No More Vietnams (20 page)

There were two reasons for the ineffectiveness of South Vietnam's armed forces: They had little to fight for, and inadequate weapons to fight with. Soldiers go to war to defend the state. It is hard to imagine risking one's life so that a group of pompous incompetents masquerading as generals could continue to play musical chairs in the cabinet room of the Presidential Palace. From Diem's death in 1963 to Thieu's ascent to power in 1965, South Vietnam's armed forces fell into such a pitiful state that it took years to rebuild them into a fighting force that could match the North Vietnamese Army. When the United States intervened in 1965, we complicated the problem. Our troops did more than just take part in the war—they took it over. The more we Americanized the heavy fighting, the more our ally's military muscle atrophied.

But it was a misconception to say that the South Vietnamese were not shouldering their share of the war's burden. From 1965 through 1968, our ally suffered more killed in action than we did in all but three weeks. Generally, our troops fought better than theirs did. But Americans had more firepower and were backed up with more artillery and air support. Shortages of M-16 rifles, machine guns, mortars, radios, trucks, recoilless rifles, and artillery pieces meant that none of these became available in large numbers for South Vietnamese troops until late 1968. Armed only with semiautomatic M-l rifles of World War II vintage, they were outgunned by the Communists, who were equipped with automatic Soviet-made AK-47s. It was like sending someone armed with a squirt gun into a water fight against an opponent equipped with a fire hose.

When our Vietnamization program began, we knew it would take several years. We quickly redressed our ally's disadvantage in firepower. We distributed automatic M-16 rifles to all regular South Vietnamese units by April 1969 and to virtually all territorial forces by February 1970. Under Thieu's mobilization, South Vietnam's regular army grew from 343,000 troops in 1967 to 516,000 in 1971. Its combat capability increased in every index of combat effectiveness. The South Vietnamese fought well during the Cambodian operations in 1970. From 1970 through 1971, South Vietnam's armed forces conducted three times as many large operations and recorded twice as many enemy killed in action as they did from 1966 through 1967.

But problems remained. South Vietnam's battlefield leadership was often poor. Thieu, who had witnessed firsthand the paralysis that resulted from political intrigue in the military after Diem's fall, was understandably obsessed with preserving his support within the army. He therefore tended to promote officers who demonstrated not their ability to command but rather their personal loyalty to him. This may have helped maintain stability, but it had a severely detrimental effect on the combat effectiveness of South Vietnam's army.

In early 1971, a critical test of Vietnamization took place:
Operation Lam Son 719. In order to blunt North Vietnam's offensive striking power, South Vietnam's army conducted a ground assault on Communist supply routes in Laos, acting for the first time without the help of American ground combat forces.

From 1966 through 1971, North Vietnam had used the Ho Chi Minh Trail to transport into South Vietnam 630,000 Communist troops, 100,000 tons of food, 400,000 weapons, and 600 million rounds of ammunition. Because Lon Nol had denied North Vietnam access to the port at Sihanoukville, all Communist supplies now had to be shipped overland along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. By December 1970, North Vietnam's 1,500 miles of roads in Laos were clogged with men and supplies en route to Cambodia for an offensive in either the spring of 1971 or 1972. To ensure South Vietnam's survival when the offensive came, we had to do something to disrupt North Vietnam's ominous buildup.

In January 1971, I authorized a military operation to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Congressional restrictions made it illegal for us to use American ground troops in Laos. But after studying the reports of my military advisers, I was confident that South Vietnam's armed forces were ready to take on such a mission alone. Our only role would be to take up defensive positions below the demilitarized zone and along the border with Laos, ferry South Vietnamese troops and supplies in by helicopter, and provide air cover with gunships and bombing raids. Our plan called for South Vietnam's forces to drive about twenty miles into Laos along Route 9 to capture the town of Tchpone—on which almost all of North Vietnam's infiltration routes converged—and then to conduct further strikes in surrounding areas to disrupt the Communist buildup. Other South Vietnamese units were to conduct a simultaneous attack on a Communist base area in Cambodia.

On February 8, the operation began. South Vietnamese troops fought bravely and effectively, but some problems soon developed. Communist forces put up stronger resistance than we had anticipated, and American military commanders in
Saigon failed to respond with a corresponding increase in air cover. When South Vietnamese forces sustained large casualties about ten miles into Laos, they made the mistake of temporarily digging in, which gave the North Vietnamese a sitting target to hit. Thieu became overly cautious and ordered his commanders to stop their offensive as soon as casualties reached 3,000. By the middle of March, soon after the South Vietnamese reached Tchpone, their casualties hit Thieu's arbitrary ceiling, and they began to retreat to the southeast along Route 914.

American news-media reports presented a distorted picture of the operation by focusing almost exclusively on the failings of the South Vietnamese troops. Because of inadequate air support during the withdrawal, a few units took such a severe pounding from enemy artillery that they panicked. It took only a few televised films of soldiers clinging to the skids of our evacuation helicopters to reinforce the widespread misconception that South Vietnam's armed forces were incompetent and cowardly.

Contrary to the news-media's stories, the operation was a military success. South Vietnamese forces killed over 9,000 enemy troops and destroyed 1,123 crew-served weapons, 3,754 individual weapons, 110 tanks, 270 trucks, 13,630 tons of munitions, and 15 tons of ammunition for 122mm rockets. Of the twenty-two South Vietnamese battalions involved in the offensive, eighteen fought extremely well and four did poorly. Their withdrawal, though marred by some panic, was on the whole orderly. South Vietnam's operation did not achieve all our objectives. But the bottom line was decisively positive: Despite the largest influx of matériel in the history of the war, there was no Communist offensive in South Vietnam in 1971.

Operation Lam Son 719 was a milestone in the Vietnam War. It marked the first time South Vietnam's army had taken on the North Vietnamese in a frontal assault without American combat advisers. It also marked the last time United States forces were involved in the ground fighting in even a supporting role.

• • •

As our role in the fighting diminished, the news media's opposition to our involvement in the Vietnam War intensified. Objectivity gave way to hostility. On June 13, 1971, when the
New York Times
began publishing a series of articles based on a classified 7,000-page Defense Department study, their conduct reached the height of irresponsibility.

Officially entitled
The History of U.S. Decision-Making
Process on Vietnam, the study soon received a more dramatic label: “The Pentagon Papers.” Written at the direction of Robert McNamara, the study's text described the history of our involvement in Vietnam from 1945 through 1968, and its appendixes contained dozens of verbatim documents from the files of the Defense Department, State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House. The documents had been illegally turned over to the
Times.
Now, its editors announced that they planned to publish not only portions of the study but also many of the original documents. Their story did not mention that all these materials were still classified a “Secret” and “Top Secret.”

My administration faced the difficult question of what to do about the most massive leak of classified documents in American history. We had only two options: We could either do nothing or move for a court injunction that would prevent the Times from continuing publication. Good policy argued for moving against the Times; safe politics argued against doing so.

My political advisers believed that it would be in my interest to let the Pentagon Papers come out. First of all, the study focused principally on Kennedy's and Johnson's handling of the war. Because it was written in 1968, it could contain nothing about my administration's actions. Furthermore, the Times stories about the Pentagon Papers leveled serious charges against my Democratic predecessors. Most of the accusations were based on grotesque distortions of the historical record. But that did not alter the fact that it would be to my political
advantage for them to appear on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the country.

Nevertheless, I decided to try to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers because concrete policy considerations outweighed whatever political benefits I might accrue. It posed a significant threat to some of our national security interests. The National Security Agency feared that the more recent documents would provide code-breaking clues and contain information about our signal and electronic intelligence capabilities that would be spotted by the trained eyes of enemy experts. The State Department was alarmed because the study would reveal SEATO contingency war plans that were still in effect. The Central Intelligence Agency was worried that it would expose past or current informants and would contain specific references to the names and activities of agents still active in Southeast Asia. One secret contact dried up almost immediately, and other governments became reluctant to share their intelligence information with us.

We also were concerned that the release of the Pentagon Papers would damage our delicate negotiations with China and the Soviet Union. Diplomacy, especially with Communist powers, depends on secrecy. If leaders cannot express their views frankly for fear that what they say will appear in the next day's headlines, the chances of making progress in negotiations will be sharply reduced. If, for example, word had leaked out about our China initiative, those who opposed it in both countries would have destroyed any chances for success. When the Pentagon Papers were leaked, Kissinger was about to take his first secret trip to Peking, and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union were just getting started. I knew that before going forward with our rapprochement, the Chinese would watch carefully to see how I handled disclosure of the Pentagon Papers. In their eyes, a failure to act would have meant that we were an unreliable partner with whom it would be risky to share sensitive information.

If the
New York Times
had acted with any degree of responsibility,
we could have avoided the battle in the court. But it had not done so. Its editors admitted having had possession of the documents for more than three months before publishing them. Yet never once had they asked anyone in the government whether publication of any of the classified material might threaten national security or endanger the lives of our men in Vietnam.

The Supreme Court ruled against the government. But I still believe I acted responsibly in challenging the right of the
New York Times
to publish the Pentagon's study. Its release was an illegal action. Its publication was a threat to our ability to conduct foreign policy. If we had done nothing, we would have been setting a dangerous precedent: Every disgruntled bureaucrat in Washington would have read our inaction as a signal that he could leak anything he pleased and that the government would simply stand by helplessly. In the thirteen years since the Supreme Court sanctioned the
Times's
publication of the Pentagon Papers, that is exactly what has happened.

• • •

Our pacification and Vietnamization programs completely transformed the war in Vietnam. The military picture we faced in 1972 was almost entirely different from the one we faced even as late as 1970. We had countered the Communists' strategy of guerrilla war so effectively that they abandoned it. Their new strategy was to wage a conventional war. In short, Hanoi had chosen to fight our kind of war.

In early 1972, we expected a major Communist offensive that would decide the outcome of the war. The presence of North Vietnamese tanks in Laos indicated that the assault would not be an urban insurrection like the Tet Offensive but an overt invasion by a conventional army. If it succeeded, South Vietnam would be swept off the map. If it failed, North Vietnam would be forced to negotiate an end to the war. We were prepared for their attack because all five elements of our Vietnam policy had come together.

Our Vietnamization program had turned South Vietnam's
military into a formidable fighting force. Its army had 120 infantry battalions organized into 11 divisions, 58 artillery battalions, and 19 armored units of battalion size. Its navy had 43,000 sailors operating 1,680 naval craft. Its air force had 51,000 servicemen operating more than 1,000 aircraft. South Vietnam, with a population of 19 million, had over 1 million men in its armed forces and another 3 million in its local militias.

Our pacification program had extended Saigon's control throughout the country down to the hamlet level. Our South Vietnamese allies had uprooted the Communist infrastructure, thereby depriving enemy forces of supplies and military intelligence. Our economic aid had produced unprecedented prosperity for the South Vietnamese people.

Our great-power diplomacy had unnerved the North Vietnamese by isolating them from China and the Soviet Union. During my summit meeting in China in February 1972, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai mildly criticized American actions in Vietnam, but they spoke more in sorrow than anger. I also had initiated the process of detente with the Soviet Union. A summit meeting with Leonid Brezhnev was scheduled for May in Moscow. We were close to resolving several issues of great importance to the Soviets, including a major grain deal and the first Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement. Brezhnev considered the war in Vietnam an issue of secondary significance by comparison. Neither major Communist power had helped us end the war. But both had taken clear steps to distance themselves from Hanoi. Communist leaders by training and practice are master conspirators. They never trust their adversaries and seldom trust each other. The fact that we were meeting with their major allies in Peking and Moscow had to concern the men in North Vietnam's politburo.