Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (91 page)

If Johnson had taken these steps, he would at least have stimulated open debate about policies in Vietnam. But he refused to go that far. He thought that these moves might trigger military responses from China or the Soviet Union, that they would "touch off a right-wing stampede" at home that would require him to escalate further, and that they would weaken congressional support for his Great Society programs, some of which (including the voting rights and Medicare bills) remained to be passed. Mobilizing reservists, he feared, would provoke widespread unease among Americans who would worry about being called into combat service. Instead, LBJ accepted the basic recommendations of the McNamara memo without explaining their consequences to the American people. On July 28 he announced a stepping up of draft calls and the dispatch of an additional 50,000 men to Vietnam. Privately he committed himself to the sending of up to 75,000 more by the end of the year. That would increase American troop strength in Vietnam to around 200,000. The die had been cast.

T
HE WRITER
D
AVID
H
ALBERSTAM
, who served as a
New York Times
reporter in Vietnam in the early 1960s, later (1972) wrote one of the first large-selling books critical of the war. Its decidedly ironic title was
The Best and the Brightest
. Many writers echoed his view that liberal intellectuals and technocrats not only sparked the drive for escalation but also poured fuel on the fires after 1965. McNamara, a genius at systems analysis and rational planning, was the most ardent: critics of administration policy spoke of "McNamara's War." But the other incendiaries seemed equally bright. McGeorge Bundy had been dean of the faculty at Harvard. Rusk had been a Rhodes Scholar. So had Walt Rostow, who then had become a widely known professor of economic history at MIT before rising to the status of a top adviser. Westmoreland had been first captain of cadets at West Point and had fought in combat in both World War II and Korea. Taylor was a D-Day veteran and a liberals' general who spoke several foreign languages and wrote books.

In the next two and one-half years some of these men developed doubts about what they had done. Bundy left the administration in early 1966, to be replaced by Rostow. McNamara's doubts rose as early as December 1965, when he told Johnson that he questioned whether the American public would support the war for the long time that would be required. Johnson was intrigued enough to inquire, 'Then, no matter what we do in the military field there is no sure victory?" McNamara replied, "That's right. We have been too optimistic." He then persuaded Johnson to declare a "Christmas bombing halt" in the hope that negotiations might begin. The halt lasted thirty-seven days without effect.
⁵²

In 1966 McNamara grew more deeply concerned. The fantastic escalation of that year was not achieving its purposes. Martin Luther King and others were denouncing him as an architect of disaster, especially for American blacks, who were dying in large numbers. By October McNamara no longer thought that further escalation of manpower or of bombing would accomplish much, and he called instead for the building of a huge infiltration barrier so as to stabilize the situation. This bizarre and expensive idea, which exposed the extent of McNamara's faith in technological solutions, evoked little support among other advisers and was eventually dropped before construction could be completed. By 1967 McNamara was pacing about his expansive Pentagon office, staring at the large framed photograph of Defense Secretary Forrestal (who had committed suicide), and weeping. By late 1967 Johnson had given up on him. The war had savaged the self-confidence of the most certain of men.
⁵³

Others among the "best and the brightest," however, stayed the course until the close of Johnson's presidency in 1969. If Rostow and Rusk entertained serious doubts about the wisdom of escalation, they kept them to themselves. Both offered consistently hawkish advice. Westmoreland occasionally reported that calibrated escalation was not working, but usually to plead for additional help.
⁵⁴
Most military leaders demanded more, not less, in the way of American involvement. For them, as for LBJ, the policy of escalation must not be abandoned simply because it was slow to accomplish its purposes.

Civilian advisers from time to time supported bombing halts and hoped for a negotiated settlement, but never at the cost of jeopardizing the independence of South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh, however, insisted that any settlement must take into account the program of the National Liberation Front. This meant (at the least) NLF participation in negotiations and substantial NLF representation in a coalition government. LBJ and his advisers were certain that this would lead to a Communist-controlled regime in South Vietnam and to unification under the leadership of Ho. For this reason Johnson never encouraged serious negotiations. When a Polish diplomat seemed about to succeed in developing peace talks in December 1966, the Johnson administration spiked the idea by bombing heavily within five miles of the center of Hanoi. A similar fate met efforts for negotiations undertaken in early 1967 by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Johnson and Ho Chi Minh were so far apart that negotiations never had much of a chance.
⁵⁵

The failure of efforts at negotiation left the fate of Vietnam to the soldiers. In 1965 the casualties remained modest, and American morale was good in the field. Despite half-hearted fighting by many (not all) units of the South Vietnamese army, Americans usually prevailed when they could confront the enemy in head-to-head battles. But escalation on both sides mounted in 1966, casualties increased, and fighting morale proved increasingly difficult to sustain.
⁵⁶
Roughly 80 percent of American soldiers in Vietnam were from poor or working-class backgrounds. Neither in college nor in graduate school—where most students received near-automatic deferments until mid-1968—they often found themselves drafted after they got out of high school. Indeed, American combat soldiers in Vietnam were unprecedentedly young—an average of 19, as opposed to 27 in both World War II and Korea. For men so youthful, combat experience in Vietnam was especially terrifying. There was most of the time no "front" or clear-cut territorial objective. The young men—boys, mainly—felt that they were always far away "in the bush." Ordered out on patrols into dense cover, they were bait to lure the enemy into battle. Many were cut down by withering fire from the bush or were blown to bits by land mines.
⁵⁷

Morale also suffered because of the way that the military organized itself. The majority of American combat soldiers in Vietnam were draftees or "volunteers" who joined the armed forces in order to serve at a time of their own choosing. Most were required to stay there for one of their two or three years of military duty. Unlike those who had fought in Korea or in World War II, they expected to leave the battleground at a clearly specified time, whereupon someone else would take their place. Unsurprisingly, some who neared the end of their terms were not eager to take chances. Most American marines in Vietnam faced thirteen-month terms there that included up to three tours in the field of eighty days each. This was an unusually heavy and frightening exposure to combat—one that in many cases proved exhausting both physically and mentally to the men involved.
⁵⁸

For these and other reasons many American combat units found it hard, especially in the later years of the war, to develop camaraderie. In earlier wars, units had tended to stay together for the duration of the effort. Soldiers in combat grew close, sometimes dying for one another. In Vietnam, however, men often arrived in the field as individuals and were placed in whatever squads needed help. Some of the men whom they fought beside had many months of service left—these might become buddies to be protected—but others were nearing the end of their term. They remained strangers, brief acquaintances who might soon go home.

Racial antagonism increasingly accentuated these problems.
⁵⁹
Many American black men at first seemed ready and eager to serve in the military: through 1966 they were three times as likely as white soldiers to re-enlist when their terms were over. But they faced the same kinds of abuse and mistreatment on the front that they had faced at home. Often, it seemed, they were told to do the dirtiest jobs and pull the most dangerous duty. Between 1961, when the first American "advisers" died in Vietnam, and the end of 1966, 12.6 percent of American soldiers there were black (roughly the percentage of blacks in America's draft-age population). In 1965, 24 percent of American combat deaths were black, a high for the war.
⁶⁰

By then black leaders in the United States were becoming openly critical of American policy in the war. King criticized escalation in August 1965, and both SNCC and CORE formally opposed the war in January 1966. Blacks became less eager to serve. Many who were drafted and sent abroad to fight had imbibed racial pride from the civil rights movement, and they would not put up with second-class treatment. Made aware of these feelings, American army leaders sought to lessen racial discrimination in the field. The percentage of combat deaths that was black began to fall, to 16 percent in 1966 and 13 percent in 1968.
^6l
Still, sharp antagonisms persisted, reflecting not only the timeless tensions of color but also the mounting racial conflicts that were rending American society at home.

Many Americans who served in Vietnam complained bitterly—again, mainly in the later years of the war—of poor military leadership. This was hardly new in the annals of warfare, but the problem seemed especially acute in Vietnam, where "fragging" (soldiers wounding or killing their own officers) became a serious matter by the 1970s. Officers who were assigned to combat normally served six-month tours. They scarcely had time to develop much rapport with men in their units. Few of those above the grade of lieutenant (the lowest officer ranks) stayed long on the front lines with the troops. They tended instead to remain in base areas, many of which were lavishly outfitted, or in the air, mainly in helicopters. Only four American generals died in combat during the years of fighting in Vietnam, three of whom crashed to their death in helicopters. (The fourth was killed by sniper fire.) Although nearly 8,000 American dead—13.8 percent of the total—were officers, most of these were lieutenants or captains. The rest were non-commissioned officers—sergeants, corporals, and the like—and draftees and "volunteers."
⁶²

Men in the front lines had to worry not only about the enemy but also about the firepower from their own side. American dead and wounded from "friendly fire" were later estimated to be as high as 15 or 20 percent of all casualties. Many things accounted for these unprecedentedly high estimates: poor leadership, inadequate training, the frequency of close-in fighting in the bush, and the penchant of high-ranking officers to hurry in calls for the heaviest sort of firepower—after all, it was there—to support infantrymen in trouble.
⁶³

American fighting men were regularly lonely and frequently scared even when they were not in combat. They had little if any understanding of the history or the culture of Vietnam, and they did not know the language. The South Vietnamese, equally ethnocentric, were bewildered by the impatient, technologically advanced, and increasingly frustrated Americans. Personal friendships across the large gap in cultures were rare. Worse, many apparently supportive South Vietnamese seemed to have an uncanny ability to avoid the mines and booby traps that maimed United States troops. It was hardly surprising in the circumstances that many American fighting men came to believe that all Vietnamese were alike. Everyone in "Nam," it seemed, wore black pajamas and sneaked about treacherously in the night. "They say, 'GI number one' when we're in the village," an American soldier complained, "but at night the dirty rats are VC." Another wrote, "During the day they'll smile and take your money. At night they'll creep in and slit your throat."
⁶⁴
More and more, American combat veterans thought that no South Vietnamese civilian deserved a second thought before being shot in the midst of a fire fight in a village. "The rule in the field/' one explained, "if it's dead, it's VC."
⁶⁵

All these problems and fears helped to account for the savagery of the fighting in Vietnam. To some this seemed even more gruesome than in other wars. NLF and North Vietnamese combatants, battling against alien invaders, fought tenaciously, resorting to sabotage and stab-in-the-back assaults on American soldiers in the night. Americans, with awesome firepower at their disposal, dropped ever more napalm and Agent Orange and poured bombs on villages and enemy installations. Commanders in the field often called in the planes, helicopters, and heavy artillery wherever they thought the enemy might be. As an American major explained in 1968 following the obliteration by American firepower of Ben Tre, a village in the Mekong Delta, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

The savagery of combat intensified in 1966–67, by which time it was becoming increasingly difficult for many of the soldiers to understand why the United States was fighting. McNamara, Westmoreland, and their own commanders, after all, were measuring progress only in body counts. When soldiers returned from patrol, they were asked one thing: how many did you kill? One soldier exclaimed, "What am I doing here? We don't take any land. We don't give it back. We just mutilate bodies. What the fuck are we doing here?"
⁶⁶