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

Yet some influential people continued to argue that the regime’s shortcomings did not matter. The CIA’s Colby cared nothing that Diem was running a dictatorship, only that it should sort-of work. He wrote later: ‘The task in South Vietnam required strong leadership, and Diem’s messianic dedication seemed more appropriate than did the confusion and indecision that could come from overly precise application of the American doctrine of the separation of powers.’ Colby formed an amicable working relationship with Ngo Dinh Nhu – indeed, Agency colleagues were bemused by his enthusiasm for this sinister figure. When the case for replacing Diem became an Agency talking point, Colby bizarrely suggested that brother Nhu might fill the bill.

The 17 April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles backed by the CIA took place less than four months into the Kennedy presidency, and overshadowed all its subsequent policy-making. So too did the communists’ erection of the Berlin Wall in August, and Khrushchev’s taunting that Vietnam was a Soviet laboratory for wars of national liberation. Nobody then knew that the West would win the Cold War. No American heard Khrushchev tell Anatoly Dobrynin, who in 1962 became the new Soviet ambassador to Washington, that he must never forget that an armed showdown with the US was unthinkable, and thus his foremost priority was to work to prevent it: ‘Don’t ask for trouble.’ The world lived in a climate of nuclear fear, and the communists posed a historic challenge. In such circumstances it was hard for national leaders and their advisers to think and act proportionately and wisely. Today, it is easy to forget that the other side blundered as often as and even more brutally than did the Western Powers – for instance in Hungary, Cuba, Berlin, Poland.

Kennedy and his fellow-crusaders saw themselves engaged in a life-and-death global competition with the communists. The president said of insurgencies such as that mounted by the NLF: ‘No one can call these wars of liberation … These are free nations.’ This was half-true – more true than some American liberals recognised then or since – but also half-false, because however ugly was the ruling regime in North Vietnam, that in the South was little less oppressive, and mitigated only by the fact that Diem’s people did not go hungry.

2 McNAMARA’S MONARCHY

An extraordinary aspect of the decision-making in Washington between 1961 and 1975 was that Vietnamese were seldom if ever allowed to intrude upon it. Successive administrations ignored any claims by the people who inhabited the battlefields to a voice in determining their own fate: business was done in a cocoon of Americanness. Frederick ‘Fritz’ Nolting, 1961–63 ambassador in Saigon, once cautioned defense secretary Robert McNamara that it was ‘difficult, if not impossible, to put a Ford engine into a Vietnamese oxcart’. The secretary professed to agree – but went ahead with doing that anyway. There is a great line in David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest about Vice-President Lyndon Johnson’s awed reaction after seeing McNamara, Rusk, Bundy, Schlesinger, Rostow and the rest of the Kennedy Round Table gathered for the first time. He rushed off to tell his friend and mentor Sam Rayburn, speaker of the House, about this brilliant group, only to be deflated by the droll response: ‘Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better if just one of them had run for sheriff once.’ Or knew some Vietnamese.

When McNamara visited Vietnam with Max Taylor, a Vietnamese eye-witness wrote that most of the secretary’s questions were directed to the advisers present, rather than to those doing the fighting: ‘Some [US officers] looked like naughty … students in front of an austere principal … In one exchange that greatly embarrassed a Vietnamese intelligence officer and his American counterpart, McNamara asked how many of our secret agents were working in the enemy’s ranks.’ The answer was none, which remained the case until late in the war. The CIA did not contrive a wiring diagram of the communist leadership until 1969.

As well as military advisers in the field, the administration received plenty of advice from gurus back at home. The Cold War spawned a proliferation of think-tanks, committed to provide both technological studies and intellectual underpinning for strategy, above all nuclear deterrence. The Advanced Research Projects Agency, familiarly known as DARPA and created in 1958 following the shock of the Soviet Sputnik launch, conceived a range of counter-insurgency techniques, almost all of which proved fanciful, and was also begetter of the chemical defoliation programme that deployed Agent Orange. The Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation was a non-profit-making body which received large funding from the air force. It employed smart people, but showed a predisposition to ride with policies already espoused by those who paid its bills.

McNamara was an unsurprising enthusiast for its work, much of which reflected the systems analysis he favoured. When the British academic Professor Michael Howard visited Santa Monica, he was impressed by the brainpower on site, but wrote later of his unease that RAND ‘seemed like a monastery inhabited by clever theologians, who were quite remote from the real affairs of the world … The Randsmen seemed to be falling into the error of assuming that everything connected with war could be quantified.’ Howard was especially dismayed to hear them earnestly debating how quickly the city of Los Angeles could get humming again after a nuclear war.

With the coming of Jack Kennedy, RAND’s chiefs realised that counter-insurgency was becoming big business, and in 1961 dispatched their first emissary to Saigon. During the years that followed, the corporation played a significant advisory role. Almost nobody among its eggheads questioned the rationale for US engagement: fired by missionary zeal, they simply sought to figure out how their country could best win this thing. Analyst Alex George said: ‘There were no pacifists at RAND.’ In the early 1960s most of their research was done in Santa Monica, because few staffers wanted to relocate to Saigon.

In justice to the Kennedy administration, in those days a significant number of South-East Asian leaders, notably including Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, shared or professed to share its belief that the defeat of Vietnam’s communists was critical to regional stability. So did some key allies. The British government regarded the US position in Indochina as precarious, but foreign secretary Lord Home minuted, ‘I hope the Americans can hold on.’ Whatever had been Britain’s reservations about the commitment, now that Western prestige was staked, winning seemed to matter. Malaysia’s prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman urged Sir Robert Thompson, who had played an important role in orchestrating the defeat of his country’s communist insurgency, ‘You must go to Vietnam and help hold my front line.’

Some Americans derived encouragement from Britain’s successes in suppressing nationalist guerrillas, though British officers were coy about acknowledging the ruthless means employed to achieve these. They behaved less brutally in their colonial wars than did the French, but their methods in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden were not for sensitive stomachs. RAF aircraft broadcast chemical herbicides and later defoliants onto crops in guerrilla-dominated areas. In 1952 the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker published a photograph of a Royal Marine brandishing the heads of two Malayan terrorists, about which public distress did not abate when it was officially explained that these souvenirs had been recovered for identification purposes. There was plenty of bombing of villages. And somehow, the British contrived to seem to prevail.

The London government was uneasily and sometimes guiltily conscious of its status as co-chair of the original Geneva Accords, and thus dismayed by the rising number of advisers dispatched to Vietnam, in breach of the terms. In 1961 the British ambassador suggested that the US might get away with upping the number by a hundred, only to be peremptorily informed that eight thousand were coming. Prime minister Harold Macmillan, loyal as ever, agreed to make no fuss, and expressed relief that there were no plans to commit American combat troops. His people nonetheless urged the State Department to be discreet about the build-up, and thus had to swallow a new snub in December, when Washington said that it had decided not to be bound by some clauses of Geneva.

The British continued to vacillate about how far they themselves were willing to engage alongside the Americans. They retained a proprietorial view of South-East Asia; believed they understood counter-insurgency; devoutly wished for the communists’ defeat. They opposed a 1962 proposal for a conference to neutralise Vietnam, like Laos, because Diem’s position seemed so weak. Harry Hohler, British envoy in Saigon, wrote hawkishly in January: ‘[A]ny solution of the Vietnam problem that does not crush and eradicate the Viet Cong will simply hand South Vietnam over to the Communists,’ an outcome that he considered would be ‘disastrous to British interests and investment in South-East Asia and seriously damaging to the prospects of the Free World containing the Communist threat’.

Nonetheless, the British were underwhelmed by the Americans’ management of South Vietnam’s affairs, and bewildered by the strife between the CIA, State Department, US Army and successive ambassadors. The Americans, meanwhile, resented meddling on their patch – Ed Lansdale, especially, was impatient of advice from a bunch of ex-colonialist losers. He, like the Pentagon, was dismissive of a proposal favoured by the State Department, to invite the British Army to commit some training personnel. Instead ambassador Nolting told his UK counterpart that President Diem would merely appreciate some advice from Robert Thompson on police and organisational issues. At that time, with a Tory government in power at Westminster and Kennedy in the White House, if the Americans had requested military trainers they would probably have got them, which might have proved the thin end of an embarrassingly thick wedge. As it was, the war effort merely acquired Thompson. His experience, together with the advice of a small British mission, had one significant effect: the CIA acknowledged the importance for intelligence-gathering of a police Special Branch, which they persuaded the Vietnamese to replicate. Otherwise, while Thompson was sometimes granted audiences in Washington and Saigon, he exercised little influence on big issues.

That winter of 1962 there was a brief surge of optimism among Americans that the regime was doing better. The Australians agreed to open a jungle warfare school. Prominent pundit Denis Warner explained the rationale to his fellow-countrymen: ‘Why is Australia getting involved in the Vietnam war? Partly because we think a Communist victory there would threaten the rest of Southeast Asia and jeopardise our security and partly because of the need to convince the Americans that we are more than paper tigers … It’s a sort of life insurance cover.’ The premiums got steeper: in 1969 the number of Australians serving in Vietnam peaked at 7,672, of whom five hundred died.

While Washington strategy advisers came and went, one arbiter remained for seven years a constant. The man who would play a role in the making of America’s Vietnam tragedy second only to that of Lyndon Johnson was among the more unlikely knights at the court of Camelot. Robert McNamara was forty-four when in 1961 he first entered his huge Pentagon office, 3E 880. He never seemed to have been young and feckless: administration sophisticates whispered in mockery that he practised the Twist at home in front of a mirror, lest he embarrass himself when making a dancing debut at the White House. This former star of Harvard Business School and wunderkind boss of Ford Motors had risen from a humble Californian background by brainpower and unremitting, humourless toil. McNamara’s character recalls a line about a numerate British statesman: ‘He uses figures as if they were adjectives.’ When this former Eagle Scout took his loved ones hiking on weekends, he was alleged to slide-rule what his children and tiny wife Margy should carry in their rucksacks. He accepted the defence job because he was irresistibly attracted by the opportunity to exercise power. Outside the family, he was a cold man who could scarcely be called a moral one: in 1961 he endorsed the fiction of the strategic ‘missile gap’, and made shamelessly baseless attacks on his predecessor Thomas Gates.

McNamara’s office became a dynamo room: for programming a missile build-up; expanding the army in response to the Berlin crisis; promoting new weapons systems. During the October 1962 Cuban drama, it was McNamara who conceived the US Navy blockade. He seemed devoid of self-doubt, and believed that a good decision should also be a fast one. His obsession with control caused him to deplore loose talk: he waged war on military leakers, and sought himself to preside as the sole public voice of America’s armed forces.

McNamara told the Senate in September 1961: ‘There is no true historical parallel to the drive of Soviet Communist imperialism to colonize the world … [No dictator] has ever been so well organized, possessed so many instruments of destruction.’ He was unafraid of telling outright lies in the cause of countering the Soviet menace – a habit that would eventually destroy his reputation. Testifying to Congress, he reeled off data that was hailed as evidence of his extraordinary powers of recall: Lt. Gen. Fred Weyand, however, observed that many of the secretary’s ‘facts’ were simply wrong. Although a committed Cold Warrior, in the first year of the administration he opposed a penny-parcel commitment in Vietnam: ‘We would be almost certain to get increasingly mired down in an inconclusive struggle.’ Alternatively, if the US made a big troop commitment, ‘the struggle may be prolonged and Hanoi and [Beijing] may intervene overtly … Success will depend on factors many of which are not within our control – notably the conduct of Diem himself.’

But then McNamara changed his mind. In May 1962 he paid his first visit to Vietnam. Paul Harkins, the fantasist who commanded MACV, hosted the trip. The general was given an advance list of the defense secretary’s questions, so that he had time to frame plausible answers, founded on statistics such as McNamara loved, though wholly fanciful. Harkins asserted that American aid was empowering the Diem regime to defeat the communist insurgency, though even as the secretary was being briefed at Binh Duong, an ARVN convoy was attacked nearby, five men killed. While he toured the northerly base at Danang, the Vietcong blew up a troop train ten miles away, killing twenty-seven people and wounding thirty. McNamara told young UPI reporter Neil Sheehan, ‘Every quantitative measurement we have shows that we’re winning.’ He did not perceive that the ‘quantitative measurements’ were being pulled out of the air by Harkins, of whom Sheehan wrote later: ‘He willed himself to believe what he wished to believe and to reject what he wished to reject.’

McNamara’s admirers respected his aloofness as reflecting impartiality and incorruptibility: he was even touted as a possible 1964 running mate for Kennedy. Hanson Baldwin, the respected military commentator, wrote a piece in the Saturday Evening Post headed ‘The McNamara Monarchy’, describing the new defense bureaucracy. But the secretary’s enemies, many of them uniformed, deplored his hubris. He developed an ill-founded belief that he understood the military. James Reston later wrote shrewdly in the New York Times: ‘He has the sincerity of an Old Testament prophet, but something is missing; some element of personal doubt, some respect for human weakness, some knowledge of history.’ Between 1961 and 1967, McNamara nonetheless wielded greater influence on Vietnam policy than any of his fellow-countrymen save successive presidents.

The main thing those Americans who really knew about Vietnam knew was how little they knew. Military adviser Gordon Sullivan had volunteered, terrified the war would be over before he could get to it. The twenty-five-year-old lieutenant from Massachusetts landed in country after a six-week Vietnamese-language course which taught him a few staple phrases. He found Saigon ‘idyllic, just a sleepy town on the river: no bomb-screens, Filipino band music blaring across Tu Do. It wasn’t easy to be an adviser in those days: I had a radio, but there was nothing on the other end of it’ – from beginning to end of the war, US advisers were chiefly valued by the Vietnamese for their power to magic artillery and air support through a handset. Sullivan’s incoming group was warned: ‘Remember that you guys aren’t even supposed to be here.’ He landed at a two-bit airstrip near the Cambodian border, which boasted a wrecked H-21 beside the runway and a sign by the control tower announcing that it stood two feet above the water level in the dry season, two feet below in the wet. The officer who drove a jeep up to collect him greeted him with ‘Hi Sullivan. Do you like eeny-weenies and cocktail onions? Our team chief gets a fresh shipment every two weeks.’

In the months that followed, the lieutenant and an NCO drove all over the delta with a huge crate of medicines which they dispensed in the villages, between inspecting strategic hamlets. Looking back on the craziness of their wanderings across a region already teeming with Vietcong, Sullivan reflected: ‘It was an adventure … There was no logical reason why we survived.’ He ‘tried to reach out to the Vietnamese’, but they seemed to function on a different voltage. Another adviser, Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, told Frank Scotton soon after the latter’s arrival in country: ‘Hell, I don’t even know what is going on across the river at night.’ Special Branch officer Capt. Phan Tan Nguu said of his relationship with CIA counterparts, ‘I only told the Americans what I thought they needed to know.’

An important 1962 Pentagon war game, SIGMA I, estimated that half a million US troops would be needed to defeat the communists. A subsequent SIGMA II examined an air-war option, and concluded that no amount of bombing would deflect Hanoi. The conflicting evidence and projections put before the policy-makers caused the various factions in Washington to box the compass with rival proposals, repeatedly changing their minds. Throughout the Kennedy era Pentagon brass favoured bombing the North – and opposed the commitment of ground troops.

3 LE DUAN RAISES HIS STAKE

In the course of 1961–62 the North Vietnamese government tilted away from Russia, towards closer links with China, yet still neither power encouraged Hanoi to escalate. The communists felt enmeshed in a sufficiency of turmoil elsewhere – Cuba, Berlin, Albania, Congo. The North’s domestic difficulties persisted: its population was increasing by half a million a year, yet grain production per head had fallen. China was taking a substantial portion of the country’s rice output and three-quarters of its coal in return for a drip-feed of cash. There was a massive migration of hungry peasants towards the cities, and little for them to do when they got there: raw-materials shortages caused factories to languish.

From May 1961 North Vietnam’s allowance of meat, which included cat and dog, fell to barely four ounces a week per person. That summer hunger protesters set fire to rice stocks amid clashes with troops, and in August burned down a bicycle factory. A bomb exploded in the city of Dong Anh. There was a local army mutiny, and on two occasions Hmong tribesmen attacked army convoys. South Vietnam and its US advisers encouraged such acts, and ran a programme of risibly unsuccessful commando stabs into the North. However, the dissent among Ho Chi Minh’s people was overwhelmingly spontaneous, driven by hunger and met with repression, which worked. By October 1961 a French diplomat reported that people had been reduced to ‘passive resignation’. Duong Van Mai said of the Northerners: ‘People were incredibly uninformed. It was as if they were sitting at the bottom of a well, seeing only a patch of sky. The communists had so many mechanisms of control.’

Le Duan now dominated Hanoi’s policy-making, as he would continue to do for the next quarter-century, though the world did not know this. In the Hollywood epic El Cid, the corpse of the eponymous Spanish medieval hero is strapped into the saddle to lead his army to one final victory. Something of the same was true of Ho Chi Minh. He was haunted by fears that Vietnam would become a new Korea, a devastated battlefield on which Americans and Chinese contested mastery. As his health declined and younger men grasped the initiative, he abdicated mastery and even influence on war-making. But he remained an indispensable figurehead, commanding respect across much of the world. Ho and prime minister Pham Van Dong remained the public faces of North Vietnam’s leadership, while Le Duan was almost invisible. The Moscow-leaning Giap became the object of animosity from comrades who deplored his bloated personal staff and lust for celebrity. One called him ‘a show-off and braggart’. The armed forces’ former chief logistician at Dienbienphu hated his old commander, and often complained about him to Ho. Another senior general and cabinet minister, who was also a brother of Le Duc Tho, likened the veteran to an old barrel, growling, ‘The emptier a barrel, the louder it booms.’

Le Duan displayed skill and patience in conducting relations with the Soviets and Chinese. He liked to quote a Vietnamese version of the English proverb ‘When in Rome’: ‘Visiting a pagoda, you must wear the robes of a Buddhist monk, and when you walk with a ghost you must wear paper clothes.’ He and his clique considered the Russians untrustworthy and weak, not least because they had blinked first in the Cuban missile crisis. Among those hard men the Spartan ethic – a willingness to suffer in pursuit of a high purpose – reigned supreme. Le Duan deplored the need to travel repeatedly to Beijing as a suppliant, and to endure its snubs. One of his acolytes claimed that on a 1961 visit Zhou Enlai challenged him, ‘Why are you people conducting armed struggle in South Vietnam? … If the war expands into the North, I am telling you now that China will not send troops to help you fight the Americans … You will be on your own, and have to take the consequences.’

Le Duan sometimes referred to Mao as ‘that bastard’, and when China’s chairman once fantasised aloud before a Hanoi delegation about sending his People’s Liberation Army to liberate the South, he awakened every visceral Vietnamese fear of their neighbour’s imperialistic inclinations. While Le Duan leaned towards China, he forswore direct criticism of the Soviet Union, because Hanoi needed its more sophisticated weapons and plant. He often made cynical remarks about the parsimony of Chinese aid, professing to believe that Beijing regarded the Vietnamese revolution as ‘a bargaining chip in negotiations between China and the US’.

In 1961–62 the North Vietnamese saw risks in pushing a new US president too hard: though they increased their commitment in the South, they remained anxious to avoid provoking the Americans to dispatch combat troops. They agonised about whether to enter negotiations, and urged their Southern comrades through COSVN to focus on the political struggle. In one of Le Duan’s ‘letters to the South’, dated 7 February 1961, he acknowledged, ‘We are weaker than the enemy.’ It was important, he said, to emphasise the autonomy of the National Liberation Front, and not allow it to be branded as Hanoi’s tool. It was a contradiction of this period that while North Vietnam gave its Southern comrades far less support than they wanted, on the international stage its leaders’ rhetoric became ever more bellicose: Le Duan was bent upon establishing his credentials as a standard-bearer for worldwide revolution. His stridency antagonised India, to name but one, which no longer viewed North Vietnam as a fellow-crusader against imperialist oppression, but instead as a menace to regional stability.

In 1962, Hanoi at last authorised large numbers of ‘returnees’ – Vietminh who had gone north in 1954 – to head South, where Communist Party membership was once more resurgent. Everywhere the NLF held sway, its cadres laboured to change the habits of centuries. Education programmes challenged Vietnamese fatalism – and the subordination of women. When couples married, the village Party secretary often supplanted the old matchmaker. In primary schools, children were invited to address such problems in arithmetic as ‘There were fifty soldiers in a government post. We attacked it and killed twenty of them. How many were left?’ An occasional nervous voice dared to enquire when the NLF or the Communist Party would provide insecticide, loans, pumps, tractors and animal-breeding advice such as the Saigon regime offered. Cadres assured peasants that all these good things would descend from the North, as soon as the revolution triumphed.

Until 1963 the Vietcong’s main sources of arms were captures from government forces: at the end of 1961 there were reckoned to be only twenty-three thousand serviceable weapons in guerrilla hands. Assassinations required little firepower, however. Between 1957 and 1960 a credible estimate suggested that 1,700 Saigon village and provincial officials were murdered. In 1961 this figure rose to 1,300: beyond the usual eliminations of village chiefs and suchlike, there were high-profile victims, such as a Southern colonel – Saigon’s senior liaison officer with the ICC – snatched and tortured to death. Such killings peaked at two thousand in 1963, then fell to five hundred, because the communists had liquidated most of their accessible local foes. Surviving officials and landlords took care not to place themselves in harm’s way, which meant – much to the detriment of Saigon’s authority – that they physically distanced themselves from the peasantry, taking refuge in towns and cities. The NLF appropriated the lands of those who fled, presenting them to friends of the revolution who thus found themselves with a tangible stake in its success.

Throughout the war American soldiers veered between contempt for ‘the dinks’, ‘the gooks’, as a primitive enemy, and an exaggerated belief in their superhuman skills and powers of endurance. Grunts recalled the old Wild West story about a cavalryman who rode a horse a hundred miles in pursuit of an Apache, then when it dropped shifted his saddle to another animal and kept chasing; meanwhile the Apache doubled back, rode the foundered mount a further hundred miles, then ate it. In reality, the Vietcong’s performance was uneven and sometimes outright clumsy, its units as vulnerable to human frailties as any army in the world. Nam Kinh, a local commander in the delta respected as a tactician but also notoriously harsh, was shot in the back by one of his own men whom he forbade to marry an attractive local widow. Thanh Hai – ‘Blue Ocean’ – a landlord’s son aged around thirty, was one of the most popular VC commanders both for his military skill and his human weaknesses. Hai was repeatedly demoted for drinking and womanising, the latter exemplified by his climbing under the mosquito net of a young conscript’s wife.

One fighter spoke for many when he complained about interminable indoctrination sessions: ‘Talking to me about political matters is like playing a guitar to a water buffalo.’ Some liked propaganda fairy tales, however: a unit in Long An province was led by a woman named Kim Loan, whose husband had been killed by government troops. She became a local folk heroine, imbued with supposedly mystical powers. On one occasion she killed a policeman who tried to arrest her while shopping. On another she fled through the back door of a beauty parlour, and when soldiers scoured a nearby hamlet for her, climbed a tree, changed into a bird and flew. Frank Scotton challenged the old man who told him that story, saying, ‘You can’t really believe that?’ The Vietnamese smiled and responded that while he could not know for sure, ‘she got away, didn’t she?’

Savagery remained the communists’ principal weapon. The Vietcong once entered a village in Lai Cay, denounced twenty inhabitants of both sexes as government spies, beheaded them and threw the bodies in the street, each with a scrap of paper attached, describing their alleged crimes. Elsewhere a hamlet chief was tied to a stake and disembowelled in front of the assembled villagers; his pregnant wife was eviscerated, their children beheaded. Such atrocities were artistically crafted to persuade peasants that the price of resistance to the revolution was much worse than mere death.

Brutality was not confined to one side, of course. Doug Ramsey conducted a survey among students in Long An province and found that between a quarter and half had lost relations to the activities of Saigon’s security forces. In the course of 1962–63, government troops killed 150 inhabitants of a single village in the Mekong delta. Of these, an estimated sixty were associated with the NLF, but the rest were not. Among thousands of political prisoners held in appalling conditions in South Vietnam’s jails and camps, some in a wing of Saigon zoo, there were many innocents. Of legal processes there were none.

Though urban areas remained firmly under government control, in the countryside the guerrilla struggle seesawed, with control of villages and entire regions frequently changing hands. Saigon acquired an arsenal of new weapons and equipment, and sometimes used these effectively. In late August 1962, guided by a defector, Southern troops overran an NLF training base at My Phuoc Tay, killing 150 cadres and trainees; surviving recruits fled back to their villages. American helicopters dramatically increased ARVN tactical mobility, so that they ranged into rural areas where the communists had for years held unchallenged sway. But capability and will were not the same thing: many South Vietnamese units declined to patrol where they might be ambushed, and flinched from pressing firefights. In 1963 the Vietcong began to receive arms shipped in quantity from North Vietnam, including some recoilless rifles and mortars, often landed from the sea, especially in the Mekong delta.

In cities, cadres laboured to prepare the masses for a popular uprising. Children were often used to toss grenades into cafés or markets. Government intelligence remained poor, and communist activists were skilled in concealing their identities. As a VC courier, ten-year-old Truong Mealy was sometimes sent into a town to meet a code-named figure in a restaurant, clutching half a banknote to identify himself to a contact bearing the other half. If he or others of his kind were caught, their knowledge was confined to the first name of their Party teacher. Only senior NLF cadres knew the names of province chiefs.

The tempo of the war was rising: after two years in which the impetus of the armed struggle had come chiefly from Southern hostility to the Saigon government, Hanoi’s influence and resources were becoming ever more conspicuous. Northern leaders scented rotting flesh, a stench of terminal decay, drifting upcountry from Saigon’s presidential palace. They had become impatient to expedite funerary arrangements for the Diem regime. So, too, were important people in Washington.

7

1963: Coffins for Two Presidents (#ulink_63dd5977-89f1-5703-a180-3f50ae7a1719)

1 SMALL BATTLE, BIG STORY: AP BAC

Alongside the swarms of American advisers, diplomats, fliers, special forces, electronic eavesdroppers and spooks setting up shop in Vietnam, ever more journalists came – men and a few women who would exercise at least as much influence on the story as the warriors and politicos. The swelling press corps reflected an awareness among their employers that the investment being made by the US deserved more attention at the sharp end than it had hitherto received. Saigon bureaux got not quite the A Team, such as then went to Washington, Paris, Moscow, London, but A-Team wannabes. Most were young, green, pretty bright, fiercely ambitious, and they fell in love with the romance of Saigon: men like David Halberstam of the New York Times, Malcolm Browne and Peter Arnett of AP, François Sully of Newsweek, Neil Sheehan of UPI who shared desk space with Halberstam and became his close friend.

Sheehan was in Japan, finishing his draft hitch with the US Army, when he persuaded UPI’s Tokyo bureau to let him earn $10 a throw pulling night shifts. Then the news agency’s Saigon correspondent quit, and Sheehan got the job. He was a Massachusetts farm boy, born in 1936, strikingly handsome, who won a scholarship to Harvard before becoming a precocious alcoholic. After 1961 he never touched a drink, but he arrived in Vietnam the following year still a little high on a faith in the United States, born out of his elevation to the Ivy League, that would be sorely tested during the years that followed. ‘Saigon was a very nice place that hadn’t then been mucked up by Americans,’ he said. ‘For the first six months I was not at all afraid. I thought it was thrilling, skiing over rice paddies in a helicopter. I was a child of the Cold War. We all felt the same way. Americans could do no wrong. We went there to stop these evil communists trying to take over the world. We had very little grip on reality. We felt this country deserved support.’

A cluster of the young correspondents, who swiftly acquired beautiful Vietnamese girlfriends, lived as a ratpack, dining together at L’Amiral, Souri-Blanche or Bistro Brodard, where they had a special table bearing a sign ‘Réservé pour la presse’; sharing cyclos or tiny blue-and-cream Renault taxis to briefings, helos to battle. Plenty of unattributable information was available from advisers, diplomats and the ubiquitous Lou Conein: in Sheehan’s laconic phrase, ‘Lou liked to talk.’ Ivan Slavitch, a soldier who commanded the first Huey helicopter unit, would sometimes call and say ‘Come out for breakfast,’ which was a coded tip that an operation was on. However, ‘most Vietnamese wouldn’t speak to you – they didn’t want to get into trouble’.

The US Army sucked up much of the precarious electricity supply, so that when air-conditioners went down, the reporters sweated profusely onto their shirts, typewriter keys, stories. They made small fortunes from submitting expenses at the official currency-exchange rate while changing dollars on the black market, though Sheehan stayed clean because he was fearful of expulsion. Halberstam later urged him to title his Vietnam book The Last Frontier, ‘because it was the last place to have fun, to fool around with somebody else’s country’. Though the correspondents loved the place, most adopted an increasingly earnest view of their mission, having identified a chasm between the relentless optimism of the US military, especially its 1962–64 commander Gen. Paul Harkins, and the realities as they observed them.

From an early stage, MACV propagated wilful falsehoods and suppressed inconvenient truths, such as the fact that US aircrew were flying combat missions in VNAF cockpits, belatedly revealed when the Indianapolis News published letters home from Air Force captain ‘Jerry’ Shank which made nonsense of official denials. Shank wrote: ‘What gets me the most is that they won’t tell you people what we do over here … We – me and my buddies – do everything. The Vietnamese “students” we have on board are airmen basics … They’re stupid, ignorant sacrificial lambs, and I have no use for them. In fact I have been tempted to whip them within an inch of their life.’ The use of napalm was unacknowledged until photos of its flame sheets appeared in the press. Peter Arnett later revealed the use of CS lachrymatory gas, which was seized upon by hostile propagandists to mean poison gas, in the face of deafening MACV and Pentagon silence.

Halberstam, then twenty-eight, started out as a True Believer, but by the autumn of 1962 had grown sceptical, writing in the New York Times: ‘This is a war fought in the presence of a largely uncommitted or unfriendly peasantry, by a government that has yet to demonstrate much appeal to large elements of its own people. The enemy is lean and hungry, experienced in this type of warfare, patient in his campaign, endlessly self-critical, and above all, an enemy who has shown that he is willing to pay the price.’ When in December Halberstam informed his office about reporting restrictions imposed by Nhu and his creatures, the Times forwarded the protest to the State Department, which shrugged that Americans in Vietnam were guests of a sovereign state. This much was true: that when the regime persistently dismissed advice and imprecations from the US embassy, MACV and the CIA, it scarcely acted out of character in refusing to indulge hostile – and, in Diem’s eyes, considerably depraved – liberal journalists. Come to that, Jack Kennedy once telephoned the Times’s publisher to lean on him to shift its correspondent.

As for the American military’s pronouncements, Time’s Lee Griggs composed a song about its chief, to the tune of the hymn ‘Jesus Loves Me’:

We are winning, this I know,