Those Who Have Borne the Battle (28 page)

As a battlefield, Vietnam was not Korea: it was not a peninsula with a moving front line of two hundred miles or less; it was a country bordered by other countries and with a potential front line of a thousand miles, largely in jungle. So we found ourselves there.
²¹
More to the point, in the 1960s and 1970s more than 2.5 million Americans would serve in Vietnam. And 58,000 of them would die.

 

 

The Military Assistance Command Vietnam, headed by General William Westmoreland, developed a tactical plan. This was represented by and evolved from the experience of the battle of the Ia Drang Valley in the central highlands in late 1965. Here major elements of the First Cavalry
Division engaged a substantial force of the North Vietnamese Army (People's Army of Vietnam). It was an extended and bloody fight—there were 155 Americans killed and 126 wounded on November 17. This would stand as the bloodiest single day of the war for the US forces.

Each side would claim victory when the battle cleared after several days of fighting—but in conventional terms the United States had prevailed. The North Vietnamese, approaching this in unconventional terms, came out of the experience believing that their advantage would be in smaller-scale action where they could get close to the Americans and neutralize the US firepower. As one of the North Vietnamese field commanders said, “Move inside the [American] column, grab them by the belt, and thus avoid casualties from the artillery and air.”
²²

General Westmoreland thought in more traditional terms. He was confident in the firepower and mobility that he commanded, and he calculated that the North Vietnamese had lost ten or twelve times the number of men the Americans had lost at Ia Drang. He had little doubt this ratio could be continued by the Americans, while it could not be sustained very long by their enemy. He believed he could defeat the communists through heavy firepower, mobility of forces, and a war of attrition, continuing to inflict heavy casualties on them. Westmoreland surely thought more comprehensively than some of his critics have allowed. He did appreciate the need to secure and hold areas and proceed with pacification, but he believed that defeat of the enemy had to come first. This objective defined the tactical plan for the first several years of the war.
²³

For most Americans serving in Vietnam combat units, there would be few extended, large-scale battles such as that at Ia Drang. Philip Caputo would recall that for him and for the marines with whom he served, by the fall of 1965, “what had begun as an adventurous expedition had turned into an exhausting, indecisive war of attrition in which we fought for no cause other than our own survival.” He would wish that he could have fought in a war with “dramatic campaigns and historic battles,” but in Vietnam, “there were no Normandies or Gettysburgs for us, no epic clashes that decided the fates of armies or nations.” Vietnam meant having to endure “weeks of expectant waiting and, at random intervals, of conducting vicious manhunts through jungles and swamps where snipers
harassed us constantly and booby traps cut us down one by one.”
²⁴
In 1965 1,863 Americans died in Vietnam.

The war in Vietnam became one of search-and-destroy missions in which the most common metric—indeed, the
objective
—seemed to be the body count. Many military officers understood the military, if not the moral, weakness of such a campaign. It was a tactic searching for a strategic objective. It did not distinguish readily between military and civilian bodies, and it licensed heavy firepower and encouraged exaggeration. The American public had difficulty following this war of attrition.
²⁵
Heavy firepower in close-range combat, which was the fighting tactic the North Vietnamese and Vietcong encouraged, often led to heavy friendly-fire tragedies. One senior military officer expressed his frustration, “The strategy of the Vietnamese War was so screwed up that trying to win the war tactically was like swimming up Niagara Falls with an anvil around your neck.”
²⁶

In March 1966
Look
printed a sequel to its August 1965 story on David Beauchemin. The young marine, now a lance corporal, was back home in Worcester, Massachusetts. He had completed his tour in Vietnam and was delighted to be home. He went out to dinner with a girlfriend, and the owner of the restaurant had treated them. His dad, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, teased him about his marine uniform. His proud mother said, “He was a little boy when he went away. Now he is a man.” The
Look
reporter, Christopher Wren, who had met Beauchemin in Vietnam the previous year and wrote the first story about him, now described a horrible friendly-fire experience that introduced this young marine to the tragedy of war: “Dave Beauchemin grew up fast, when a round from an American 4.2 mortar dropped short in the midst of his platoon. The marines had just been pulled back for a rest. Their lieutenant, due to be married, woke to find his legs sheared off at the hips. He died of shock. Beauchemin struggled to plug the hole in his sergeant's chest. The sergeant vomited over him, stiffened and died in his arms. Eleven marines were casualties in the accident. Beauchemin, helping sort the bodies, cried.” Wren observed, “Though he seldom speaks of Vietnam, Beauchemin is haunted by it.” All of the members of his squad were killed or wounded in Vietnam. He “broods” about them and their experience.
Beauchemin admitted that he often thought he would not make it home, but the young marine said he was proud to have served—and would do it again.
²⁷

This pride continued to be widespread. One of the striking things is how the American military did sustain a sense of pride and professionalism in the early years of the war. This despite the absence of any clear military objectives, other than killing the enemy. The Marine Corps had enough independence from Westmoreland's MACV to be able to develop a different tactical approach. They did try to develop enclaves that they held and attempted to develop a working relationship with the civilians living within these areas. They had far fewer “free fire zones” than the army did.
²⁸
General Westmoreland praised the approach—but insisted that there were not enough troops in Vietnam to do this other than in limited areas. Army units did well in their complicated and morally cumbersome warfare—certainly, they did better in the first few years of the war when they had cohesive units that had trained together and were led by experienced officers and veteran NCOs.

When American ground troops first engaged in the war in Vietnam, most Americans supported them, even as some were questioning the assumptions and objectives that framed the war. Over the first five years, for example, most television reports from Vietnam had interviews “with appealing young Americans in uniform.” There was little graphic violence from Vietnam shown on television.
²⁹
In his study for the Twentieth Century Fund, Peter Braestrup observed that daily briefings held at military headquarters in Saigon, called by the reporters the “Five O'Clock Follies,” were often marked by fragmentary field reports regarding a war that appeared to be a “seemingly disconnected episodic affair, with no moving battle lines,” and in which “the Saigon communiqués usually read like ‘police blotters,' a daily compilation of seemingly random, small-unit engagements that in World War II or Korea might not have seemed worthy of notice.”
³⁰

Television was increasingly important as a source of information. In 1964 92 percent of American homes had a television set. The three networks distributed evening news programs through 526 affiliated stations around the country. These news updates were a part of the American day.
Television reporters had difficulty tracking the Vietnam War. Their equipment in the 1960s was heavy and cumbersome, and there was always a delay in getting film out to a broadcast facility. Because of this logistical problem, often television accounts of battles consisted of interviews with men who would talk about the engagement they had completed. The enemy was demonized—“slopes,” “gooks,” and “dinks” were names used often by GIs and broadcast freely. Americans were “winning” these battles. A Harris poll in July 1967 reported that 83 percent of Americans were more supportive of the war after watching television accounts.
³¹

More critical reporting in the last years of the war caused some to remember media as hostile to the soldiers in the field. This type of reporting was largely not the case early on. (In fact, I would argue, it was never the case that mainstream media were hostile to the American forces in the field.) In those first years, the press tended to be positive, and even though combat did not fit the traditional image of the American warrior, this did not result in individual criticism. Historian Andrew Huebner concludes, “The heroic, selfless soldier of World War II mythology was transforming into a different sort of cultural hero, one inviting sympathy, even pity, along with respect.”
³²
Even those reporters who came to raise questions and criticisms about American policy tended to affirm their confidence in the skill of American troops; when they were critical, they focused on military tactics and what many considered “official obfuscation.”
³³

In 1965
Time
wrote of the “professionalism, skill, and teamwork” of the US troops in Vietnam, “the most proficient the nation has ever produced.” A few months later,
Newsweek
noted that “today's American soldier and marine is as well prepared as any fighting man in the world for waging guerilla warfare.” By November 1965, ABC correspondent Malcolm Browne raised some concerns when he noted that maybe American training was not a good fit with Vietnam: “I think these boys are magnificently trained to fight World War II and fight Korea, but I think this is a different kind of conflict.”
³⁴

During the year 1965 Americans also confronted some of the complexity of this type of war. On August 3, Morley Safer of CBS showed footage of marines using their cigarette lighters to burn the village of Cam Ne. Safer noted that there were no Vietcong there. (President Johnson,
always monitoring these reports with great personal sensitivity, called CBS News's Frank Stanton to ask, “Are you trying to fuck me?”)
³⁵

There were stories of civilian casualties and of South Vietnamese mistreating Vietcong prisoners, but the Americans were not depicted as participants or perpetrators of these incidents. General Westmoreland was the
Time
“Man of the Year” for 1965.
Time
described the American servicemen as helping orphans and others at Christmas: “As it has everywhere else, the G.I.'s heart inevitably goes out to the war's forlorn victims.”
³⁶

American troops in Vietnam, as had been true in previous twentieth-century wars, were apparently not motivated by slogans or ideology. They focused professionally on the task at hand. One study done during the war noted that the men resisted patriotic or political exhortations to encourage them. But troops also shared in a belief in the strength of the “American way of life.”
³⁷
The US government film titled
Why Vietnam?
included footage of Hitler and World War II and featured President Johnson's reminder that “aggression unchallenged is aggression unleashed.” The president warned, “If freedom is to survive in any American home town it must be preserved in such places as South Viet Nam.” All of the troops shipping out to Vietnam watched this film.
³⁸
In 1966, 6, 143 Americans died in Vietnam.

 

 

Unlike President Truman in 1950, President Lyndon Johnson refused at the outset to ask for any new taxes to pay for the war in Vietnam. He was protective of his Great Society domestic program and did not want it to become caught in budget tensions—he insisted that the United States could have “Guns and Butter” without any sacrifice. In his January 1966 State of the Union speech, he argued that he would not take away any support from “the unfortunate here in a land of plenty. I believe that we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.”
³⁹
Johnson argued that the war would not be a major expense—and the administration underestimated the cost of engagement.

Following some major Democratic defeats in the 1966 off-year elections and projections that the budget deficit due to Vietnam would be
much greater than expected, Johnson did propose a 6 percent surtax on individual and corporate taxes. Even some of his conservative opponents were quoted in the
Wall Street Journal
: “I just don't see how we can be hawks on the war and then vote against taxes to pay for it.”
⁴⁰
But Johnson balked at calling it a “war tax” and continued to insist that he would not cut domestic spending. After he announced in the spring of 1968 that he was not a candidate for reelection, he did make some domestic cuts in order to get a 10 percent surtax from Congress.

Neil Sheehan of the
New York Times
returned to the States in the fall of 1966 after completing his second posting in Vietnam. He wrote an article describing his growing frustration with the nature of the war there. He was concerned about the Vietnamese casualties in a war marked by heavy firepower, about the growing corruption in South Vietnam and the “mandarin” system of government, about the growing cynicism of American troops who found little support among the South Vietnamese Army or on the part of the civilian population.
⁴¹
These concerns were becoming more widespread.

In 1967, as military activity increased in Vietnam, political discomfort intensified in the United States. In that year some of the media shifted—even supportive
Time
became more critical of the policies and strategies, and accounts from the field sometimes showed servicemen who were “bitter about their situation in Vietnam, resentful of the brass, and even emotionally scarred by combat.” These, of course, would fit into the images that would shape subsequent popular mythology about Vietnam as a place where unhappy troops were on an unclear mission.
⁴²
In 1965 General Westmoreland had wanted to impose some censorship rules on the media, but the Pentagon and the White House had refused to take this step. By and large, the media handled the war responsibly—if sometimes clumsily. They did realize by 1966 or 1967 that they were receiving a lot of double-talk from US authorities, which increased some of the skepticism they were developing about their sources.