American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (26 page)

The counteroffensive did indeed produce a body count to beat all body counts. But that was irrelevant. The U.S. objective required a
political
triumph. The creation of a stable and independent non-Communist South Vietnam depended on broad political support for the American-backed government in Saigon. Only then could that government survive without vast U.S. military and economic support.

In fact, the Tet Offensive and the U.S. counteroffensive actually made the odds of political victory all the worse, both at home and in Vietnam. In the United States, most Americans viewed the Tet Offensive as conclusive evidence that the administration had lied about progress in Vietnam. CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite famously concluded that the war had become a bloody stalemate with no end in sight. The American counteroffensive merely proved that a superpower can prop up an unpopular regime indefinitely.

In Vietnam, Tet made South Vietnamese civilians more insecure than ever. Those who supported the Saigon regime, or at least depended on it for their livelihood, tended to live in the cities and large towns of the South. A good many had prospered from the wartime economy and U.S. aid. The war had not yet directly touched these urban elites. Then came Tet, and the war was suddenly and brutally at virtually every doorstep. The immediate threat came from the attackers who regarded Vietnamese who served the “puppet regime” as traitorous collaborators. In Hue city, Communist forces captured, killed, or executed a great many people who had served the Saigon government and its American backers. The death toll of the massacre may never be precisely known, and continues to be debated, but it is certainly possible that several thousand people were killed.

Tet demonstrated that the United States was unable to protect these people. That itself was profoundly troubling to urban Vietnamese whose lives had become enmeshed with the United States. But the South Vietnamese learned another, even more troubling, lesson from Tet. They learned that the United States did not regard the security of
any
Vietnamese people—even their closest allies—as equivalent to the security of American troops. To drive the Communists back, U.S. forces launched a
brutal and indiscriminate counteroffensive
. To defend themselves, the Americans made no effort to distinguish “friendly” Vietnamese from the enemy. They bombed and shelled wherever Communist forces had penetrated, including downtown Hue and, during the “mini-Tet” of early May, the affluent District Eight in Saigon where so many middle-class Catholic government employees lived. To those “allies,” the military “success” of the counteroffensive did not bolster their allegiance. Tet was the most dramatic revelation of how irrelevant military power was to the political reality and outcome of the Vietnam War.

Tobias Wolff, an American lieutenant, described the devastating impact of the American counteroffensive in his 1994 memoir,
In Pharaoh’s Army
. As a Green Beret, Wolff had received a year of training in Vietnamese, allowing him “to speak the language like a seven-year-old child with a freakish military vocabulary.” In Vietnam, he served as an adviser to a South Vietnamese (ARVN) artillery battalion near the Mekong River town of My Tho.

In response to the Tet attack, Wolff participated in the effort to drive the Viet Cong out of My Tho with massive, sustained artillery fire:

We knocked down bridges and sank boats. We leveled shops and bars along the river. We pulverized hotels and houses, floor by floor, street by street, block by block. I saw the map, I knew where the shells were going, but I didn’t think of our targets as homes where exhausted and frightened people were praying for their lives. When you’re afraid you will kill anything that might kill you.
Now that the enemy had the town, the town was the enemy
.

After two days of nearly constant shelling, “the jets showed up” and proceeded to bomb the town, taking out whatever targets the artillery had missed and then some.

Only when we finally took the town back . . . did I see what we had done, we and the VC together. The place was a wreck, still smoldering two weeks later, still reeking sweetly of corpses. The corpses were everywhere, lying in the streets, floating in the reservoir . . . the smell so thick and foul we had to wear surgical masks scented with cologne, aftershave, deodorant, whatever we had, simply to move through the town. . . .
Hundreds of corpses and the count kept rising
. . . . One day I passed a line of them that went on for almost a block, all children.

There were similar scenes all over South Vietnam. Tobias Wolff concluded that the Tet Offensive had failed as a Communist “military project.” But as a political “lesson” it had succeeded.

The VC came into My Tho and all the other towns knowing what would happen. They knew that once they were among the people we would abandon our pretense of distinguishing between them. We would kill them all to get at one. In this way they taught the people that we did not love them and would not protect them; that for all our talk of partnership and brotherhood we disliked and mistrusted them, and that we would kill every last one of them to save our own skins. To believe otherwise was self-deception.

After the Tet Offensive, General Westmoreland was replaced by General Creighton Abrams (1968–1972). Admirers of Abrams credit him with waging a smarter, more focused war, providing more security to villagers and attacking the enemy with greater precision. The record does not substantiate these claims. In fact, Abrams presided over an even more indiscriminate air war (against South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) and cooperated with the CIA’s notorious program of political assassinations called the Phoenix Program. Phoenix began in 1967 and expanded during Abrams’s tenure. It was designed to “neutralize” the Viet Cong Infrastructure—the shadow government of Communist political officers and operatives. Under Phoenix, thousands of unarmed, unresisting suspects were murdered. The killing of unarmed noncombatants, even those who proved to be Communist officials, was a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions of war and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Moral condemnation of the Phoenix Program grew as evidence mounted that many victims were not Communist agents but ordinary civilians. Untold numbers of civilians were killed because they were misidentified, wrongly accused, or simply in the same vicinity as the “target.”

Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto was assigned to the Phoenix Program for two months in late 1968. A recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross for service in the 25th Infantry Division, the future judge came to view Phoenix as a program of “
uncontrolled violence
.” At times, he says, “I think it became just wholesale killing.” The Phoenix teams often relied on unreliable informants. “Half the time the people were so afraid they would say anything.” Once a target was identified, a Phoenix team often arrived at the suspect’s house in the middle of the night. “Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they’d come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people.”

Under the command of General Creighton Abrams, the body count continued to be a primary measure of success. Abrams supported and promoted one of its most flagrant advocates, General Julian J. Ewell. As commander of the Ninth Infantry Division in 1968–1969, Ewell was dubbed the Butcher of the Delta. He was notorious for hectoring his troops for body counts. “
Get a hundred a day
, every day,” he demanded. When Lieutenant Colonel David Hackworth arrived to take command of one of Ewell’s battalions, the general said, “It’s a pussy battalion and I want tigers, not pussies.” According to Hackworth, every battalion commander in the Ninth Division was required to carry a small card with an “up-to-date, day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month body-count tally, just in case Gen. Ewell happened to show up.” Ewell “didn’t give a damn whose body was counted, and a great many—too many—civilians in the Delta were part of the scores. . . . ‘
If it moves, shoot it
; if it doesn’t, count it’ would have been the perfect division motto.”
In his postwar memoir, Hackworth criticized Ewell’s ruthlessness, but the colonel was hardly free of complicity. He made no protest at the time, and one of Hackworth’s sergeants was holding the radiophone when he heard his commander screaming at helicopter gunship pilots to destroy a sampan. “
I don’t give a shit
,” Hackworth reportedly said. “Shoot them anyway, women or not.”

From December 1968 to May 1969, Ewell’s Ninth Infantry launched a major offensive to gain control of a large and heavily populated region of the Mekong Delta. Called Operation Speedy Express, the offensive employed eight thousand infantrymen backed by heavy artillery, helicopters, fighter-bombers, and B-52s. The military command considered it one of the war’s most stunning successes. Even before the operation was over, General Creighton Abrams promoted General Ewell to the largest army command in Vietnam—II Field Force. At the change-of-command ceremony Abrams praised the “magnificent” performance of the Ninth Division and the “
brilliant and sensitive” leadership
of Ewell. “General Ewell has been the epitome of the professional soldier.”

The body counts were staggering. The Ninth Division claimed that Operation Speedy Express achieved an enemy body count of 10,889. American deaths were put at 267, a kill ratio of roughly 41 to 1. One of the most telling statistics from the operation is the number of enemy weapons claimed: a mere 748. How could almost 11,000 enemy troops be killed with so few weapons to be found? That question, along with the physical evidence of destroyed villages and hospitals full of civilian casualties, led
Newsweek
reporters Kevin Buckley and Alex Shimkin to investigate. Three years later the magazine finally published a much truncated version of the study. But the evidence was profoundly disturbing. It “pointed to a clear conclusion: a staggering number of noncombatant civilians—perhaps as many as 5,000 according to one official—were killed by U.S. firepower to ‘pacify’ Kien Hoa [a Mekong Delta province]. The death toll there
made the My Lai massacre look trifling
by comparison.”

Decades later, in 2001, additional evidence was unearthed by Columbia graduate student Nick Turse. A tireless investigator, Turse discovered a previously unexamined collection of shocking documents in the National Archives. These twenty-nine boxes of wartime documents (nine thousand pages of them) had been classified for decades. They were assembled in the wake of the My Lai massacre revelations by a group of officers charged by the Pentagon to investigate allegations of other war crimes committed by members of the U.S. Army in Vietnam. This
Vietnam War Crimes Working Group
gathered hundreds of sworn testimonies from soldiers and veterans who witnessed or participated in torture, rape, murder, and other war crimes. For all the damning evidence they found, a number of the army investigators believed they had discovered only the tip of the iceberg. Most war crimes were never reported or investigated.

Among the documents, Turse found a ten-page letter written in 1970 to General William Westmoreland, then the army chief of staff. It came from a “concerned sergeant” who had participated in Speedy Express and wanted the Pentagon to investigate. “Sir,” he wrote, “by pushing the body count so hard, we were ‘told’ to kill many times more Vietnamese than at My Lay [Lai], and very few per cents of them did we know were enemy.” Great sections of the delta had been declared free-fire zones, he explained, even though many of the villages were still fully populated. Air strikes and artillery were called in “even if we didn’t get shot at.” The number of civilians killed, the sergeant claimed, added up to
a “My Lay [Lai] each month
for a year.” A Pentagon lawyer deemed the sergeant’s charges plausible, and investigators located him for further investigation. Before they could proceed, Westmoreland shut it down.

However, after the
Newsweek
story on Speedy Express appeared in 1972,
the army commissioned its own secret investigation
. It reached the same conclusion: “While there appears to be no means of determining the precise number of civilian casualties incurred by U.S. forces during Operation Speedy Express . . . a fairly solid case can be constructed to show that civilian casualties may have amounted to several thousand (between 5,000 and 7,000).”

No top commanders openly rebelled against the body count obsession, even though many harbored serious private doubts about its effectiveness and morality. That surprising news emerged from a study by retired general Douglas Kinnard. In 1970, after two tours in Vietnam, Kinnard was disgusted with the war and quietly resigned to pursue a PhD in political science at Princeton. In 1974, he sent a questionnaire to each of the 173 army general officers who had held command positions in Vietnam from 1965 to 1972. Promised anonymity, two-thirds of the generals complied, and
Kinnard published his findings
in
The War Managers
(1977). Kinnard found that only 2 percent of the generals believed that the “measurement of progress system,” based largely on the body count, “was a valid system to measure progress in the war.” Some of the generals added personal comments denouncing the body count: “A great crime and cancer in the Army in the eyes of young officers in 1969–1971,” wrote one. “Gruesome,” wrote another. “The bane of my existence,” wrote a third.

Throughout the war and beyond, many military elites have defended their institution by blaming the failures in Vietnam on politicians, or home front dissent, or the media. They have often said that U.S. forces in Vietnam never lost on the battlefield. In a narrow sense that is true. The United States consistently proved that it was the greatest military superpower in the world. With B-52s, supersonic jets, aircraft carriers, cluster bombs, napalm, gunships, chemical defoliants, artillery strikes, ground operations by the thousands, year after year, the military demonstrated its capacity to maintain control of South Vietnam as long as the United States was willing to incur the costs. But the U.S. goal was not to fight forever; it was to bolster a non-Communist South Vietnamese government that could survive on its own. Achieving that end depended on gaining what the United States could never secure—the broad political support of the people. Military power could not persuade; it could only destroy. Some U.S. officers used a short expression to encourage greater aggression against the enemy: “Make ’em believers!” they cried. It meant to kill them.