American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (23 page)

The criticism reflected a growing American empathy for Vietnamese civilian victims, a remarkable degree of emotional identification coming from a people that had never experienced the sustained bombing of its own homeland. In the United States, a deep-seated sense of invulnerability to foreign attack has been an important, but sometimes neglected, aspect of national identity. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of 2001 were great challenges to that sense of security, but those attacks, horrible as they were, lasted a few hours, not years. And even the underlying dread caused by the nuclear arms race hardly compared to the
anxiety of people living under daily bombing
.

American empathy with Vietnamese victims was not widespread when the bombing began, but it grew. Near the end of the war, the mainstream media began to reflect some of this public concern.
Time
magazine, for example, had for years echoed official reassurances that civilians were never targeted and rarely hit. By 1972, however, even
Time
expressed skepticism. That summer, B-52s were bombing the heavily populated Mekong Delta with wave after wave of daily attacks. “The most heavily hit region of the current campaign has been Dinh Tuong province, where 600,000 Vietnamese, mostly small farmers, are crammed into a tiny area one-third the size of Rhode Island. . . . The U.S. maintains that civilians are not being bombed in the Delta [but] in fact the bombing has claimed numerous civilian casualties . . . the
bombs are dropping night and day
on the friendly Vietnamese of Dinh Tuong.”

The sustained air war in South Vietnam (1962–1975) was far more destructive than the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam (1965–1968, 1972). The United States dropped four million tons of bombs on the South, one million tons on the North. And while the air war quickly intensified in the South with the beginning of the B-52 strikes in 1965, the bombing of the North began much more gradually, moving northward from the 17th parallel, and did not include B-52 carpet bombing until Nixon renewed and intensified the air war over North Vietnam in 1972.

Yet public debate and the media tended to focus more on the bombing of North Vietnam. In part, that was because there was a lot of controversy around LBJ’s graduated escalation of the bombing there, his close control over bombing targets, and his fruitless effort to use bombing “pauses” as a diplomatic card to encourage the North to drop its firm commitment to reunite with the South.

Attention on the North was also raised by the media’s greater interest in the navy and air force pilots who bombed North Vietnam. Among U.S. pilots, their stories were often the most dramatic because North Vietnam had a formidable air defense system. With antiaircraft artillery, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), and MiG fighter jets provided by the Soviet Union and China, the North Vietnamese were able to shoot down more than sixteen hundred U.S. aircraft. In the South, the Viet Cong shot down hundreds of helicopters, but did not have the weapons to pose much threat to fighter-bombers, and they were completely unable to shoot down the high-flying B-52s.

Magazine articles offered colorful accounts of naval aviators taking off from aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Roaring off the deck with “an
unforgettable outburst of raw power
,” they would soon be over North Vietnam “jinking and diving” to avoid North Vietnam’s surface-to-air missiles—those “28-foot ‘flying telephone poles.’” When airmen were forced to eject, journalists raised public concern about their plight (“two more comrades faced indefinite imprisonment in North Vietnam”). And sometimes there was a dramatic rescue to report:

Streaking out of low cloud cover
just seaward of Haiphong, the U.S. Air Force Voodoo flew smack into a sky full of flak. As his reconnaissance fighter belched flame from its starboard engine, Captain Norman Huggins, 36, of Sumter, S.C., knew his search for North Vietnamese SAM sites was over for the day. . . . Whoosh went the canopy, pow went the 37-mm. cartridge under his seat, pop went the parachute. . . . Huggins splashed down west of [an] island. . . . Onto the scene fluttered a revamped “Silver Angel”—the stubby-winged HU-16 sea-rescue amphibian of Air Force Captain David P. Westenbarger. . . . Dropping down through the cloud layer to 100 ft., Westenbarger saw an oncoming 30-ft junk spitting machine-gun bullets just short of Huggins. “Dunk that junk,” he ordered four fighters circling overhead. As they complied, Westenbarger splashed down [and] pulled the downed aviator aboard . . . Huggins needed only a minute to regain his breath, then grabbed a rifle himself. “Come on,” he said with understandable vengeance, “let me do some of that shooting.”

Stories about American pilots could sound like comic books—“pop went the parachute”—but accounts of the actual bombing were often as dry as dust and relied on details provided by military briefers who made the U.S. air war sound like a surgical procedure. As journalist Zalin Grant recalled: “In reality
the air briefing was a bore
. . . . Normally reporters yawned and wrote their stories from the blue mimeographed press release, often quoting it word for word.” Briefings about air strikes on the “Phu Ly-Co Trai military complex,” for example, implied that U.S. forces had cleanly wiped out a major center of munitions factories and military bases. In fact, the target was a single bridge that ran through a thickly populated area in which civilian casualties were nearly inevitable.

Even America’s most sophisticated aircraft
routinely missed their targets
. Take the air force’s F-105 Thunderchief. Flown from bases in Thailand and South Vietnam, the F-105 dropped almost three-quarters of the one million tons of bombs used against North Vietnam. According to military statistics, the F-105 missions had a “circular error probability” of 447 feet, meaning that half the bombs they dropped fell at least 447 feet away from their target. Only 5.5 percent of the F-105 bombs were “direct hits.”

Moreover, there were few targets of military significance in North Vietnam. The Pentagon could identify only ninety-four, and even those paled in comparison to the vast transportation networks, military bases, naval shipyards, and munitions factories of industrialized military powers. Vietnam was overwhelmingly agricultural and rural. The third-largest city in North Vietnam—Nam Dinh—had a population of only about ninety thousand. War-related manufacturing and storage were also dispersed throughout the land. Briefers in Saigon talked about bombing strikes on “POL” storage areas as if North Vietnam had hundreds of gigantic tanks of petroleum, oil, and lubricants. In fact, most of those products (along with guns, ammo, and everything necessary to carry on the war) were distributed in small quantities throughout the country. In a tiny village two hundred miles from Hanoi you might stumble upon a few well-hidden fifty-five-gallon drums of oil and boxes of ammunition.

Even the “significant” targets proved not to be very significant. If U.S. bombs destroyed a bridge, for example, the movement of troops and supplies from North Vietnam to the battlefields in the South might be interrupted, but never permanently halted. Within hours, alternative crossings were devised—ferryboats were moved in or pontoon bridges were created out of lashed-together flat-bottom canal boats covered with bamboo. Or, if bombs knocked out a section of railroad tracks, hundreds of Vietnamese would arrive at the stalled railroad cars to transfer the cargo onto bicycles. They had figured out a way to load up to six hundred pounds on a single bicycle. The loaded bikes, steered with a long wooden pole across the handlebars, were walked to the undamaged side of the tracks where another railroad car would be waiting to continue the journey.

Even when the United States finally succeeded in knocking out North Vietnam’s most important rail and highway link to the South—the Thanh Hoa Bridge—it had no impact on the war. But to the U.S. military, the bridge had become an obsession. Nearly nine hundred American warplanes attacked Thanh Hoa. And because the North Vietnamese surrounded the bridge with antiaircraft guns, more than a hundred airmen were shot down near the site. Finally, in 1972, the U.S. managed to destroy the bridge using new laser-guided bombs. Yet it was a meaningless triumph. Communist forces quickly found alternative routes over the Song Ma River before repairing the bridge a year later. The story of
the Thanh Hoa Bridge
vividly reveals the failure of U.S. airpower in Vietnam, despite official claims to the contrary.

Some of these realities came to public light in the winter of 1966–1967, when Harrison Salisbury became the first U.S. reporter to gain admission to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). The fifty-eight-year-old Salisbury was a seasoned journalist. He had been the
New York Times
bureau chief in Moscow from 1949 to 1954 and had traveled to many other Communist countries prior to his arrival in Hanoi. During his two-week visit, his dispatches for the
Times
were picked up by newspapers around the world and represented the first major media challenge to Washington’s claim that U.S. bombing was effectively curbing the North’s support for the Viet Cong while avoiding civilian casualties.

Salisbury’s initial look at the North Vietnamese countryside led him to assume that U.S. bombing could hardly fail. After all, there was only one major highway and one major railroad. How hard would it be for the world’s greatest superpower to destroy them? “The railroad and the highway, running side by side, across the completely flat terrain crossing and recrossing canal after canal and river after river” represented a “bombardier’s dream.” But after witnessing how quickly the Vietnamese repaired the bomb damage or created alternative routes, he could not ignore the obvious: “
I could see with my own eyes
that the movement of men, materials, food and munitions had not been halted. . . .The traffic flowed out of Hanoi and Haiphong night after night after night.”

Salisbury was right. In fact,
the more the United States bombed, the more troops went south
. In 1965, when the United States flew 25,000 sorties against North Vietnam, some 35,000 North Vietnamese troops moved to the South. By 1967, the U.S. had quadrupled the air war against North Vietnam, flying 108,000 sorties. Nonetheless, some 90,000 NVA soldiers arrived in the South.

Salisbury also documented North Vietnam’s extraordinary efforts to minimize the impact of the bombing. In his first
Times
dispatch, published on Christmas Day 1966, he described Hanoi as a city “
going about its business
briskly, energetically, purposefully . . . hardly a truck moves without its green bough of camouflage. Even pretty girls camouflage their bicycles and conical straw hats.” A few days later he reported that hundreds of thousands of individual bomb bunkers—concrete manholes—had been dug on sidewalks throughout the city and that many residents had evacuated to the countryside. “Everything dispersible has been dispersed. The countryside is strewn with dispersed goods and supplies. The same is true of the people.”

Despite these measures, Salisbury reported, the bombing had taken a substantial toll on North Vietnamese civilians. Although U.S. officials had repeatedly insisted that only military targets were hit, Salisbury discovered that many residential neighborhoods had been struck, along with schools, shops, nonmilitary factories, Catholic churches, Buddhist temples, and dikes. And in many cases there were no discernible military targets in the area. “
The bombed areas of Nam Dinh
possess an appearance familiar to anyone who saw blitzed London, devastated Berlin and Warsaw, or smashed Soviet cities like Stalingrad and Kharkov.”

In response, the administration and its supporters did their best to discredit Salisbury’s dispatches. They especially attacked him for reporting casualty figures provided by the North Vietnamese, as if that itself were an act of disloyalty. According to
Time
magazine
,
Salisbury presented a “
distorted picture
” that would “reinforce the widely held impression that the U.S. is a big powerful nation viciously bombing a small, defenseless country into oblivion, and thus spur international demands for an end to the air war.”

Evidence of civilian casualties put the Johnson administration in an embarrassing position. Even as Salisbury’s reports were coming out, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy had an article in
Foreign Affairs
claiming that “the bombing of the North has been the most accurate and the
most restrained in modern warfare
.”

A substantial number of Americans agreed with Bundy and were appalled. They wanted to eliminate all restraints. A Gallup poll in October 1967 found that 42 percent of Americans would support the use of nuclear weapons to win the war in Vietnam. That was the highest percentage ever recorded on that question, but other polls routinely found 20–25 percent willing to embrace atomic warfare against North Vietnam. Like retired air force general Curtis LeMay, who once recommended that the U.S. bomb Vietnam “back into the Stone Age,”
many pro-war hawks railed
against President Johnson for micromanaging the air war against North Vietnam and limiting the targets. Why weren’t American bombers allowed to blast and mine Haiphong harbor, where Soviet ships delivered crucial war supplies? What about the rail lines near the Chinese border? Or
why not simply firebomb
all of Hanoi as the United States had done to Tokyo and more than sixty other Japanese cities during World War II? Even during the Korean War, U.S. bombing had utterly destroyed most of the major population centers of the Communist North.

By contrast, the bombing of North Vietnam
was
restricted, especially during the first two years of Operation Rolling Thunder (1965–1966). And LBJ
did
micromanage the air war in the North, once bragging, “I won’t let those Air Force generals bomb
the smallest outhouse
north of the 17th parallel without checking with me.” His personal oversight was based on one overriding fear: that a more aggressive campaign against North Vietnam might compel the Chinese, or even the Soviets, to enter the war. Johnson well recalled how 300,000 Chinese troops poured into Korea after the United States attacked past the 38th parallel and fought all the way up to the Chinese border.