No More Vietnams (19 page)

News media reporting portrayed our troops as divided along racial lines, undisciplined and addicted to drugs, and guilt-ridden over their involvement in the war. None of these problems was unique to the Vietnam War. But all of them were exaggerated in the press.

It was commonly asserted during the war that blacks constituted a disproportionate number of combat casualties and that this injustice, in turn, stirred racial animosities. But in fact casualties among blacks were not out of proportion to their share of the population. By March 1973, when blacks comprised 13.5 percent of all American men of military age, blacks accounted for 12.3 percent of combat deaths.

Our armed forces in Vietnam were not collapsing from a lack of discipline or being overrun by drug addiction. Our
troops in Vietnam were more disciplined than those in Korea. During the Korean War, for the years in which statistics were kept, the average AWOL rate was 170 per 1,000. In the Vietnam War, the rate was 115 per 1,000. Drug use was a widespread problem for the generation growing up in the 1960s. It was not appreciably worse among military personnel in Vietnam than among those stationed in other countries or among draft-age civilians in the United States. Among students at Harvard College in 1968, 75 percent had smoked marijuana or used hard drugs. In 1971, a survey showed that 50.9 percent of Army personnel in Vietnam had smoked marijuana and that 28.5 percent had used hard drugs, like heroin or opium. Few were truly addicted, and most had used drugs before being sent to Vietnam.

American soldiers were not haunted by doubts about the morality of the war. Overwhelming majorities still believe our cause was right. An opinion poll conducted in 1980 revealed that 82 percent of those who engaged in heavy combat believed that the United States lost the war because the armed forces were not allowed to win it. And 66 percent indicated that they would be willing to fight again in Vietnam for the same cause.

Many believe the war in Vietnam was a war without heroes. But that was not the case. All our fighting men were heroes in the sense that they were risking their lives in a selfless cause. Heroic acts were as common in Vietnam as in any other war. But our prisoners of war, who had been courageous in action and even more courageous in captivity, were among the most remarkable heroes of the Vietnam War.

Many Americans did not know that our POWs were brutally tortured by the North Vietnamese until we freed them in 1973. During the war, the news media virtually ignored reports that trickled out about the mistreatment of our prisoners and were bamboozled by antiwar activists engaged in a concerted propaganda campaign to portray North Vietnam's treatment of our prisoners as humane. Acting out of naïveté or malice, these critics would go to Hanoi, meet a handful of American POWs, and make rosy statements about their condition. What the
American people were not told was that the prisoners who were presented to these activists often had been tortured minutes before to guarantee that they said nothing out of line.

These antiwar activists knew or should have known what was going on. In August 1969, after going to North Vietnam and securing the release of two prisoners, a group of these opponents of the war praised Hanoi's humane treatment of its captives. In a hospital press conference, one of the newly freed POWs refuted their assertions, saying, “I don't think that solitary confinement, forced statements, living in a cage for three years, being put in straps, not being allowed to sleep or eat, removal of fingernails, being hung from the ceiling, having an infected arm almost lost without medical treatment, being dragged along the ground with a broken leg, and not allowing exchange of mail for prisoners are humane.” But after a trip to Hanoi in August 1972, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark testified that the POWs were well treated and well fed and were “good, strong Americans.” One of the prisoners later said that the Communists “persuaded” him to meet with Clark by hanging him by his broken arm.

North Vietnam's Communists, who were masters at the art of physical and psychological torture, worked overtime in trying to force their captives to turn against their country. But it did not work. Our POWs would not break. When Captain Jeremiah Denton, the first American prisoner of war to get off the plane that had brought the POWs out of North Vietnam, stepped up to the microphone, he did not complain about his hardship or issue an antiwar manifesto. He said, “We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances. We are profoundly grateful to our Commander in Chief, and to our nation for this day. God bless America.”

• • •

In the time we won through our Cambodian operations, our new military strategy in Vietnam took hold. Starting in 1968, with the close cooperation of President Thieu, we had replaced the strategy of attrition with one of pacification. We also had
begun making steady progress toward turning the fighting over to South Vietnamese forces. By 1972, South Vietnam's government had consolidated its control of the countryside, and its army conducted virtually all of the day-to-day fighting against the North Vietnamese.

Pacification did not begin in earnest until after the Tet Offensive in 1968. Kennedy and Johnson administration officials regularly turned out policy papers that called for mobilizing the South Vietnamese people behind the war. But very little came of these proposals because the United States preoccupied itself with looking for a quick military fix to the war. Pacification programs were little more than misguided political reforms or start-and-stop economic development programs. These well-intentioned efforts read like a laundry list: Reconstruction, Civic Action, Land Development Centers, Agglomeration Camps, Argovilles, Strategic Hamlets, New Life Hamlets, Rural Construction, Rural Reconstruction, and Revolutionary Development. Some, particularly the Strategic Hamlet program in its early years, met with limited success. But none adequately addressed the problem of providing the South Vietnamese with security at the village level.

The decisive defeat of the 1968 Tet Offensive changed the balance of power in South Vietnam. Communist forces lost 37,000 troops by the end of February and compounded these losses by launching unsuccessful small-scale offensives in May and August. In late 1969, General Giap said that his army's casualties totaled more than a half-million men over the last two years; an equivalent loss for the United States would have been 5 million men. In addition, the Communists had sacrificed their political infrastructure; it was exposed during the Tet Offensive, and United States and South Vietnamese forces uprooted it once the tide of battle had turned. North Vietnam's defeat had destroyed its ability to control the countryside. This victory had created a vacuum of power. Winning the war meant winning the race to fill it.

American and South Vietnamese strategies shifted to exploit
this new opportunity. Immediately after the Tet Offensive, the United States moved tentatively. American forces regrouped to defend the towns and cities. President Thieu ordered a general mobilization and the formation of local militias in rural areas. General Abrams put a higher priority on pacification. A campaign to retake rural areas in late 1968 met with great success. Some officials in the Johnson administration advocated the abandonment of the strategy of attrition. But in the final analysis, the United States made a few marginal adjustments in tactics, but no fundamental changes in strategy.

When I came into office, I recognized that we needed a new strategy. The Johnson administration had sent more than a half-million troops to Vietnam, dropped over a million tons of bombs a year, and killed nearly a quarter-million enemy troops in three years. Yet immediately after the Tet Offensive, the United States and South Vietnam controlled no more territory than before the American intervention in August 1965. All the United States had won through our strategy of attrition was a costly stalemate.

We therefore put new strategic emphasis on pacification in 1969. It required us to separate the enemy from the population, reestablish Saigon's control of the countryside, and help the South Vietnamese government win the loyalty of its people through economic and political reforms. Our first step was military. “The key strategic thrust,” our new Strategic Objectives Plan read in 1969, “is to provide meaningful continuing security for the Vietnamese people in expanding areas of increasingly effective civil authority.” Our previous goal of destroying North Vietnam's regular forces was subordinated to those of providing security at the local level—during both the day and the night—and eliminating the Communist infrastructure. Our next steps were political and economic. I ordered a step-up in our Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program. By 1970, we had over 6,000 military and 1,000 civilian advisers helping to reconstruct South Vietnam's government and economy. These
advisers worked with almost a million South Vietnamese throughout the country. Their efforts were the key to solidifying our military gains in the countryside.

President Thieu supported our plans wholeheartedly. After the Tet Offensive, he mobilized his country behind the war. In June 1968, Thieu had announced the conscription of all men between the ages of sixteen and fifty, with those between eighteen and thirty-eight going into the armed forces and the others forming the new People's Self-Defense Force. Confident that the South Vietnamese people opposed a Communist victory, Thieu decided that the best way to wage the war in the countryside was to give weapons to the people. His self-defense force, a part-time unpaid militia designed to combat small enemy units, was filled with peasants, traders, and local craftsmen. Its ranks soon numbered 1.5 million and later grew to over 3 million.

Thieu devoted most of his new draftees to the task of pacification. South Vietnam's military was divided into regular forces, which were composed of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps; and territorial forces, which were made up of the Regional Forces and the Popular Forces. Recruits for the Regional Forces fought in their own provinces and those for the Popular Forces defended their own villages. Both were tailor-made for pacification. In four years Thieu increased their ranks from 300,000 to 532,000 troops, and by 1971 these forces represented 51 percent of South Vietnam's military strength. Though they consumed only 20 percent of the military budget, the territorial forces accounted for 40 percent of enemy troops killed in action. Combat effectiveness was uneven in both the self-defense force and the territorial forces—which was to be expected for any military force assembled so quickly—but they effectively secured the countryside for Saigon.

Thieu recognized that while protecting the rural population was critical in the short term, it would not be enough in the long term. Defeating the Communist revolution required a counterrevolution—not in the sense of just suppressing the insurgency with force but in the sense of countering their revolution
with one of his own. He knew that the South Vietnamese people, like those of most poor Third World countries, would probably not fight indefinitely simply to preserve the status quo. Thieu therefore took steps to give them a stake in the war. He turned local administration over to elected village councils, instituted a massive land-reform program, and overhauled South Vietnam's social programs. From 1970 through 1973, Saigon redistributed 2.5 million acres of land to over 800,000 tenant farmers, reducing the proportion of arable land worked by tenant farmers from 60 percent to 10 percent. American aid helped build schools, hospitals, and public works of all kinds. By 1972, over 80 percent of South Vietnamese children of primary-school age were attending classes, and enrollment in secondary schools was expanding rapidly.

Pacification worked wonders in South Vietnam. In 1969, we set ambitious goals. We sought to bring 90 percent of all hamlets under government control, with 50 percent having a high degree of security and the other 40 percent having a significant but lesser degree of security. We reached our goals by October. From 1968 through 1971, the proportion of the population living in secure areas increased from 47 percent to 84 percent, while that figure for those living in contested areas or under Communist control dropped from 23 percent to less than 4 percent. Over a million refugees were returned to their homes. Enemy ground attacks fell to almost half their previous level and were limited to ten sparsely populated provinces. Over 75 percent of South Vietnam's essential roads and waterways were safe for civilian travel. Life for most of South Vietnam returned to normal.

We had won the political struggle for the allegiance of the South Vietnamese people. For years, Communist propaganda had trumpeted that theirs was the winning side, but now our side appeared to be the wave of the future. We were in control of areas that we had previously not dared to enter. We were resettling thousands of refugees displaced by the fighting. We had produced unprecedented economic prosperity.

Even the Communists took note. During 1969, their troops
defected to our side at a rate of 4,000 a month. In many areas the Popular Forces were composed entirely of former Communist soldiers. Kien Hoa Province had been a stronghold of the Communists since World War II. In October 1970, when the local Communist leader defected to our side, he said that his troops had dwindled from 10,000 to 3,000 and that he was abandoning his comrades because he realized that they were on the losing side.

While our pacification strategy was designed to deal with the political aspect of the war, our Vietnamization program readied our allies to handle the military part of it.

During the mid-1960s, South Vietnam's army was a mediocre fighting force. A commonly heard quip was that while United States forces tried to “seek out and destroy” Communist troops, those of South Vietnam sought to “search out and avoid” them. During nine months of 1966, battle reports indicated that 90 percent of American large-scale operations resulted in direct fighting with the enemy, compared with only 46 percent of South Vietnamese army missions. American commanders rated almost a third of South Vietnam's military units as having a marginal or unsatisfactory combat effectiveness. And during this period more than a fifth of Saigon's troops deserted.