No More Vietnams (8 page)

The National Liberation Front also had a systematic policy of assassination or abduction of anyone likely to stand up to it and provide anti-Communist forces with leadership. Its secret service, operating out of North Vietnam's Ministry of Public Security, was present throughout South Vietnam. The Communists drew up lists of victims and then deployed specially trained teams to kidnap or kill the targets. From 1957 to 1973, they assassinated 36,725 South Vietnamese and abducted another 58,499. The real figures are much higher; accurate statistics could not be kept during the Tet Offensive in 1968. Some of those kidnapped were returned after indoctrination, but many were never seen again. They were either forced to fight with the guerrillas or executed as enemies.

The death squads of the National Liberation Front focused on leaders at the village level. The guerrillas cynically differentiated between honest and corrupt hamlet chiefs. One National Liberation Front defector explained that when faced with dishonest leaders “the Communists will publicly denounce
the government and demand that it be overthrown, but actually they will support and encourage the corrupt hamlet chiefs. On the other hand the honest hamlet chief who has done much for the people and who has a clear understanding of the party is classified by the party as a ‘traitor of major importance.' He is eliminated.”

The target lists also included anyone who improved the lives of the peasants, such as medical personnel, social workers, and schoolteachers, whether he had any links with the government or not. When asked why teachers were assassinated, one Communist defector said, “Because they were people with a profound understanding about politics, people who were pure nationalists, who might be able to assume anti-Communist leadership in their area. Such people are very dangerous and hence are classed as traitors.”

Those labeled “traitors” faced a grim fate. Once, the Communists occupied a village whose chief had cooperated with the Saigon government. Guerrillas assembled all the villagers outside, including the chief and his family. While everyone watched, they disemboweled the chief's wife and dismembered his children one by one, cutting off their arms and legs despite their screams. Then they castrated the village chief. After witnessing these grisly executions, no one in the village dared cooperate with the central government.

That was not an isolated incident. In February 1966, United States forces were ordered to liberate a coastal village in Binh Dinh Province. A young woman who was working for the South Vietnamese government urged the peasants not to resist. The Communists captured her, tied her to a coconut tree, and gathered the villagers. First, the leader of the Communists screamed accusations against her. Then, as she struggled against the ropes, he raised a broad, long-handled knife with a curved point that peasants used to open coconuts. While two other men restrained her, he twice plunged the knife into her, leaving her lower body in tatters. Her entrails seeped out and dripped onto the ground. “Death to traitors of the people,” he
read from a piece of yellow paper. “The same will happen to all who betray the just cause of our liberation struggle.” He stuck a small bamboo stick through the paper and shoved it into her gaping wound. The Communists left her there to die as an example for the others.

• • •

That we became preoccupied with the insurgency in South Vietnam, which was instigated and controlled by the real aggressors in North Vietnam, showed that Ho Chi Minh was a master of the art of political magic. A magician depends on sleight of hand, and the essence of sleight of hand is diversion. At the moment he switches the ball from the first shell to the second, he must be sure that the attention of the audience is focused on the third. That North Vietnam was engaging in aggression against South Vietnam was clearly evident to anyone who bothered to look carefully. The United States was aware of the facts, but failed to draw the logical conclusions. We focused on Ho's diversion—the insurgency in South Vietnam—and like a master magician, he played us for suckers.

American military and political leaders fell for Ho's diversion because they were wearing strategic blinkers. In the early 1960s, the Communist tactic of “revolutionary war” obsessed our strategists. Mao had used it to win power in China; Fidel Castro used it in Cuba. In January 1961, Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev announced that he intended to support “wars of national liberation.” The Soviets now would seek to take over countries from within by sending military supplies to Communist movements in the target countries rather than by attacking across a border.

President Kennedy believed the Communists saw revolutionary war as the wave of the future. He remarked to an aide that he would wager with nine-to-one odds that the next war would be a revolutionary war and considered the Vietnam War a classic example. His aides urged him, and later Johnson, not to attack North Vietnam until we had defeated the revolutionary war in South Vietnam. Their advice was based on the naïve
premise that if we could counter the causes of insurgency in the target country, it would not be necessary to attack those outside the country who were directly responsible for it.

Kennedy's advisers displayed not only appalling naïveté but also fundamentally poor judgment. They failed to understand the vitally important distinction between revolutionary war and guerrilla war. Guerrilla warfare is a military operation; revolutionary warfare is a political operation. Guerrilla warfare supplements normal conventional military operations by infiltrating small units behind enemy lines to disrupt his communications, interrupt his supplies, and harass his forces; revolutionary war aims to subvert the enemy's control by leading the people to rise up against him. Guerrilla war helps regular armies achieve victory by weakening the enemy; revolutionary war achieves victory on its own through a popular uprising.

In Vietnam the insurgency was not primarily a revolutionary war, because the people as a whole were not rising up against the government. The real war in Vietnam was an invasion from North Vietnam that came in the guise of a guerrilla insurgency. While we treated the symptom, the disease went unchecked.

• • •

Because we failed to understand the nature of the war, the chances were small that we would choose the correct strategy to fight it. Our first error probably doomed us to follow the wrong path, but we sealed our fate by committing three more.

The first resulted from events half a world away from Vietnam. In April 1961, 1,400 anti-Communist Cubans, who were organized, trained, armed, and directed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, landed in the Zapata Swamp of Cuba's Bay of Pigs with the mission of leading an anti-Castro revolution. Within three days, they capitulated after a valiant effort against vastly greater and better-supplied enemy forces. It was a debacle for the United States. The freedom fighters had been promised American air cover, and never would have gone forward with the plan without such a commitment. When we did not deliver it, their attack stalled quickly. Without air
support, they could neither advance nor even be resupplied. As a result, they literally ran out of ammunition on the beaches.

After this disastrous failure, President Kennedy ordered Robert Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor to undertake an investigation. They concluded that the CIA was not equipped to handle large-scale paramilitary operations and that the Pentagon should be put in charge of them. Our involvement in Vietnam fell into this category, even though at the time we were only training and advising South Vietnam's army.

This decision had enormous consequences. The CIA's political sophistication and on-the-spot feel for local conditions went out the window as people who saw the world through bureaucratic and technological lenses took over the main operational responsibility for the war. Our armed forces were experts at mobilizing huge resources, orchestrating logistic support, and deploying enormous firepower. In Vietnam, these skills led them to fight the war
their
way, rather than developing the new skills required to defeat the new kind of enemy they faced. They made the mistake of fighting an unconventional war with conventional tactics.

• • •

The second critical mistake took place in Laos. For years the Laotian people had been fighting a three-cornered civil war. The Communist Pathet Lao controlled two northeastern provinces bordering on North Vietnam. Neutralists held the central plain. Rightists ruled the areas bordering on Thailand along the Mekong River in southern Laos. The fighting had never been intense—until North Vietnam began to intervene.

Running through Laos were the best routes around the demilitarized zone between the two Vietnams for infiltrating men and arms into South Vietnam and Cambodia. Hanoi therefore set up Group 559 in May 1959 and Group 959 in September 1959. According to the North Vietnamese history of the war, the task of Group 559 was “creating the first foot travel route connecting the North and South, and organizing the sending of people, weapons, and supplies to the revolution in the South.” Group 959 was set up for providing military specialists
for the Pathet Lao, organizing “the supplying of Vietnamese material to the Laotian revolution and directly commanding the Vietnamese volunteer units” operating in Laos.

With these actions, Hanoi had set out to crush the Pathet Lao's two non-Communist rivals and take total control of the country in order to facilitate their invasion of South Vietnam. By December 1960, the North Vietnamese had stationed 7,000 troops in Laos.

President Eisenhower believed that Laos was the key domino in Southeast Asia. Defending Laos was the major specific action Eisenhower urged on President-elect Kennedy when they met in January 1961. Eisenhower told Kennedy that if Laos were to fall into Communist hands, we would have to write off all of Indochina. But in the event that efforts to reach a political solution failed, he advised, the United States should intervene militarily with its allies if possible, or alone if necessary.

Kennedy's initial moves in Laos were promising. On March 23, 1961, he said forcefully that unless Communist attacks on its neutral government were stopped, “those who support a truly neutral Laos will have to consider their response.” He warned that no one should doubt his resolution on this point. “The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence,” he said. “I know that every American will want his country to honor its obligations to the point that freedom and security of the free world and ourselves may be achieved.”

He instructed the CIA to supply arms to the neutralists and rightists who were fighting against the expansion of Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese control. It was a limited commitment, involving fewer than 700 American advisers, but it was enough to stalemate the war and keep North Vietnam's larger forces off-balance.

One month later, however, Kennedy backed away from his commitment to keep Laos independent. He decided that Laos was beyond our security perimeter in Southeast Asia and that it was the wrong place to draw the line against North Vietnamese
aggression. If he had to engage American forces in the area, he preferred to do so in South Vietnam.

His advisers provided him with persuasive arguments to support his reversal on Laos. Laos enjoyed little national unity. Its armed forces were small and poorly trained. Its terrain was forbidding. Its geography made it difficult to apply American air and naval power. Its common border with Communist China stirred fears that any American action might provoke Mao to intervene as he had in Korea.

The Bay of Pigs disaster on April 19, 1961, reinforced Kennedy's reluctance to act. When I saw him at the White House on April 20, I pledged bipartisan support for any action he decided was necessary to prevent a Communist conquest of Laos. His response was that he did not see how we could make any move in Laos, which was thousands of miles away, if we did not make a move in Cuba, which was only ninety miles away. Kennedy also told an aide that one of the lessons he had learned from his defeat in Cuba was that the United States should pursue a political solution in Southeast Asia rather than a military one.

Accordingly, he instructed Averell Harriman to negotiate an agreement in Geneva that would neutralize Laos. The talks began in May 1961 and soon ran up against implacable North Vietnamese intransigence. Ho stalled because he sensed the United States would abandon Laos even without an agreement. After ten months of Communist delays, Kennedy sent 5,000 marines to Thailand and put American forces at Okinawa on standby. Ho appeared to back down, and within two months there was an agreement in Geneva. Fifteen countries signed a treaty in which they pledged to recognize a new neutralist coalition government in Laos, to withdraw any military forces they had in the country, and to stop any paramilitary assistance to the rival political factions. The agreement was hailed by foreign-policy pundits in the media as a significant contribution to peace in Southeast Asia.

All countries complied except one: North Vietnam.

The agreement had stated that all foreign troops would leave
Laos through internationally supervised checkpoints. Ho never took any serious steps to remove his 7,000-man contingent from Laos. The total number of North Vietnamese soldiers recorded as leaving was forty.

Unlike the American administration, Ho viewed all of Indochina not as four separate countries but as one strategic theater. His motive in signing the Geneva agreement was simple and cynical: He hoped it would enable him to restrict our zone of operation while his armies continued to operate freely throughout Indochina.

When the plan worked, the North Vietnamese wasted no time in exploiting their advantage. Through the work of their Group 559, they virtually annexed southern Laos and constructed an elaborate system of infiltration routes—dubbed the “Ho Chi Minh Trail”—into South Vietnam and Cambodia.

Those who argued that the war in Vietnam was an internal South Vietnamese conflict minimized the importance of the Ho Chi Minh Trail or even questioned its existence. The official North Vietnamese history of the war does not. It reads: “During the sixteen years of operation, Group 559, which at first had only a few hundred people who primarily used cargo bicycles on narrow trails, became a force with many components: transportation troops, military engineers, infantry, antiaircraft artillery, [fuel supply] troops, communications units, etc., totalling tens of thousands of people and thousands of cargo trucks organized into many divisions, regiments, troop encampments, workshops, stations, etc. There was created a strategic route bearing the name of the great Uncle Ho which crossed the Troung Son mountains [in Laos], connected the battlefields, and amounted to a relatively complete land route, pipeline, and river route network.”