Fire in the Lake (65 page)

As for the GVN itself, it had ceased to exist in Hue. The province chief, the same Colonel Pham Van Khoa who had moved his troops out of the city during the Buddhist crisis, spent the first six days of the Tet offensive hiding in the rafters of the hospital and the rest of the time organizing his friends to steal the emergency shipments of rice sent in to avert starvation in the refugee camps. Charged with having been informed of the offensive two days in advance by the NLF, he said, in his defense, that he had allowed the Communists to come into the city so that they would be trapped there.
¹⁶
Led by his example, the ARVN soldiers defending the city (one thousand of whom had gone on leave for Tet) found their way to the refugee center and stayed there for three weeks behind the U.S. Marines, making no effort to regroup. “A full colonel walked out of there,” one American reported. “He hadn't done a damn thing but hide for three weeks.”
¹⁷
When the fighting stopped, the same soldiers went about brazenly and systematically looting every house that still stood; not for seventeen days did Colonel Khoa issue orders that all looters would be shot. “By then,” said an American official, “everything had already been stolen, sometimes twice.”
¹⁸
As for the civilian officials, most of those that survived the enemy onslaught and remained in Hue concentrated their energies on cornering what they could of the relief supplies and complaining to the Americans. Frank Kelly, one of the most experienced Americans in Vietnam, told Robert Shaplen, “I walked through the refugee centers and was accosted by colonels out of uniform, high-society ladies, university professors and others who begged me to help them escape. No one ever really smiled at the United States here before, but I haven't met anyone who is mad at the Communists and what they did.”
¹⁹
To many Americans in the field, the Tet offensive appeared to complete the demoralization of the Saigon government and its supporters.

The same was by no means true for the high American officials in Saigon. Throughout the weeks of fighting and desperation in the cities Ambassador Bunker and General Westmoreland maintained their seamless façade of optimism, never once expressing regret for the damages the Americans had wrought or fear for the political consequences. In a CBS interview Ambassador Bunker said that the South Vietnamese armed forces had “demonstrated their ability” in fighting the Communists and “gained confidence in themselves.” And he added, “I think the people have gained confidence in them. There is an indication, I think, that the government has probably a wider support today than it had before the Tet offensive. The fact that the government has handled this situation, has moved in quickly to restore the damage, to take recovery measures has demonstrated to the people that the government is capable of acting.”
²⁰
He was never to change his opinion; no more was General Westmoreland, who some months later wrote in his report on the war, “The
Tet
offensive had the effect of a ‘Pearl Harbor’; the South Vietnamese government was intact and stronger; the armed forces were larger, more effective, and more confident; the people had rejected the idea of a general uprising; and enemy forces, particularly those of the Viet Cong, were much Weaker.”
²¹

Westmoreland was in some sense correct. The ARVN was not routed; the GVN did not fall, and as a year would show, the Tet offensive had weakened the Front and forced the GVN to recruit the troops necessary to support the American operations and occupy much greater areas of the countryside. Only the real question remained, and that was whether these changes made any fundamental difference to the war. What Westmoreland and Bunker could not see, could not appreciate, was that the Tet offensive had simultaneously revealed and answered this question for much of the American people.

On March 10, just two weeks after the U.S. Marines had driven the last North Vietnamese units from Hue, a story was leaked to the press that General Westmoreland had asked for 206,000 more American troops to be sent to Vietnam. The press and the public naturally assumed that the request was made out of desperation about the American military position in Vietnam. But such was not the case at all. Westmoreland really meant what he said. He wanted additional troops to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, to invade the enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia, and to carry out an “Inchon-type” landing in North Vietnam, encircling the enemy troops at the DMZ. It was the strategy he had been recommending all along; the Tet offensive, he imagined, would make his strategy suddenly acceptable in Washington. His lack of political perspicacity in this matter was matched only by that of General Earle Wheeler and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Concerned not so much for Vietnam as for the depletion of American strategic reserve forces around the world, Wheeler visited Westmoreland in Saigon and made an agreement to give him 100,000 of the 206,000 troops he would request. Wheeler, who knew perfectly well that Johnson would not accept Westmoreland's plan, reversed the whole tenor of Westmoreland's report to him and asked the President for the troops on the grounds that the United States needed them to recover from the heavy blow of the Tet offensive. The new commitment would, however, have forced Johnson to call out the inactive reserves, and that was the last thing the President wished to do after the domestic political debacle of Tet. Appointing a task force to review the request, Johnson handed over the responsibility to Clark Clifford, who, though formerly one of the most hawkish of Johnson's advisers, ended up recommending not only that the request be denied, but that an attempt be made to open negotiations with a bombing halt.
²²

Johnson's decision did not reflect a “failure of nerve” among the American people, as certain U.S. officers would later claim. It reflected the American judgment on the administration's original war aims. And that judgment was much the same as the one the French had made on their own war aims in Vietnam some fifteen years previously. “The French people,” wrote Michel Debré at the end of 1953, “feel that the war is out of their control and in the hands of destiny.… They have the impression that France does not know what she wants and that we are fighting aimlessly without a clear objective. What is painful is not so much the fact of fighting and accepting the sacrifices, it is that we are apparently fighting without any goal.”
²³
Only those responsible for the conduct of the war in Vietnam — those who had witnessed the devastation of the cities, the bodies piled on the streets and the crowds of refugees — did not appear to reflect upon these larger questions.

Returning to Saigon in the fall of 1968, the
Washington Post
correspondent, Ward Just, found the American officials in much the same frame of mind that they had been in the year before: self-confident and generally satisfied with the progress being made. The pacification program was going forward, the war was being won. “It is so remote,” he reported,

One had forgotten how thoroughly caught up one had been, how thoroughly a part of the war's odd, mad logic. So when you asked about the effect here of the Tet offensive, you were not prepared for the bizarre analysis. The feeling is almost universal that the attacks were a good thing, almost beneficial, because they made clear to both the Vietnamese and the Americans in the cities that the war was real; the Saigonese could no longer fiddle while Rome burned. The analysis offered by most Americans in Saigon was turned on its head, topsy-turvy: the effect of Tet was something of a psychological triumph for the reason that it woke up the Americans and badly frightened the Vietnamese and their fragile government.

“We had people here after Tet who actually volunteered to go into the ARVN,” said one official. “And if that isn't progress, I don't know what is.”

Baffled, one tried to explain that if a single moment could be marked as a turning point in the support of the war in America it was the moment that the Vietcong occupied the American Embassy, and later the pictures in
Life
magazine of George Jacobson leaning out of his bedroom window with an automatic pistol in his hand.
The Communists have occupied the Embassy!
Well, that may be the way it looks to you in Washington, they say here, but it is not the reality in South Vietnam.
²⁴

To many American officials in Saigon, Tet was not an end but a beginning.

III

Conclusion

16

Nixon's War

The war must stop being a French war supported by Vietnam and become a Vietnamese war supported by France.

Paul Reynaud,
vice-premier of France, 1953

By the fall of 1968 much of the American public felt that the issue of the war had been settled. With the withdrawal of President Johnson from the presidential election the American peace movement had, as one analyst said, come as close to overthrowing the government as can happen within the American system. During the primary campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy it seemed on the verge of becoming a majority. Even after the assassination of Kennedy and the victory in the nominating conventions of two long-term hawks, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, the pressure for peace remained constant. Just before the election President Johnson took the important steps of establishing a negotiating table in Paris and stopping the bombing of the north. The train of events seemed irreversible. Nixon came to the presidency with a promise to end the war, and most Americans believed that he would end it, if only because it was for nothing.

But the war did not end. It expanded and grew bloodier. In the first three years of Nixon's administration fifteen thousand Americans were killed. In that same period the GVN armed forces lost more men than they had lost in the three previous years and more than the total of American dead in Vietnam. In those three years there were more civilian casualties than there had ever been before — that is, Laotians and Cambodians as well as Vietnamese civilians. In 1970, two years after the start of the peace talks in Paris, the Vietnam War became the Indochina War with major battles in three countries. By 1971 the governments of Indochina had more than two million men under arms; the political and social geography of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam had changed more radically than it had changed in all the years of the Johnson administration.

How was it possible? It was possible because the American government did not want to face the consequences of peace. It was, after all, one thing to wish for an end to the war and quite another to confront the issues upon which the war had begun. President Johnson had wanted to end the war; so, too, had President Kennedy. But to end the war and not to lose it: the distinction was crucial, and particularly crucial after all the American lives that had been spent and all the political rhetoric expended. Nixon, perhaps even more than his predecessors, felt that he could not take the responsibility for “losing the war.” “Johnson got us into the war quietly, now we are trying to get out of it quietly,” said Henry Kissinger. But the time for Senator Aiken's solution had long since passed: the issues were all too clearly formulated. To withdraw support from Saigon and allow the Thieu government to fall would be, by Nixon's definition, to “lose the war.” There remained the hope of winning it, and failing that, of not losing it until sometime after an American withdrawal from Vietnam.

Politically unable to recharge the war to meet the specifications of the Joint Chiefs for a quick military victory, Nixon adopted a policy of scaling down the participation of American ground troops while increasing every other form of military pressure on the enemy. His aim was still to force Hanoi to accept an American-supported government in Saigon, and his strategy was still that of attrition. In fact his policy involved little more than a change of tactics — and a change that originated not with him but with President Johnson in the summer of 1968.

The centerpiece of this policy was “Vietnamization,” the ironic name for the slow withdrawal of American ground troops and the buildup of Vietnamese armed forces to fight an American-directed war in their stead. It was, of course, the same strategy the French officials had attempted in 1950, when the war began to seem too expensive and too politically divisive for their country. And it was the same strategy that led to the situation the United States took over in 1954. Still, as was not the case with the French, the Americans dominated South Vietnam militarily. At the height of their strength in 1968–1969, they had the troops, the air power, and the money to maintain the Saigon goverment over a number of years, even with a schedule of troop pullouts. Most important of all, Nixon found a measure of support for his policy in the United States. As was calculated, the American troop withdrawals cut the middle-of-the-road “doves” off from the peace movement, for it indicated to them that Nixon intended to end the war. At the same time Nixon's assurance that he would not abandon the South Vietnamese convinced many “hawks” that he had found a way to win the war without using American ground troops. Nixon's campaign promise to “end the war and win the peace” was perfectly ambiguous.

For the first sixteen months events played in Nixon's favor. Nineteen sixty-nine was a year of military success for the Allies in South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese units remained relatively inactive while the NLF showed an appreciable decline in strength following the bloody campaigns of 1968. Seizing the initiative, General Creighton Abrams, the successor to Westmoreland, diverted the American forces from the large-scale border battles to an all-out attempt to destroy enemy base areas and supply lines in the south and to put as much South Vietnamese territory as possible under GVN control. Under the so-called Accelerated Pacification Campaign the U.S. Ninth Division almost literally “cleaned out” the Front-held regions of the northern Mekong Delta, bombing villages, defoliating crops, and forcing the peasants to leave their land. The Korean forces, the U.S. Marines, and the Americal Division wrought similar destruction upon large parts of central Vietnam. The results of these operations and of the overall pacification campaign were spectacular by contrast to those of earlier years. Front units still operated through central Vietnam, but the Delta slipped away from them with an abruptness that surprised experienced American observers. In the spring and summer of 1969 ARVN soldiers walked through villages formerly held by the Front without receiving a single sniper round. Setting up their outposts and an occupation force of RD cadres, they discovered either that the Front “infrastructure” did not exist, or that it operated in parody form, with sixteen-year-old boys running village or district committees.
¹
American civilians drove unarmed down roads that had been defended by NLF battalions since 1962. The guerrilla units that remained in action were heavily seeded with North Vietnamese soldiers, and captured documents described a return to the small-scale tactics of the early stages of the war. For the first time, the eternal pessimists of the American mission, Frank Scotton, John Paul Vann, and others, reported that the situation had changed and that the tide of the war was running against the enemy. The NLF, they said, was now finding it difficult to recruit and to maintain the support of the population.