American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (16 page)

Another American social scientist who defended “ruthless projections” of military power to advance capitalism and smash Communism was Harvard government professor Samuel Huntington.
Huntington had quibbles
with Rostow, but agreed that modernization was crucial to success in Vietnam. His most famous work on the subject was a 1968 article that appeared in
Foreign Affairs
, the house organ of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Huntington argued that modernization in South Vietnam was working
because
of the war’s destruction. The United States was succeeding because its military policies were forcing millions of people out of the countryside and into the cities. This “American-sponsored urban revolution” was effectively undercutting a “Maoist-inspired rural revolution.” The forced relocation of peasants effectively eliminated a key source of support for the insurgency
and
introduced the rural population to the attractions and opportunities of modern urban life. For Huntington, nation-building projects to win the hearts and minds of peasants were merely “gimmicks” and largely “irrelevant.” Gaining political support was not crucial. All that mattered was control. “The war in Vietnam is a war for the control of population.” Huntington basically conceded the rural countryside to the Viet Cong. It was simply too tough to establish control out in the boonies. But Huntington believed you could control the peasants once you got them in the cities. America was bombing the countryside “on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city.” Huntington called the approach “
forced-draft urbanization
.”

The effective response [to “wars of national liberation”] lies neither in the quest for conventional military victory nor in the esoteric doctrines and gimmicks of counter-insurgency warfare. It is instead forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power.

Air force general Curtis LeMay once recommended that the United States bomb Vietnam “into the Stone Age.” Huntington recommended that the U.S.
bomb Vietnam into the future
. He made it sound almost bloodless and even appealing. Yes, he concedes, “the social costs of this change have been dramatic and often heartrending.” But “the urban slum, which seems so horrible to middle-class Americans, often becomes for the poor peasant a gateway to a new and better way of life.” Like Rostow, Huntington went to his death defending his position on the Vietnam War. In a 2001 interview, he went even further than he had in 1968 to extol the blessings that came to Vietnamese who were forced off their land by the United States. “You could very easily become incredibly well off in the cities [of South Vietnam].
There were all these wonderful jobs
that had been produced by this overpowering American presence. So you had to be pretty stupid to stay out in the countryside and not move into the cities.”

Wonderful jobs? A clue to how grossly Huntington distorts reality can be found in a wartime survey conducted among a group of relatively privileged Vietnamese who were training to become teachers:

When
students at Saigon’s teacher training college
were asked to list 15 occupations in an English examination, almost every student included launderer, car washer, bar-girl, shoeshine boy, soldier, interpreter, and journalist. Almost none of the students thought to write down doctor, engineer, industrial administrator, farm manager, or even their own chosen profession, teacher. The economy has become oriented toward services catering to the foreign soldiers.

Some other common jobs the students might have added include prostitute, pimp, black marketeer, and dope peddler. The entire economy had been distorted and corrupted by the United States, and made increasingly dependent on continued U.S. support. Urban inequalities widened and the most vital sector of the economy—agriculture—was devastated by the war. South Vietnam had once produced a surplus of rice for export. By the mid-1960s, it
had to import its major crop
.

Nation building looked like a sick joke alongside the wreckage caused by American weapons. But even as the military was doubling and redoubling its bombing attacks and search-and-destroy missions, President Johnson was still prattling on to his advisers about building schools and dams. “
I want to leave the footprints of America
in Vietnam. I want them to say when the Americans come, this is what they leave—schools, not long cigars. We’re going to turn the Mekong into a Tennessee Valley.” At one point the president began
pushing to get “cheap TV sets” into Vietnam
for the “purposes of education and indoctrination.” Perhaps they could come from Japan, he said. Of course, most of the rural countryside had no electricity.

LBJ’s vision of an Americanized Vietnam failed except for one obvious exception—those American “footprints.” The United States did not do much nation building for the Vietnamese, but it practically built an entire nation for itself. To garrison, arm, and feed its military force of half a million, it embarked on one of the greatest logistical and construction projects in history. The most advanced and technologically sophisticated military in the world was to sustain itself eight thousand miles from California in a poor, agricultural nation.

Great mountains of lumber, steel, concrete mix, and food, rivers of oil and jet fuel, a constant flow of trucks, jeeps, plows, tanks, howitzers, helicopters, and planes, and every imaginable consumer product were shipped to Vietnam day after day, year after year. Simply to unload all that cargo, deepwater ports had to be dredged and equipped. These “
Ports a-Go-Go
” were outfitted with prefabricated piers constructed in the Philippines and towed hundreds of miles to Vietnam. Eventually, the United States completed seven deep-draft ports. When dock space was still limited, hundreds of supply ships had to wait offshore to unload, sometimes up to a month. And before some fourteen million square feet of warehousing was constructed, supplies were simply stacked in the open. In December 1965, for example,
nine million cans of beer and soft drinks
were piled on Saigon wharves.
Theft and corruption
were so rampant that an estimated 40 percent of all supplies disappeared whether they were warehoused or not.

Then there were the dozens of inland bases carved out of the jungles, plateaus, and wetlands—environments utterly transformed into military cities. In the Mekong Delta, for example, the United States built a
base for the Ninth Infantry Division at Dong Tam
on top of riverfront wetlands. To build the six-hundred-acre base, engineers had to raise the ground level by up to ten feet. To do it, they dredged more than two million cubic yards of fill from the river. When the project was completed, the base housed ten thousand troops and included the largest combat heliport in the world.

To accommodate its vast array of warplanes, the U.S. constructed 115 airfields. Fifteen of them had the giant two-mile-long runways required by the bigger American jets. That’s just in South Vietnam. In Thailand, eight other major air bases were constructed or expanded for U.S. bombing strikes against Laos and North Vietnam. Between the airports, roads, and bases, the United States put down some
eleven million tons of asphalt
in South Vietnam, as if it were literally carrying out the prescription of Ronald Reagan’s famous 1965 quip as California governor: “We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.”

In the early 1970s, the navy commissioned a book about military construction in Vietnam written by Richard Tregaskis. It was a surprisingly dull subject to be taken up by the once famous author. In 1943, at age twenty-six, the six-foot-seven Harvard graduate had published one of the best-selling combat narratives of World War II,
Guadalcanal Diary
(1943). An overnight sensation, the book was made into a film within a year of publication.
Guadalcanal Diary
is a classic of what we would now call embedded combat reporting, offering an eyewitness account of the first six weeks of the famous battle through the lives and experiences of U.S. Marines, focusing largely on how green infantrymen overcame their initial fears and uncertainties and developed the “cool, quiet fortitude that comes with battle experience.” Along with the details of small-unit jungle warfare, the book is full of the rah-rah partisanship we associate with the “Good War”: “Down the beach one of the Japs had jumped up and was running for the jungle. ‘There he goes!’ went the shout. ‘
Riddle the son-of-a-bitch
!’ And riddled he was.”

Tregaskis went on to try something similar in the early years of the Vietnam War—
Vietnam Diary
(1963)—but it did not create the same sensation. The World War II combat narratives just didn’t work in Vietnam. By 1973, when Tregaskis
died while swimming
near his home in Hawaii, he was finishing a book called
Southeast Asia: Building the Bases
. It may have seemed like the only triumphant story to tell about the current war. The heroes were not marine riflemen; they were engineers. Published by the Government Printing Office, it was practically designed to sit unread and gather dust. Yet you can still hear the voice of a once popular writer doing his best to attract an audience:

Never before in history
has so much building been crammed into such a small area: a tiny, tropical Asian country the size of the State of Washington. . . . Flying over Vietnam, one sees whole mountains gouged into bases and new cities, with row on row of metal-topped, silvery buildings; wide airbase complexes clustered around the concrete ribbons of runways and taxiways. They were built to defend Vietnam with air power. But they also had the interesting collateral effect of preparing her way for a catapult-style launching into the modern age.

We can also hear the echoes of Walt Rostow and Samuel Huntington as Tregaskis assures us that the vast U.S. military presence in Vietnam will trigger an economic takeoff into the glories of modernity. Even during the war, this bottom-line, last-ditch defense of American policy appeared in the press. As early as 1966,
Time
magazine was already preparing readers for the possibility that the war itself might not go well, but everyone could at least celebrate America’s physical buildup throughout the region:

Whatever the outcome of the war
, the most significant consequence of the U.S. buildup is that, for the first time in history, the U.S. in 1965 established bastions across the nerve centers of Southeast Asia. From formidable new enclaves in South Viet Nam to a far flung network of airfields, supply depots and naval facilities . . . the U.S. will soon be able to rush aid to any threatened ally in Asia. . . . The huge new ports that are being scooped out along the coasts of Viet Nam and Thailand should permanently boost the economies of both nations.

Some wartime construction projects remain in use, but many are in ruins. You can see videos on the Internet of Vietnam veterans exploring the almost unrecognizable sites of their former bases, the buildings stripped away or dilapidated and the land reclaimed by nature. Vietnam is littered with American military ghost towns—isolated, empty, and useless.

During the war, however, those bases were flooded with Americans and
an astounding quantity of American goods
. Although Hollywood films about the war have focused primarily on the experience of combat soldiers who endure levels of physical deprivation and danger unknown to most Americans, the great majority of U.S. troops worked in the rear as mechanics, clerks, cooks, truck drivers, and stevedores and in other supporting roles, many of them housed on huge bases where living conditions were rudimentary by U.S. middle-class standards, but luxurious compared with life in the bush or the living conditions of most Vietnamese anywhere. By the late 1960s, the largest U.S. bases provided not only hot showers, hot meals, and access to well-stocked PXs, but also swimming pools, libraries, nightly movies, maid service (for a nominal charge), ice cream, hobby clubs, academic courses, American television shows (e.g.,
Laugh-In
,
Bonanza,
and
The Beverly Hillbillies
), and service clubs that offered cheap alcohol, slot machines, and occasional go-go dancers, bands, and strippers. Even up in the Central Highlands near Pleiku at Camp Enari, headquarters of the Fourth Infantry Division, the United States built a PX that was 8,800 square feet and had six checkout counters.

At bases across South Vietnam, GIs also had access to “
massage parlors” and “steam baths
” where they could buy sexual services. The largest U.S. military base in South Vietnam, Long Binh, featured a brothel that employed four hundred South Vietnamese women and adolescents. The military command typically denied that it authorized prostitution, but its actions proved otherwise. Many base commanders made sure that the sex workers were routinely treated for venereal diseases (whether they had one or not), and some brothel areas, like “Sin City” in An Khe, were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by U.S. military police.

Occasionally, the military’s official support made it into the media. In 1966,
Time
reported, without a trace of disapproval, that the First Cavalry Division had created Sin City—“the first brothel quarter built exclusively for American soldiers in Vietnam.” The “
25-acre sprawl of ‘boom-boom parlors
’” would eventually include forty structures, each with “a bar and eight cubicles opening off the back.” The women were required to have a weekly medical exam and take “a U.S. provided shot of a long-lasting penicillin-type drug to suppress disease.” As one colonel explained, “We wanted to get the greatest good for our men with the least harm.”
Time
even quoted the rates: “The price of a ‘short time’ varies with the demand from $2.50 to $5.”

The tens of thousands of Vietnamese who worked for Americans to construct bases and other military infrastructure were paid much less. Many of them were employed by the private firms that were contracted to do most of the military’s construction. The bulk of the contracts went to RMK-BRJ,
a consortium of large American construction firms
—Raymond International, Morrison-Knudsen, Brown & Root, and J. A. Jones. The Vietnam War brought a takeoff in military subcontracting, the privatization of jobs that historically had been done primarily by the armed forces. This trend has only escalated in the decades since Vietnam.