A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (53 page)

“Tell me something,” the prime minister said. “The American generals are always boasting of how they are winning the war in the South. Do they believe it?”

“Yes,” Maneli replied. “As far as I can discover they do.”

“You’re joking,” Pham Van Dong continued, his eyes studying Maneli. “Perhaps they boast for propaganda, but the CIA must tell them the truth in its secret reports.”

“I don’t know what the CIA tells them,” Maneli said. “All I can find out is that they seem to believe what they say.”

“Well, I find it hard to believe what you say,” the prime minister said. “Surely the American generals cannot be that naive.”

When the Vietnamese Communist leaders proceeded to exploit Ap Bac as a catalyst to transform the revolution in the South, they were to discover that Ambassador Maneli was correct. They were to discover more. They were to learn that their American opponents were supplying them with the wherewithal to fundamentally alter the balance of military force in South Vietnam, that virtually everything the United States and its Saigon ally were doing would facilitate their task.

By January 1963, the United States had potentially furnished the Vietnamese Communists with enough weapons to create an army in the South capable of challenging and defeating the ARVN. The Americans had distributed more than 130,000 firearms—carbines, rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, BARs, machine guns, mortars, and recoilless cannon, along with copious quantities of ammunition and grenades and thousands of radios—to Saigon’s Civil Guard and Self-Defense Corps militia and to a menagerie of irregular units financed and equipped by the CIA. As the training and equipping programs for the Civil Guard, the SDC, and these irregular units were carried forward, the number of weapons potentially stocked for the Communists in the countryside was to nearly double by mid-1963, to approximately 250,000. The ARVN was another possible source of captured arms, of course, but its weapons were not conveniently arrayed in the outposts that Diem refused to dismantle and in vulnerable hamlets.

With a modest portion of this quarter of a million American arms, Ho Chi Minh and his confederates could double or triple their main striking forces in the South, the regular and provincial guerrillas, estimated in January 1963 at about 23,000 men. With a more generous share of this weapons bonanza, the Vietnamese Communists could formidably enhance the Guerrilla Popular Army, the roughly 100,000 village and hamlet guerrillas who were the local enforcers and intelligence gatherers for the clandestine Viet Cong government and the reserve manpower pool for the regular and provincial units. The local guerrillas would have no further need for the homemade shotguns of galvanized pipe that were as much a threat to the user as to the target. For the first time in the war, every local guerrilla could be armed with a modern weapon. The
end result could be an immense expansion of Communist control in the countryside and the turning of the Main Force and Regional guerrillas, now organized into units no larger than companies and battalions, into regiments and divisions.

The basic infantry weapons for this second Viet Minh army were not all that was in place or was unwittingly being prepared. The soldiers to fill its ranks and the political climate within the rural population to sustain it with vigor were also being created by the constant bombing and shelling and by a still more enraging act: the forced relocation of millions of peasants into the new strategic hamlets. A peasantry already alienated by the exactions and indignities inflicted on it by the regime was being roused into a fury by an abuse beyond any it had previously experienced from this foreign-rooted government.

Cao had shown the common sense to oppose the Strategic Hamlet Program. The religion of the majority of the Delta peasants was a meld of Buddhism, ancestor worship, and animism—devotion to the spirits that were thought to dwell in the streams, rocks, and trees around their hamlets. Cao pointed this out to Vann and explained that many of the Delta farmers had comfortable homes by their standards. His government would profoundly anger the peasants, he said, if it systematically destroyed their houses and made them leave their fields and the graves of the ancestors they worshiped. He was bold enough to tell Robert (subsequently Sir Robert) Thompson, the British pacification specialist who had played a major role in suppressing the Chinese insurgency in Malaya and had come to Saigon to be the brain truster of pacification in this war, that the scheme would not work in South Vietnam. (Cao then, in character, became one of the most enthusiastic herders into the barbed wire after Diem and Nhu informed him that the program was the centerpiece of their strategy and they expected him to support it.) The forced relocations were particularly massive in the Delta, not simply to move peasants out of guerrilla-dominated regions, but also to reduce many hamlets to a physical area small enough to be encircled with barbed wire and fortified. The larger Delta hamlets sprawled out along the canals and streams, often on both banks, for the best part of a mile or more. This meant that roughly half of the houses—starting at both ends and squeezing in toward the middle—had to be demolished in order to shrink the area to the desired size.

Two groups of peasants were infuriated. The first consisted of the farm folk who had seen their houses torn down or burned and been forced to build new ones, inferior to their former homes, with their own labor and at their own expense. Those relocated to entirely new hamlets
to take them out of areas controlled or contested by the Viet Cong were often subjected to the further indignity of having their homes blown up and burned down by bombs and napalm. Although the technique was an expensive way to destroy thatched housing, Anthis liked it because it kept up the sortie rate of his fighter-bombers and added more “structures” to the statistics reported to Washington. The corruption endemic to the regime worsened the relocation ordeal. The local officials customarily “sold” the peasants the galvanized sheet-metal roofing and other building materials provided free by the United States. Vann sent a report to Harkins on the entrepreneurship one province chief was exhibiting with the most common item provided gratis by the U.S. government—the barbed wire. “He was putting a price on it and then charging each peasant for the amount of barbed wire that was strung in front of his quarters,” Vann said, using the military term, “quarters,” for the new homes of the peasant families. (The practice turned out to be common.) The second group of angry peasants were those who were permitted to keep their original homes, but now lived in crowded conditions they found distasteful, with neighbors squatting in houses built on
their
land. Both groups shared a common anger at the long days of compulsory labor they had to put in digging a moat around the place, erecting the barbed-wire fence, raising a firing parapet for the militia, and cutting and planting sharpened bamboo stakes—the “pungee stakes” the Viet Minh had taught them to set out for the French and which the Viet Cong had had them conceal in foot traps to impede the Saigon troops. The more prosperous peasants paid bribes to evade the work. This placed a larger burden on the poor farmers. The prosperous ones still resented having to pay the bribes. What little the peasants received in the way of free medicine, Yorkshire hogs, and other amenities in exchange for this misery was hardly likely to persuade them to forgive their tormentors.

In the competition to kowtow to the palace, the province chiefs were erecting strategic hamlets willy-nilly everywhere. The regime had no priority as to which section of the country should be pacified first. The CIA and AID, which were financing the program, and Robert Thompson had wanted to pacify areas of strategic and economic value and then proceed to less important ones in the “spreading oil spot”
(tache d’huile)
method of pacification originated by the French. Diem and Nhu had decided to proceed simultaneously all over the South. Harkins’s staff believed that about half of the thousands of strategic hamlets reported constructed by January 1963 had gone beyond the rudiments of fortification to become functioning communities.

The rub was for whose benefit the strategic hamlets were functioning. The Americans and Diem and Nhu were not gaining the communities of controlled peasants they sought. They were instead fostering temporary encampments of peasants motivated as never before to support the Viet Cong. By day the hamlet might appear to be controlled by the regime. The outward calm reinforced in Americans their false conviction that the Vietnamese peasants were essentially passive, seeking security above all else. The appearance of control existed because the Vietnamese had learned to be devious in combating the French and because officials on the Saigon side from hamlet chief to province chief lied to those above them on what they controlled in order to keep their jobs. The CIA and AID officials involved also fooled themselves with devices of constraint like the plastic-covered identity cards they encouraged the regime to issue to everyone. What actual control existed during the day was tenuous. The farmers, their wives, and the older children had to be released in the morning to go back and cultivate their fields, a walk of a mile to half a dozen miles from the strategic hamlet. They were out of sight and hearing until they returned at sunset. As soon as darkness came, the garrison of Self-Defense Corps militiamen retreated with the hamlet chief into their mud-walled fort at one corner of the place. The Viet Cong cadres would then often emerge to take charge. The new “volunteer” hamlet militia would also have taken shelter in the outpost for the night, or they might turn out secretly to be local guerrillas who were pleased with the five-shot pump shotguns and carbines and grenades the CIA had presented to them.

Ap Bac came at the most propitious moment and was a drama ready-made for the purposes of Ho Chi Minh and his disciples. It was exactly the sort of event they needed to infuse the building of a Viet Cong army with the patriotic emotion they had aroused and poured into the creation of the original Viet Minh. In March, with their assessment completed and their preparations made, they seized on the battle and turned Ap Bac into the rallying cry of the revolution in the South. Posters, professionally printed in color, began to appear in the Delta extolling the victory and the fighters who had attained it. The Hanoi Politburo had the Central Committee of the National Liberation Front announce the first three-month round of “the Ap Bac Emulation Drive” that was to continue for the next two years. Everything started to move ahead full speed. Harkins’s intelligence section thought that infiltration from the North during the 1962–63 southwest monsoon dry season was running
at approximately the same level as the 1961–62 season, about 6,000 infiltrators on an annual basis. (The southwest monsoon dry season extends for seven months from October, right after the rains end and the trails through southern Laos and the Highlands become passable once more, until the monsoon returns in late April or early May.) Subsequent evidence showed that in an act of faith rewarded by Ap Bac, Hanoi had doubled the flow from an average of 850 men coming down the trails each month during the 1961–62 season to about 1,700 a month during the current season. The infiltrators were more former southern Viet Minh who had gone to the North in 1954, more “autumn cadres” to join the “winter cadres” who had survived Diem’s terror and launched the rebellion in 1957. Almost all of the infiltrators were military personnel who had been serving since 1954 in the Vietnam People’s Army, the regular army of the North. They would provide additional officers and noncoms for the second Viet Minh army; specialists in communications, intelligence, heavy weapons and other fields; and training groups like the one Cao had permitted to escape. A minority were civilians who had been in the Northern administration and who would now assist in expanding the secret Viet Cong government or practice specialties for which they had been trained like propaganda, mass organization, counterintelligence, and terrorism. The distinguishing characteristic of the infiltrators was that all of them were skilled. They and the veteran cadres awaiting them in the South were akin to the steel beams that form the framework of a modern building. The southern peasants being recruited as fast as possible were the concrete to raise the walls. Every cadre would be needed. In Kien Hoa Province, for example, just south of My Tho across the upper branch of the Mekong (Ben Tre was its capital), 2,500 young farmers volunteered in the spring of 1963. Diem’s province chief there was a favorite of the CIA officials involved in the Strategic Hamlet Program, because he had fought the French with the Viet Minh for almost four years before deserting, could talk the language of guerrilla warfare, and took pacification seriously. The Viet Cong cadres recruited most of the 2,500 volunteers they needed from Kien Hoa right out of his strategic hamlets.

Skilled manpower was not all that was secretly entering the South at a quickened pace. Hanoi also decided after Ap Bac to begin smuggling in earnest the heavy weapons for a Viet Cong army. Prior to 1963, Ho and his colleagues had kept the smuggling of all weapons to a minimum because experience had taught them that to become viable a guerrilla movement must learn to sustain itself with captured arms. What was happening to the American arms illustrated a social truism that tends
to confound an imperial power intervening in the affairs of a smaller nation: resources put into a society at odds with itself do not necessarily benefit the intended recipient, but rather end up aiding the faction best organized to profit by them. Crew-served heavy weapons could not be captured in the quantities needed, however, and so Hanoi had always intended to supply these. The second Viet Minh would need 12.7mm antiaircraft machine guns, the Soviet-designed equivalent of John Browning’s .50 caliber, to further intimidate the helicopter pilots and to force the fighter-bombers to fly higher and become less effective than they already were; 81 mm mortars to unnerve its Saigon opponents, who were not accustomed to being shelled (the 81 mm and an 82mm Soviet variant hurl seven and a half pounds of shrapnel and high explosive more than two miles); and 57mm and 75mm recoilless cannon to break open outpost bunkers and turn tanks and armored personnel carriers into hulks.