as OCO Director for III Corps and had gotten into a spectacular row with DePuy, who wanted his 1st Infantry Division to have complete charge. Vann had thought Schell’s reporting of the event accurate, despite Schell’s personal opposition to the war.

McNamara had not turned away visitors like Schell when friends sent them in the past. He liked to give the impression that he had an open mind. In a short time the visitor would notice that the secretary was fretting and glancing at the clock on the wall opposite his desk. An
assistant would walk in and hand him a message or there would be a telephone call of overriding importance and the visitor would have to leave the office so that the secretary could speak freely. When the visitor returned, McNamara would be on his feet beside his desk, and who could continue to impose on such a harried public servant?

Schell was not interrupted. He still got the impression that he was imposing on a bristlingly busy man, but McNamara made no attempt to hurry Schell. He listened intently with a poker face, asking few questions. When Schell was through, McNamara took him over to a map and asked him to point out the districts of Quang Ngai he had been describing. “Can you put something in writing? We’ve got to have something in writing,” McNamara said. Schell said that he had a manuscript in longhand. McNamara summoned an assistant and told him to arrange for Schell to dictate the manuscript. Schell thanked the secretary for listening to him and left.

McNamara did not ask Schell how long his article was. It was the length of a short book. Schell spent the next three days reading it into a dictaphone in the office of a general who was away. A secretary sent the recordings one after another down to the Pentagon typing pool. McNamara’s assistant also arranged for Schell to eat his meals in a Pentagon mess reserved for high-ranking officers and civilian officials. Schell had several conversations there that struck him as “weird.” He left at the end of three days with a typed copy of the manuscript he could submit to
The New Yorker
. McNamara never contacted him afterward to let him know what happened to the copy left at the Pentagon. When Schell next encountered McNamara in an airport fifteen years later, McNamara seemed “a haunted man” and Schell thought it unkind to ask.

Robert McNamara sent the manuscript straight to Bunker. The ambassador showed it to Westmoreland and, with the general’s consent, ordered a secret inquiry. “The descriptions of destruction by the author are overdrawn but not to such a degree as to discredit his statements. … Mr. Schell’s estimates are substantially correct,” the report of the investigation said. “There are some very important political and military reasons for the scope of the destruction in this area,” the report continued. “The population is totally hostile towards the GVN and is probably nearly in complete sympathy with the NLF movement.” The Viet Cong also refused to accept American rules and insisted on fortifying hamlets and organizing the entire population to resist. “For the Viet Cong there isn’t any distinction; the Viet Cong
are
the people.” (The emphasis is in the original report.) In a display of the moral obtuseness
that had become so characteristic of U.S. officialdom, the report tried to explain away everything Schell had written.

Less than four months after this exercise in exculpation was submitted, on the morning of March 16, 1968, a massacre occurred in the village of Son My on the South China Sea about seven miles northeast of Quang Ngai town. The largest killing took place at a hamlet called My Lai and was directed by a second lieutenant named William Calley, Jr., a platoon leader in the 23rd Infantry Division (Americal), which Task Force Oregon had been formally designated. The criminal investigation division of the Military Police subsequently concluded that 347 people perished at My Lai. The CID reports indicated that about another ninety unarmed Vietnamese were killed at a second hamlet of the village by soldiers from a separate company the same morning. The monument that was erected to the victims after the war was to list the names of 504 inhabitants of Son My.

Some of the troops refused to participate in the massacre; their refusal did not restrain their fellows. The American soldiers and junior officers shot old men, women, boys, girls, and babies. One soldier missed a baby lying on the ground twice with a .45 pistol as his comrades laughed at his marksmanship. He stood over the child and fired a third time. The soldiers beat women with rifle butts and raped some and sodomized others before shooting them. They shot the water buffalos, the pigs, and the chickens. They threw the dead animals into the wells to poison the water. They tossed satchel charges into the bomb shelters under the houses. A lot of the inhabitants had fled into the shelters. Those who leaped out to escape the explosives were gunned down. All of the houses were put to the torch.

Lieutenant Calley, who herded many of his victims into an irrigation ditch and filled it with their corpses, was the only officer or soldier to be convicted of a crime. He was charged with personally killing 109 Vietnamese. A court-martial convicted him of the premeditated murder of at least twenty-two, including babies, and sentenced him to life in prison at hard labor. President Nixon intervened for him. Calley was confined for three years, most of the time under house arrest in his apartment at Fort Benning with visitation rights for a girlfriend.

The officers of the court-martial acted correctly in seeking to render justice in the case of Calley, and Richard Nixon shamed himself in frustrating them. Calley appears to have been a sadist, but his personality alone does not explain the massacre. What Calley and others who participated in the massacre did that was different was to kill hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese in two hamlets in a single morning and to kill
point-blank with rifles, pistols, and machine guns. Had they killed just as many over a larger area in a longer period of time and killed impersonally with bombs, shells, rockets, white phosphorus, and napalm, they would have been following the normal pattern of American military conduct. The soldier and the junior officer observed the lack of regard his superiors had for the Vietnamese. The value of Vietnamese life was systematically cheapened in his mind. Further brutalized by the cycle of meaningless violence that was Westmoreland’s war of attrition, and full of hatred because his comrades were so often killed and wounded by mines and booby traps set by the local guerrillas and the peasants who helped them, he naturally came to see all Vietnamese of the countryside as vermin to be exterminated. The massacre at Son My was inevitable. The military leaders of the United States, and the civilian leaders who permitted the generals to wage war as they did, had made the massacre inevitable.

McNamara tried again to convince the president at the beginning of November 1967. He stated his case fervidly at the weekly White House planning session on Vietnam on October 31, called the Tuesday Luncheon because Johnson always held it during the Tuesday noon meal. The next day he gave the president a memorandum elaborating his dissent. The memorandum predicted the course of the war over the next fifteen months if Johnson held to the strategy they were pursuing until the end of his current term of office on Inauguration Day in late January 1969. By that time, McNamara said, Lyndon Johnson would have on his conscience “between 24,000 and 30,000” Americans killed in action. (The number was to exceed 31,000.) The president would have nothing of substance to show for the dead. The public would be crying out for withdrawal from Vietnam. Simultaneously, the military leaders and the hawks in Congress who supported them would be pushing hard to mine the ports and bomb the population centers of the North and to widen the ground war by thrusting into the Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos, and invading North Vietnam above the DMZ.

In May, McNamara had wanted the president to try to induce Hanoi to negotiate by limiting the bombing to the 20th Parallel. Now he wanted Johnson to halt the bombing in all of North Vietnam and to do so by the end of the year. The evening of the day he handed the president this latest unpleasantness, McNamara told a secret gathering of elder statesmen and close advisers whom Johnson had convened in Washington
that he was afraid everything he and Dean Rusk had done since 1961 to further the war effort might turn out to be a failure.

Lyndon Johnson was perplexed by the change in McNamara. Rusk, whom McNamara had included in his gloomy remark, certainly did not share his feelings, nor did anyone else whose opinion the president respected. The group McNamara spoke to was dubbed “the Wise Men” within the bureaucracy, because it was a constellation of American statecraft and military experience that included Dean Acheson and Omar Bradley, the surviving five-star general of the Army from World War II. (President Eisenhower was technically another, but he had surpassed the distinction by becoming a commander in chief.) They were briefed the same evening by Earle Wheeler, who addressed Westmoreland’s operations and the air war, and by George Carver, the CIA’s ranking specialist on Vietnam, who evaluated Komer’s pacification program.