American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (7 page)

Nor did Americans know about that summer’s other covert operation—the one in Guatemala. In June 1954, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to launch its secret plan to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala,
Jacobo Arbenz
. The Eisenhower administration considered Arbenz a Communist sympathizer, if not a full-fledged Red, because in addition to the liberal, New Deal–style reforms he had implemented (e.g., universal suffrage, social security, the right to organize unions), he introduced an agrarian reform program that seized about one-seventh of the property owned by the United Fruit Company, a U.S. firm that owned 42 percent of Guatemala’s land. This modest nationalization of fallow land (for which the company was compensated), along with a small shipment of old “Communist weapons” from Czechoslovakia, led Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to declare that Arbenz had begun a “reign of terror.”

The next thing the American public heard about Guatemala was the wholly fictitious story of a successful “popular uprising” against Arbenz by Guatemalan “patriots.” It was the CIA alone that was responsible for ousting Arbenz and installing Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, a brutal dictator who immediately revoked the land reforms, disenfranchised most Guatemalans, banned labor unions, and initiated fifty years of repressive government and civil war that ultimately killed more than 200,000 people. Under Eisenhower, the CIA launched
170 major covert actions
in forty-eight nations.

Eisenhower’s foreign policies thus bear a striking resemblance to those of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Both presidents led war-weary nations reluctant to fight again, especially where there was no compelling goal or clear end point. Yet both men were devout cold warriors. Confronted by the Never Again Club that emerged from Korea and the Vietnam syndrome of the 1970s and 1980s, Eisenhower and Reagan used military force primarily in secret and by proxy.

A major difference between the two eras, however, is that in the 1950s most Americans trusted their government to carry out foreign policy in ways that were necessary for national security and to advance freedom and democracy. By the 1980s, largely because of the experience of the Vietnam War, many Americans questioned the fundamental premises and execution of U.S. policy. They were far more skeptical when their president claimed to be supporting “freedom fighters” in a righteous struggle against “Communist-controlled revolutionaries.” There was much broader public awareness that Cold War America had supported many dictatorial and repressive regimes to gain their political, strategic, and economic compliance. By the 1980s, many Americans opposed not only major U.S. military interventions, but even the U.S.-backed proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

The rise of dissent toward Cold War foreign policy can be traced in the history of a phrase. In the 1950s, “Communist aggression” was one of the most common expressions in American political discourse. It tripped off so many tongues and pens it seemed like an unquestioned law of nature, solid and permanent, beyond doubt. It was easy to assume that Communists and Communist nations were, by definition, always the aggressors, always the ones to initiate hostilities, always the ones to favor violence over peaceful negotiation, always the ones to sabotage democratic elections.

Oddly, if you search the
New York Times
from its first issue in 1851 (three years after Marx and Engels published
The Communist Manifesto
) until 1946, “Communist aggression” appears in only eight articles. From 1946 to 1960, by contrast, as the Cold War and Third World anticolonialism elevated the specter of Communism to the level of national fixation, the expression appeared in 2,714 articles. “Red aggression” adds another 90 results and was especially common in headlines. Communist aggression was the primary ideological justification of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, yet during the key years of combat in Vietnam (1961–1975), its use declined substantially, dropping in the
Times
to 833 articles. Then, from 1976 to 1990, despite the rise of the New Right and its effort to renew Cold War concerns about Soviet power, the number of
articles mentioning “Communist aggression
” fell to 75.

In 1961, when John Kennedy replaced two-term president Dwight Eisenhower, it was hard to say which one took a harder line against Communist aggression. Although JFK had eloquently opposed direct military intervention in French Indochina back in 1954, he embraced U.S. support for the creation of a permanent, non-Communist South Vietnam after France was defeated. He believed aid and training alone would be enough to preserve “our offspring,” the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Like most American public officials of the 1950s, Kennedy believed the United States could shape affairs in South Vietnam without the taint of colonialism that had made the French so reviled. He did not anticipate the rise of a broadly popular insurgency to overthrow the American-backed government in Saigon.

But by the end of JFK’s first year as president, reports from South Vietnam were ominous. Diem’s government and military were riddled with corruption, paralyzed by incompetence, and ever more unpopular. Worst of all, from Washington’s perspective, Diem had failed to suppress the Viet Cong insurgency. In fact, it was growing by leaps and bounds. The Viet Cong had a guerrilla fighting force of more than thirty battalions and deep support in many provinces throughout the South.

Unless U.S. military support increased substantially, advisers told Kennedy, the insurgency would triumph. JFK believed a Communist victory in Vietnam would be an intolerable blow to his political fortunes. He was also a steadfast believer in the domino theory. Losing South Vietnam might lead to Communist gains throughout the Pacific. So for all his private skepticism about the effectiveness of U.S. policy in Vietnam, and his genuine wariness of deeper military commitments, he was willing to do whatever was necessary, at least to avert defeat. And he often said,
even in the months before his assassination
in 1963, that American forces could only come home if victory over the Viet Cong was achieved.

So in late 1961 Kennedy ordered a tripling of U.S. military “advisers” in South Vietnam, from 3,000 to 9,000. By 1963 that number had risen to 16,700. JFK also deployed fighter-bombers, helicopter squadrons, and armored personnel carriers, and authorized the use of napalm and chemical defoliants. He also approved a program to force rural peasants into armed camps called strategic hamlets.

Kennedy’s escalation of the war was called
Project Beefup
.
The White House tried to keep it as secret as possible, not wanting to raise fears of a larger land war in Asia or draw attention to its blatant breach of the Geneva Accords (which restricted military advisers to under seven hundred). The effort to downplay and deny such an obvious militarization was so ludicrous it produced a “credibility gap” several years before the term was invented. For example, on December 11, 1961, journalist Stanley Karnow was having a beer with an American information officer at the Hotel Majestic, overlooking the Saigon River. Karnow glanced at a bend in the river and saw a U.S. aircraft carrier, the
Core
, looming into view, dwarfing the junks and sampans skirting around its giant hull. On the carrier’s deck were dozens of helicopters. “My God,” he said. “
Look at that carrier
!” The officer said, “I don’t see nothing.”

The officer was joking, but the Pentagon was dead serious when it cabled Saigon demanding an investigation: Who leaked information about the helicopters? Radio Hanoi knew about every chopper, right down to the serial numbers. Nor was Secretary of State Dean Rusk joking when he cabled the U.S. embassy, “No admission should be made that [Geneva] Accords are not being observed.” It was like trying to deny that forty circus elephants had just walked down Main Street.

At press conferences in 1962, President Kennedy denied that Americans were directly engaged in combat, a tough lie to sustain as the number of U.S. casualties increased. And even as late as 1964, some officials still denied that napalm bombing had been authorized in South Vietnam, long after dramatic evidence to the contrary had surfaced. On January 25, 1963, for example,
Life
magazine ran a cover story on the war that included a two-page color photograph by Larry Burrows taken from the backseat of an American aircraft. An enormous orange-and-black napalm fireball rises from the Vietnamese lowlands. The caption reads “WEAPONRY OF FLAME. Sweeping low across enemy-infested scrubland, a U.S. pilot-instructor watches a Vietnamese napalm strike. Object of the bombing is to sear the foliage and flush the enemy into the open. U.S. airmen train Vietnamese to handle T-28 fighter-bombers. . . . But as advisers they may not drop bombs.” The caption was written by editors still willing to parrot the official fiction that American pilots only “watch” while the Vietnamese bomb, that napalm is used merely to “sear” and “flush,” not to incinerate, and that it is used on “scrubland,” never on villages.

Despite denials, by 1962 the United States had already initiated the aggressive tactics it would eventually unleash on a vast scale—search-and-destroy missions aimed at amassing high body counts; the bombing, napalming, and burning of South Vietnamese villages; the spraying of chemical defoliants; the indiscriminate shelling of free-fire zones; and the forced relocation of peasants. Still to come were hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, more advanced weapons and aircraft (e.g., Phantom jets and Cobra helicopter gunships), B-52 carpet bombing of South Vietnam, and the systematic bombing of North Vietnam. Yet much of the American war, in microcosm, was already in place.

Also put in place by 1962 was Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV, pronounced “Mac-Vee”). First under the command of General Paul Harkins (1962–1964), then William Westmoreland (1964–1968) and Creighton Abrams (1968–1972), MACV oversaw virtually the entire American military operation in Vietnam. Like the war itself, the command headquarters grew to enormous proportions. By 1966 it earned the nickname “Pentagon East.”

Military personnel assigned to
MACV wore a distinctive shoulder patch
that graphically represents the vision of the war American officials wanted to project. The shield-shaped patch has a field of red with a white sword thrust upward through a gap in a yellow, crenellated wall. According to the army’s Institute of Heraldry, “The red ground alludes to the infiltration and aggression from beyond the embattled ‘wall’ (i.e., the Great Wall of China). The opening in the ‘wall’ through which this infiltration and aggression flow is blocked by the sword representing United States military aid and support.”

Taken literally, the MACV patch is absurd. The Great Wall of China does not border Vietnam, but is far to the north in interior China. Nor did Communist China invade South Vietnam or cause the war there.
China’s support of North Vietnam
was substantial, especially between 1965 and 1970, when it sent up to 175,000 troops to operate antiaircraft guns, repair roads, build bridges, and construct factories. But none of the Chinese troops fought in South Vietnam.

Nor did North Vietnamese troops start the war. The war’s real origins were in South Vietnam and effectively began when Ngo Dinh Diem began arresting, torturing, and executing southerners who were organizing political opposition against him and his U.S. backers. By 1958, the rebels began to take up arms, increasingly staging executions of their own against Diem-appointed village chiefs. Starting in 1959, the North began to send some soldiers through the Truong Son mountain range into South Vietnam—a network of footpaths and (eventually) roads that Western media soon dubbed the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But the large-scale deployment of North Vietnamese troops in the South did not begin until the mid-1960s, and U.S. troops outnumbered them until the early 1970s.

More important, most South Vietnamese did not consider the North a foreign country. Supporters of the Viet Cong looked to the North as an ally in a common nationwide struggle for independence and reunification. Even many anti-Communist southerners longed for national unification under non-Communist leadership. To the majority of Vietnamese, the only foreign aggressors in South Vietnam were the Americans and the allies they had hired or recruited from South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand.

The MACV patch reflected the government’s intense effort to define the Vietnam War as a war of “outside aggression” in which a “foreign” enemy from the North attacked an independent and sovereign neighbor in the South. Countless government speeches, pamphlets, briefings, and films hammered home that claim.

The narrative of North-South conquest did not go unchallenged. On March 8, 1965, the very day that the first combat brigade of U.S. Marines hit the beaches of Da Nang, Izzy Stone did what he had done every week since 1953—he published his one-man, four-page newsletter,
I. F. Stone’s Weekly
. A small but growing readership relied on Stone for his surgical analysis of current events. He pored over government documents no one else even skimmed. He especially liked to study the details tucked away in appendices, always telling friends that the best way to read official reports is backward, since the most telling information is always buried near the end. Stone devoted the March 8 issue to debunking a government white paper called “Aggression from the North: The Record of North Vietnam’s Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam.” By using the government’s own statistics (Appendix D) he demonstrated that North Vietnam’s support for the southern insurgency was actually quite minimal. For example, despite the government’s claim that the war in the South was “inspired, directed, supplied, and controlled” by Hanoi, from 1962 to 1964 only 179 of the 15,100 weapons captured from the Viet Cong guerrillas of South Vietnam had come from Communist countries. Virtually all the weapons had southern origins and the southern Viet Cong were still doing most of the fighting. The government in Saigon was facing a revolution, not a foreign conquest.

But I. F. Stone’s analysis reached only a few thousand. The government’s narrative of external Communist aggression reached the entire country. And it was full of deceptions and flat-out lies. In a 1966 government film called
Night of the Dragons
narrator Charlton Heston gravely announces: “Nearly 40,000 trained guerrilla soldiers from the Communist North have infiltrated into South Vietnam. Known as the Viet Cong, they have organized a war of terror against the people. After six years of war South Vietnamese soldiers are still trying to defend their border against North Vietnam.” The story could not be more black and white, and distorted. The people of South Vietnam are presented as uniformly committed to peace, defense, security, freedom, hard work, and progress. The Communists of the North are identified entirely with aggression, terror, invasion, and murder. From this and other government sources no one could possibly understand that the Viet Cong were southern insurgents with substantial southern support. The propaganda campaign was largely effective. A 1966 poll found that 75 percent of Americans wrongly believed the Viet Cong were North Vietnamese.