A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (141 page)

When it came to actual military strategy in Vietnam, McNamara was equally obtuse. He said of the military situation early in the war, “The greatest contribution Vietnam is making…is that it is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without necessity of arousing the public ire.”
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This admission was nothing short of astonishing. By conceding that the administration did not even want the public to view the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong—who were killing American sons—as the enemy, McNamara ceded the entire propaganda campaign to the communists and their allies. For the first time in American history, the government expressed no spirited animosity toward its enemy, provided U.S. citizens with no examples of North Vietnamese or Viet Cong atrocities (even though plenty existed), and refrained from speaking ill of Ho Chi Minh (let alone demonizing him). It was 180 degrees from the yellow-press positions a half century earlier. At no time did the administration launch even the most basic education campaign to explain the communists’ objectives to the American people. Nor did any administration prior to Nixon even remotely suggest that the warlords in the North, particularly Ho Chi Minh, should personally face retaliation in response to their policies in the way Tojo, Mussolini, and Hitler had been singled out as individuals for their actions. Quite the contrary, Johnson deliberately avoided any air strikes that could conceivably have injured or killed Ho. Years later, in 1995, Colonel Bui Tin of the North Vietnamese Army was asked if the United States could have done anything to prevent a communist victory. He answered, “Cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. If Johnson had granted General Westmoreland’s request to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Hanoi could not have won the war.”
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The entire approach to the war literally stood the principles of victory on their head.
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Moreover, by 1966, if the question of complete victory was in doubt, then it was right to again ask if Vietnam was the line in the sand for resisting communism wholeheartedly. A poorly conceived and inadequately undertaken military action only compounded the larger point: why Vietnam? As the war dragged on, the only answer increasingly seemed to be, “Because we are there.” In retrospect, a stronger response to either Berlin or Cuba may have proven more effective at stopping communism. When Ronald Reagan later referred to the “great lesson” the United States had learned in Vietnam, that “we sent men to fight a war the government wouldn’t let them win,” he reiterated the central fact that military action must be both purposeful and pragmatic. If Vietnam was ever the former—a point that still remains in doubt—it was never the latter.

In part, this end product stemmed from both Kennedy’s and Johnson’s reluctance to pursue the war in the first place. In part, it reflected the failure to grasp the fact that this was not, as critics later claimed, a civil war but a thoroughgoing invasion of the South by the North. General Vo Bam of the North Vietnamese Army let slip that in 1959 he had been instructed to lead the “liberation” of the South. But the failures also illustrated the radical left’s complete dominance of the dialogue involving the war. Those sent to fight had virtually no voice at home: “A few photographs of Vietnamese villagers who had been disemboweled or had their heads impaled on posts [by the communists] would have destroyed all the leftist arguments and demonstrations from the beginning.”
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Johnson, rejecting the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) not to engage in a limited bombing of the North, or to use any sort of gradual escalation, chose to do just that. Like Kennedy, he hoped at first to get by with mere U.S. “support” of the ARVN. In July 1964, Johnson had boosted U.S. strength there to 21,000 men, up 30 percent from Kennedy’s levels; then, in August, an incident occurred that sealed the involvement of the United States in Vietnam. On August second, the U.S. destroyer
Maddox
, operating in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam, reported that it was under attack from North Vietnamese PT boats. Questions later arose as to whether the
Maddox
had been attacked at all. Two days later a second attack supposedly occurred on the
Maddox
and a second destroyer, the
Turner Joy
, and this time the ships called for air support. Commander James Stockdale, one of the first aviators on the scene, performed a thorough reconnaissance and concluded in his official report that there were no North Vietnamese vessels in the area, and that the
Maddox
and
Turner Joy
had probably fired on each other in the haze.
⁸⁸

With only a cursory amount of information—and certainly no clear proof of attacks against the United States—Johnson went on television to announce that he had ordered air responses to the attacks. At the same time, he sent a resolution to Congress, which he wanted adopted retroactively, that was the “functional equivalent” of a formal declaration of war.
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The August seventh Gulf of Tonkin Resolution said, “Congress approves and supports the determination of the President…to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”
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Johnson received all the support he needed. Only two senator (both Democrats) voted against the measure. Voting in favor were soon-to-be antiwar activists George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, and William Fulbright of Arkansas (all Democrats). Bobby Kennedy, still LBJ’s attorney general, but future senator from New York, supported the 1964 war wholeheartedly.

Johnson, although vastly underestimating the undertaking to which he had committed the nation, did not lack an awareness of the implications of fighting a war on the Asian mainland, saying, “We’re not going north and drop bombs at this stage…. I want to think about the consequences of getting American boys into awar with 700 million Chinese.”
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But the Viet Cong would not cooperate in letting the United States play a peripheral role. On Christmas Eve, 1964, Viet Cong bombed a Saigon hotel that quartered American junior officers, killing 2 and wounding 38. Then, on February 7, 1965, a mortar attack on the American air base at Pleiku resulted in more casualties. Hundreds of aircraft moved in, but Johnson refused to order a bombing campaign. The Viet Cong had already achieved a victory of sorts. More soldiers were needed to keep the aircraft safe; and as the security area around the bases was expanded, the ground troops needed more air power to keep them safe. It was a nonstrategy, a quicksand, with no hope of producing a victorious outcome.

Finally, in March 1965, more attacks led Johnson to approve a bombing campaign known as Rolling Thunder, and as the name implies, Johnson did not intend for this to be a knockout blow or an overwhelming use of power to intimidate the enemy into surrender, but an incremental gradualist strategy.
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He denied outright the military’s request to strike oil-storage facilities.
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Quite the contrary, McNamara and Johnson picked the targets themselves, placing sharp restrictions on what was fair game, claiming the purpose of the operation was to present a “credible threat of
future
destruction [emphasis ours].”
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In essence, McNamara had staged a giant demonstration, with live antiaircraft fire directed at U.S. airmen. It was immoral and wasteful, and it was guaranteed to produce a more determined enemy while at the same time doing nothing to limit the North’s ability to fight. North Vietnam responded by erecting 31 acquisition radars, adding 70 MiG fighters, and installing deadly SA-2 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). By 1967, Hanoi possessed some 7,000 to 10,000 antiaircraft guns and 200 SAM sites, and could claim credit for downing 80 U.S. aircraft.
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Even then, American aircraft fighting over the North were instructed that they were “not, repeat, not authorized to attack North Vietnamese air bases from which attacking aircraft may be operating.”
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Nor did Johnson and McNamara permit American pilots to eliminate the SAM sites: “The rules of engagement throughout Rolling Thunder stipulated that American aircraft could only attack SAM sites that were
actually firing at them
[emphasis added]
.
”
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Limited war of this sort had been addressed by no less an expert than William Tecumseh Sherman a hundred years earlier: “War is cruelty,” he said, “and you cannot refine it.”

Meanwhile, on the ground, the United States had grown disenchanted with ARVN operations. By late 1965, U.S. troop numbers (including all personnel—naval, air, and other) had reached 200,000, a number well below what the JCS had categorically stated more than a year earlier would be needed to win. Based on the balance of forces alone, the war should have ended long before 1965. One of the problems involved the complete lack of strategy. General William Westmoreland, named the new army commander in Vietnam in March 1965, was impatient with the South Vietnamese operations against the Viet Cong and had introduced search-and-destroy missions by American forces. Whereas U.S. artillery, air, and armor (to the extent it could be used) had previously supported the ARVNs, the new strategy called on the ARVN units to guard cities and strongholds—exactly what the South Vietnamese warlords wanted in order to preserve their troops from combat. Worse, it placed American troops in a position to absorb the bulk of the casualties.

Aimed at finding the communists in the countryside, eliminating them and their supply bases, and gradually expanding the safe area of operations, the search-and-destroy missions, as with all McNamara ideas, depended heavily on numbers and tallying, specifically of body counts. How many Viet Cong did an operation kill? The calculation turned into a giant con game. Forces in the field well knew that the VC tended to drag bodies off so as
not
to let their enemy know the casualty numbers, and that tactic, consequently, led to estimates. Before long the estimates were wildly inflated, and, grotesquely, the policy rewarded the production of any body, whether a genuine VC or not. Loyal or neutral Vietnamese caught in firefights were added to the body-count totals.

The policy had no grounding in common sense whatsoever: no democracy would willingly fight a long war of attrition. It goes against the grain of democratic republics to measure success purely in numbers killed, especially when the enemy, in this case, made clear that it welcomed such a tradeoff in human carnage. Ho Chi Minh had explained this exchange flatly to the French in the 1940s, saying, “You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”
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Ho’s statement reflected an awareness that the communists had no qualms about sacrificing one third to one half of their population to gain a strategic victory. Human life had little meaning to those running the war in Hanoi.

McNamara took his technical solutions to an absurd level when he proposed building a giant electrified reinforced fence across the North-South border to stop the flow of supplies. Quick fixes—technology substituted for a sound war-fighting doctrine—was what Clark Clifford, McNamara’s replacement as secretary of defense, found when he arrived on the job in 1968. “It was startling,” Clifford said, “to find out we have no military plan to end the war.”
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By that time, U.S. troop strength neared 470,000, and casualties mounted.

One massive problem that Johnson tried to ignore was that the allied forces (reinforced by Australian, Philippine, and New Zealand units) were not just fighting Viet Cong rebels in black pajamas, but also a large and well-equipped People’s Army of Viet Nam (PAVN), or North Vietnam’s Army. These troops received their supplies from no less than the Soviet Union itself, and they delivered them to the South along the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail, a more than 350-mile pathway through the jungles of Laos, which terminated at strike points opposite Da Nang air base, and the Pleiku and Ankhe firebases.

For all these substantial (and, in most cases, debilitating) weaknesses, the United States still had to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The watershed event came with the so-called Tet Offensive on January 31, 1968, when the Viet Cong assaulted multiple targets throughout the South. VC troops even reached the U.S. embassy in Saigon, where they (contrary to popular movie renditions) were killed to a man. They stormed the old capital of Hue and surrounded the U.S. base at Khe Sanh. They made spectacular gains, but at great cost: for every American soldier or marine killed at Khe Sanh, 50 North Vietnamese died, a ratio “approaching the horrendous slaughter…between the Spaniards and Aztecs in Mexico or British and Zulus in southern Africa.”
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At Hue the surprised and outnumbered U.S. Marines evicted 10,000 Viet Cong and Vietnamese regulars from a fortified city in less than three weeks and at a loss of only 150 dead.

From that point on, any pretense that Vietnam was a civil war was over. The only hope the communists had to win had to come from direct, and heavy, infusions of troops and supplies from Hanoi, Moscow, and Peking. At Khe Sanh, nearly 25,000 air sorties subjected the seasoned North Vietnamese attackers to a merciless bombardment, killing 10,000 communists compared to 205 Americans.
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One senior American general called Khe Sanh the first major ground battle won almost entirely by air power.
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A U.S. military historian, Robert Leckie, referred to Tet as “the most appalling defeat in the history of the war” for Hanoi—an “unmitigated military disaster.”
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Even General Tran Van Tra, a top-ranking communist, agreed, “We suffered large sacrifices and losses with regard to manpower and material, especially cadres at the various echelons, which clearly weakened us.”
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Yet the very failure of the communists’ Tet Offensive illustrated the flawed nature of U.S. strategy. Here, in a single battle, Americans had achieved a fifty-to-one kill ratio, and yet the media reported this as a communist victory.
embassy in saigon captured
! read one erroneous headline. Television repeatedly showed a photograph of South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a man in the head, claiming the man was a “Vietcong suspect.” In fact, the man was a Viet Cong colonel in civilian clothes—a man Loan knew personally—and, by the rules of war, a spy. Andrew Jackson had done almost exactly the same thing to British agents more than 120 years earlier. But Jackson did not have to deal with the power of television or the impact of the camera. Scenes were cut and spliced in the studios into thirty-second clips of marines and body bags, with an accompanying text, “American troops mauled.”