Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (32 page)

The CIA-run Phoenix Program, designed to identify and neutralize the Communists’ political infrastructure through assassination, terrorism, and torture, had a particularly devastating effect on mid- and low-level political cadres, as US special forces and ARVN commandos adopted the ruthless population control methods used for so long by the revolution’s own special agents. It succeeded in denying revolutionary forces access to thousands of villages where they had previously obtained recruits, funds, and provisions. The CIA claimed that Phoenix resulted in the capture or killing of 40,000 cadres in 1969 and 1970.
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HANOI’S GRAND STRATEGY

From early April 1968, when Hanoi accepted Johnson’s invitation to open negotiations, until January 1973, when Hanoi and Washington signed the Paris Peace Accords, Hanoi continued to pursue an ingeniously flexible and eclectic protracted war strategy. For twenty-five years, Giap had been adapting and experimenting with the Maoist three-stage model of protracted war to meet his needs. As we have seen, however, Hanoi did not so much follow Mao’s model to the letter as use it as an analytical tool to make judgments about the changing balance of forces, the timing of operations, the relationship between political and armed struggle, and the relative merits of fighting spirit and military technology.

Giap understood that in taking on a power as vast as the United States, Mao’s model posited too rigid a trajectory from the defensive to a state of equilibrium, and finally to victory through the means of a general offensive carried out only after one had military forces stronger than those of the enemy. Giap had long refused to be fenced in by the theory. He simultaneously adapted tactics appropriate for stage one warfare in one area, and stage two and stage three in others.

Hanoi referred to the variant of protracted war it practiced between the spring of 1968 and the spring of 1973, when the United States departed Vietnam for good, as “fighting while negotiating.” It might better have been called “fighting, waiting, waiting some more, and then negotiating.” In fact, Hanoi had little incentive to engage in serious negotiating at all until the balance of military and political power in South Vietnam had shifted significantly in its favor. The shift could not happen until Nixon withdrew substantial numbers of American troops, especially US ground combat divisions, and Nixon agreed to make several critical concessions the United States was determined to resist on the grounds that they could be read as a prelude to an American defeat.

The first of these concessions was an unconditional halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. Hanoi refused to negotiate on any issue whatsoever until it had wrung out this concession, for continued bombing would have severely retarded its war-production facilities and its ability to move men down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. At the end of October 1968, after five months of no progress in negotiations, Johnson called off the bombing. Hanoi also demanded that, in exchange for its agreement to halt the fighting, the United
States agree to form a coalition government in South Vietnam and dissolve Nguyen Van Thieu’s regime in Saigon, on the theory that it had no standing with the Vietnamese people and was therefore an illegitimate product of American colonialism. Hanoi was even more adamant that no agreement would be forthcoming until the Americans agreed to the removal of all “foreign” forces in South Vietnam, by which the Communists meant American and allied forces (Australian, Korean, etc.), but without a concurrent withdrawal of the formidable array of regular PAVN units that had come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the battlefields in the South.

After three more years of war, after Giap had achieved significant gains in the military balance—albeit at a frightful cost in casualties—Hanoi saw its way clear to dropping the demand for the removal of Thieu. By that point it was a painless concession to make. Meanwhile, the Americans failed utterly to move the Communists on the most important issue for Saigon and Washington: the removal of PAVN regulars from South Vietnam wherever they stood at the time of the agreement.

Thus, the essence of the “fighting and talking” strategy was that Hanoi’s negotiators would stonewall at the conference table, prolonging the fighting and dragging out the war. Hanoi was reasonably confident that the contradictions between Washington’s war policy and the desires of the American public for peace would grow deeper. So would the friction between ARVN and American forces in the field and between Washington and Saigon over how to prosecute the conflict. Ever the realist, Giap fully expected that the war would continue for a considerable period of time. A captured 1969 COSVN document reflected this view, advising the faithful that revolutionary “victory will not come suddenly, but in a complicated and tortuous way.”
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And so it would.

GIAP’S NEW STRATEGY FOR THE GROUND WAR

The Communist “mini-offensives” of May and August 1968 were directed at American targets to a far greater extent than had the Tet attacks of February and March. In launching these two offensives, Hanoi wanted to reinforce the impression in Washington and among the American public that the force of the Revolution could not be defeated outright militarily, given the limitations placed on US operations by domestic politics.

Without a doubt, the so-called mini-offensives further attenuated domestic support for the war effort in the United States, but Giap paid
a heavy price. For all their political success, the offensives of 1968 were so costly in blood that they substantially constricted the scope of Giap’s combat operations for about two years. Having suffered 75,000 combat deaths between Tet and September 1968, Giap had to all but abandon high-intensity big-unit combat and return to guerrilla warfare. The “stand and fight” tactics of the latter two 1968 offensives were put aside in favor of the PAVN’s traditional fighting style of “slow plan, quick attack, strong fight, quick withdrawal.”
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Offensive operations in 1969 and 1970, a captured document for field commanders explained, should occur “simultaneously, continuously, widespreadedly [
sic
]”—meaning that sustained, massed attacks should be avoided whenever possible.
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A very high percentage of Communist-initiated combat in this period was carried out by independent companies and battalions rather than regiments or divisions. In addition to wearing down US infantry units with harassment actions and ambushes, PLAF and PAVN units were tasked with frustrating increasingly well-coordinated allied pacification efforts.

If PAVN regiments and divisions were used very sparingly in 1969 and 1970, just what were they doing? Some units were withdrawn to North Vietnam, and others remained in their sanctuaries along South Vietnam’s western border. The vast majority of Giap’s main forces were refitted with an impressive array of state-of-the-art weaponry, motorized vehicles of various functions and sizes, tanks, and communications equipment provided by the People’s Republic of China and the USSR. Moscow and Beijing read President Johnson’s post-Tet decisions as auguring very well indeed for the Vietnamese revolutionaries, and they responded with unprecedented largesse. With the help of several thousand advisers and military aid from China and the Soviet Union, Giap transformed the PAVN between 1969 and 1971 from a fine light-infantry organization with limited punching power and mobility into one of the largest and most formidable armies in the world, with a combined arms capability Giap could only have dreamed of during the War of Resistance. PAVN’s divisions were being prepared for use against the South Vietnamese in conventional warfare once the United States had withdrawn the lion’s share of its combat forces.

It seems reasonably clear that Giap saw 1969 and 1970 as a time to alter the psychological and military balance of forces in his favor, as one Communist document at the time put it, “bit by bit.”
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The morale of American troops was sure to suffer as a result of frequent and inconclusive engagements against guerrillas and sapper units that attacked at a place
and time of their choosing. Remarkably, in his pronouncements during this difficult phase of the conflict, Giap continued to display unalloyed confidence in eventual victory even as he admitted that Abrams’s new strategy was inflicting serious damage on the revolution’s infrastructure, and making gains in pacification reforms. He had faith that, in time, the South Vietnamese people’s disillusionment with American neocolonialism and with the incompetent and corrupt Saigon regime would lead to a reinvigorated revolutionary political presence.

Giap made it clear that the reversion to what might be called “proto-guerrilla” operations was only temporary, as the iron law of revolutionary war required a return to conventional operations once the Americans turned over the bulk of the fighting to the fractious ARVN forces. A few months after the first withdrawal of US forces—Nixon ordered 25,000 troops to return home in July 1969— Giap wrote that the Revolution had to “incessantly develop the guerrilla war into a regular war. Only through
regular war
in which the main force troops fight in a concentrated manner and the armed services are combined and fighting in coordination with the regional troops, militia guerrillas, and the political forces of all the people, can they annihilate important forces of the enemy . . . and create conditions for great strides in war.”
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The abandonment of big-unit combat had the salutary effect of diminishing Communist casualties precipitously. Combat deaths dropped from 208,000 in 1968 to 132,000 in 1969, and then to 86,000 in 1970, but the significant diminution of combat also opened the door for US/GVN gains on the pacification front and permitted the ARVN to expand and modernize at a pace of growing concern to Giap and his colleagues on the Central Committee. Political struggle had to fill the gap left by the depletion of armed forces—at least to some degree. To that end, the NLF formed an alliance with a “third force” of political parties hostile to the policies of Saigon and pronounced the formation of a provisional Revolutionary Government. The clear intention of this maneuver was to diminish the prestige and standing of the GVN in the eyes of the world, and to undercut President Thieu’s authority among the South Vietnamese people.

Even today, despite the passage of almost forty years and the release of thousands of documents from all the adversaries, all statistics concerning the Vietnam War must be viewed with caution, for they are all rough approximations at best. Yet it is clear from captured NLF documents that
1969 and much of 1970 were extremely hard on Communist guerrilla units and political cadres. One authoritative study on pacification by an American scholar concluded that revolutionary political infrastructure operatives were reduced from 84,000 in January 1968 to 57,000 in February 1972, while the percentage of the population living in GVN-controlled hamlets rose from 42 percent to 80 percent in 1972.

The difficulties encountered in the South as a result of the revamped pacification programs and clear-and-hold operations led to extreme hardships for all of Giap’s forces. Rice was often in perilously short supply, and main-force units were often denied access to friendly villages and districts by General Abrams’s screening operations, in which highly mobile US troops were quickly inserted between populous areas and PAVN forces moving in their direction. The “ink blots” representing liberated base areas on the maps in Giap’s headquarters began to shrink in number and size. As a result, comments the official history, “our most important work became the education of cadre and soldiers operating deep behind the enemy lines in moral character and in the revolutionary traditions . . . [thereby] building a will to fight and a spirit of resolution . . . to endure.”
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As far as the 1969 guerrilla war campaign went, a PLAF internal document reported important gains and a number of successful attacks in the Mekong Delta, but “generally speaking, our campaign was not strong or continuous.”
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But the PAVN’s commander in chief remained undaunted, looking beyond adversity to a brighter future. There had been setbacks aplenty in twenty-five years of revolutionary history. There would be others ahead. Nonetheless, in January 1970, the Central Committee’s eighteenth plenum projected that more aggressive, mobile warfare attacks would resume by late 1970 or early 1971.
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Lewis Sorley joins a number of other historians and participants in suggesting obliquely that had the success of the American strategic initiatives of 1969 and 1970 been fully appreciated by the US media and the public, the war might not have ended with the fall of South Vietnam and American defeat. Sorley’s “what might have been” scenario is both thought provoking and controversial, if for no other reason than that his conclusion is belied by his own assessments of the particulars. As Sorley tells it, Abrams’s initiatives in ground tactics, pacification, and Vietnamization made startlingly impressive progress initially, but as time went on, Communist countermeasures and the old bugaboos that afflicted the US/GVN war effort started
to rear up yet again. As the NLF infrastructure began to rebound, the ARVN lacked the expertise to deploy its new arsenal of sophisticated weapons effectively in combat operations. This was an ominous sign that the ramped-up ARVN training program was running into serious obstacles.

Not surprisingly, signs of morale and leadership problems began to surface in US Army and Marine ground units. In part this was the result of the changed political context of the war. Victory was no longer the objective, and increasing numbers of US servicemen saw no point in risking their lives for a cause that was no longer supported by the American people. Other factors in declining American military performance were counterproductive rotation and replacement policies. Combat unit commanders typically served only six months in the field before rotating out to staff jobs. They were often replaced by “cherry” junior officers whose judgment was questionable in the eyes of experienced noncommissioned officers and enlisted men. Incidents of fragging—the killing of inexperienced, excessively “gung ho”officers by their own men—reached alarming proportions. The widespread use of drugs, and growing rancor between black and white servicemen, severely damaged unit cohesiveness in all but the most elite units.