The Best and the Brightest (107 page)

Now, in 1965, the bombing campaign was going ahead under the name of Rolling Thunder; it was, in the minds of most of the civilian principals, designed to make the other side negotiate, and thus avoid combat troops; but in the intelligence community the men most knowledgeable about Vietnam knew that it would not work even to this degree, and that the very incidents which had finally provoked it, the bombings, Pleiku and Qui Nhon, were a sure sign from the North that Hanoi would never capitulate, never negotiate in the face of bombing pressure. Thus the very acts which helped initiate the bombing were evidence from the other side that the avowed purpose of it would not work. But it would, the principals thought, stave off the use of troops. On February 22, nine days after the decision to go ahead on a bombing campaign, General William Childs Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam (COMUSMACV, in military parlance, or
Com
mander
US M
ilitary
A
ssistance
C
ommand,
V
ietnam), sent in a request for two U.S. Marine corps to provide security for the U.S. air base at Danang, the base from which more and more raids against the North (and the Vietcong in the South) were being launched.

It was a small request, just two battalions, and the mission was minor too, simply to provide security. But it was the beginning; it was the first time American combat units would arrive as units, and there was a sense among many in Washington and Saigon at the time that it was not the end either in numbers or in the extent of the mission, that both would soon be expanded, and that the man who had ordered the troops knew this better than anyone. And they were right. But it was a very small request, and it had to be done. In Hawaii, Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp of CINCPAC pushed the Westmoreland request with particularly well chosen words, words designed to drive fear into any serious, concerned civilian, that the troops be delivered to Westy as quickly as possible “before the tragedy,” as he put it, and Washington quickly acceded, though there were doubts. Slipping in the first troops was an adjustment, an asterisk really, to a decision they had made principally to avoid sending troops, but of course there had to be protection for the airplanes, which no one had talked about at any length during the bombing discussions, that if you bombed you needed airfields, and if you had airfields you needed troops to protect the airfields, and the ARVN wasn’t good enough. Nor had anyone pointed out that troops beget troops: that a regiment is very small, a regiment cannot protect itself. Even as they were bombing they were preparing for a new rationale, the protection of our men and matériel, which meant the arrival of our boys, which of course would mean more boys to protect our boys (and later greater bombing of the North to protect our boys, who were of course there originally to protect the airfields). The rationale would provide its own rhythm of escalation, and its growth would make William Westmoreland almost overnight a major player, if not
the
major player. This rationale weighed so heavily on the minds of the principals that three years later, in 1968, when the new thrust of part of the bureaucracy was to end or limit the bombing and when Lyndon Johnson was willing to remove himself from running again, he was nevertheless transfixed by the idea of protecting our boys. During that month of agonizing review he would call in General William Momyer, commander of the 7th Air Force in Vietnam, and ask him if he—and the boys—could live with it. Would it endanger American lives? Momyer answered yes, he could live with it. But Johnson was not satisfied, it was a delicate issue and one which weighed heavily on his conscience, and so once more he would personally summon General Momyer and ask, “Can you live with it?” and once more General Momyer said he could live with it and the boys could live with it, and Lyndon Johnson nodded. But he was still bothered, and a third time he would ask General Momyer if he could live with a bombing halt, and for the third time General Momyer would say yes, he could. These things, set in motion, were much harder to stop and turn around than anyone had imagined.

That airfields would need troops for protection was no surprise to William Westmoreland; he had in fact for some months been quite convinced that American combat units would be needed to save Vietnam from the Communists, and he thought the war was going quite badly. In February and March 1965 he was considerably more pessimistic than his old friend Max Taylor; he thought the war was in the South and thus the answers, and victory, were to be found in the South. He had no confidence at all in the ARVN despite the lip service his command continued to pay toward the optimism invented in earlier and more euphoric days. In fact, he had started the planning on the needs of the combat troops in 1964. The embassy’s chief political officer, Max Taylor, had said that the bombing would bring political benefit, and so Westmoreland, who was not a presumptuous man (Max was, after all, astute politically and Westy was not), was quite willing to go along with the Taylor judgment. But he had a feeling deep down that this was a minor decision, a stop-gap measure when the gap had already passed, a gesture to the civilians as much as anything else, and so he continued with his own contingency planning for American ground troops. He was not rushing anyone, not pushing anyone; he knew it was a sensitive problem for civilians. He would recall the night of Pleiku with a certain detached amusement, the excitement of the civilians there (“George McBundy, he was a big hawk then,” he would say later); McNamara staying up all night in his office in Washington awaiting the outcome. Rostow, they told him, had gone around with all the control officers that night talking to them excitedly, emotionally. The civilians, he had thought at the time, were taking this all very seriously, and they were much more optimistic about what this might bring. If you knew anything about the military, you knew this was only a token thing, simply showing that the U.S. was getting ready. Rolling up its sleeves to do a job. Not the last time, he thought, that the civilians were naÏve about what the military might accomplish.

As early as August 1964, after Tonkin, Westmoreland had asked for security troops for Vietnam and for the beginning of a logistical command. He had wanted one Marine battalion at Danang for security reasons; the 173rd Airborne Brigade (then stationed at Okinawa) in the Tan Son NhutBien Hoa area, also for security; and in addition, he wanted an Army Engineer group and Signal Corps units which would anticipate a larger build-up if necessary. The Army Engineer group included three or four battalions, plus specialized engineering companies, some of them for ports, some for airstrips. Westmoreland was even then trying to get them into the country to prepare the inner logistic base for combat troops eventually coming ashore. Since the engineers weren’t provided, in mid-1965, when the combat troops did start arriving, the logistical component was not ready; instead of the petroleum being pumped in by an underwater pipe line already laid down by the engineers, the 55-gallon drums had to be hand-lifted to shore or carried over with a crane shovel.

Westmoreland had also asked for three Hawk antiaircraft battalions for the Danang and Bien Hoa areas, in case the North Vietnamese responded to American air attacks by bombing the South. A brief by-play immediately took place which was to reflect the sharply differing attitudes toward American combat involvement. In Washington, considerable debate ensued over the Hawk battalion, and on November 14, 1964, the Joint Chiefs directed deployment. Ambassador Taylor, however, recommended against it, fearing that it would begin Americanizing the war. When, on November 25, CINCPAC recommended landing the Hawks, it appeared that they would arrive after all, but then, in early December, Taylor was back in Washington again recommending that they hold back the Hawk battalion and divert it to Okinawa; once again deployment was stopped. Now with the approval of the Marine battalion landing teams, the Hawk battalion was finally approved for Danang. At the same time, in mid-August 1964, when Westmoreland made his recommendations for new security troops, he also told Admiral Sharp at CINCPAC in a cable that although the United States knew that the air strikes were a reaction to a specific provocation, in the eyes of the North Vietnamese they were overt attacks. If, he said, the other side responded, it would respond on the ground. “Even if they don’t take action now, they will later on, in response to escalation on our part and they are preparing the capability for it.” Then he listed the three possibilities for North Vietnamese reaction. The first was an overt attack across the DMZ, which he said was unlikely because of the exposure to major air attacks. The second was an increased pattern of infiltration, and a major step-up of Vietcong activity in the South. This, he said, was likely, but probably not enough to satisfy Hanoi’s desire for reprisal. The third, he said, was infiltration of North Vietnamese divisions. This could lead to a sudden attack on Danang or Hué. The Vietnamese general staff, he said, thought this was most likely. For the moment, Westmoreland said, there was no specific intelligence that they were infiltrating divisions, but he certainly gave them the capability.

It was a very important cable, this one from Westmoreland to CINCPAC, because it showed that he knew that there would be a North Vietnamese reaction to bombing. It was not something the mission pushed upon Washington, it did not want to scare Washington out of the war, but it was something that the American military were aware of but not frightened by. For all the evidence that the Vietcong gave of their combat toughness, and for all the abundant evidence of the ferocity and professionalism (and size) of the North Vietnamese army, there was a certain Caucasian arrogance about the Vietnamese ability, a belief that when pitted against American troops, the Vietnamese would have to cave in, that American troops with their fire power, with their air support, their helicopters, would simply be too much. The arrival of the first team would do it. The principals simply could not understand the leavening influence of the terrain, the jungle, the paddies, on their modern fire power, thus stripping away the greatest advantage the Americans had, nullifying all the hardware, making even the helicopters a limited weapon (and cruelest of all ironies, coming up with a basic infantryman’s weapon, the Chinese-made AK-47, which worked better under extremely difficult conditions and jammed less frequently than the basic weapon carried by the Americans). Thus, with technology stripped away, were the Americans that impressive? Would they be braver, more willing to die than their enemies, who were leaner, less expectant of what life was going to give them, easily as well led, and above all
Vietnamese
?

This came later. In the beginning the belief in our superiority was a part of Westmoreland’s attitude, and it was even more a part of the key general who was one of his chief advisers during those crucial months, Bill Depuy, one of those men who played a major role all through Vietnam and were virtually unknown to the public. Depuy was one of the Army intellectuals. Very bright, considered by most civilians in the Pentagon the brightest general they had ever met. He was not like other generals in his background. Unlike them, he made for a long time a point of living off-post in Washington, in the nice Cleveland Park area, far from the incestuous inner world of Army generals and Army wives talking of who was doing what to whom; but a better residence from which to meet important civilians and influence them. He had been in the CIA for some time, and he had been brought to Vietnam by Dick Stilwell, another of the Army intellectuals who had served in the CIA. Depuy had risen rapidly, he had made it with Westmoreland, and quickly become his most trusted adviser on strategy. He was a formidable figure, tiny but cocky and imperious as if to make up for that lack of height (when he finally got a division, in Vietnam, the 1st Infantry, a pick division, he made a fetish of firing his battalion commanders and company commanders, replacing them with his own men—public relief of command it was, and it was very controversial. Army Chief of Staff Harold Johnson, a conservative traditionalist, thought it was criminal; but it was considered part of Depuy’s style, his toughness:
Don’t mess with Depuy
). He was a skilled bureaucrat, an effective military politician and he was extraordinarily important in the early planning of the American ground strategy (search and destroy was as much his strategy as it was Westmoreland’s).

In late 1964 he was probably the most pessimistic of the generals about the capacity of the ARVN to hold on without American troops, but he was also one of those most confident about the capacity of American troops to fight there. John Vann would later recall that when Depuy took over the 1st Division, Vann and a few senior Vietnamese officers tried to advise him a little about the background of the fighting and the Vietcong. But Depuy was not interested, no one who had been associated with the past, flawed as it was, could teach him anything. He told the old-timers in effect, Just stay out of my way and I’ll show you how it’s done. He believed that massive fire power and American mobility were the answer, that the enemy simply could not stand up in the face of it. Eventually, like others before him, he would learn how tough the enemy was, and by the end of his tour as a general his strategy was a good deal less aggressive. He had a tendency to establish contact and then pull back his troops and pound the area with air and artillery, a tactic which lowered his own losses, increased civilian casualties and led to vastly inflated casualty claims. This attitude—the awe of the new technology, the new mobility—existed in Washington as well as Saigon. McNamara still believed that the new technology could affect the war in a decisive way, and so did Rostow. Rostow was in fact particularly enthusiastic about it, and Lou Heren, the correspondent for the London
Times,
would recall being at a dinner with Rostow when the key decisions were being made in 1965, and Rostow spouting both his enthusiasm and his ratios. Normally, explained Rostow, the ideal ratio against guerrillas was 10 to 1, a figure which the United States would not be able to meet. But there were factors of fire power and of mobility, and each was given a factor of 3. Thus one needed only a ratio of 4 to 1. Heren, who had spent long years covering the war in Malaya, explained that it was not a war but a police action which the British had fought there; had there been bombings and use of tanks, the British would have lost the population, and thus lost the war. Heren would remember Rostow sneering at him. Heren was old-fashioned, he said, too much like the now departed Hilsman. He did not understand the new strategy, the new mobility. That atmosphere prevailed in many quarters, a belief in American industrial power and technological genius which had emerged during World War II. Later there would be a phrase for it. Fulbright, who was appalled by it, would call it “the arrogance of power.” We had power and the North Vietnamese did not; besides, they were small and yellow.