Fire in the Lake (43 page)

It was thus that, five months after he had been publicly humiliated by the Buddhists, General Khanh returned to power with the support of the Buddhists. In the process, however, Khanh infuriated the Catholics and the Americans. In February 1965 a group of Catholic officers attempted their own coup under the leadership of a mysterious figure called Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, who managed to be at once a former Viet Minh officer, a friend of the departed Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, and a great favorite of the Americans. The coup failed mainly because Thao’s troops did not succeed in capturing the air base fast enough, and for the second time in five months General Ky, high up in the air over Saigon, threatened to bomb the rival units of his own army. Ky desisted only when it was pointed out to him that there were American troops as well as Vietnamese at the air base. The coup was stalemated for three days during which time General Khanh toured the Delta provinces in search of support. When he returned, he discovered to his surprise that Colonel Thao had been defeated, but that the generals who had apparently rushed to save him were now voting to depose him as president and chief of the Armed Forces Council. On February 21, General Khanh accepted an appointment as ambassador-at-large and joined the other two ousted heads of state, Generals Minh and Khiem, in exile.

The end of the Khanh regime left the political situation more confused than it had ever been. The Armed Forces Council, having succeeded in all its objectives, now could not decide who its leaders were nor whether it ought to dissolve itself in favor of a civilian government. At this point the Buddhist-Catholic conflict broke out again — the struggle duplicated and complicated by the personal rivalries between General Thi and Colonel Thao on the one hand and the civilian chief of state and his new premier, Dr. Phan Huy Quat, on the other. In the end — that is, after some five months of disputation — these rivals knocked each other out, leaving the field clear for the younger generals to seize power. On June 12, 1965, Generals Thieu, Ky, and Co proclaimed the establishment of a National Leadership Council. The triumvirate later expanded to ten members and, to Ambassador Taylor’s dismay, appointed General Ky as chief of the executive council charged with the day-to-day administration of the country.
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About two weeks later President Johnson announced that he was sending a contingent of fifty-three thousand regular combat troops into action beside those of the Saigon government.

The arrival of the American regulars in Vietnam was a demonstration, if such was necessary, of the failure of a decade of American policy in Vietnam. The Johnson administration did its best to represent the intervention as a response to “aggression from the north” and, indeed, an “invasion” of North Vietnamese troops, but by February 1965 there was little more than a regiment of North Vietnamese troops below the 17th parallel, and there were already thirty thousand American soldiers in Vietnam openly supporting the ARVN in offensive action. In March American airplanes began bombing targets in both North and South Vietnam. The fact was that the GVN was succumbing to the NLF even though it had over three times as many regular troops and an overwhelming superiority of firepower. By late spring the GVN was losing one battalion and one district capital a week to the NLF;
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its cities and provincial capitals were largely isolated from the countryside. More ominous still, the GVN was deteriorating from within. The desertion rate had risen dramatically throughout 1964. The increase gave only a superficial indication of the lowered morale, as in many units soldiers did not even have to desert in order to stop fighting the war. No keener than the enlisted men to fight a battle they knew they were losing, the officers forsook operations in order to concentrate on the scramble for power in Saigon and the making of arrangements with the Liberation Front.

In analyzing the debacle, those American officials and journalists who saw it as such returned to much the same set of arguments that their predecessors had made about the declining Diem regime. On the one hand they blamed the sects for their continual agitation and disruption of government efforts. (Was not the government working on their behalf to defeat the Communists?) On the other hand they blamed the politicians and the ARVN officers for their fractiousness, their failure to compromise with the sects, and their disregard for the general welfare of the country. Certain long-established journalists such as Robert Shaplen also blamed the American embassy for its failure to pressure the Vietnamese officers to make compromises and “meaningful” reforms. The irony was that only three and a half years before, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, with the advice of State Department officials, had in his 1961 report implicitly criticized his predecessor, Frederick Nolting, recommending that the United States pressure the Diem regime to make a similar set of reforms. The repetition of history perhaps ought to have raised some suspicion that there was some larger issue at stake that they had thus far failed to identify.

In looking for a Vietnamese leader, American officials such as McNamara, Taylor, and Cabot Lodge looked merely for a general or prime minister with administrative skills and the political acumen to deal with the sects. They looked for a manager to run an organization already functioning. In their eyes the army and the civil service were functioning institutions. But they were deceived by their own creation, for army and administration were no more than shells: artificial, foreign-made shells encasing people who had not made them and who could not use them. What the American officials could or would not realize was that the sects were less a part of the problem than an attempt at a solution — an inadequate one, perhaps, but nonetheless an attempt to deal with the chaos caused by the collapse of a traditional society.

The problem for the Vietnamese soldiers and politicians was, then, not simply to rule but to create a system through which to create power and to begin ruling. The inability of the young officers to do anything of the sort owed not to their bad characters but to their background, their training, and to the situation in which they found themselves. Generals Khanh, Ky, and Thieu were, after all, professional soldiers. During the first Indochina War they had worked within a foreign army and served foreign ends. They were trained to fight, not to consider the issue of war as an extension of politics or diplomacy. Catapulted to power as a result of their capacity for petty infighting, they did not so much as understand the nature of their problem. Like their American advisers, they saw the war as a series of military engagements. By contrast, Vo Nguyen Giap, a teacher and a political journalist by training, based all his militery strategy on an analysis of the political issues. Traditionally the Vietnamese feared and disdained professional soldiers, not out of any class or caste distinction, but out of the suspicion that they had not the moral or political authority to build up a government behind them. Occasionally the old warlords had managed to transform themselves into emperors or mandarins, but they had the traditional Confucian system to fall back upon. The Saigon generals faced the task of creating an entirely new way of life, a new civilization for the Vietnamese. Trained and for so long dominated by foreigners, they had perhaps less capacity to undertake it than anyone in Vietnam. They had some desire to defeat the Communists, but their desire did not constitute a political system. Unlike Ngo Dinh Diem, they had not even an unworkable system in mind; their anti-Communism was founded in a simple ambition to hold onto what they had, rather than give it up to the NLF.

For those Americans who associated the word “strong” with the words “military leadership,” the government of the Saigon generals would be almost impossible to comprehend. If the generals were ruthless, theirs was the ruthlessness of adolescents who see themselves in terms of fanciful clichés and think no further than tomorrow. Since 1960 General Khanh believed he had a role to play in Vietnamese history, and yet, though nurtured for more than four years, his schemes had no substance. He and the other generals had simply no idea of what Vietnam was or ought to be. Even their conflicts were insubstantial. Preceded by a few titillating moments of suspense, their coups were habitually followed by the double ceremonies of weeping and breast-beating on the part of the losers, declarations of unity and harmony on the part of the winners. While the sects with their cosmic concerns murdered each other’s members, the generals did very little damage within their own ranks. Apart from the case of the unfortunate Colonel Thao, fingered by General Thieu, and mysteriously disposed of, there were no killings and not a single suicide among the coup leaders. The deposed generals were either named ambassador-at-large or exiled to play endless games of tennis with the American military attachés in Washington or Bangkok — a fate no worse, perhaps, than that of Anthony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s A
Handful of Dust
, trapped in a South American jungle and forced by his keeper to read aloud the entire work of Charles Dickens.

Seen under the great klieg lights of international politics and the war that was to overwhelm their country, the Saigon generals looked quite simply out of proportion — ordinary men who otherwise would have lived ordinary lives. General Khanh made an excellent staff officer under the French regime, Generals Thi, Ky, and Thieu, excellent subalterns, but, as the American military command repeated monotonously for a decade, the “problem” of the ARVN was not its lack of training but its lack of leadership. Those Americans who held the Ngo family responsible for the loss of battles and the alienation of the peasantry were to find that the fall of the Ngos meant not a social revolution but a replacement of bad leadership by no leadership at all. The generals stepped into a vacuum of power they could not fill, and their reign over Saigon fit the classical Vietnamese definition of the “interregnum,” the period of warlordism and anarchy following the decline of a Confucian regime.

7

The United States Enters the War

Before the dry season of 1965 ended, the Johnson administration had taken those steps necessary to transform a holding action against the NLF into a major war involving North and South Vietnam. The American intervention in force did not rest on any single decision, nor was it the reaction to any unforeseen circumstance. As early as 1961 General Taylor and Secretary McNamara had predicted that United States troops would be needed to preserve the Saigon government. President Kennedy resisted that final commitment, but from 1961 on the American buildup in Vietnam proceeded steadily with a series of incremental decisions. In February 1964, a few months after the fall of Diem, the Johnson administration began the covert bombing of Laos near the North Vietnamese border and increased its program of secret intelligence and sabotage missions inside North Vietnam. It was in response to an amphibious sabotage raid by GVN forces that North Vietnamese PT boats attacked the U.S. destroyer
Maddox,
mistaking it for one of the belligerent South Vietnamese vessels. The administration portrayed this incident as an example of North Vietnamese aggression and in July 1964 sent Congress a resolution authorizing the use of American force in Southeast Asia — a resolution American officials had drafted two months earlier.
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By September 1964, during the presidential campaign in which Johnson ran as the candidate who opposed an enlargement of the war, administration officials came to what the Pentagon historians called a “general consensus” on the bombing of North Vietnam.
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The bombing began in March 1965, and in March the first U.S. regular troops were landed in Da Nang.

In their history of American decision-making during this period the Pentagon analysts have shown that, apart from George Ball, no high administration official came out against the general policy of intervention to save the Saigon government. The issues debated within the administration were merely those of strategy and timing. Certain officials — principally the Joint Chiefs of Staff — urged that the President pursue a rapid schedule of escalation. Those whose views prevailed advised a slow and carefully orchestrated campaign combining a gradual increase of force with diplomatic initiatives that would signal to the North Vietnamese the strength of American resolve to go as far as was necessary. Interestingly enough, few, if any, of the proponents of the gradualist approach had confidence that such a strategy would deter the North Vietnamese from (in Dean Rusk’s phrase) “doing what they are doing.” The CIA estimates were uniformly pessimistic, and at no point were the high officials deceived about the results of their actions. By the beginning of 1965 virtually all the high administration officials had faced the prospect of a commitment of U.S. ground troops.
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Throughout this period Johnson gave cryptic indications of his plans, but concealed the official doubts about their effectiveness. The picture of Johnson the Pentagon history presents is that of a President constantly pressed forward by the tempo of events in Vietnam and constantly hanging back from the final commitment out of domestic political considerations. Politically, Johnson faced a dilemma. On the one hand he, like his predecessors, judged the “loss” of Vietnam to be irreconcilable with U.S. security interests and unacceptable to the American public. On the other hand he had no certainty of immediate success for his policy and felt that the American public would be reluctant to support another ground war in Asia. His political strategy was therefore to conceal his doubts about the outcome of the policy while attempting to convince the U.S. public of the necessity for the war.
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The commitment of American troops in no way removed the desire of the administration for concealment. Even with the bombing of the north and the prospect of U.S. ground combat operations, the CIA intelligence analysts remained pessimistic. In July 1965, Johnson authorized the deployment of forty-four maneuver battalions charged with the mission to search out and destroy the enemy units in the south. The implication of this order was that the administration officials had relinquished hope that the very presence of the American troops would deter the North Vietnamese and the NLF. The high officials had no confidence that the ARVN would recover in the near future or that the enemy would respond to anything less than the destruction of its main forces. Given their estimates on enemy strength, Johnson’s advisers were — the Pentagon analysts concluded — preparing for a long and costly war.
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