Fire in the Lake (56 page)

The dialogue was, of course, not entirely without issue, for though American policy had not changed, the American effort had increased by orders of magnitude. By the fall of 1967 there were half a million American troops in Vietnam — and that partly a result of the mission's confidence. “We are winning,” the argument went. “We can win with a little more support.” Every two or three months Westmoreland asked for thousands more troops, and after some debate the President acceded, though giving him each time something less than he asked for. Finally, Johnson put a “troop ceiling” at 525,000 men, or close to the number the U.S. military could send without calling up the reserves. The figure was arbitrary with regard to Vietnam. But then any figure would have been arbitrary, for no one knew how many troops or how long a fight would be necessary to “stop the North Vietnamese from doing what they are doing.” The dilemma was that the figure of half a million represented not enough and too much at the same time.

In 1967 the “Free World Forces” in Vietnam — Americans, Vietnamese, and Koreans, with additional small contingents of Australians, Thais, and Filipinos — had reached a combined total of 1,300,000 men: one soldier for every fifteen people in South Vietnam. With two thousand tactical jet aircraft and the B-52S of the Strategic Air Command at his disposal, Westmoreland “for the first time” had what Komer described as “marginally adequate resources” to take the offensive.
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The year began with operations against the oldest and most secure enemy base areas in the south: War Zone D, or the “Iron Triangle” north of Saigon, and War Zone C, the jungle region of Tay Ninh near the Cambodian border. It proceeded with a series of bloody set-piece battles against North Vietnamese regulars in the Central Highlands near the Lao border and in the mountainous country just below the DMZ: Dak To, Con Thien, the “Rockpile,” Khe Sanh — all of these battles ended with hundreds of Americans and thousands of North Vietnamese dead. Westmoreland counted all of them victories — and they were victories in the sense that with the support of saturation bombing the “kill ratio” always ran in the favor of the United States. From another perspective they were defeats, for the United States seemed to have gained nothing by them — neither the control of territory nor any reduction of the enemy's effectives. The North Vietnamese managed once again to maintain their numbers in the south while drawing an important section of the U.S. combat forces away from the populated areas. The American casualty figures combined with the apparent lack of progress towards the termination of the war had a most depressing effect on the popularity of the war in the United States.

Westmoreland's strategy had always been to use the American troops as a “shield behind which” the GVN forces could move in to establish government security. The commanding general never quite came to terms with the fact that the war was being fought at points rather than along lines. With the support or even the neutrality of the population, the enemy forces could break up into small units and go anywhere in the countryside circumnavigating the “Free World” outposts. Westmoreland was trying to play chess while his enemy was playing Go. The result was that he kept having to make moves which in no way conformed to his strategy. From the very beginning the American troops were forced to engage in the small-unit patrolling and the “holding” operations that were supposed to be the tasks of the ARVN and the local security forces. As their numbers increased, the U.S. forces took on more and more responsibility for pacification in the critical areas around Saigon and in the First Corps. In 1966 the U.S. Marines had some three divisions engaged in “clearing and holding” the narrow coastal strip of Quang Nam province; two Korean divisions and other Marine units were settled into the villages of Binh Dinh and Quang Ngai, while by 1967 three U.S. army divisions sat astride the routes into Saigon. The difficulty, however, remained that the American forces could not be everywhere at once, and that military occupation did not constitute pacification. A different approach had to be found.

Two years before — that is, two years too early — Westmoreland had outlined his new strategy for “pacification.” “Until now,” he said in 1965,

the war has been characterized by a substantial majority of the population remaining neutral.… In the past year we have seen an escalation to a higher level of intensity in the war. This will bring about a moment of decision for the peasant farmer. He will have to choose if he stays alive. Until now the peasant farmer has had three alternatives: he could stay put and follow his natural instinct to stay close to the land, living beside the graves of his ancestors. He could move to an area under government control. Or he could join the VC.… Now if he stays put there are additional dangers. The VC can't patch up wounds. If the peasant becomes a refugee, he does get shelter, food, and security, job opportunities and is given a hope to possibly return to his land. The third alternative is life with the VC. The VC have not made good on their promises; they no longer have secure areas. There are B-52 bombings, the VC tax demands are increasing; they want more recruits at the point of a gun, forced labor to move supplies. The battle is being carried more and more to the enemy.

“Doesn't that give the villager only the choice of becoming a refugee?” one journalist inquired. “I expect a tremendous increase in the number of refugees,” answered Westmoreland.
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Westmoreland's statement was significant, for it meant that with the arrival of the American troops the U.S. command had largely given up hope for the conventional pacification schemes, the aim of which was to drive the NLF out of the villages and to secure the villagers' loyalty to the government. The new attempt would be to destroy the villages and, as it were, dry up the “water” where the “fish” of the Liberation forces swam in their element. As Robert Komer put it in American terms, “Well, if we can attrit the population base of the Viet Cong, it'll accelerate the process of degrading the VC.”
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The logic was impeccable. Given the American war objectives and the political impotence of the GVN, the strategy was to be the only one available. Furthermore, it would have worked had the Vietnam War been a war for control of territory.

In Operation Cedar Falls — the operation chronicled by Jonathan Schell in his book
The Village of Ben Suc
— the U.S. armed forces in effect drove a steamroller over the densely populated area of the Iron Triangle, flattening the villages with five-hundred-pound bombs, bulldozing the miles of tunnels, and destroying the jungle cover with herbicides. This operation “generated” (in the impersonal military phrase) seven thousand refugees and rendered the area uninhabitable by anyone except the Front troops. By Westmoreland's own estimate, it put the Front headquarters out of action for a mere six months.
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In the region of the large-scale war in the Central Highlands and around the DMZ, the U.S. forces moved a total of seventeen thousand people and resettled them in barrack-like camps, where without any independent means of survival most had to depend on the irregular handouts of supplies from the Saigon government. In other provinces of Vietnam, when the resettlement was not so well organized, the refugees swarmed to the government outposts and the cities of their own accord to avoid the bombing and the military sweeps. The coastal regions of central Vietnam were particularly hard hit. Having failed to “pacify” Quang Nam province even by a battalion-sized occupation of each district, the Marines simply tore down the villages, sending thousands of people into Da Nang, where not even the Americans were able to feed them. In the same year U.S. forces expended tons of herbicides, which ultimately stripped an area the size of Massachusetts of crops and vegetation. The American command claimed that the aim of the “resources control program” was to deny food to the Front troops. The crop destruction, however, affected the civilians almost exclusively. For while the troops, being mobile, could find other sources of supply, the civilians, particularly the women and children, could not.
⁷

In early 1967 Westmoreland gave a most complicated and interesting explanation for the rationale behind the President's “ceiling” on the number of American troops. “If,” he said, “you crowd in too many termite killers, each using a screwdriver to kill the termites, you risk collapsing the floors or the foundation. In this war we're using screwdrivers to kill termites because it's a guerrilla war and we cannot use bigger weapons. We have to get the right balance of termite killers to get rid of the termites without wrecking the house.”
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To continue this extraordinary metaphor, the American force had managed to wreck the house without killing the termites; they had, further, managed to make the house uninhabitable for anyone except termites. In a different manner they had made the GVN “house” unlivable as well.

With the influx of refugees from the countryside, the cities and towns overflowed with people. Two million in 1966, three million or more by 1967 — the numbers were impossible to estimate, as most refugees, if they came to the government camps to begin with, did not stay in them for fear of exposure or starvation. But the number was surely more than the 4.8 percent of the population that Komer claimed came “under government control” that year. The swamps of Saigon and the dunes seaward of Da Nang, Hoi An, Qui Nhon, and the other capitals of the center now supported small cities of tin shacks. Many of the neat towns of the Delta almost disappeared beneath a tide of
bidonvilles.
These settlements survived because of the American presence; they survived as dependencies of the American bases. The American aid went not into the improvement of these American-created slums, but, as always, into the countryside for the purposes of counterinsurgency.
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At the Guam conference President Johnson took the long-awaited step of putting all civilian operations under the command of General Westmoreland. His move signified that Washington no longer gave even symbolic importance to the notion of a “political” war waged by the Vietnamese government. The reign of the U.S. military had begun, and with it the strategy of quantity in civilian as well as military affairs.

As an assistant to Westmoreland, Robert Komer had something of the general's notion of scale. After all the history of failed aid programs, he believed that the only hope for success lay in saturation. The Vietnamese officials might rake off 25 percent and 25 percent more might go to waste, but the rest of the American aid would reach its destination. The U.S. government had no choice but to force its supplies upon the Vietnamese people: thousands of tons of bulgur wheat, thousands of gallons of cooking oil, tons of pharmaceuticals, enough seed to plant New Jersey with miracle rice, enough fertilizer for the same, light bulbs, garbage trucks, an atomic reactor, enough concrete to pave a province, enough corrugated tin to roof it, enough barbed wire to circle it seventeen times, dentists' drills, soybean seedlings, sewing kits, mortars, machine tools, toothbrushes, plumbing, and land mines.

In part, of course, this aid was absolutely necessary, for the U.S. military was at the same time bombing, defoliating, and moving villages at such a rate that all the aid the United States could ship would not have been excessive as refugee relief. The difficulty was that the Americans had to distribute the supplies through the Vietnamese government — a vessel which, even despite its sponge-like properties, could not dispose of all the commodities. The U.S. aid had grown beyond the point of absorption.

Partly to solve this “technical” problem of GVN efficiency, the United States sent in more American advisers. At the beginning of 1966 the mission had three or four civilians in every province capital; by the end of 1967 it had a small bureaucracy in each, comprising pig experts, rice experts, market and gardening experts, AID administrators, International Voluntary Service workers, English teachers, city planners, accountants, doctors, police inspectors, welfare workers, handicraft consultants, “psychological warfare” and counterinsurgency experts. (One man who, in the early 1960's, was sent out to study underground water levels remained in Vietnam unnoticed until the late 1960's when a secretary happened to come across his dossier in the back of an old filing cabinet.) After a few months “in country,” the advisers and experts usually came to the conclusion that the United States was not sending enough commodities for them to do their job properly. Most of them came to that conclusion in a most reasonable manner — the advisers discovering that few of the commodities had reached their province capitals, much less the villages they wished to develop; the experts suggesting that, while progress was being made, a new approach might be more fruitful. So the U.S. government sent them more commodities and better transportation, utilization of which required more advisers and experts such as refugee relief coordinators, underwater engineers, warehouse architects, port overseers, labor leaders, sanitation engineers, and systems analysts, who in their turn discovered new “requirements for” and “shortages of” new and different types of commodities: television sets, plastic limbs, chicken feed, mosquito repellent, air conditioners, Bourbon, paper clips, prefabricated houses, rubber bands, and athlete's foot powder.

The Vietnamese government had developed the Midas touch — in much the same manner as the king himself, and with much the same results. Having once requested American support, the officials could not seem to stop it. Inefficiency, military defeats, rape, pillage, and coup d'etats made no difference. Everything they touched turned to commodities — commodities that were, like Midas's gold, quite useless for the purpose of government. The pigs, the barbed wire, and the tin roofing sheets that actually arrived at their destinations remained pigs, barbed wire, and tin roofing — things with no political significance. Where the NLF remained strong, the GVN officials could not even use the commodities as bribes, for the peasants did not consider pigs an adequate inducement to take up arms against the Front. Where the American troops had gone with artillery and bulldozer, the commodities could not compensate the peasants for the loss of their ricé fields and their ancestral homes.