No More Vietnams (7 page)

To understand what went wrong in Vietnam, the critical question is not why we were in Vietnam but how we got into Vietnam. In 1950, President Truman gave France $10 million in financial aid to support its war against the Communist Viet Minh. By 1960, President Eisenhower had stationed 685 noncombat advisers in South Vietnam and had given its government $2 billion in aid. But our commitment remained clearly limited, contingent on whether the South Vietnamese government undertook needed reforms and represented the true nationalist aspirations of its people.

President Kennedy made the first major escalation in our commitment. He raised the number of American military personnel in Vietnam to over 16,000 and permitted them to go into combat. In 1965, President Johnson ordered air strikes against North Vietnam and sent additional American combat troops to fight in South Vietnam. After four years of steadily deepening involvement, the number of American servicemen in Vietnam reached nearly 550,000. By the end of 1968, the war had cost the United States over 31,000 lives, and Americans were being killed at a rate of 300 a week. Yet we were no closer to victory than we had been a decade before.

Our critical error was to ignore one of the iron laws of war: Never go in without knowing how you are going to get out. Successive American administrations upped our commitment by increments—first in aid, then in noncombat advisers, and finally in combat soldiers—without having clearly in mind how these increases would achieve our goals. Policymakers
based their decisions on what was needed to prevent defeat rather than what it would take to reach victory.

Several fatal flaws plagued American policy in Vietnam from 1960 through 1968. We failed to understand that the war was an invasion from North Vietnam, not an insurgency in South Vietnam. We failed to prevent North Vietnam from establishing a key supply route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, through Laos and Cambodia. We failed to foresee the consequences of our backing the military coup that overthrew South Vietnam's most capable leader, President Diem, and that ushered in years of debilitating political instability. We failed to tailor our military tactics to the political circumstances of the war. We failed to understand the determination of our enemy and what it would take to defeat him. We failed to explain the war to the American people and mobilize them behind it.

Our goals were noble in Vietnam. But a just cause is not a substitute for strategy. We were morally right in trying to help South Vietnam defend itself, but we made crucial errors in how we went about it.

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The first rule of war is that one must know the enemy and understand his strategy and tactics. The second is that one must adopt strategy and tactics suited to the circumstances of the war. In the early years of the Vietnam War, North Vietnam conducted an invasion of South Vietnam that was cloaked as an indigenous insurgency. The United States mistook the nature of the war, choosing to fight against the insurgency instead of the invasion, and in the early 1960s compounded this error with three others. By the mid-1960s, American forces found themselves fighting the wrong kind of war with the wrong kinds of tactics.

The North Vietnamese invasion that began in late 1959 proved Hanoi's leaders had learned a lesson from the Korean War. North Korea's blatant invasion across the border had given the United States clear justification to intervene and had enabled President Truman to rally the American people and
our United Nations allies to the defense of South Korea. North Vietnam therefore shrewdly camouflaged its invasion to look like a civil war. But in fact the Vietnam War was the Korean War with jungles.

Hanoi's invasion came under and around the border instead of over it. By 1963, North Vietnam had infiltrated more than 15,000 troops or advisers into the South, most of them southerners trained by the Communists in the North. Subsequently, the infiltration became predominantly northern. North Vietnam sensed that victory might be at hand and consequently stepped up the attack. It sent 12,000 troops in 1964, 36,000 in 1965, 92,000 in 1966, and 101,000 in 1967. After the Tet Offensive in early 1968, the fighting was conducted almost exclusively by the North Vietnamese Army.

Hanoi also had a fifth column in South Vietnam. Ho had ordered thousands of Communist Viet Minh to stay in the South after the 1954 partition in anticipation of his push to conquer the whole of Vietnam. They organized the National Liberation Front, a coalition of political groups opposing the South Vietnamese government. These included idealistic youths, peasants in areas where land reform had failed, Saigon intellectuals, and victims of Diem's anti-Communist campaign. It was a classic example of the Communist tactic of the united front. Though some non-Communist groups gathered under this umbrella organization, the Communists always dominated it. As distinguished from the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, in which the Communists captured what were at the outset primarily non-Communist movements, the guerrilla insurgency in South Vietnam was started, controlled, and dominated by the Communists from the beginning. When the non-Communists were no longer useful to the Communist cause, they were eliminated.

The nature of the National Liberation Front became a central issue in the debate over the propriety of the American intervention in the Vietnam War. There were two critical questions: Was the front an indigenous political movement independent of North Vietnam? Did it represent the legitimate aspirations
of the South Vietnamese? The answer to both questions was unequivocally
no
.

It was vitally important for North Vietnam to create the appearance that the National Liberation Front was an independent movement. Communist leaders went to elaborate lengths to maintain this illusion. But Hanoi's hand was hidden only from those who chose not to see it.

North Vietnam decided to use armed force to unite Vietnam in January 1959 and sent out orders to that effect in May. By July, Communist infiltration into South Vietnam markedly increased. These agents organized a political and military revolt against the Saigon government. A few months later, the number of guerrilla attacks escalated dramatically. In September 1960, North Vietnam's Communist party publicly called for “our people” in South Vietnam to “bring into being a broad National United Front against the United States and Diem.” In January 1961, the creation of the National Liberation Front was announced in Saigon. North Vietnam called for the formation of separate military and political organizations for South Vietnam's Communists. By December 1962, both the People's Liberation Army and the People's Revolutionary party had appeared.

One Communist defector explained that North Vietnam could hardly permit the International Control Commission, which supervised compliance with the 1954 Geneva cease-fire agreements, to say that there was an invasion from the North, “so it was necessary to have some name . . . to clothe these forces with some political organization.” When two other defectors were shown American publications arguing that the National Liberation Front was independent of Hanoi, they remarked with amusement that North Vietnam had been more successful than expected in concealing its role.

There was direct evidence of North Vietnam's role as well. In April 1960, North Vietnamese Communist Party First Secretary Le Duan said, “The liberation of the South is not only a task for the southern people, but also of the entire people, of the South as well as of the North. The northern people will
never neglect their task with regard to one half of their country, which is not yet liberated.” At the Geneva Conference on Laos in July 1962, a leading member of the North Vietnamese delegation divulged to journalists that the names of some members of the Central Committee of his country's Communist party were being kept secret because “they are directing military operations in South Vietnam.”

A few simple calculations proved that the guerrillas in the South could not hold out for long without material support from North Vietnam. Until mid-1964, the National Liberation Front conducted low-level military assaults while it recruited members and organized and strengthened its structure. Then it was ready to step up the size of its attacks. In 1964, its main forces grew from 10,000 troops to 30,000, and its paramilitary forces increased from 30,000 to 80,000. These men needed weapons. Caches left behind before the 1954 partition contained 10,000 weapons. The National Liberation Front had captured 39,000 weapons and lost 25,000, producing a net gain of 14,000. But this would have left 86,000 troops unarmed. AK-47s did not grow on trees and could not be carved from bamboo shoots. The weapons had to come from North Vietnam.

If there was any doubt during the war that the National Liberation Front was merely a front, it was quickly dispelled after the war ended. North Vietnamese General Van Tien Dung, in his account of the final victory of his armies in 1975, barely mentions the role of South Vietnam's Communists. In southern Vietnam, all key government positions were given to northerners, and the forces of the People's Liberation Army were immediately absorbed into the North Vietnamese Army. In May 1975, Le Duan said, “Our Party is the unique and single leader that organized, controlled, and governed the entire struggle of the Vietnamese people from the first day of the revolution.”

Those who had been members of the front organization came forward after the war to testify that Hanoi had from the start
planned and orchestrated a war of conquest against the South. In December 1975, Nguyen Huu Tho, a former president of the National Liberation Front, remarked in a speech that his organization had been “wholly obedient to the party line.” After he escaped from Vietnam, Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the front, wrote that “we discovered that the North Vietnamese Communists had engaged in a deliberate deception to achieve what had been their true goal from the start, the destruction of South Vietnam as a political or social entity in any way separate from the North.”

North Vietnam's war might have been justified if it advanced the wishes of the people of South Vietnam. Many critics of American policy argued that the National Liberation Front could operate as freely as it did in the countryside because Communist ideology was in tune with Vietnamese culture and because the humanitarian policies of the guerrillas had won the support—the “hearts and minds,” in the fashionable phrase—of the villagers. The Communist revolution in South Vietnam, they said, was as legitimate as the American Revolution.

To compare the two in any respect is a ludicrous libel of America's Founding Fathers.

Love of communism did not dwell in the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese. Hatred of it ran in their veins. In Vietnamese tradition, a leader should win power by his virtue, but the Communists sought to control by virtue of their power. In Vietnamese culture, the individual does not exist merely to serve the community; instead, society should maximize the freedom of each individual. A tenacious belief in private property, a deep desire for individual freedom, and a resentment of power not based in moral authority are all part of the Vietnamese character. Communism, on the other hand, completely subordinates the individual to the state. It destroys freedom of expression, abolishes private property, and demands blind obedience. The Communists were well aware that their ideology was antithetical to Vietnamese culture. One of the main
reasons they set up the National Liberation Front was to keep the people from learning that the Communists were behind the revolution.

The Communists won converts by cultivating not hope but hatred. Even a prominent antiwar writer observed that one key to the success of the National Liberation Front was its “systematic encouragement of hatred.” Like almost all developing nations, South Vietnam had problems in providing social justice and avoiding governmental abuses. The Communists made it their mission to exacerbate the problems in order to help them whip the Vietnamese people into a frenzy of hatred. “Promotion of hatred,” stated one National Liberation Front directive, “must be permanent, continuous, and directly related to the struggle movement as closely as a man is to his shadow.” To Communist leaders, positive reforms were a danger. Where these were instituted, they warned, Communist agents “have tended to be self-satisfied with their records and less eager to continue promoting hatred among the masses, and thus . . . the Revolution does not boil and remain violent.”

Violence was the other key to the successes of the National Liberation Front. Communist forces systematically attacked not only the government and its army but also South Vietnamese civilians. Their purpose was to promote instability and insecurity, to destabilize the government by killing its most able officials, and to intimidate the people by demonstrating that they could not be protected.

For the National Liberation Front, terror and atrocities were calculated policies.

In Long An, after failing to persuade a man to ask his sons to desert the South Vietnamese army, the Communists coldly shot him in the back as he turned to go back to his home. When they captured the village of Cai Be in 1967, the Communists murdered forty wives and children of the members of the local militia. In Dak Son in 1967, they killed 252 civilians, two-thirds of whom were women and children, by incinerating the hamlet's straw huts one by one with flamethrowers. They buried mines on roads used only by villagers taking goods to
market; threw grenades into crowded public squares, pagodas, and schools; shelled crowded refugee camps; and fired 122mm rockets indiscriminately into Saigon, Danang, and other major cities. This continual terrorism killed thousands of South Vietnamese civilians every year.

Isolated atrocities committed by American soldiers produced torrents of outrage from antiwar critics and the news media. When it was revealed in December 1969 that United States troops killed 175 civilians at My Lai during the Tet Offensive of 1968, it dominated the front pages and the television news for weeks. Communist atrocities, on the other hand, were so common that they received hardly any attention at all. Certainly we should not have ignored the war crimes on our side. But it also is vitally important that we keep one distinction in mind. The United States sought to minimize and prevent attacks on civilians. North Vietnam made attacks on civilians a centerpiece of its strategy. Americans who deliberately killed civilians received prison sentences. Communists who did so received commendations.