Fire in the Lake (67 page)

With the Phoenix program the United States succeeded in fashioning much the same instrument of civilian terror that the Diemist laws for the suppression of Communism had created in 1957–1958. The only difference was that given the numbers of American and GVN troops and the participation of statistics-hungry U.S. intelligence services, the terror was a great deal more widespread than it had been before. The program in effect eliminated the cumbersome category of “civilian”; it gave the GVN, and initially the American troops as well, license and justification for the arrest, torture, or killing of anyone in the country, whether or not the person was carrying a gun. And many officials took advantage of that license. Some of the district and province chiefs engaged in systematic extortion rackets, arresting the rich of their districts twice and three times a year. Other officers settled their old scores or terrorized their fellow officers. The Phoenix program permitted them to indulge in all the practices classical to an irresponsible secret police. But the corruption of individual officers was not the worst of it. The true destructiveness of the program came from the very structure of the program itself. Like any stranger to the village, the district intelligence officer, were he a model of probity, would of necessity have some difficulty distinguishing between the “hard-core” Front cadres, the marginal Front supporters, and the people who went along with the NLF for the sake of survival. Inclined by the nature of his position to arrest anyone with Front contacts, he would tend to act like the Americans when they came into a “Viet Cong-held area.” He would introduce legalistic notions of justice into what ought to have been a family affair, filling his quota and his prisons with anonymous people who had lived under the Front aegis. Rather than eliminate the “hard-core” cadres (who were, after all, the best protected and concealed), he would actually create new ones, for, as during the Diem regime, the peasants had to accept what protection they could get from such arbitrary justice. By its very nature the Phoenix program tended once again to polarize the villages and to destroy what order and accumulation existed, thus involving a new portion of the population in the life-or-death struggle.
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The Phoenix program was in a sense a model for the entire Vietnamization program. The armed forces of the GVN everywhere contained underpaid and badly led soldiers who terrorized rather than pacified the civilian population. To augment this force meant to increase the number of bandits at large in the country — and bandits that were now supplied with modern American weapons. But again, there was another issue at stake. As American-made institutions, the armed forces of the Saigon government were structurally incapable of dealing with the political struggle. By fitting out more Vietnamese with rifles and uniforms, Nixon was merely forcing them into a conflict they could not possibly win even if there were no Front soldiers left in the south. With American support the top-heavy bureaucracy of the ARVN tended merely to crush those people at its base; without American support it threatened to topple over, crushing everyone including its own officers. In the anarchy that would ensue from such an event there was a high probability that the massacres and revenge-killings would become general: the ARVN units would turn to banditry, and the NLF would have to respond with violence. In any case the potential for domestic violence increased with the drafting of each new soldier.

The “Vietnamization” program was, like so many American policies in Vietnam, a solution to an American rather than to a Vietnamese problem. While it permitted Nixon to claim that the United States was “saving” the South Vietnamese, it was in effect creating a social upheaval and exposing more Vietnamese to those very dangers he claimed to be saving them from.

“Vietnamization” was not, however, Nixon's only strategy for the expansion of the war. In April 1970, the administration sent a large force of American and South Vietnamese troops to destroy the North Vietnamese base areas across the Cambodian border. It was the initiative that the Joint Chiefs had for so long requested; only now with the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk by a general of Thieu's political complexion, the administration had no fear of opposition by the Cambodian government. Nixon presented the invasion as a necessary step to prevent a North Vietnamese buildup and an eventual attack on the dwindling numbers of American troops. Despite the flimsiness of this pretext (the North Vietnamese had by then offered to refrain from attacking American troops if the United States set a withdrawal date), he was, it appeared, surprised by the force of the reaction in the United States. The American public would tolerate the buildup of the Saigon regime's army, but it would not, it seemed, stand for the invasion of another country by American troops. There were demonstrations and student strikes throughout the country, their numbers and intensity growing after the incident at Kent State University in which National Guard troops shot and killed four white students. Spurred on by this public outcry, Senate doves invoked the constitutional issue of the right to declare war and passed an amendment calling for the prohibition of American troops and air support from Cambodia after July of that year.

From a purely military point of view, the advantage the Cambodian invasion gave the United States and the GVN was important but temporary. It was one thing for the Joint Chiefs to recommend such a strategy in the context of an American buildup in 1966 or 1967, but it was quite another for an administration to implement it during a period of American troop withdrawal. In their two months in Cambodia the U.S. troops destroyed thousands of tons of North Vietnamese equipment and supplies, but they killed very few enemy troops. The greatest achievement of the operation was indirect: it permitted the new Cambodian regime to close the port of Sihanouk-ville to the Front and the North Vietnamese, thereby cutting sharply into the flow of munitions and other supplies to the southern guerrillas. Still, by most Pentagon estimates the operation set back the North Vietnamese offensive by no more than a year. Before the operation — and in anticipation of such an event — the North Vietnamese troops drove west to occupy the northern provinces of Cambodia and to set up a new (and indestructible) supply route along the Mekong river. At the same time they began to build up a local insurgency movement, the FUNK (Front Uni National de Kampuchea), and to menace Phnom Penh itself with guerrilla units. With the removal of the American forces from Cambodia in July 1970, Nixon put himself in the position of having to defend yet another government that could not protect itself and of leaving the ARVN with a new responsibility that it could not fulfill.

A second border of Indochina was crossed the next year with the ARVN invasion of Laos — an operation that had much less happy results even in the short term than the Cambodian initiative. In February 1971, sixteen thousand ARVN troops, supported by American aircraft and helicopters, marched across the DMZ with the mission of cutting the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran from North Vietnam into Cambodia. The American commanders who planned the operation in Saigon saw it as a decisive blow to enemy supply lines: the North Vietnamese would either fall back and abandon their communication centers and storage depots, as they had in Cambodia, or they would fight a last-ditch battle for control of the trail, which would be their Waterloo. The American command had, however, greatly underestimated North Vietnamese strength in the region and the problems of operating in such terrain. In order to cut enemy lines it is first necessary to surround them, and in Laos it was the ARVN units who walked along a line and the North Vietnamese who surrounded them. For days there was no action to speak of. The ARVN columns moved slowly forward down the long narrow valleys, while American helicopters lifted in battalions to set up fire bases overlooking the vast network of camouflaged roadways the North Vietnamese had built through the mountains. Then, suddenly, just as the advance units reached the center of the trail, the North Vietnamese attacked with tanks, heavy rockets, and four of their best divisions. Most of the ARVN units stood up to the assault, and American aircraft killed thousands — perhaps ten thousand—North Vietnamese with close-in bombing near the ARVN positions.
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But the North Vietnamese were on their own territory and they clearly outclassed the ARVN units, which still depended upon American air power and upon their now absent American advisers to call it in with precision. The ARVN casualties mounted and the positions of their units weakened so that certain battalion commanders had to request orders for a withdrawal. Their requests were refused. The American command and the White House had claimed that the ARVN would stay in Laos and occupy the trail until the end of the dry season in May, and the ranking ARVN officers did not dare contradict the Americans. It was not until some of the commanders on the ground threatened to take the troops out and the retreat had already begun that the order for withdrawal was formally given. By the end of the forty-five day campaign the ARVN reportedly suffered about 50 percent casualties: 3,800 killed, 5,200 wounded, and eight battalions put out of action.
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Three months later U.S. intelligence sources reported that the traffic on the Ho Chi Minh trail had, if anything, increased during the spring.

The Laos operation was a military failure in terms of the objectives the American command had set for it; it was a political failure as well. During the initial stages of “Lam Son 719” President Nixon said that this operation, like its predecessor in Cambodia, was designed to save the lives of American troops in Vietnam. Whether or not his announcement made any impression on the skeptical American public, it certainly had a powerful effect on the ARVN troops, who with some justification blamed their casualties on the failure of American intelligence and American air power. Lam Son 719 showed the South Vietnamese that “Vietnamization” meant increased Vietnamese deaths in pursuit of the American policy objective to extricate the American troops from Vietnam without peace negotiations. In Lam Son 719 the Americans had actually risked an ARVN defeat in pursuit of this short-term goal. And their maneuver had not worked.

As Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon consultant, suggested, the operations in Laos and Cambodia were designed not only for their military utility but for their importance as a signal to the North Vietnamese.
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The signal was that Nixon was willing to remove the constraints that Johnson had observed; he was willing to use whatever force he had at his disposal in order to maintain the American position in South Vietnam. Just how far Nixon was actually willing to go remained a matter of doubt. He would not reintroduce American troops into Vietnam or take any action that was likely to bring the Chinese into the war. But short of that he had a number of options, all of which — or so the signal indicated — he was willing to use. In the first week or so of the Laos operation Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky had threatened a ground incursion by the ARVN into North Vietnam. The announcement was, no doubt, an attempt at a bluff. But had the Laos operation been a success, the North Vietnamese would have had to live with the threat of a future invasion by the ARVN. As it was, Nixon now had to rely on his air power alone.

Even before Laos the U.S. air force had taken on the main burden of the war. The Johnson administration had intended that it should do so in 1964, but the strong ground position of the NLF inside South Vietnam forced the President into a commitment of American ground troops. Because after 1968 the main military threat came from the north, such a strategy was now feasible as a temporary measure. From 1969 on, Nixon expanded and intensified the air war, doubling the total tonnage of bombs dropped, so that after two years and a few months of his administration the United States had dropped more bombs on Indochina than it had in both the European and the Pacific theatres during World War II.
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The tactical strikes in South Vietnam continued while the B-52S expanded their operations in northern Laos, turning a large percentage of the Lao population and most of the montagnard tribes into refugees.
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U.S. air operations over Cambodia finished the job the troops had taken on, killing thousands of people and displacing millions.
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The administration also renewed the bombing of North Vietnam with what American officials called “protective reaction strikes against antiaircraft positions.” This hail of bombing did not substantially affect North Vietnamese military strength, but, perhaps, it was not even designed for such a purpose. Nixon could only claim in a vague manner that the strikes were made to protect American lives. Had he been interested in saving American lives, he would have negotiated a withdrawal and a political settlement. The raids were providing Nixon with the means to maintain the Thieu regime and the American presence in Saigon for a certain length of time at the cost of the lives and property of millions of Indochinese.

The strategy would work for a while, but it would not work indefinitely, for the withdrawal of the American troops was removing the underpinning of the war. In May 1971, the U.S. and the GVN command announced a new drive into Laos through the Ashau valley with several thousand ARVN troops. The troops stalled in the valley while the ARVN generals demanded more American bombers and helicopter support. After two weeks, news of the operation receded from the newspapers, and, after three, it was possible to determine that the ARVN remained in place only because a North Vietnamese unit attacked a forward patrol. The ARVN would not go into Laos again that year, and, after a bloody battle near the Cambodian town of Snoul, certain divisions would be most reluctant to return to Cambodia.
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In 1970, during the first Cambodian operation, the desertion rate rose from its normal level of eight thousand a month to twelve thousand; after the Laos operation it was questionable how many battalions remained combat-effective. In the fall of 1970 the CIA reported that there were some thirty thousand people inside the Saigon government who more or less cooperated with the NLF, and that soon their numbers might reach fifty thousand, or 5 percent of the GVN armed forces.
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To change the Saigon government in the future, the Front would hardly require an introduction of any new personnel. The following year the resurgence of the political apparatus of the NLF began to manifest itself in a decline in GVN security in the countryside. The history of the insurgency, going back to 1961, had begun to repeat itself. At the end of the process, time would once again run out for the U.S. government. If the President did not make a settlement, he would be faced with the same dilemma with which the war had begun.