Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (58 page)

In the end, his account of Sicily reads as Sophoclean tragedy, or, as General Omar Bradley remarked of the possibility of fighting the Chinese in the early 1950s, “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” Sicily, after all, was an entirely new theater of operations, eight hundred miles by sea from Athens, against a power that had not directly attacked Athens, and at a time when the Spartan army at home was free to march up to the walls of Athens.

No wonder, Thucydides tells us, that the Athenian public quickly lost heart with the continual news of deadlock overseas and the need for ever more men and matériel. In a consensual society, ancient or modern, voices are raised when overseas military operations prove expensive, costly in lives, and without promise of eventual victory. In that sense the rise of American antiwar sentiment was predictable. Dissent at home was in line with the entire history of Western opposition to its own military practice on those rare occasions when victory proves elusive—often with results that are not necessarily negative to the long-term interests of the state, although admittedly abjectly harmful to the unfortunate soldiers in the field.

The Americans’ objectives, both local and geopolitical, were more or less clear from the start: the security of an independent noncommunist Vietnamese state in the South, and with it an end to general communist aggression in Southeast Asia. But the methods of achieving those seemingly moral goals were far less apparent. The formula for victory was never fully thought out. The eventual costs were never seriously computed. Ideally, it was believed in the early 1960s, the Americans would train a sophisticated democratic army of resistance. In two to three years this reconstituted Army of the Republic of Vietnam could perhaps defend itself, albeit, as in the Korean instance, requiring a near permanent American presence of 30,000 or so GIs along a demilitarized zone to preserve the peace. A grateful Vietnamese populace would then support this newly democratic government and willingly enlist in its army to save the country from communism, which in the past had led to so many civilian deaths and dislocations. Or so it was all thought.

Yet by 1964 the communists proved tougher, the South Vietnamese weaker, and the American people more skeptical than imagined. At that point—somewhere between late 1964 and mid-1965—President Johnson undertook a disastrous strategy of steady escalation, without changing the ground rules under which previously small American contingents had operated. The president knew nothing about military affairs. He showed no awareness that such a tremendous commitment of sending hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to Vietnam to defeat Third World communists—more than half a million troops, 1.2 million bombs a year, thousands of enemy killed each month, three hundred to four hundred dead Americans per week—raised the geopolitical and domestic stakes among friends and enemies. Failure to win with such a sizable force could only invite further Soviet adventurism in the wake of perceived American weakness, increase domestic unrest, and highlight the incompetence of the South Vietnamese government. Once empires commit such resources to military adventures, time becomes an enemy rather than an ally, as the inability to achieve immediate success sends ripples of doubt—fatal to any hegemon—beyond the battlefield to lap at uneasy allies and citizens at home.

Yet the Americans for nearly a decade went on to fight a conventional war in unconventional terrain without the presence of clearly demarcated battle lines or even a home front. Since the overall strategy was the promise to stop communism’s spread in Asia while at all costs avoiding even indirect or accidental confrontations with either the Soviets or the Chinese, a number of paradoxes arose that thwarted planners every time a change in American strategy was debated. Generally, the policy that coalesced was a reluctance to mine harbors—which was not allowed until 1972—or to wipe out key government installations in Hanoi and Haiphong in fear of killing communist foreign suppliers and consultants. There was an absolute and unquestioned prohibition on invading North Vietnam. Urban power plants and supply depots that provided the energy to unload war supplies were off limits for years. For most of the war, no allowance was given for entering Cambodia, Thailand, or Laos in force, the sites of vast enemy supply dumps and sanctuaries. Airpower and artillery strikes, along with fortified defensive bases, were emphasized, rather than ambitious guerrilla offensives and sustained counterinsurgency efforts to rid the cities and villages of Vietcong.

The irony was that in their misguided efforts to restrain the war according to murky and poorly thought-out parameters, the American administration ensured that the killing would go on for nearly a decade. In the topsy-turvy world of Vietnam, indiscriminate bombing of jungles would be seen as acceptable military practice, when the far more humane precision attacks on factories and dockyards in Hanoi would not be—and thus as a result thousands of American lives would be sacrificed in defeat. Visitors to Hanoi after the war were startled that the city seemed to have suffered little damage from bombing—despite assertions from antiwar activists that the American military had killed thousands in the streets and nearly leveled the capital.

The Johnson and Nixon administrations thought that they could achieve another Korea—a victory of sorts that had been won despite a South Korean government that was corrupt, a huge Chinese army that had entered the war, nearly 50,000 American lives that had been lost, and strict political parameters on the way that the Korean conflict had been waged. Yet they often misread the entire Korean analogy. In relative terms the Soviets and Chinese were both much weaker than the United States in 1950 than they were in 1965. In the prior war neither had posed a credible nuclear threat to American shores. But the government of the United States further underestimated the traditional Chinese fear of conventional American military power, failing to remember that the communists had lost 800,000 dead in Korea to massive American air and artillery strikes and largely had no wish to repeat that debacle in Vietnam. While it was true that precautions were needed in order not to provoke the communist nuclear powers, in most cases an inordinate concern with the Russians and Chinese unduly curtailed the range of American responses.

By 1965, as long as the Americans were convinced of the potential for wider and possibly nuclear involvement, they avoided hitting Soviet ships in North Vietnamese waters, pursuing fighter aircraft across national borders, and threatening Hanoi to such a degree that direct Soviet or Chinese intervention would be necessary to save the regime. It was seen as preferable by the Johnson administration to lose American lives to Chinese and Russian volunteers quietly than to have them killed in battle openly. In addition, American pilots had quickly dominated the skies over North Korea, but by 1972 in Vietnam there were sophisticated Soviet and Chinese air defenses—8,000 antiaircraft guns, 250 surface-to-air missile batteries, between two hundred and three hundred modern jet fighters, and thousands of foreign advisers—that meant the toll of lost American aircraft would continue to rise in any sustained bombing campaign. The terrain of Vietnam was much more heavily forested than Korea’s, making bombing accuracy more difficult as canopies of brush hid the exact location of enemy troops.

Far more important, the South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, had garnered more domestic support than any of the South Vietnamese leaders. Rhee had been able to pose as a protector of Korean autonomy against the northern puppets of Chinese Stalinists—in a manner that Ho Chi Minh had done in Vietnam by reminding the population that the Americans were merely the latest imperialists in a long line of Japanese and French aggressors who were all eventually evicted from Vietnamese ground. In Korea the Americans were convinced that their persistence had stopped a communist tidal wave headed toward Japan. Few, in contrast, believed the loss of Vietnam would result in a communist sphere of influence much larger than Southeast Asia—and few American citizens or soldiers cared about Southeast Asia. Americans in 1964 were also a different people than during the immediate postwar years of the 1950s at the beginning of the Cold War—more affluent, reform-minded, and often tired of two decades of costly and constant deterrence to worldwide communism.

Finally, in Korea the United States faced a real threat of a united communist bloc; but by 1965 many Americans sensed—no doubt often naïvely—that China and Russia were near-enemies, that Vietnam was a traditional foe of China, and that the Cambodian, Laotian, and Thai communists were never completely unified, themselves sharing a long history of antagonism toward each other and against the Vietnamese. So it became far more difficult in Vietnam to convince America’s allies or its own people that communist aggression in Vietnam endangered either Europe or America:

Vietnamese Communism, obnoxious though it might seem, presented no clear threat to American national security. Had Vietnam been in Africa or west Asia rather than on the border of China, a communist take-over from the colonial French or from a local anti-Communist regime would have occasioned only passing concern. (D. Oberdorfer,
Tet!,
334)

All these considerations would have been moot had the United States won the war decisively and quickly. But that envisioned victory was impossible under the conditions in which the military conducted the war— and millions of Americans would become angry and eager to apprise their own military and political leaders of just that ignorance and incompetence.

Fault
Lines

As early as 1965, three years before Tet, vast fault lines over the conduct of the war had developed inside the American military and political establishment, as the media and popular culture reached a consensus that war was not merely wrong but increasingly amoral. On the radical left, an old coalition of communists, socialists, and pacifists, teamed with assorted newer dissidents and anarchists—the entire gamut from Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, and Abbie Hoffman to Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Ramsey Clark, and the Berrigan brothers—openly advocated an American exit. They accepted, if not welcomed, defeat and saw the American role as predictably imperialist, racist, and exploitative—in character, in their view, with much of American history. Indeed, many wished to conduct war crimes tribunals to indict American generals and politicians.

Less extreme, but perhaps as naïve, were many traditional liberals who increasingly became radicalized as the war progressed. They envisioned the North Vietnamese more as European socialists and the Vietnam conflict solely as a “civil war”—despite evidence of North Vietnamese atrocities dating back to the early 1950s, direct Soviet and Chinese involvement, and almost no groundswell of support among South Vietnamese for communism. Both these factions called for immediate U.S. withdrawal and either openly advocated or were indifferent to a North Vietnamese military victory.

Middle-of-the-road Democrats still believed in the Cold War idea of containment. But after Tet, dissidents and ex-members of the Johnson administration, such as Robert McNamara, felt that the cost of victory in Vietnam was perhaps too high and too divisive in its effect on American society. Many reasoned that American troops were better deployed elsewhere, especially as bulwarks against Soviet and Chinese aggression in Europe and Korea. In general, by 1970 such moderates called for a negotiated settlement, and, barring that, a gradual but irrevocable U.S. withdrawal to save the country from tearing itself apart.

Conservatives were equally split. Those on the extreme right like Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, whose 1968 running mate was Curtis LeMay, saw no reason why the war could not be ended quickly and victoriously, through any means possible—including an invasion of the North and perhaps the use of tactical nuclear weapons. They were confident of American tactical military superiority over the North Vietnamese and the nation’s strategic edge over Russia and China. What was lacking, in their eyes, was not American power, but will.

Many more-mainstream Republicans were equally furious at the military’s rules of engagement, but believed a vigorous conventional war could bring results rather quickly without the need for full-scale invasion of the North or a declaration of war. Thus, they advocated wider bombing of North Vietnam, raids into Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, hot aerial pursuit into purportedly neutral countries, mining of enemy harbors, and a blockade of Vietnamese waters. By 1970 Vietnamization under Richard Nixon was their creed, hoping that sustained American bombing would bolster the South Vietnamese’s own resistance.

Finally, some mainstream populists and conservative isolationists, ranging from senators such as Wayne Morse and Mike Mansfield to the editors at the
Wall Street Journal,
argued that Vietnam was outside the American sphere of interest altogether and not worth any American dead. Their calls for withdrawal, however, centered on the terrible waste of American lives and capital in Asia—quite unlike their counterparts on the radical Left, who seemed to worry more about Vietnamese than American dead.

Other fault lines were not so ideological. Southerners, for example, put a high premium on American “honor” and generally supported escalation if it led to victory, while those in New England and on the West Coast were more likely to advocate immediate retreat. Black and Hispanic leaders, even if sizable percentages of their constituencies were committed to serving and dying in Vietnam, saw resistance to the war as integral to larger civil rights issues and alliances with liberal whites, and so generally approved of an immediate end at any cost. Women tended to value peace more highly than victory. The educated favored reassessment, if not acknowledgment of defeat, while those without college degrees were more likely to support official U.S. policy.

In the context of identifying support for the war, the traditional rubrics “Republican” and “Democrat” began to mean little. Even the more rigid binaries “hawks” and “doves” often evolved to “fascists” and “communists,” and ultimately “war criminals” and “traitors”—all reminiscent of Thucydides’ gripping portrait of the stasis at Corcyra (Corfu; 427 B.C.) in the third book of his history. Consensual societies, Thucydides relates, when confronted with debilitating wars, steadily rip away the thin veneer of hard-won culture—civility, moderation, and honesty in expression becoming the predictable first casualties of extremism. All of these divides were to be expected in a free society at odds over the conduct and expense of a seemingly unwinnable and unpopular war. The plays of Aristophanes, tragedies of Euripides, and history of Thucydides during the Peloponnesian War offer ample precedent of antiwar dissent at the beginning of Western civilization. But what made the issue of protest much different in Vietnam from the long tradition of Western opposition to military operations were perhaps three new factors in Western culture.