Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975

It was significant that Hanoi was slow to inform the Russians about Resolution 15, because Le Duan and his comrades knew how unwelcome it would be. Moreover, only on 7 May 1959 was word of the new mandate passed to COSVN, communist headquarters in the South. North Vietnam’s leaders remained morbidly fearful of provoking the Americans, perhaps even causing them to strike at their territory. The ideological divide between Russia and China was deepening apace, and this was reflected by rival factions in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh and Giap leaned towards Moscow; Le Duan led those who inclined towards Beijing.

At the time of Mao Zedong’s catastrophic industrialisation programme the Great Leap Forward, which cost the lives of at least fifty-five million of his own people, Le Duan may have been responsible for Hanoi’s inopportune expression of national ambition: ‘The China of today is the Vietnam of tomorrow.’ Meanwhile he and his comrades still struggled to suppress domestic dissent: Catholics staged demonstrations at which they demanded a right to migrate south. Chants of ‘Down with communism’ prompted troops to open fire, inflicting casualties. Economic woes obliged Hanoi to slash defence spending, from 27 per cent of the national budget in 1955 to 19.2 per cent in 1958, 16 per cent in 1960. Factories languished, and falling agricultural production prompted a cut in the rice ration. The Czech ambassador reported home that much Soviet-bloc aid was being wasted. In June 1959 the British consul in Hanoi reported: ‘The standard of living is sinking into ever shabbier and drabber uniformity. Even the poor are poorer … No member of the Western community has ever met a Vietnamese who was in favour of the regime, except the members of the regime itself.’

In a mirror reflection of Diem’s advancement of loyalists at the expense of honest men, Hanoi promoted war veterans and ideological purists rather than its brightest and best. A French diplomatic observer reported that nine-tenths of the North’s population was ‘ready for an uprising if it had the means’. Yet Le Duc Tho, as head of Party organisation, chose this moment to demand fresh purges of ‘undesirables’, meaning former landlords and ‘rich’ peasants. In its preoccupation with ideological rectitude, the North Vietnamese politburo behaved more like Bolsheviks of forty years earlier than latter-twentieth-century socialists. A new Party statute, denouncing dissenters, was enforced by the Ministry of Public Security, whose chief Tran Quoc Hoan became known to his critics as ‘the Beria of Vietnam’, recalling Stalin’s most notorious enforcer.

Meanwhile in the South, during the months following promulgation of Resolution 15, revolutionaries continued to kill government officials and launched a new round of attacks on South Vietnam’s army, hereafter known by the acronym conferred by its US trainers: the ARVN. A young Vietnamese told an American interviewer: ‘I hated the soldiers … because they were very haughty. The villagers were already very poor, and yet the soldiers commanded them to build roads and bridges … The soldiers carried weapons to protect [Diem] and his regime.’ Symbols of American nation-building became favoured targets: for instance, in the spring of 1959 near the Cambodian border, black-clad attackers blew up two John Deere tractors.

Many young country people, trapped in a relentless cycle of agricultural toil under the petty tyranny of local officials, discovered a romance in revolution. An eighteen-year-old told how an old man who had fought against the French exhorted the teenager to take up arms in his turn. ‘I got excited when he told me about Vietnamese heroes. He told me that Diem had asked the Americans to … help in their plot to put South Vietnam under their rule. He urged me … to perform the duty of a young patriot in fighting for the independence of the country to bring back happiness and prosperity.’ During the weeks of military training that followed, fifteen peasants in his group deserted, demoralised and homesick. He himself, however, stuck it out: ‘I only saw the glory and didn’t think of the hardships.’

In the course of 1959, Vietcong attacks grew steadily in intensity. On the evening of 8 July, American advisers with 7th Southern Infantry Division near Bien Hoa were watching the opening credits roll at a screening of The Tattered Dress, starring Jeanne Crain, when six VC launched a gun and grenade attack in which thirty-eight-year-old Major Dail Ruis and Master-Sergeant Chester Overnand, forty-four, were killed. These were the first Americans to die at communist hands in what became known as the Second Indochina War. The tempo of guerrilla attacks increased nationwide: in early-morning darkness one day in December, a VC platoon stopped a bus on Route 4 in the delta. They ejected the passengers, clambered in with their weapons and forced the driver to take them to a government fortified post. They arrived at dawn, to find the gates opened to allow soldiers to visit the market. When the attackers stormed in, a policeman and several defenders were quickly shot down; the rest of the garrison surrendered. The guerrillas collected weapons and wrecked the post before disappearing into the jungle with the village chief, whom they killed.

The VC objective was to show an ability to strike at will. A cadre proclaimed exultantly, ‘The Tiger has awakened!’ Villagers found themselves obliged to make ever more perilous calculations about the local balance of power, in which a misjudgement cost at best all that they owned; at worst, their lives. Almost all paid secret taxes to the communists, whose imaginative propaganda much exaggerated their reach and power. Cadres cited proverbs beloved of Vietnamese: ‘Better the head of a rat than the tail of an elephant’; ‘No matter how hard you try to shed your horns, you will always remain a water buffalo.’ They staged rallies that sometimes mustered a thousand peasants, under varying degrees of compulsion, accompanied by a cacophony of gongs, megaphones and ‘wooden fish’ – the clackers of temple bells. Government flags were torn down, tree trunks plastered with posters and slogans. Reports were spread about the VC’s supposedly mystical powers: their magic rice-cookers, inflatable boats carried in knapsacks, ‘sky horses’ and guns that could kill fifty men at a discharge: credulous peasants embraced such fairy tales. Guerrillas sometimes paraded through villages in daylight, merely to show that they could.

Some of the many victims of 1960 murders were tried and dispatched with machetes in front of village crowds, just as in the Vietminh era: one woman was hacked to death because she had two sons in the ARVN. A man being buried alive shrieked repeatedly, ‘I’m going to die! I’m going to die!’ before his cries faded beneath a rising mound of earth. Another was killed merely because he drank with the local policeman. For every peasant who backed the communists out of belief, two did so from fear. Yet real support also existed, partly because the revolution offered the poor a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves: it conferred pride on humble folk. Prudence was a factor too – a growing belief that the communists represented the future, Diem the past.

By the beginning of 1960, it was claimed that VC armed propaganda units had killed seventeen hundred government officials, village chiefs, teachers, hospital workers, and had seized another two thousand. Uprisings took place in the Central Highlands. Diem’s troops fought back, recapturing lost ground. Under the terms of a draconian new Treason Law, thousands of dissidents and members of religious minorities were rounded up, along with communist suspects. The guillotine was reintroduced as the preferred tool of government executioners.

Many Vietcong were frustrated by the refusal of COSVN – and, ultimately, of Hanoi – to authorise escalation to full-scale open warfare. Local cadres made renewed appeals for weapons to resist Saigon’s ‘cruel terrorism’. Without the stimulus of action, many men found intolerable the boredom and privations of a covert existence. A fighter with a unit based in the Mekong delta spoke later of the awesome, sinister silence of the wilderness, broken only by its wild creatures: ‘Because of the jungle vastness, the polluted waters and malaria, it was sad all the time.’ A company commander exploded before senior officers, pounding his chest and saying, ‘I’d rather die than live like this! Let’s start the armed struggle!’

At last, in September 1960, COSVN gave the order that its supporters had waited so long to receive: there were to be coordinated uprisings against government forces. Thereafter, the revolution’s territories expanded with remarkable speed. One-third of South Vietnam’s population, an estimated six million people, were soon estimated to be living under open or secret communist control. Cadres embarked upon energetic land redistribution. Guerrilla activity increased steeply, especially in the delta, where insurgents exploited local people’s intimate knowledge of river and tide conditions. Ambushes were set on bends of streams and canals; underwater mines buoyed with driftwood, wired to electrical detonators ashore. While North Vietnam was now a fiercely disciplined, regulated society, in response to terrorism the South became an oppressively militarised one. Nine-tenths of US aid was spent not on economic or agricultural development, but instead on arms to sustain the regime. The American advisory group focused on creating a conventional army, capable of resisting an invasion from the North such as South Korea had faced. Meanwhile, in one province of six hundred thousand inhabitants there were six hundred police, nine Civil Guard companies and twenty-four militia platoons manning thirty fortified posts and guarding 115 villages. Yet still the communist tide rose.

In 1960 Cold War tensions increased across the world. In April the South Korean dictatorship of Syngman Rhee collapsed, prompting exultation in Hanoi, hopes that this was the precursor of a similar fate awaiting Diem. A week later the Russian shootdown of an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft blew apart East–West détente. The Sino–Soviet split was ever more visibly reflected in North Vietnam’s politics, with Ho Chi Minh making a vain attempt to mediate. Le Duan, Le Duc Tho and their pro-Chinese faction achieved dominance in the politburo. For Hanoi, the political imperative to support the Vietcong’s armed struggle had become irresistible. The only issue was how much aid should be provided, how quickly: Le Duan faced the prospect of supporting the war that he wanted almost entirely from his own country’s resources.

Meanwhile in Saigon, on 26 April 1960, eighteen prominent anti-communist South Vietnamese met at a well-known hotel, after which they issued the ‘Caravelle Manifesto’, signed by ‘a group of patriots’, calling on the government to change course. Later that year US ambassador Elbridge Durbrow submitted a memo to Diem which itemised reforms Washington considered essential: publication of government decisions and budgets; scrutiny of all branches by elected representatives; liberalisation of press laws and improved relations with the foreign media; radio ‘fireside chats’ with the peasantry; more generous credit for farmers. These were all sensible, perhaps indispensable, measures for a functioning democracy, but wholly unacceptable to Diem. Just as he ignored the ‘Caravelle Manifesto’, so he received this shopping list as a manifestation of American condescension. He might also have responded to Durbrow by asking how much of his liberal wish-list was fulfilled by the Northern politburo.

The US remained overwhelmingly preoccupied with the armed struggle. Washington responded to the Vietcong upsurge by dispatching several hundred additional military advisers, raising the total number from 342 to 692, in breach of the limit on such personnel set by the Geneva Accords. Their commanders, notably including Gen. Sam Williams of the MAAG – Military Aid and Assistance Group – viewed the guerrillas solely as a security problem, to be addressed from the business end of a gun.

At the end of 1960 the communists formally rebranded the Southern resistance movement as the National Liberation Front, or NLF. Importantly, though all its leaders were communists, it sought to project itself as a nationalist coalition. Here, incoming US president John F. Kennedy would be told, was a political force that constituted an unacceptable threat to freedom and democracy in South-East Asia. The avowed objectives of the NLF were to bring social unity to the South; overthrow Diem; evict the Americans; impose land redistribution; unify the country by negotiation. This prospectus admitted nothing of Le Duan’s unswerving intention to create a Stalinist society.

In the years that followed the Geneva Accords, it was the misfortune of both Vietnams to fall into the hands of cruel and incompetent governments. Had Southern peasants known the plight of their Northern brethren, they might have thought less harshly of their own: at least few of Diem’s people went hungry. His American sponsors entirely misjudged the attitudes of Moscow and Beijing, supposing their leaderships guilty of fomenting the rising insurgency. Instead, until 1959 resistance to the Saigon regime was spontaneous and locally generated. For some time thereafter, it received only North Vietnamese rather than foreign support.

Le Duan was the principal personality driving renewal of the unification struggle: it is hard to exaggerate his personal role in what followed. As for his politburo comrades, it seems legitimate to speculate that some favoured war in the South as a means of escaping acknowledgement of the failure of their policies at home; of instilling a new sense of purpose in Ho Chi Minh’s threadbare people. It was their good fortune that the ‘imperialist’ foe, indispensable to such a regime as their own, had harnessed its fortunes to Ngo Dinh Diem, a dead donkey if ever there was one. The war that now gained momentum was such as neither side deserved to win.

6

Some of the Way With JFK (#ulink_8ea4dab4-d4b5-5b6a-b3d3-88974c58db4f)

1 ‘THEY’RE GOING TO LOSE THEIR COUNTRY IF …’

When Dwight D. Eisenhower briefed his successor John F. Kennedy about the issues that he would confront on assuming the presidency, it was not Vietnam – of which he said nothing – but neighbouring Laos that evoked stridency from the old warhorse. Eisenhower said he had been warned by the State Department that Laos was ‘a nation of homosexuals’, which bemused Kennedy. This was the first domino, asserted the outgoing president, key to South-East Asia, loss of which could threaten neighbouring Thailand. Here would come a test of the new commander-in-chief’s resolve, a rite of passage. Such a view seems fanciful in the eyes of posterity, but appeared real at the time. Laos, Laos, Laos, once known as ‘the land of a million elephants’, made headlines around the world as a collision point between communist and anti-communist forces. In 1960 the New York Times devoted three times more space to this tiny country, a wilderness with few and very poor inhabitants, than it did to Vietnam.

The Lao people, or the multiplicity of ethnic groups that comprise them, have perplexed the outside world by appearing to giggle their way through the past century of political upheavals, famines, civil wars and foreign-fostered tragedies. They love parties and priapic jokes, especially at the spring rocket festival when everybody makes their own fireworks, some enormous, and launches them at mortal risk to life and property. In the late 1950s the Americans began to throw money at Laos, to which France ceded independence in October 1953, and which had since become an alleged focus of Chinese and North Vietnamese meddling. A visiting Wall Street Journal reporter described the leadership as ‘ecstatically drowning in American aid’, big cars and iceboxes, while the rest of the country subsisted on an average annual income of $US150. The CIA began to take an interest, not least because its officers such as Texan Bill Lair, who became famous there, fell in love with this new frontier. Lair’s colleague Robert Amory said later that many of the Agency’s men embraced Laos as ‘a great place to have a war’. Outside Vientiane, the frontier-town capital, you could do pretty much what you liked – come to that, fight whomever you chose and grow what narcotics you fancied – without bothering anybody who would make a fuss.

The Lao government, if a rackety clutch of local potentates and generals could be so dignified, sustained a precarious rule until in 1960 a civil war erupted between rival factions, and was fought out on the streets of Vientiane. On slender grounds, the Americans persuaded themselves that a communist takeover loomed. What was indisputable was that Reds were roaming the country, both indigenous Pathet Lao, who intermittently claimed a share in coalitions, and some North Vietnamese troops. Bill Lair achieved what was deemed a notable coup by making a deal with local Hmong chieftain Vang Pao. In return for cash and arms, this warlord launched a guerrilla campaign against the communists. The initial US investment in himself and his kind swelled from $5 million to $11 million in 1962, then to $500 million by the end of the decade, with Vang Pao claiming leadership of twenty thousand fighters and considerable battlefield success, as well as a fortune acquired through drug trafficking. Some seven hundred CIA personnel were deployed, most engaged in secret paramilitary activities, shifting food and weapons to the tribesmen and their families, leapfrogging hither and thither betwixt mountains in jeans and Pilatus Porter STOL aircraft, themselves occasionally joining a battle.

The tinpot country achieved a bizarre prominence on the agendas of both East and West. Mao Zedong asked Le Duan, ‘How big is Laos?’ The Vietnamese answered: almost eighty thousand square miles, with a population of two million. ‘My God,’ said Mao, ‘they have so much land and so few people. Yunnan is about the same size but has forty million. If we could send fifteen or twenty million over there to live, wouldn’t that be a good idea?’ The Poles and Indians on the ICC found it politic to avert their eyes from landings by Soviet transport aircraft at Hanoi’s Gia Lam airbase, delivering war materiel destined for Laos. The British Conservative government was pressed by Washington to support the American counter-commitment, and at a March 1961 summit with Kennedy, prime minister Harold Macmillan reluctantly promised some military gesture if the Vientiane government collapsed. When Pathet Lao troops moved near to the western border of Laos the following year, in response a squadron of RAF Hunters was deployed in neighbouring Thailand. It was the usual story: the British were desperate to avoid a new commitment, but obsequiously anxious to comply with American wishes.

As a West Point cadet, Mike Eiland found himself participating in exercises in a fictional country called Soal – Laos spelt backwards – and in Washington the JCS favoured committing ground troops. In May 1961, however, President Kennedy declared that he preferred to reinforce covert operations, for which he nursed a romantic enthusiasm. Better still would be for all the foreign powers to stop messing on Laos’s Plain of Jars. The erratic Prince Norodom Sihanouk, ruler of neighbouring Cambodia, proposed an international conference, bastard offspring of 1954, to ‘neutralise’ Laos. With varied degrees of reluctance, all the interested parties signed up. After more than a year of negotiations in which Averell Harriman was a prime mover, in July 1962 new Geneva Accords were signed by the US, Russia, China and both Vietnams, for the neutralisation of Laos.

Hanoi’s leadership treated this arrangement with contempt, as a mere figleaf thrust over its military operations by Moscow, requiring no more respect than Saigon had given to the 1954 settlement. North Vietnamese troops continued to move freely through Laos, though their presence was always denied. CIA cynics dubbed the Ho Chi Minh Trail ‘the Averell Harriman Memorial Highway’, because the veteran diplomat had secured no safeguards against the communists’ systematic violations of the Accords. For the purposes of this story, which is Vietnam’s, all that matters is that Prince Souvanna Phouma thereafter ruled in Vientiane, ever more deeply in thrall to the US. Elsewhere across his wild and woolly country, a desultory and unacknowledged war raged in which several hundred thousand people fell victim to the insistence of Hanoi upon using Laos as an estuarial network of protected supply routes into Cambodia and South Vietnam; and to the desire of the Americans to stop them doing so, without too conspicuously flouting Neutralisation.

Almost from inauguration day, MIT economist Professor Walt Rostow, a World War II bomb-target analyst now translated into Kennedy’s deputy special assistant for national security and within a few months director of policy planning at the State Department, urged the administration to shift focus from Laos to Vietnam. The president himself soon agreed that the latter looked a better place to face down the communists: in the face of intensifying guerrilla activity, more must be done to shore up Diem. Security in the Mekong delta had become so precarious that medical supplies could be distributed to civilian hospitals only by the CIA’s planes and helicopters, amongst abandoned villages and untilled rice fields. In May 1961 Vice-President Lyndon Johnson visited Vietnam, pledged America’s continuing backing and dubbed Diem ‘the Winston Churchill of Asia’. David Halberstam wrote later of this trip: ‘He had given our word. It not only committed the Kennedy Administration more deeply … attached Washington a little more firmly to the tar baby of Saigon, escalated the rhetoric, but it committed the person of Lyndon Johnson. To him, a man’s word was important.’

In October Ed Lansdale wrote to World War II Airborne commander Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy’s personal military adviser until appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the following year: ‘The Vietnamese are an able and energetic people. They don’t seem to be themselves today. They are going to lose their country if some spark doesn’t make them catch fire to go to work to win this war. The spark could well be to place the right Americans into the right areas of the Vietnamese government to provide operational guidance … Such work will require Americans of talent and compassion.’

Lansdale thus recommended that the answer to the problems of the Vietnamese was to send them more Americans, and over the thirty-four-month span of the Kennedy presidency, that is what was done. In May 1961, four hundred Green Berets were dispatched, followed a few months later by forty US Army helicopters, along with four hundred personnel to fly and maintain them, together with a steadily increasing corps of advisers, soon serving alongside the ARVN down to battalion level, and by mid-1962 totalling eight thousand. The 8 February 1962 creation of MACV – Military Assistance Command Vietnam – was correctly interpreted by Hanoi as signifying Kennedy’s intention to lift his stake. By November 1963 there would be sixteen thousand Americans on the ground: soldiers, sailors and airmen; technicians and pilots; electronic eavesdroppers and agriculturalists; academic social analysts and flamboyant special forces cowboys; spooks and geeks of every hue.

US aid was running at $400 million a year, with military equipment and vehicles shipped in unprecedented quantities. In April 1962 the Diem government embarked on a ‘strategic hamlets’ programme, a refinement of the earlier agrovilles, designed to separate peasants from guerrillas by relocation behind barbed wire – at the cost of displacement from the burial plots that meant so much to every family. A RAND Corporation report questioned the policy’s acceptability, but at the Pentagon Marine Maj. Gen. Victor ‘Brute’ Krulak pounded the table and asserted that his country would ‘force the peasants to do what’s necessary to make the program succeed’. The hamlets had significant tactical success, making life tougher for the Vietcong, but the social and political cost was high. Old Indochina hand Howard Simpson watched as a ‘sullen, bedraggled group of peasants’ was herded from their huts for resettlement. An old man with sores on his scalp protested vehemently, and in rapid French, to a TV crew filming the scene, ‘It isn’t just! They are making us move. We don’t want to move. Tell them. It is not just!’ As security men hustled the old peasant away he wailed disconsolately, ‘The Americans don’t understand. Tell the Americans we don’t want to leave!’

At a 23 July 1962 strategy conference in Honolulu, Gen. Paul Harkins told an audience of politicians and brass headed by defense secretary Robert McNamara: ‘During April, 434 ground operations were mounted … increased to 441 in May. Over 1,000 air sorties were flown in June … PRES DIEM has indicated that he plans his troops will get out into the field more often and stay out longer … There is no doubt that we are on the winning side.’ Asked about timings, Harkins said that he thought victory over the NLF could be attained by the end of 1963. McNamara entered a cautionary note, saying, ‘We must expect the worst and make our plans accordingly,’ which the defense secretary interpreted as scheduling Vietcong defeat for year end 1965.

In those Kennedy years, many of the characters who would play roles throughout the American war, some prominent and others less so, gathered around the stage and set about learning their lines. In 1961 Duong Van Mai travelled from Saigon to Washington to study. She was fascinated by the US, but troubled by segregation in Southern states, feeling unsure whether she was expected to use a White or Coloured bathroom. Then she met David Elliott, who would become her husband and the other half of a remarkable partnership that committed most of two lifetimes to studying the Vietnamese people. A Bostonian, he had attended Yale before serving with the US Army’s radio interception unit at Tan Son Nhut. He then spent a year with MACV intelligence before joining RAND, for which he embarked on a protracted research programme in the delta. Why Vietnam? Elliott said: ‘This was where it was happening, the most intense front in the Cold War. I was offered a front seat to see history being made.’

Idealists and sensation-seekers alike plunged into the heady mudge created on Saigon’s streets by diesel fumes, spices, obsessive vehicle-horn abuse, breathless heat. Some of those strolling up Tu Do and gawking at the sights – or, more likely, at the girls – were bright young men eager to set the world to rights, who came to care passionately about the Vietnamese. Frank Scotton, born in 1938, grew up in Massachusetts, ‘where the revolutionary war against oppressive foreign occupiers is part of the culture’; his father had been killed at the Bulge in 1944. ‘I thought that I would perform some sort of service. In the past we had been good tinkerers abroad, getting in there and fixing things. We had the folk belief that we would always win, even after Korea sandpapered that ideal a little.’ Throughout Scotton’s long stint in Vietnam he remained powerfully conscious of his own heritage, his family’s record of physical courage: ‘I didn’t want them to feel that I wasn’t measuring up.’

He joined the US Information Agency rather than the Foreign Service, ‘because I’m a natural field man’. In Washington before flying, he met three young Vietnamese lieutenants who asked if he spoke their language. No, he said, but he had been told that French would do. They looked uncomfortable. One said, ‘That is the colonial language.’ When the American reached Vietnam in 1962, he quickly became aware of the handicap imposed on almost all his countrymen by the inability to converse: ‘They couldn’t even pronounce place names. I also became very conscious of the weight of history against which we were contending. Within a few weeks, I was a sufficiently wise guy to recognise that Diem was not “the Winston Churchill of Asia”.’

Scotton became an impassioned student of the country, travelling fearlessly and indeed recklessly through paddies and jungle, supervising a survey for the US ambassador about sentiment in remote hamlets. One of a small band of Americans who became committed to the cause, he said, ‘I was always looking for other people who felt the same way. There was a divide between those who really cared, and those who did not.’ Young Saigonese who met him soon began to say that Scotton was ky qua – strange or eccentric – and plenty of Americans would have agreed: embassy people called him ‘the maverick mongrel’. Vietnam cost him a marriage: his wife Katherine did her utmost to make a life at their house in Qui Nhon, organising English classes. After some months, however, she went home, they divorced, and thereafter he formed a series of passionate local relationships.

Doug Ramsey also arrived in 1962, fresh from language school, and was posted to spend his first months circulating USIA material from an office in Dalat: ‘I found it ironic to be distributing a paper entitled “Free World” in the interests of the Diem dictatorship.’ Local people proved wary of expressing opinions about anything to a foreigner unless or until they knew him well, but Ramsey quickly decided that Diem was not a credible or sustainable leader, and developed a matching enthusiasm for some elusive political ‘Third Force’. ‘I got interested in what Frank Scotton was doing – trying to build from the bottom.’ He came increasingly to believe that a decade or two of communist domination was preferable to ‘the imbecility of our policies’, an interminable war. Dominance of a given area by either side ‘in many places extended to no more than the lethal range of an AK-47 or an M-14’. Ramsey professed to be less dismayed by communist terror than by ‘indiscriminate artillery and air strikes by the US and Saigon regime’. Down in the Mekong delta, he caught an early glimpse of the limitations of government forces when the mere rumour of an impending attack caused the local ARVN unit to take flight.

Bob Destatte was one of sixteen children in a Catholic family of poor but fiercely hard-working Ohio factory workers. He abandoned a college teaching course in favour of the army: ‘I wanted to see something outside my small town.’ He volunteered for the Army Security Agency because a military friend told him this would ensure overseas postings, and he became a morse interceptor. In 1961 he was sent to Saigon. On the plane flying in, he expected something, he said, ‘like those people in Terry and the Pirates – sneaky folk hiding in the shadows’. But from the moment that from the back of a truck he glimpsed his first two girls in ao-dais, he thought differently: so differently, indeed, that within months and at the age of twenty-two he was married to Nguyet Thi Anh. He met her when a young Vietnamese boy who worked with their unit, in those days based in two vans at Tan Son Nhut airbase, invited him to a family dinner. He liked the mother from their first meeting, and the boy’s sister taught him to use chopsticks. ‘I guess it was love at first sight.’ They were joined in a civil ceremony, but in collusion with his officers the marriage was not made official until just before he rotated back to the US in 1963, because local weddings triggered instant repatriations. Unlike many such partnerships, that of the Destattes lasted.

Bob Kelly, a psychological-warfare adviser working with the South Vietnamese in Quang Ngai province, organised pro-government rallies, of which the first was not an unqualified success. Local people were herded like cattle to attend, then left sitting without water under a hot sun. The occasion’s highlight was to be a C-47 flying low overhead, broadcasting government propaganda. The plane arrived early, and from a thousand feet its raucous tones drowned out the local province chief’s speech on the ground. Then the airborne broadcaster demanded in Vietnamese: ‘Mr Province Chief, have you finished yet?’ This infuriated and humiliated local officials, whose temper was not improved when the plane began to drop leaflets in bundles that failed to burst in the air, so they landed like bombs. It never occurred to the Americans involved, some laughing and others almost tearful amid the shambles, that it was wildly inappropriate for them to be seen to be orchestrating a Vietnamese political rally.

William Colby, born in 1920, spent part of his childhood in China, then attended Princeton. In 1944–45 he served some months with the OSS in occupied France and Norway, which he found an intensely romantic experience, then spent a few boring years working for ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan’s law firm. Better times started in 1950 when he joined the CIA, ‘a band of brothers’. He did an apprenticeship in Sweden and Italy, then in 1959 was posted to Saigon. He travelled widely across the country, and decided that containment of the communists was the only realistic objective. He dissented when Max Taylor and Walt Rostow recommended a dramatic increase in US advisory strength: Vietnam ‘really wasn’t a military problem’. In July 1960 Colby became CIA head of station, and presided over a series of doomed efforts to infiltrate paramilitary groups into the North, and to launch counter-terror operations against the Vietcong. Like many Americans, he grasped a few strands of the Vietnam tangle, but never enough to promote coherent policies.

Al Gray, born in 1928 the son of a New Jersey railroad conductor, became a career Marine and found bootcamp easy: ‘We were tough guys.’ He became an NCO, then in 1952 was commissioned and saw a little service as a forward observer at the back end of the Korean war. Thereafter he got into signals intelligence and special operations, monitoring North Korea, Russia, the Thai–Burma border. In 1960 Capt. Gray was sent to Saigon, liked the South Vietnamese, and admired Diem: ‘I thought he was on the right track.’ As a semi-spook he travelled in civilian clothes, often as a passenger with Air America. He spent the next ten years working on an interface between the Marines and the intelligence community: ‘I felt what we were doing was some day going to save lives.’

They all had adventures, which of course was what most were seeking. Though Frank Scotton was a civilian, he indulged a passion for roaming the countryside, often alone but always armed, in search of action as well as knowledge. This practice led him into situations unexpected for an information agency staffer. One morning during his early wanderings in the Central Highlands, he saw approaching a man with a slung weapon: ‘I would have been relieved had he not seen me and simply passed by. But he pulled his rifle forward and raised it while still looking as surprised as I felt myself. I was the quicker for having my carbine chambered and off safety. We were so close that I could not miss. Aiming is as simple as pointing your finger, extension of intention. If something must be done, make sure it is done. I fired several times. I felt no guilt afterwards, but some deep remorse that two strangers would meet by a hillside and one lose his life.’

On another occasion Scotton was moving across country with a young tribesman guiding him. As the light faded at evening, they saw two armed men strolling carelessly towards them. The American’s companion sprang forward and dispatched the rearmost guerrilla with a knife thrust in the back. As the other turned to raise his rifle, Scotton shot him several times. The montagnard dragged the corpse of his own victim to a trail intersection and sat him upright, apparently gazing back whence he had come. Scotton asked his companion, who spoke some French, why he did this. The man shrugged, ‘C’est la guerre psychologique!’

Throughout the Kennedy years there was an ongoing debate in Washington about whether the US should go much further than its advisory and support commitment – start deploying major combat units. Gen. Maxwell Taylor was among those who, before recanting when he learned a little, favoured an increased troop commitment: ‘South Vietnam is not an excessively difficult or unpleasant place to operate … North Vietnam is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing … There is no case for fearing a mass onslaught of Communist manpower into South Vietnam and its neighbouring states, particularly if our airpower is allowed a free hand.’ As a military man, Taylor viewed the conflict as a military problem. He recommended dispatching at least eight thousand logistical personnel.

Secretary of state Dean Rusk and defense secretary Robert McNamara dissented: neither thought that a small commitment would achieve enough to justify the political cost. The Pentagon calculated that to see off South Vietnam’s communists, 205,000 American troops would be required. Some of the young diplomats who had accompanied Taylor on his visit to Vietnam not merely opposed the general’s recommendation for troops, but thought the Diem regime unsustainable. Memories of the World War II experience hung heavy over strategy-making. Its foremost lesson seemed to be that overwhelming might was irresistible. Greg Daddis has written: ‘The one common failing of most military officers and senior civilian officials … was their faith that military power, broadly defined, could achieve political objectives in post-colonial states.’ Possession of armed might can be corrupting: it feeds an itch among those exercising political authority to put it to practical use. Successive Washington administrations have been seduced by the readiness with which they can order a deployment, and see this promptly executed. It is much easier to commit armed forces, especially air power, in pursuit of an objective than to grapple the complexities of social and cultural engagement with an alien people.

In 1961 and indeed thereafter, there was an insensitivity among policy-makers about the impact that a Western military presence makes. Many harsh things may justly be said about what communist fighters did to Vietnam, but their footprint on the ground was light as a feather by comparison with that made by the boots of the US military. The very presence of affluent Westerners, armed or unarmed, uniformed or otherwise, could not fail to exercise a polluting influence on a predominantly rural and impoverished Asian society. Like other senior Americans posted to Saigon, the CIA’s Bill Colby adopted a domestic style befitting an imperial proconsul, occupying a villa with a domestic staff of six. Army enlisted men took it for granted that a Vietnamese cleaned their boots and policed their huts.

By contrast, one of the perceived virtues of the enemy was that they had so little save their guns. Again and again, peasants were heard to say that, whatever else was wrong with the communists, they were not getting rich. Western wealth and technology did not generate envy among poor Vietnamese; it merely emphasised a remoteness, an alienation from their enormous foreign visitors, that no amount of MEDCAP visits, inoculations, food aid, tractors, outboard motors, ‘miracle’ rice could assuage. Material aid never secured the gratitude its donors hoped for. Children visiting Saigon zoo often likened the apes to Americans, because both had such long, hairy arms. Some older Vietnamese were uncomfortable with black soldiers, who awakened memories of France’s exceptionally brutal colonial units. Local cynics, as well as communist propagandists, asserted that Washington shipped to Indochina only commodities discarded by Americans, such as hated bulgur wheat.

A West Point adviser could scarcely fail to regard with disdain a forty-seven-year-old battalion commander with blackened teeth, alongside whom he was assigned to service without any common language. An ARVN officer wrote: ‘No superior anticipated or taught the young [American] captain to adapt to our situation and cultural environment. He would make ridiculous intrigues to control his Vietnamese counterparts and take control of the battalion, as if it was his toy.’ After a year, before he went home, the American told his counterpart that he was now starting to understand the war, and regretted his earlier crassness. But then he boarded his plane, another adviser came, and the cycle restarted. ‘That is the history of advisors. American people have goodwill, but they are impatient.’ A Vietnamese officer trainee cited the sort of cultural clash an American might precipitate: at Dalat military academy, a US Army captain tapped on a cadet’s helmet with his briefing stick, to awaken him from a doze. This gesture almost provoked a riot prompted by the shared fury it aroused among the Vietnamese, for whom even a token blow signalled colonial contempt. That confrontation was eventually defused by the school commandant, Col. Nguyen Van Thieu, later Vietnam’s president.

Chuck Allen’s special forces A Team, out at Khe Sanh in the winter of 1962, referred to their Vietnamese counterparts as ‘LLDB’ – Lousy Little Dirty Bastards: ‘It could be hard to get [them] out on an operation. They didn’t want to leave the camp. Sometimes we had to bribe them with extra food or clothing.’ Patrolling Americans were exasperated by ‘accidental’ discharges of weapons to cause bangs to push away the VC, or wilfully tall plumes of smoke from cooking fires. ‘It takes a while to learn that the American way isn’t always the right way … In Vietnam, the poor bastards had been at war for fifteen years. And here we come, full of piss and vinegar, wanting to win in six months.’ That A Team nonetheless felt good about its own little corner of the action, singing a song that a host of Americans would reprise before it was all over: ‘We were winning where we were.’

Yet the vast majority of the three million Americans who eventually served in the country departed without holding any more meaningful intercourse with its inhabitants than a haggle about the price of sex. It was inevitable that US forces should require access to ersatz-American facilities when serving in a faraway country – so do all foreign armies in such circumstances. Even the correspondents who reported the war took for granted their privilege of receiving sanctuary in American messes to write dispatches often savagely critical of American failings. But the manner in which most of Kennedy’s crusaders lived apart from the Vietnamese, save when orchestrating violence, was a formula for alienation.

Robert Kennedy, as attorney-general present at the creation of much Indochina policy-making, said that ‘a military answer is the failure of counter-insurgency … Any effort that disregards the base of social reform, and becomes preoccupied with gadgets and techniques and force, is doomed to failure and should not be supported.’ Lyndon Johnson reported after his 1961 trip to Vietnam on the importance of ‘responsible political institutions … There must be a simultaneous, vigorous and integrated attack on the economic, social and other ills of the Vietnamese people. The leadership and initiative in this attack must rest with the Vietnamese leaders.’ Roger Hilsman of the State Department opined that insurgency ‘isn’t a war, it’s a political struggle with military aspects’. Such good sense should have led the policy-makers to a harsh conclusion: unless a political foundation existed, the military commitment was futile. Vietnamese were unimpressed by programmes and systems: they judged everything by personalities, and most recoiled from the Ngo family nexus – its cruelty, incompetence and Catholicism. Even Americans were embarrassed by the fact that while democracy was the mantra constantly cited as providing a moral basis for promoting resistance to communism, Washington set its face against any outcome determined by ballot.