American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (22 page)

Twenty months later, journalists tracked down Meadlo in his hometown of Goshen, Indiana. They found that most townspeople supported the young veteran and what he had done at My Lai. “He had to do what his officer told him,” said the owner of a pool hall. “Things like that happen in war. They always have and they always will,” said a veteran of World War II and Korea.

Meadlo’s parents, however, did not agree. His father, a retired coal miner, said: “If it had been me out there I would have swung my rifle around and shot Calley instead—right between the God-damned eyes.” Meadlo’s mother said this: “
I raised him up to be a good boy
and did everything I could. They come along and took him to the service. He fought for his country and look what they done to him—made him a murderer.”

F
OR
SHEER
SIZE
and firepower you couldn’t beat the B-52. The pride of the Strategic Air Command, the massive, eight-engine jet bomber was activated in 1955 and designed to drop America’s hydrogen bombs on enemy targets anywhere in the world. The B-52 Stratofortress was not nearly as sleek or speedy as America’s supersonic fighter-bombers—the Phantoms, Thunderchiefs, and Super Sabres—but no aircraft could deliver as many weapons of mass destruction. Air force crews called it BUFF: Big Ugly Fat Fucker.

During the 1960s, B-52s flew along the Arctic Circle twenty-four hours a day, every day, awaiting a Go-Code, the order to fly over the top of the world to attack the Communist bloc. Even in 1961, when U.S. nuclear stockpiles were a fraction of what they would soon become, the Pentagon’s plan for “general nuclear war” called for bombing strikes on hundreds of targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe with an
estimated death toll
of at least five hundred million. That unfathomable figure did not include potential American or Western European fatalities, but it did highlight an obvious point—the vast majority of every nation’s dead would be civilians. Nuclear war would be mass murder.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, American anxiety about nuclear holocaust far outweighed public concern about events in Vietnam. In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Americans went to bed wondering if there would be a world left in the morning. The war in Vietnam was still a minor story. Only a clairvoyant could have foreseen that Vietnam would soon become such a daily source of dread that nuclear worries would fade into the background.

Nuclear nightmares were fueled not only by real Cold War tension, but by a number of haunting films that made the possibility of atomic obliteration chillingly credible. From
On the Beach
(1959) to
Fail-Safe
(1964) and
Dr. Strangelove
(1964), Americans were confronted with doomsday scenarios, including the possibility that nuclear war might be triggered by a technical glitch (
Fail-Safe
) or a madman (
Dr. Strangelove
).

Dr. Strangelove
may be the most bleakly hilarious film ever made. Air force general Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) unilaterally orders his wing of B-52s to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union because he believes the Russians are destroying America through the fluoridation of U.S. water supplies—“the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.” General Ripper is convinced that fluoridation has sapped “all of our precious bodily fluids” and has rendered him
impotent
(or sexually confused): “I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.”

The squirmy humor discomfits as much as it amuses. For underneath the caricature of a lunatic general who is willing to destroy the world to recover his manhood lies the film’s most provocative and disturbing claim—that American culture harbors a deep and sexualized male attraction to violence (strange love indeed). In a famous scene near the end, we see B-52 pilot Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) straddling the tip of a hydrogen bomb as he rides it to his target, ecstatically rocking his hips on the nuke, whooping and waving his cowboy hat en route to the inevitable explosion.

On the cusp of major U.S. military escalation in Vietnam, American filmgoers were already confronted with the possibility that their nation might engage in unthinkable violence for no rational reason, in which killing became an end in itself. And the B-52 was an emblem of the apocalypse.

In June 1965, that very aircraft suddenly appeared over the skies of South Vietnam. America’s mightiest bomber—with a wingspan wider than a football field—spearheaded the U.S. escalation. Of course, the United States had been bombing and napalming South Vietnam since 1962. But now, with waves of B-52s turning large swaths of South Vietnam into a cratered wasteland, it was no longer possible to refer to Vietnam as a little “brush-fire war,” or a limited “conflict.” Now strategic bombers were pummeling the very country where President Johnson said U.S. troops were protecting “
simple farmers
” and “helpless villages” from the “unparalleled brutality” of “Communist aggression.”

Within a few months, the
B-52 bombing missions became so routine that flight crews began calling them milk runs—frequent, round-trip deliveries with no threat of antiaircraft fire from the ground. They flew their sorties from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam
. The largest island in Micronesia, the former Spanish colony of Guam was seized by the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and remains a U.S. territory. From this American sanctuary, the B-52s, with their six-man crews, flew 2,600 miles to the west to reach Vietnam. After dropping their bombs, they returned to Guam. It was such a long flight the planes had to refuel in midair. The round-trip milk run took twelve hours. On the way home, crews fought off sleep with coffee and frozen dinners heated on board.

The B-52s that bombed Vietnam were refitted to hold conventional bombs on pylons attached under the enormous swept-back wings. Additional modifications of the internal bomb bays allowed each plane to carry
60,000 pounds of bombs
—30 tons. A single B-52 could drop eighty-four 500-pound bombs from its belly, and another twenty-four 750-pound bombs from under its wings. Each bomb could produce a crater about fifteen feet deep and thirty feet in diameter. Each explosion sent shrapnel flying two hundred feet in every direction.

The B-52 strikes over South Vietnam were code-named Operation Arc Light. Ordinarily, a “cell” of three B-52s attacked a target “box” that was 1.2 miles long and 0.6 miles wide. Many targets were hit by a wave of seven or eight “cells.” That degree of carpet bombing ensured nearly total destruction of an area roughly the size of the National Mall in Washington, DC.

In addition to high-explosive bombs and napalm, B-52s dropped enormous quantities of
cluster bombs
—little bombs packed inside one big one. Every big bomb contained hundreds of smaller bomblets, each one containing hundreds of steel pellets or razor-sharp darts (fléchettes). For example, the tiny BLU-26B “Guava” fragmentation bomblet was only 2.3 inches in diameter, but upon impact it released an explosion of three hundred steel pellets. The Defense Department ordered some 285 million Guava bomblets from 1966 to 1971—roughly seven bomblets for every person in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Cluster bombs are prototypical antipersonnel weapons (weapons intended to destroy people rather than structures). The steel pellets or fiberglass darts did not always kill, but they often burrowed deep into the body, where they were impossible to remove and could cause long-term suffering and eventual death. A single B-52, loaded with cluster bombs, could cover a square mile with 7.5
million
steel pellets firing out in every direction.
Bomblets that failed to explode
on contact could explode years and even decades later when inadvertently dislodged by farmers or picked up by children. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians have been killed or wounded since the war by ordnance left behind by U.S. air strikes.

High-flying B-52s were invisible and silent to those on the ground. They usually dropped their bombs from an altitude of five or six miles. In heavily bombed areas, Vietnamese learned to suspect an imminent B-52 attack when oft-sighted helicopters and other low-flying aircraft did not appear for an extended period of time, a sign that the Americans might be clearing airspace for the giant bombers. “
When everything was very calm
overhead, we moved to the deepest parts of the tunnels,” recalled Duong Thanh Phong, a Viet Cong veteran who lived northwest of Saigon in a region with an enormous network of underground tunnels. Many people who hid underground were crushed, buried, suffocated, deafened, and brain damaged. But more people survived than anyone might have thought possible.

When the bombs hit, there was no mistaking an Arc Light strike. CIA analyst George Allen was having dinner in Saigon the night of the first B-52 strikes in 1965. Although the bombs were falling thirty-five miles away, he suddenly felt adrenaline flowing through his body. “Then I noticed that the shutters of the house had begun to rattle, and
the drapes were fluttering
. In the distance we could hear the faint, ominously deep, and sustained rumble of explosions.” To anyone within three miles, the thunderous concussions were terrifying. The explosions created
enough turbulence to make clothing slap
against skin as if a hurricane were approaching.

Given that scale of destruction, it’s surprising that B-52s are not a more iconic symbol of the Vietnam War. In American memory, helicopters are far more commonly linked to the war, and for obvious reasons. Thousands of Hueys, Chinooks, Cobras, and Loaches were almost constantly visible over South Vietnam. Choppers appeared in countless TV reports. Perhaps the single most common TV war footage showed American troops, bent at the waist, jogging toward or away from helicopters, the rotors whipping up so much wind the nearby grass is flattened.

The B-52s, by contrast, flew far above and beyond the war zone. You might see occasional shots of B-52s releasing dozens of bombs that looked like harmless sticks of wood falling out of the giant planes. But the aftermath on the ground remained invisible. Newspaper accounts of B-52 attacks in Vietnam were as routine and bloodless as the missions were to the crews. And since the strikes became so common, reporters required to file daily dispatches could always use a formulaic B-52 story on slow news days. The B-52 “lead” became one of the easiest and most predictable press reports of the war. A few samples:

Giant United States B52 bombers pounded the dense Red-infiltrated jungle 35 miles northwest of Saigon today (AP, July 5, 1965).

A flight of 25 to 30 B-52 bombers Wednesday saturated a Viet Cong stronghold near Saigon with an estimated 500 tons of bombs (UPI, July 22, 1965).

Guam-based B-52 bombers, newly modified to hold 60,000 pounds of bombs each, jackhammered a Viet Cong radio and communications center 35 miles northeast of Saigon (
New York Times
, April 15, 1966).

Waves of United States B-52 jet bombers droned over South Vietnam today and smashed three suspected Vietcong targets on the fringe of the Michelin rubber plantation, about 40 miles from Saigon (
New York Times
, November 30, 1966).

However many colorful synonyms reporters found for “bombed”—pounded, smashed, jackhammered, plastered, rained, saturated—the overall impact of these stories was numbing. And for years, virtually every B-52 report automatically parroted the official claim that the bombs fell strictly on military targets—on Viet Cong base areas, strongholds, positions, redoubts, and installations, or at least
suspected
Viet Cong targets
.

A more probing media would have raised obvious questions about the use of B-52s. The most obvious would address the likelihood of major civilian casualties. Carpet bombing was indiscriminate by definition. And why were strategic bombers, designed for wholesale destruction of the enemy homeland, used in
South
Vietnam? After all, the Johnson administration had insisted that
North
Vietnam was the clear, external aggressor against an independent South. The intense and massive bombing of suspected Viet Cong strongholds just a few miles from South Vietnam’s capital demonstrated a reality Washington was not willing to concede—that the most imminent and dire threat to the American-backed government in 1965 was posed by the homegrown guerrillas of the South, not North Vietnamese regular troops coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. LBJ and his advisers believed major bombing near Saigon was
essential simply to forestall defeat
.

The major media did raise some doubts about the effectiveness of the B-52 attacks. Was this blunt instrument really a smart way to fight a counterinsurgency? One common source of insider criticism, Colonel John Paul Vann, had been criticizing the bombing of South Vietnam since 1962, three years before the B-52s came on the scene. Bombing, he often said, was
the worst way to fight
a counter-guerrilla war. It was cruel, indiscriminate, and self-defeating. It killed more civilians than combatants. In a war that depended on political allegiance, bombing enraged the people, helping the enemy recruit a new fighter for every one that was killed.

Yet officials continued to defend the bombing. The B-52s were so terrifying and dislocating, they insisted, the enemy would eventually become demoralized. At the very least, the strikes would keep him “on the run” and destroy his jungle hideaways. But nothing in the American arsenal, including its most powerful bomber, could destroy the enemy’s ability or willingness to continue fighting.

As the war went on, however, policymakers did find a justification for B-52 bombing that had some basis in reality. It couldn’t bring victory, but it could delay defeat. On the few occasions Communist forces massed together in large numbers near U.S. positions such as Dak To (1967), Khe Sanh (1968), and An Loc (1972), heavy bombing could prevent large bases from being overrun. Similarly, when Hanoi launched the Tet Offensive of 1968 and the Easter Offensive of 1972, B-52 strikes produced especially massive body counts that effectively prevented Communist military victories. Indeed, the sheer killing power of the bombers eventually led John Paul Vann to reverse his position on air strikes. Having once criticized the entire U.S. air war as excessive and counterproductive, by 1972 Vann was relying so heavily on massive bombing his Vietnamese staff started calling him “
Mr. B-52
.”

Vann’s conversion to bombing rested more on desperation than faith. It could at least defer defeat. As long as you ruthlessly pounded every major Communist advance, you could occupy South Vietnam indefinitely. But it intensified Vietnamese hostility toward the United States and the U.S.-backed regime in Saigon.

The bombing also eroded public support for the war at home. Many Americans eventually found it intolerable that the world’s greatest superpower was bombing a small, poor, mostly agricultural nation that posed no threat to U.S. national security. At antiwar demonstrations, signs reading “Stop the Bombing” were as common as “Stop the War” or “Peace Now.”