They Marched Into Sunlight (67 page)

Kissinger said he detected “slight movement” in Hanoi’s position since the exchanges began. There were signs, he said, that the North Vietnamese wanted “to keep this going.”

President Johnson listened to the debate for a few minutes before offering his opinion. “My judgment is that they are keeping this channel going just
because
we are not bombing Hanoi,” he said. “I know if they were bombing Washington, hitting my bridges and highways, I would be delighted to trade off discussions through an intermediary for a restriction on the bombing. It hasn’t cost him one bit. The net of it is that he has a sanctuary in Hanoi in return for having his consul talk with two scientists who talked with an American citizen.”

Katzenbach disagreed with the president. A bombing pause made sense, he said. It would “bring together the ranks in this country and abroad.” He favored a pause beginning in mid-November or early December.

“Just pause, period?” Johnson asked.

“Yes,” Katzenbach answered. “I would say very loud and clear that we are ready. I would make clear through private channels that the assumption that they would not take advantage of the bombing still holds. If they attacked us along the DMZ, I would respond immediately. If they were to begin a major resupply, we should deal with that immediately.”

Johnson turned to Defense Secretary McNamara. “Bob, how effective can you be in dealing out resupply?”

McNamara, who had become a disbeliever when it came to bombing North Vietnam, used this opening to press his point again. “Mr. President, I believe I can show beyond a shadow of a doubt that bombing in Hanoi and Haiphong will not affect resupply in the South one bit.” If the North took military advantage of a pause, he added, “we should counter with military reciprocal action.”

General Taylor now entered the debate. The former ambassador to South Vietnam and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recently returned from a trip through South Vietnam and much of Asia with Clark Clifford. Fresh in everyone’s mind was the article Taylor had written for the previous Sunday’s
New York Times Magazine
in which he argued assuredly that the war was being won. “Any indication of weakness is viewed with contempt,” Taylor said now. It would be weak, he argued, to initiate a bombing pause without any signs of reciprocity from Hanoi. “If we have a pause, let Thieu request it,” he said, referring to the South Vietnamese president, who was to be inaugurated at the end of the month. “This would give us a better position and would not make it appear as another Washington proposal to Hanoi. We cannot afford to be weak.”

Clifford, in lawyerly fashion, parsed the message from Hanoi. “As I see it, there are five parts to their response,” he said. “One, they charge the U.S. with escalation. Two, they charge the U.S. with trickery. Three, they will not receive Mr. Kissinger. Four, the position of their government is clear. Five, it is only when bombing ceases that negotiations—or discussion—can take place.”

To Clifford this seemed like old stuff. “We should say that we assume from the language you have used that you feel there is nothing to be gained from a continuation of this dialogue. If you have a different view, we would be glad to hear it,” he argued. The exchanges with the Frenchmen were probably not viewed by the North Vietnamese as anything more than a way to stay informed, he said. “I do not believe they will use this type of channel when they are serious about really doing something.” There was, then, “no basis for suspension or cessation” of the bombing, he concluded, agreeing with his traveling companion, Taylor. “I think it would be misinterpreted in Hanoi. It would be utilized to build up their supplies, just as they did during the four-day Tet holiday.” If there was to be a suspension of bombing, he said, it should not come until “after the formation and shake-down of the new government” in South Vietnam. In conclusion, Clifford said, he would recommend ending “Henry’s effort” and doing three simple things: “One, watch; two, wait; and three, see how the situation develops.”

Abe Fortas agreed with Clifford. The unofficial channel should be closed, he said. “Professor Kissinger should say, ‘Thanks, it’s too bad. You know you could have gotten somewhere if you had really wanted to.’”

The next time the president made a public statement about suspending bombing, Fortas argued, he should be prepared to stop bombing altogether, not merely pause. “The bombing pauses have intensified criticism in this country. I cannot see why they will not negotiate with the bombing but say they will talk without the bombing. This has always been incomprehensible to me.” In any case, given the circumstances, Fortas thought it “would be sad” if Johnson were to cease the bombing now.

“I see no ray of hope out of this,” Justice Fortas said.

Rostow, the national security adviser, had the last word. The enemy’s military situation in the South was weak, he declared. The major field of battle now was “no longer in the South [of Vietnam]…but in American politics.” The White House was slow to come to that realization he said, but it was obvious. “The question is, would a pause destroy our strength with the hawks and the doves? Domestic politics is the active front now.” A bombing pause, he argued, “would be no more than an exercise of domestic politics and international politics.” He recommended sending word back to Hanoi that they interpreted the last North Vietnamese message as “a dignified rejection” of the American proposal. But he also thought they should keep the Kissinger channel open. “After that, then we could see about a pause which would unite the country rather than divide it.”

Johnson agreed with Rostow. The back channel discussions might be a failure to that point, but he saw no reason to stop them. He doubted that a pause would work, but he still held out hope.

The president and his aides, with the world’s most sophisticated military hardware and intelligence gathering apparatus at their disposal, had no idea that another mass gathering scheduled for that weekend would have far more bearing on the course of the war than the peace demonstration in Washington. The Politburo in Hanoi was convening for five days of meetings at which back channel talks with a pair of French scientists over a possible bombing pause seemed inconsequential. The agenda was to “finalize the bold plan” for an all-out military attack against the cities of the South, what would become known as the Tet Mau Than event, or Tet Offensive. As the evening of October 18 drew to an end, LBJ and his men seemed to be stumbling through the fog of war and peace.

Chapter 25

Body Count

O
N THE MORNING OF
October 19 Jim Shelton visited the 2/28 Black Lions officers quarters in Lai Khe. It had been only a few weeks since he had last lived and worked there as the battalion operations chief, but that posting, in a more literal way than he could have imagined, was many lifetimes ago. The surroundings were familiar but empty-feeling now, every mundane object transformed into a relic of the dead. As he looked around, a Vietnamese woman approached and pulled on his sleeve. Big Jim recognized her from the old days; she was the woman from Ben Cat who washed their laundry. She motioned for him to follow her into a quonset hut, where she showed him stack upon stack of folded clothes.
This is all the dead guys, all their laundry. Those are Terry Allen’s pants and shirts,
Shelton realized. He paid and tipped the laundry woman, then asked some enlisted men to take away the stacks of clean clothes and burn them.

At Alpha Company’s camp nearby, Tom Grady, the highest-ranking company officer now that Captain George was in the hospital, began taking inventory of the personal effects of soldiers killed in the battle. It was an uncomfortable task, and in the rush to get it dispensed with, someone said they should just dump each dead man’s belongings into a box and ship them home. To Grady that seemed thoughtless. Check every item first, he said. He did not want incriminating items going back to the families. There could be letters to married men from girlfriends or pictures of the wrong woman. Life was always complicated, and it seemed more so for young soldiers. The families had enough heartache already, Grady said. There was no reason to make it worse. It was also Grady’s responsibility to write letters to the families, and for that he used the same cautious philosophy of benign censorship. He found no compelling reason, for instance, to tell grieving parents that their son had put an M-16 to his head and killed himself in the heat of battle. In death all the soldiers were heroes.

On the other side of Lai Khe, up at the Delta Company base camp amid the rubber trees on the northeastern perimeter, a helicopter flew overhead at midmorning and hovered above the company street, a dirt road where Clark Welch and Bud Barrow once held formations. Big Rock and his trusty first sergeant were gone now, recovering from wounds at the hospital in Long Binh, and the new company commander, Captain Gerry Grosso, was just beginning to rebuild the devastated unit. Ray Albin, the plotter for the mortar platoon, looked up and noticed “this huge net hanging from” the helicopter. “And they dropped the net and the helicopter took off.” Albin and a few other soldiers walked over to see what was inside the net and were appalled by the sight. “It contained all the web gear and weapons of guys who had been killed and wounded,” Albin reported. “It was the most classless thing I had ever seen, to just plop that stuff down like that. We were still mourning. It couldn’t have been a worse place and a worse time. There it all lay—web gear, helmets, weapons, aid kits, radios—all with the scars of battle.”

The pile was at once awful and mesmerizing, and curious Delta survivors combed through the mess. David Laub, the third platoon radioman who had made it out of the battle unscarred, rummaged through the strewn gear and found a roll of film stuffed into some web gear. The photos, when he later had them developed, were not combat shots but more the stuff of a tourist travelogue. Several showed a group of soldiers posing around a Vietnamese cart. Laub also picked up an M-16 that had the cleaning rod welded into the barrel. A broken weapon was no surprise to him or any of the men who combed through the debris. In accounts given to military historians, at least ten surviving riflemen claimed that their M-16s jammed and became worthless and two grenadiers said that their M-79s broke during the battle. Taking into account the dead men and others who were not interviewed, it is reasonable to assume that many more weapons malfunctioned.

Coincidentally, only hours before Laub and his buddies examined the broken rifles in the battle pile, a House Armed Services subcommittee in Washington had released a scathing report accusing the army of “unbelievable” mismanagement of the M-16 rifle program. The M-16, which became the regular combat rifle for troops in Vietnam earlier that year after a long phase-in, was now a controversial symbol of a troubled war. When it replaced the M-14, the Colt-made M-16 was thought to be a superior weapon and the answer to the problems of fighting in the hot jungles of Southeast Asia. It was five inches shorter and nearly four pounds lighter than the M-14, was easier to hold, aim, and shoot, and could fire more rounds per minute when switched to fully automatic. As the rifle was originally designed, when it was known as the AR-15, it was considered reliable. But with its use in Vietnam came persistent newspaper articles and network television reports detailing instances where it jammed in combat. One NBC news account, in which the correspondent described several men throwing the M-16 away (as Black Lions did in the October 17 battle), drew the attention of congressional investigators. So did a letter that a soldier wrote home to his mother lamenting that several buddies had been killed when their rifles failed.

The congressional subcommittee, chaired by Democrat Richard H. Ichord of Missouri, held hearings throughout the summer, visited two camps where the M-16 was tested, and traveled to Vietnam for ten days in July. At the start of the investigation Ichord defended the weapon, accepting the military’s argument that any problems were the fault of soldiers who did not properly clean their rifles. As the hearings progressed, Ichord changed his mind. The final report asserted that the M-16 had malfunctioned “seriously and excessively.” Most of the malfunctions involved jamming, and the jamming was caused primarily not by inept soldiers, although there were problems with training, but by a change in the gunpowder used in the rifle. The original IMR powder, recommended by the inventor of the M-16, Eugene Stoner, was clear burning and sent a minimal amount of residue down the gas-tube recoil system to the bolt. The replacement Ball powder created more residue but was considered easier to make and safer to manufacture because it was less combustible. The powder change, according to the congressional report, was done without adequate testing and reflected a decision for which the safety of soldiers was a secondary consideration. In fact most testing of the M-16 was done with the original powder, even though the army had already switched powders, a sloppiness that, in the words of the subcommittee, “borders on criminal negligence.”

The guns found on the Ong Thanh battlefield eventually made their way to Steve Goodman, the unofficial battalion armorer, who examined them to see if any could be repaired. Of most interest to Goodman were not the M-16s, whose problems were familiar, but the larger M-60 machine guns. There were eight M-60s recovered from the battlefield, and when Goodman started pulling them apart, he discovered that in five the gas pistons had been turned backward. “When the gas piston in the M-60 is turned backwards that means it only fires one round at a time; it’s not a machine gun anymore, because there’s nothing to collect the gas to perform the recoil of the bolt which makes it an automatic weapon,” Goodman reported. He thought back to the battle and to the possibility of soldiers being killed and wounded or fleeing because they lacked the firepower they should have had. What happened? Could five machine gun teams make the same mistake? Goodman did not have answers. When he raised the question with higher-ups, he never heard another word about it. The thought of the backward pistons haunted him for years.