Those Who Have Borne the Battle (29 page)

The unexpected Tet Offensive in January 1968 provided a shock to the American public. It turned most assumptions upside down. North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces orchestrated a major assault on several South Vietnamese cities, including Saigon. Sappers attacked the American
Embassy there. The US and South Vietnamese forces turned them back but had greater difficulty with the force that occupied the old Citadel in Hué. Tet seemed related to ongoing assaults the North Vietnamese had undertaken against marines who were occupying a strategic position at Khe Sanh, up near the Demilitarized Zone, close to the border with Laos. Some forty thousand North Vietnamese soldiers attacked six thousand marine defenders.

The North Vietnamese and Vietcong offensives finally proved to be military failures. They lost some fifty-eight thousand men out of attacking armies of around eighty-four thousand. By some assessments, the Vietcong had lost their effectiveness as a result of these battles. They were unable to hold on to any of their objectives, and the North Vietnamese Army finally was beaten back at Khe Sanh after some heavy bombing of their positions there.

But the strategic impact was quite negative in the United States. The fighting was brutal—and the media reports illustrated this fully. On February 2 NBC showed the photo of South Vietnamese general Nguyen Ngoc Loan holding a pistol to the head of a Vietcong prisoner whom he would execute. David Burrington reported from Hué, “American marines are so bogged down in Hué than nobody will even predict when the battle will end. . . . More than 500 marines have been wounded and 100 killed since the fighting in Hué began.” He observed that even with such a high price, the marines had gained only about fifty yards a day in the city, which was now “in rubble.”
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Murray Fromson of CBS reported from Khe Sanh on February 14 that the Americans could not claim to have the initiative. “Here the North Vietnamese decide who lives and who dies . . . and sooner or later they will make the move that will seal the fate of Khe Sanh.”
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ABC's Don North described a group of marines, all of whom he estimated were about eighteen years of age, waiting to “make a final dash” across the runway at Khe Sanh to pile on a plane and rotate out. He said that “their main aim in life here was to become nineteen.”
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Following news of Tet, Walter Cronkite exclaimed, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war!” Many joined him in acknowledging how startled they were. Cronkite, whom many described as
the most trustworthy newsman on television, said on his program, “To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest that we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only reasonable, yet unsatisfactory conclusion.” Columnist Joseph Kraft concluded that the war was “unwinnable, and the longer it goes on the more the Americans will be subjected to losses and humiliation.”
Newsweek
observed that “a strategy of more of the same is intolerable.” In March 1968 78 percent of Americans believed that the United States was making “no progress” in the war.
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There continues to be controversy over whether the media turned an American Tet victory into a defeat. Perhaps they did—but this conclusion also depends upon distinguishing between tactics and strategic goals. The Americans and South Vietnamese did finally win the battles, but the fact that the enemy was even able to undertake these major offenses proved to be political embarrassments, if not strategic setbacks. And this in a war with unclear military objectives. Part of the problem was the erosion of credibility for the military and the Johnson administration. They had too many times argued that the war was nearly won. When General Westmoreland insisted that the North Vietnamese had suffered a major loss at Tet and Khe Sanh, he was essentially correct. And many did not believe him—or if they did believe him, they had lost their confidence that this would have positive results. As humorist Art Buchwald wrote, Westmoreland's optimistic report was like General Custer at the Little Big Horn insisting, “We have the Sioux on the run.”
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When combat reports become the fodder for humorists, perhaps the war is in drawdown. Except the war in Vietnam was not in drawdown after Tet. Lyndon Johnson announced at the end of March 1968 that he was not going to stand for reelection. He was already on the defensive within his own party from Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, who opposed him in the democratic presidential primary. Ironically, he would be described as a casualty of the war. If so, he had company in 1968: 16,592 Americans died in Vietnam that year, significantly higher than for any other year. The total for the war now stood at 36,152,
nearly equal to the figure for the Korean War. But this war was not nearly over in 1968, and few assumed it was, given the current course of action.

By the time 1968 ended, it would have proved to be a traumatic and a seismic year for the United States. The Tet experience chastened a sense of military control and omnipotence; the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and rioting in cities and on campuses pulled at the historic fabric of cohesion; the fighting at the Democratic National Convention, coming as it did a few months after billowing smoke covered the nation's capital following the King assassination, seemed to signal a political system in tatters; the election of Richard Nixon as president promised change—even if the directions of change were not yet clear.

The music and culture of the young promised change as well and rejected traditional cries for patriotic support. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez assured that “the times they are a-changin'.” Country Joe and the Fish's “I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die” challenge and John Lennon's “Give Peace a Chance” plea mirrored as they shaped a generation's sense of resolution—and revolution. The dominant sounds and symbols of American culture seemed totally at odds with all that the military in Vietnam seemed to represent. “Peace” and “love” along with “brotherhood” and “sisterhood” became slogans of the young—if this cultural shift was sometimes self-congratulatory and even narcissistic, it was nonetheless powerful.

The youth culture of the 1960s was not simply a passive representation of an alternative lifestyle. It was aggressive in its spread and was actively contrary to the culture of the '50s—and to the assumptions that underlay Vietnam involvement and to the perceptions of the nature of that engagement. And it was largely antimilitary—or, perhaps more accurately, was opposed to the ideas of hierarchy and authority that were essential to military culture. All of this made a complicated military operation even more complicated.

By 1967 the protests against the war had become more vocal and consequential. Draft riots and rallies in 1966 culminated in massive protest, with 400,000 people in New York and 100,000 in San Francisco taking to the streets on the same day in April. There were 100,000 protesters at the Lincoln Memorial and the Pentagon in the fall of 1967. And at Oakland and Berkeley, Madison, Chicago, and Boston, around the country and
around the world, protesters joined Martin Luther King Jr., Benjamin Spock, teachers, and students. In June some veterans organized the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and in 1967 Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, was sentenced to prison for refusing his induction notice. Protest actions became more widespread in 1968, and the political campaigns that year focused increasingly on the war—with few running on behalf of the status quo.

 

 

On July 3, 1968, General Creighton Abrams replaced General Westmoreland as the commander of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam. Westmoreland returned to Washington to assume the position of chief of staff of the army. Abrams shifted the US Army tactics in Vietnam from search and destroy and body counts to a “secure and hold” approach, with an emphasis on “pacification.” The inauguration of Richard Nixon in January 1969 was marked by the new president's declared resolve to end the war. The initial Nixon strategy was to intimidate the North Vietnamese into serious negotiation by the use of greater firepower and increased threats. When these seemed to have little impact, in June 1969 President Nixon announced a policy called Vietnamization in which responsibility for the war would shift increasingly to the Vietnamese. The president announced the beginning of a drawing down of American combat units in order to affirm and advance this new policy. Nixon was juggling two volatile and contradictory political goals: to defuse opposition at home while assuring the international community, friends and enemies, that the United States would meet its obligations.

US troops in Vietnam peaked at more than a half million in 1968, and by the end of 1969 they had been reduced to 475,000. They would continue to decline rapidly after that until they were down to 24,200 by the end of 1972. Negotiations were under way, slowly, in Paris. In 1969 11,616 Americans died in Vietnam; the numbers would be 6,081 in 1970 and 2,357 in 1971. Some 20,000 would die from the time Vietnamization was announced in 1969 until the last troops were withdrawn in 1975.

During these years after Tet, fighting in Vietnam became a more slogging, repetitious affair. Television coverage back home lost its upbeat confidence.
In June 1969 Don Webster reported on CBS that soldiers had successfully captured an area they called “the Country Store,” because of the volume of enemy equipment that had been stored there. He reported that they had lost count of the times they had taken the area. The pattern was to enter, push the communists out, then leave and watch the communists return. Then it was “business as usual at the ‘Country Store.'” In July Jack Russell of NBC reported on troops taking a hill: “This hill was taken, as hills usually are in the war. But as often happens, it was difficult to assess the value of this captured objective.”
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Colin Powell went back for a second tour in Vietnam during the summer of 1968. He would later write that he found the troops there to be “good men,” who were no less “brave or skilled” than those who had fought America's wars through history, “but by this time in the war, they lacked inspiration and a sense of purpose. Back home, the administration was trying to conduct the war with as little inconvenience to the country as possible. The reserves had not been called up. Taxes to finance the war had not been raised. Better-off kids beat the draft with college deferments. The commander in chief, LBJ himself, was packing it in at the end of his term. Troops of the ally we had come to aid were deserting at a rate of over 100,000 a year.” Powell noted that Nguyen Cao Ky, the premier who was now vice president, with his silk flying suit, long trailing scarf, and airline-hostess wife wearing the same type of outfit he had, flew around as a celebrity and said Hitler was his hero. “This was the man for whose regime three, four, even five hundred Americans were dying every week in 1968. They were dying with the same finality as at Valley Forge or Normandy, but with little of the nobility of purpose.”
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All of the controversy and the criticism, the eroding support at home, clearly had some impact on the troops serving in Vietnam. Given the rotation system, they were very familiar with events back in the States. Men who came to Vietnam for a second tour noted that the units had lower morale, less aggressiveness than during their first posting. As one soldier said, “They wanted to get back home.”
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An NBC report in January 1971 described growing tensions among one unit: “They were a combat unit, but now find themselves relegated to the role of security forces. They feel that the war has gone away, that withdrawal is the order of the day, and
they want to go home now.”
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It seemed more and more like the last days of the Korean War—except it was a culturally different time. In January 1971
Newsweek
carried a photo of a GI with a peace sign hanging from his neck.

 

 

There had been a change among the troops serving in Vietnam over the years following 1964, but it was more complicated and more consequential than the shifts in morale and the wearing of peace signs in the bush. The absence of a strategic mission became more and more pronounced in the years following Tet, as President Nixon initiated peace negotiations. And as the war became more controversial, those who were dispatched to fight it became even less representative of the American population. It had become, by all analyses, a blue-collar war.

In the early years of the war, there were fewer draftees. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, volunteer enlistments, supplemented by and indeed encouraged by the draft, filled most of the military needs. So the early units in Vietnam were units that had trained together and were led by NCOs and officers who had trained with them. World War II and Korean War veterans held positions of responsibility. They conducted themselves well, even if the nature of combat had little similarity with the front-line battlefield for which they had originally trained. They adapted.

The military and civilian leadership did not adapt well—partially this was due to political caution. President Johnson refused to call up the reserves and the National Guard in order to minimize the political fallout from such an action. So it was necessary to increase draft calls. There were about 100,000 draftees a year in the five years prior to 1965, and the average was 300,000 a year from 1966 to 1970. In 1966 there were 346,000 draftees. For context, the annual draft call in these peak years was less than the monthly draft during World War II, and it was half of the number drafted in 1951 for the Korean War.

The process of determining which men would serve would become politically and culturally important. There were 26.8 million American males who reached their eighteenth birthday, draft age, between 1964 and
1973. In 1973, at the end of an extended, major war, 40 percent of them had served or were serving in the military, 10 percent in Vietnam. Draftees were not a majority of the military or of those who were assigned to Vietnam. On the other hand, draftees were a majority of those who served
in combat
in Vietnam. Given the size of the baby-boomer generation, the military required an even smaller percentage of eligible young men.